Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller (10 page)

‘Is everything okay?’

Gabby stood at her bedroom door, bag in hand, as still and alert as a startled deer.

‘Sorry, miles away,’ I smiled, busily seeking out a positive note on which to reboot our conversation.

‘I went to see Lilian yesterday. I’ve agreed to help with her dissertation.’

‘I know! She called me. I meant to say thank you. She is so excited. And who knows, it might actually help.’

‘So I’ve kept up my end of the bargain.’

She nodded, her closed lips resigning at the corners.

‘Have you started looking for somewhere to live yet, Gabby?’

Her skin flushed.

‘You haven’t told your parents about Dom stalking you, have you?’

She shook her head.

‘Or that you need to move out of here?’

‘How can I?’ she said softly, addressing the floor. ‘It’s so embarrassing.’

‘So what excuse have you given them for staying at theirs?’

‘I … they think I’m having some floors replaced.’

I breathed a long disapproving sigh. I liked this Donal: uncompromising, direct, manly. Why could I never pull it off outside of work? I fingered Dom’s deranged love note, now an unlikely bookmark. Part of me wanted to show it to her, dispense the short sharp shock she clearly needed. On the other hand, I didn’t want to scythe down the green shoots of her recovering confidence. I needed to prod her in another way.

‘You’ve got to tell them. And you’ve got to get on with finding a new place to live before he puts two and two together and turns up at your family’s place in Maidstone.’

‘He wouldn’t?’

‘If he finds out you’re staying there, then of course he will. And what are you going to do about this?’ I asked, pointing at her mail on the table.

‘Oh yes, of course,’ she flustered, shoving it awkwardly into her handbag.

‘No I mean … Look, Gabby, because of my job, I’ve dealt with this kind of situation before. You shouldn’t get your mail automatically forwarded to your new address.’

She looked at me, confused.

‘Someone as determined and conniving as Dom could easily wheedle that information out of a Royal Mail employee.’

‘Oh, gosh, I hadn’t even thought of that. That’s okay though, I’ll pop back every couple of days to pick it up.’

‘Oh no,’ I blurted, ‘you can’t do that. I’ll pick it up for you. It’s no bother. I pass here every day anyway.’

She looked unsure.

‘And you’ll be doing me a favour. There’s been a new directive at work about protecting victims of domestic abuse or stalking,’ I lied. ‘I really need to follow all the guidelines so it’s important that you don’t come back here alone.’

‘Okay. Thank you,’ she said uncertainly, rummaging in her handbag and producing keys.

‘You really mustn’t come back here alone,’ I said, way too urgently, ‘and you really need to get a new place sorted, right away. When you do, I’ll bring your post over to you.’

She nodded, somehow sensing that I was holding something back.

‘I’ll lock up,’ I said brightly, ‘and then I’m giving you a lift to the train station.’

As soon as her seatbelt clicked, I started the engine. I zapped on the headlights and swung the car round, part one of a tight three-pointer. As I crunched it into reverse, a figure appeared in the headlights next to that white works van I’d fallen against earlier. Clad in camo and a bear hat, Dom Rogan stared directly at me and smiled, tapping some sort of instrument against his open palm. I glanced left: thankfully Gabby was busy repacking mail into her handbag. I knocked off the headlights, completed points two, then three, wincing in expectation of some sort of attack. As I flicked on the headlights and sped off, I realised it was time I took the initiative with Dom Rogan.

King’s College Hospital, South London

Thursday, July 18; 09:55

The following Thursday, I turned up for my second ‘consultation’ with Lilian, looking forward to some answers. Her reassurances during our previous session that I’d a) retain my anonymity and b) could quit at any time convinced me to really give this a go. I had nothing to lose. Ever since my encounter with Meehan, I’d been craving a clinical explanation. I had pored through all the books I could lay my hands on about the subject, but had found nothing that remotely chimed with my bizarre hyperreal encounters.

