Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller (3 page)

‘I’ve been expecting him for three fucking years. Every night.’

‘What are you talking about? Why would he be wanting to finish you off?’

‘It’s why I can’t sleep.’

Aidan couldn’t have looked more bewildered.

‘Something weird happened that night, Aidan. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I’ve never told anyone. You’ll think I’m insane.’

‘What with some of the people I deal with? I doubt it,’ Aidan laughed, but kindly. ‘Try me.’

The Irish Midlands

Thursday, August 18, 1988

I last clapped eyes on Tony Meehan three years ago at Tullamore General Hospital in rural Ireland.

He’d put me there.

We, the class of ’88, had completed the Leaving Cert exams. It was late summer and tomorrow I’d be flying to London, with Eve. Before the exams, I’d asked her to change her plans and come to England with me. After a few days, she had agreed. She told me that her dad, Frank, would put down a deposit on a flat for her in Camden, where we could both live. She’d work for his construction company and, hopefully, so would I. She was waiting for the right time to tell her mum, Mad Mo.

I would have jumped on the next flight out after the exams. But for Eve, this felt too sudden; too final.

‘We have the rest of our lives to work and pay bills,’ she reasoned, ‘let’s spend one last carefree summer at home, with our friends.’
One last carefree summer.
How that statement haunts me still.

I had conceded to her demands, as usual, but on the condition that we draw a line at the Leaving Cert results.

And now, finally, we were nearly there. There was just one last hurdle before our flight tomorrow. Never one to knowingly shun a pun, Eve had arranged ‘The Eve of Results Fancy Dress Party’, to be hosted at her sprawling family bungalow.

Eve loved fancy dress as much as I loathed it. Whoever said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit hadn’t seen people over the age of ten dressed up as Disney characters, pop stars or zombies.

This party’s theme: heroes. I could hear myself now:
‘Hang on a minute, you’re a woman dressed as a male singer. You’re blowing my mind. Tell me you don’t have a lightning bolt on the other side of your face? Oh you do! Holy shit, you’re David Bowie
–
and you’re mad and funny and not remotely tragic.’

I appealed to Eve: ‘Don’t you trust us to get drunk and have fun in normal clothes?’

She was having none of it: ‘Would you not just dress up and have a laugh? What’s wrong with you?’

‘I’m just saying it’s a big occasion. We don’t need props.’

Her response stunned me: ‘Jesus, Donal, for once in your life can you stop being so … aloof? You think you’re so above it all, don’t you? Just put in some effort and have some fun and don’t be so fucking up yourself.’

She gave the door a Force 10 slam that caused the lights to flicker.

Charitably, I put it down to insecurity. Fancy dress would
force
people to have fun, thereby
guaranteeing
a night to remember. And saying a final farewell to lifelong friends would surely be less upsetting when we were all dressed up like eejits.

The day came and, after thirty seconds of deliberation, I opted for Hunter S. Thompson. For one thing, the Doc is easy: all you need are shades, a pork pie hat and a Hawaiian shirt. Like most men, I’d been storing a Hawaiian shirt in my closet for years, unable to offer a single good reason why until that very moment. Mum dug out the rest, somehow even exhuming a plastic cigarette holder.

Hunter got the nod for another reason. It was thanks to the Doc that I first struck up a conversation with Eve Daly.

Having lusted after her for two years, I’d all but given up hope of ever uttering a single word to Eve Daly. Then, in the school library one day, I heard her faux-Dublin accent say: ‘A bit of cult reading then?’

I turned to see her nodding towards the book, already slippery in my quivering hand.

I’d only read about twenty pages of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
because it scared me and I hated it. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. So I just stood there, reddening, while failing to think of a single thing to say, until I wanted to die of awkwardness.

‘You must be Fintan’s little brother,’ she purred, eyeing me playfully, as a cat might a wounded mouse.

My face was toast now but, somehow, I managed to nod nonchalantly.

‘Yeah, not so little actually.’

For months after, she never missed an opportunity to mock me mercilessly over that line. It became our secret catchphrase. I hoped that my homage to Hunter tonight would propel her back to those giddy early days of illicit cider and snogging; the first sweet breaths of our awakening love. In fact, I was counting on it: things had grown strained between us lately. Waiting didn’t agree with me.

Before I set off, Mum felt compelled to issue those classic Irish maternal warnings.

‘Don’t drink too much now,’ was self-explanatory. ‘No messing,’ she said, which meant no fighting. ‘And no carrying on,’ she added, which meant no shagging.