What these books did reveal is that universities have entire departments dedicated to the study of sleep and sleeping disorders. Somewhere, there was a forest of solid academic research on the subject, some of it based on people with extreme conditions. I’d little doubt Lilian had spent the week negotiating these woods, tracking down the rare condition that I suffered from. Part of me even dared to hope that the diagnosis would come with a bespoke solution, one that didn’t involve secure hospitals or surgery.

‘Hi Doner,’ she said, this time around making my name sound like it should be followed by
kebab
.

Her hair was tied back again, but less severely. She’d even allowed herself a jaunty curl at the fringe.

‘Hi Lilian,’ I said, offering an awkward hand, ‘I’ll try to stop for breath this week, let you get a word in.’

She shook it limply, avoiding my eye. Strange, surely, for a shrink? Perhaps she was shy.

She wanted to go all the way back to my childhood scrapes with St Johnny Giles. I regurgitated it all again, a little resentfully. How much more did she need to know?

Over the course of the hour, she kept recycling the same stock questions:

‘How did that make you feel, Doner?’

‘What would you have wanted to happen?’

‘What do you think this meant?’

I found myself making stuff up, rather than confess I’d never given it much thought. Even my honest answers seemed to disappoint her, as if they weren’t what she’d been hoping for. By the end, her relentless probing for extra insight and meaning had worn me out. Tired answers morphed into defensive agitation.

After one more: ‘What do
you
think this meant?’ I snapped.

‘I was rather hoping you’d be able to tell me, Lilian. That is why I’m here after all. For answers.’

‘Maybe you have to find the answers within yourself?’

Oh for fuck’s sake
, I thought. ‘What does that even mean?’

‘Why are you feeling so … defensive, Doner?’

‘Look, I don’t need therapy, Lilian. I’m not interested in exploring my feelings, okay?’

‘What would you like to happen?’

‘I’d like to know why dead people are attacking me in the middle of the night. That’s why I’m here. Remember?’

‘Why do you think this is happening to you?’

‘You know what I think? I think that when I get close to the body of someone who’s died violently, they find a way to communicate with me. I think Marion was trying to tell me something.’

‘Tell you
what
, Doner?’

‘I don’t know. My gut reaction the first time was that she was trying to lead me to her killer. I know that sounds mad, but that’s the only explanation I could come up with. The second time, in the car, I just don’t know. She seemed to place a lot of emphasis on slamming doors. I’ve been thinking, maybe this is a clue to what happened to her.’

There, I said it, out loud
, I told myself. She let it hang in the air until I felt myself shrivel with embarrassment.

‘That’s a wonderful concept,’ she said finally, treating herself to the faintest smile, ‘but highly improbable.’

How fucking probable is
any
of this, Lilian?
I felt like shouting. Dead people battering me in the middle of the night surely merited some lateral thinking? At least I’d come up with a theory, which was more than she’d managed.

‘Have you been back to the scene of Marion’s death, since the second attack?’

‘No.’

‘And she hasn’t come to you since then?’

I didn’t bother answering.

‘So it’s difficult to prove that theory, isn’t it?’

Easy for her to say – I would have to be pretty desperate before I’d put myself in the way of Marion’s deranged spirit again.

‘Okay, well that’s all we’ve got time for today,’ she said, getting to her feet and bouncing her papers on the table, like a newsreader during the credits.

She turned back suddenly, decisively. ‘Look, Doner, I’m not questioning you, or judging you. I’m just exploring the things that happened to you, so that I can make a judgement on them. Does that make sense?’

I’d made an arse of myself, so forced a smile: ‘Look I’m sorry, Lilian. I’m just not used to talking about it.’

‘Well you’ll be pleased to know you won’t have to for a couple of weeks now. I’m going on holiday. Can I book you in for Wednesday 7th August?’

‘Of course,’ I said, walking out of her office, certain that I’d never set foot in her surgery again.

London, England

Monday, August 5; 15:30

August arrived, sticky, fuming and breathless, cranking up agitation on South London’s seething streets and tense estates.

It had been more than a month since Marion Ryan’s murder and the police had still made no arrests. The story no longer got a single mention in the media.

That afternoon, Fintan rang me with news: Shep was taking over the investigation. DS Dan Shepard. How on earth had he become involved?

Later, I found a mysterious handwritten note on my desk instructing me to meet the man himself at six p.m. that evening, at the Feathers. The site of my glittering career before joining the police, and mine and Shep’s first meeting. I’d left suddenly, unannounced and under a cloud.

I’d been bartending about a week when I noticed that Seamus, the manager, neither took nor was offered money for drinks by certain officers. I assumed this was some sort of arrangement for the nightly ‘lock-in’, and that these officers would expect the same from me. So whenever I handed a drink to a cop – and you can always recognise a cop – I never asked for money. Those not ‘in’ on the racket paid as a matter of course. The rest thought me terrific at my job.

I was about to ring the bell one night to scatter civilian drinkers when a voice behind me said: ‘Do you not want paying for this?’

‘Sorry, miles away,’ I smiled.

‘Detective Superintendent Dan Shepard,’ he said, holding out a hand. I held out mine. ‘That’ll be one pound forty,’ I said, and he laughed.

Looks-wise, he could have been Sean Connery’s tress-blessed younger brother: dark, arched eyebrows, thick white, collar-length hair, knowing blue eyes that always seemed mildly amused by something. He had the aura of someone born to power; he owned the room.

‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘A small town in the Midlands,’ I said, ‘the flat bit you drive through to get to somewhere nice.’

‘Oh I know it well,’ he said, ‘I spent most of my summers in the Midlands, as a kid.’

‘So you know Tullamore?’

‘Of course. My people come from Tipperary, Clonmel.’

‘I hear it’s a long way,’ I teased.

‘Well, my heart’s still there, I can tell you. God, I used to love it. Everyone making a fuss of you, giving you cake and lemonade. The nights in the pub. Later I found out that my old man used to have to borrow the money to go, and a suit. Can you imagine?’

Another middle Irish son, I thought, having to find his own way.

‘What did he do here?’

‘Spent his life working on the buildings, until it killed him. His last job was in ’76, digging the tunnel so the tube could get to Heathrow airport. The irony was he’d never once flown home himself. He never had the dough.’

‘Do you ever go back yourself?’

He shook his head wistfully.

‘Anyway,
slainte
,’ he said a little sadly, raising his double scotch.

He headed to a seat in the far corner of the lounge, where he sat bolt upright and slung it back in one. Seamus came downstairs and told me he was popping out for a short while. He was always ‘popping out’. I struggled to imagine where he’d be going for a quarter of an hour at this time of night.

When I next looked, Shep had gone. He only ever stayed for one, always around closing time, but he seemed on very good terms with the regulars.

Over the weeks, I got to know several of the officers by name. And soon it became routine that Shep would pop in to chat to me every day at closing time, often asking about who’d been in and at what time. This soon progressed to what they’d been gossiping about. If a titbit of news particularly pleased him, he’d stand me a pint. He was a man you wanted to please.

I finally twigged that Seamus also ‘popped out’ every night around the same time Shep finished his nightcap: Seamus must have been his snout. I didn’t dare confirm this by spying on them, and I never mentioned it to a soul. But I had no doubt that Seamus was passing on all he heard from pissed coppers during their late-night sessions. As was I. It was hard to refuse the man.

No doubt, the lock-ins generated little money but lots of valuable indiscretion. Because the Yard handled everything from Royal security to organised crime, the sheer scale of suppressed scandals made my eyes water. I learned about Princess Diana’s apparent habit of stalking married men, the celebrity customers of major drugs dealers, the sexual peccadilloes of senior government ministers. Hardly a night passed when I didn’t think: ‘Imagine what Fintan would do with that information?’

Of course, I should have expected my new job to come with conditions. Four weeks in, Fintan called the pub one afternoon and instructed me to meet him at the Queen Victoria memorial, down the road near Buckingham Palace. I wondered why he couldn’t just come to the Feathers.