She cupped my chin: ‘Think once, think twice, then think M-A-M-M-Y.’

I nodded and smiled. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this for the last time.

‘Be good now, and be careful,’ she concluded.

‘Oh I’ll be good, Mammy,’ I quipped, setting off on the bike, ‘it’s up to her to be careful.’

Where the bungalows ceased between Clara and Tullamore, a blood-red sun sank behind the cooling fields, turning sleepy cows into steaming silhouettes. Chirpy birds made their racket on the crooked black power lines, distant African heat urging them onwards. I felt strangely gloomy, unsettled.

Discontented air nibbled at my skin; that damp heavy Midlands air that slides inside your clothes and your bed sheets and chills your bones. I squinted at the winking downtown lights in the distance, trying to picture where Eve’s bungalow sat in the Tullamore ground mist. But the drifting white steam kept deceiving me.

As I dumped the bike behind the tree in her front garden, I assumed she was still waiting for the right opportunity to break the news to her mum. This, surely, could be the only remaining obstacle to our new life together.

Eve answered her front door, a knockout in a Viking helmet, tiny animal-skin mini dress, fishnets, a leather hip holster sporting a shiny little prop dagger and a whale bone on a string around her neck.

‘We can’t stop here, this is bat country,’ I said, in my best American accent.

The Viking heroine looked me up and down, her face crumpling in disdain.

‘You know who I am, right?’ I pleaded.

‘James Joyce?’ she ventured, her top lip curled in disgust.

‘James Joyce? What, on a Caribbean cruise?’

She looked set to burst into tears.

‘Hunter S. Thompson,’ I announced, OD’ing on indignation.

‘Jesus, Donal, you could’ve made a bit more effort,’ she said, shaking her head, then stomping back into the house.

I hauled myself through the front door, wincing at the Dire Straits track booming out of the sitting room to my right. Someone must have commandeered the hi-fi. ‘Twisting by the Pool’? Twisting by the fucking neck would be preferable. I couldn’t resist a smirk of superiority, watching these musically illiterate morons bouncing around the room to this shite. I walked on into the hallway, soothingly dark save for some randomly-draped strings of white fairy lights, giving it a grotto vibe.

‘Good,’ I thought; easier to hide.

The dressing down I’d just received for not dressing up had stripped me of party spirit.

But guilt soon burrowed its way to my frazzled nerve endings: Eve was right, I should have made more of an effort. I thought about going to find her, to say sorry. But, recently, her hair-trigger outbursts were taking longer to pass. I decided to beg for forgiveness later, when the party would be jumping and she’d be less stressed.

I headed to the refuge of the kitchen at the back of the house. To my horror, it was packed too, everyone yelling at the same time. The smug Uni-bound crowd were enjoying one last gleeful blast of ‘points’, ‘grades’, ‘retakes’, and ‘grants’ before tomorrow’s life-defining results. A bottle of gin grinned at me from the top of the fridge. I snaffled it all for myself and headed to the little utility room, tucked away next to the back door. I kept the light off and poured a kamikaze measure. ‘Make it better, Beefeater,’ I demanded, downing it in one.

Sometime later, with Beefy half-empty and me half-cut, a pair of disconnected white eyes suddenly sprang through the doorway. I recoiled. My eyes adjusted to take in a trilby, a checked dickie-bow and pristine white gloves. My brain finally made sense of it: Choker
,
the mad bastard, being so politically incorrect that it surely constituted a hate crime.

Tony ‘Choker’ Meehan, blacked up as a minstrel. Or was it Al Jolson? Either way, he’d somehow transcended gloriously offensive. As he wallowed in near-the-knuckle notoriety, I pulled a mug off the shelf and poured him a large one. Better to appease him, a fact I knew only too well …

Choker had been brought up by the Jesuit Brothers in the town’s orphanage – as it was still called. Legend has it that, aged four, he saw his dad murder his mum with his bare hands. That’d certainly explain his penchant for strangulation. In primary school, he used to sneak up behind kids and wordlessly throttle them. Some of his victims actually passed out. He even got hold of a pair of black leather gloves, which he touchingly christened his ‘stranglers’ – a development that spread mild alarm through the entire town.

Unchecked, his levels of violence spiralled. A few months ago, he jumped off a stage at the local community hall disco and scissor-kicked a complete stranger in the head. The victim spent three months in hospital, two of them on a liquid diet. Meehan’s solicitor played the ‘poor orphan’ card in court and the judge acquitted him of GBH.