As we walked through St James’s Park, he told me how Scotland Yard had set up a secret ‘Ghost Squad’ to crack down on corruption. As a result, officers had grown paranoid about meeting him, or even talking to him on the phone, making his job nigh-on impossible. I was only half-listening, when he asked me if I could help him out.

‘Help out how?’

‘Well any cop could go into the Feathers and chat to the barman, couldn’t they? That wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.’

‘I suppose …’

‘You could pass on messages for me,’ said Fintan, ‘you know, act as a sort of go-between for me and my contacts.’

For several minutes, I was too shocked to speak. God knows why.

‘Don’t worry,’ Fintan laughed, ‘I’m not asking you to pass brown envelopes, just phone numbers, times and places where I can meet or talk to people, stuff like that.’

What staggered me most was Fintan’s matter-of-fact tone, as if bent cops, immoral hacks and shadowy fixers was a business standard.

‘Isn’t that corrupt?’

‘How is it corrupt? You’re just passing on messages?’

‘I mean you getting information from cops on the take?’

‘Who said anything about them being on the take?’

‘Why else would they give information to you?’

Fintan stopped walking so he could focus on putting me right: ‘Some leak information to me because they can’t accept a cover-up, or unaccountability. Others to boost their own careers, or to bring down a rival. The smarter ones recognise the power of the press, and use it to put pressure on their own organisation. Look, it’s not my job to work out their motivation. If it’s in the public interest, I print it.’

‘But you pay some of them, right? Some of them must do it just for the money?’

‘There are a few who’ve had money troubles, and some who are plain greedy, but what’s important is that they pass on vital information. This stops the people in power getting away with murder.’

‘Murder?’ I scoffed.

‘Trust me,’ said Fintan, ‘Northern Ireland, Hillsborough, the miners’ strike, Lockerbie, you name it, senior police and politicians have lied and lied to cover their arses. People in power don’t serve the public, they serve their own agendas, which is getting more power.’

‘Yeah but that doesn’t justify …’

‘Look what’s happened to Eve. There are cops, as well as judges and politicians that would have let her hang to save their own arses, and you know it.’

‘Well, yeah but, this middle man stuff, it all sounds so sleazy,’ I said.

‘Everything to do with power is sleazy, Donal, Jesus. I’m just asking you to pass on a phone number every now and then.’

I examined his jowly pale face, looking ten years older than his twenty-eight and racked with indignation. He’d been banished from Ireland by the gilded circle. Now he wanted to wage war against the powerful, using any means necessary. This was his unfinished business.

‘How do you think we get stories, Donal?’ he patronised. ‘You think we just publish what Scotland Yard tells us? God they’d love that. The public has a right to know certain things that the people at the top don’t want them to know. It’s called democracy.’

‘Call it what you like, Fintan. I can’t do it. That’s the end of it.’

Fintan took a deep breath.

‘I think it might be too late for that,’ he said, eyeing me sourly.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘No doubt you’ve seen Seamus giving out free drinks? Who do you think is paying for those drinks?’

I’ve always hated riddles.

‘You’ve most likely seen Seamus passing envelopes,’ said Fintan, ‘what do you think is in those envelopes? And where do you suppose the cash comes from?’

‘I’ve never seen any envelopes. And if I had, what would it have to do with me? Nothing,’ I protested.

‘Is that right?’ said Fintan, challenging me with his glare. ‘You think the Ghost Squad haven’t been into the Feathers and seen you giving out free drinks?’

Every drop of blood in my head went south.

‘You think they don’t know who you are? You think they’d believe you if you said you didn’t know anything about what was going on? That, as a brother of mine, you’re not complicit in the whole thing?’

‘I’m not complicit in anything!’

‘You may as well help me, Donal. If they launch a witch hunt you’ll be taking the fall anyway. At least this way you’ll get some protection, from me and the officers you help. As it stands, you’re totally isolated.’

I only became aware that my mouth was hanging open when I tried to say ‘Jesus Christ’, but dribbled instead.

‘Have a think about it,’ said Fintan, raising his collar against the biting wind, checking left and right then scurrying off. Fintan Lynch, champion of the free press, like a rat caught out in the open.

As I saw it, I had only one option: quit the Feathers and lay low for a while.

Instead, that closing time, I asked Dan Shepard to meet me the following morning at the most obscure location I could think of, a Harlesden café so squalid that even we used to avoid it.

I figured that, after all the helpful information I passed his way, Shep owed me. As a senior officer, surely he could offer me the ‘protection’ Fintan seemed to think I’d need. And, although conscious that I may have been suffering either A) Stockholm Syndrome or B) some sort of unconscious craving for a father figure, I actually
liked
Shep.

Next morning, Shep’s flint-sharp suit, rolled-up
Times
and flashy rainbow golf umbrella caught the eye of a few road workers sitting nearby. He had a quiet word with the boss who led us through to a closed-off back room. Shep was a man people wanted to please.

I told him everything: the non-payment for drinks, Seamus allegedly passing brown envelopes, the lock-ins. Fintan could hang. I wasn’t prepared to turn a blind eye to reporters paying bent cops. Shep listened intently but showed not one flicker of surprise. When I wrapped up, he reached into his inside pocket, took out cigarettes and a gold lighter, lit up and leaned back to survey me.

Finally, he spoke. ‘Of course, we knew who you were,’ he smiled, and I felt myself redden. ‘We were having a bit of fun with you,’ he added, smirking and taking another drag.

‘We assumed your brother had planted you. But there was only one way we could know for sure.’

I frowned. What is it with these people?

‘The lads agreed to let slip some dynamite information your way. We sat with the
Sunday News
every week, to see if any of it appeared. When it didn’t, we were a little disappointed, to be honest. Your brother’s been a right pain in the arse for us. We were hoping for payback. But we realised you weren’t biting.’

He took a mouthful of tea so I could catch up.

‘Listen, Donal, thanks for telling me what you know. But we’re all over it.’

‘You are?’

‘We know certain officers are selling information to newspapers, and to private investigators. But it’s far more complicated than you think.’

My mind flashed back to Fintan, in the shadow of Buck Palace, railing against people in power and their secret agendas. There must be plenty in power who’d much rather avoid a scandal of this magnitude in the police force.

Shep put out his fag and swallowed the last remnants of his tea.

‘I have to ask you,’ he said, ‘can you carry on working at the Feathers, but for us? You could really help us build a case. All you’d have to do is tell me everything you see and hear, maybe ask a few questions.’

‘I don’t know. It sounds risky.’

‘Your role would be known only to me. I’d protect you. You have my word on that.’

‘I, I don’t think so …’

‘Would you be willing to make a statement about what you just told me?’

‘I’d rather not. He’s flesh and blood, after all.’

‘I had to ask,’ said Shep, smiling to let me know he’d expected my answer. He got to his feet and pulled his coat from the back of the chair: ‘What are your plans now?’

‘I’m not even going back,’ I said, ‘Seamus scares the shit out of me.’

Shep laughed: ‘Have you anything else lined up?’

‘No.’ I shrugged.

‘Why don’t you join the Met?’ he said. ‘You’d make a decent detective. I’ll even put in a word.’

Now here I found myself, two years on, back at the Feathers. I walked in to find nothing had changed, except the bar staff – both bleach blonde Aussie surfer types. I recognised some of the old regulars but managed to skirt around their half-cut eyelines to reach a low-profile table in the far corner of the lounge.

Why had Shep invited me here? Maybe he had decided to bump me up to Acting Detective Constable? By the time he strode through the door, I’d convinced myself that this had to be the case.

Like everyone in London that scorching August, he looked a little sweaty and steamed up.

I remembered how few senior officers derived so much obvious satisfaction at being called ‘Guv’ than Shep, or being stood a drink.

‘Afternoon, Guv,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘what can I get you?’

I delivered his double neat scotch and sat where he told me.

‘Right, the reason I wanted to meet you is to make sure I’m not going mad.’

‘Guv?’

He leaned forward, conspiratorially: ‘You were the first officer on the scene of Marion Ryan’s murder, correct?’