We should have universally ostracised him after that, but we didn’t. We couldn’t. Any group of Irish male teens needed a psycho to call on occasionally, either on the Gaelic football pitch or outside the chippie.

Even the Gardai seemed wary of him, and turned a blind eye to his pot dealing. Some put this down to Choker’s close relationship with Father Devlin, a senior Jesuit who trained the college football team and, reputedly, liked a fiddle with teenage boys. Acutely aware of this, none of his players ever went down injured.

Eve, a true crime nut, was obsessed with the murder of Meehan’s mother. She asked my brother Fintan – a newspaper reporter in Dublin – to get cuttings on the case. I refused to read them. It was difficult enough facing Choker without knowing about his homicidal genetic disposition.

‘Mr Aaaal Jolson,’ he sang, to the tune of ‘Mr Bojangles’ while jazz-wafting his enormous white hands. I stared speechlessly, trying to decide if it would be safer to join in or just carry on feigning delight.

‘Who are you supposed to be?’ he demanded accusingly.

‘James Joyce,’ I said, wanting to keep it simple.

He shook his head mournfully: ‘Jeez, you could have made some effort.’

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a bottle with no label.

‘I was gonna save this for later,’ said Choker, ‘but I bet you’d like some right now.’ His tone suggested that I
should
like some, right now.

As the Incredible Hulk-hued green liquid glugged into my glass for way too long, I heard myself warble: ‘What is it?’

‘Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,’ smiled Choker, sounding like Shank would, if he’d been brought up in a bog.

I took a sip and fought back tears. Choker nodded, so I took another.

‘The really fit birds love fancy dress, don’t they?’ declared Choker. ‘Gives them a chance to strut their stuff. Put those swotty heifer lumps back in their hay boxes, what?’

He could tell I didn’t follow.

‘All those chubby bitches banging on about their As and Bs and which Uni they’re going to? When they see a woman like Eve in an outfit like that, puts them right back in their place, doesn’t it?’

He grimaced at my confused face, strutted towards the door, then turned.

‘You need to keep an eye on that one.’ Choker smiled to reveal his blinding white teeth, then jazz-wafted his huge white hands again, lingering just a bit too long, like a baddie in a B-movie.

I gulped hard: so hard I could hear it. In my mind flashed Choker’s big white hands, closing in on Eve’s pale and oh-so-thin and snappable neck. My heart felt too big for my chest. My temples throbbed sweat.

I should definitely go and find Eve.

As I turned into the hallway, Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Freak Scene’ skidded into life. Eve had clearly re-appropriated the hi-fi. I was halfway to the sitting room pondering what, if anything, I could do if the orphan got frisky with the Viking, when my legs started to lose their feeling. With every step, they got heavier and heavier. This rattled me. I’d been pissed before, often enough. This felt different, like my legs were dying.

‘So fucked I can’t believe it,’ drawled J Mascis and he wasn’t wrong. I felt dead-legged, sweat-soaked and zoned-out, as if life itself was leaking out of my feet. Vanity prevented me raising the alarm. I needed Eve not to see me like this. I needed Tullamore’s teen population not to see me like this; not on my final public appearance. I had to get outside. My only hope was the back door.

It took some sort of indefinable judo throw to uproot my dead legs and hoist them around, so that they now faced the rear of the house. I set off in a straight-legged goose-step towards the back door, holding my arms ahead of me in case I fell.

I couldn’t feel my feet or legs now at all. I actually wondered if I was dying. I couldn’t help thinking how gloriously rock ’n’ roll it would be if I dropped dead right here and now, Eve cradling my head, kissing me one last time, Yoko to my John Lennon.

Suddenly one of the closed bedroom doors creaked open. Out of it came a meek-looking Tara Molloy. In the dark behind her, some fella was struggling to get his trousers back on. She stood and stared but said nothing of my dead-legged, metronomic stomp. What did she think I was doing? My own
Thriller
tribute?

I goose-stepped on like a Nazi on acid. I only had to make it past the kitchen now and the back door was right there.

As the kitchen clatter came into range, I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. It seemed to take an age.
Please don’t anyone look. Please don’t anyone see.
I got past. Then – dread – footsteps sounded behind me. I stopped, waited, breathing hard. The footsteps went away. Thank Christ. I leaned my raging forehead against the back door’s cold glass. Relief.