Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller (6 page)

He got up, strode to the door and flung it open: ‘Better get back out there, son. Those bike thieves won’t catch themselves.’

As I made my way back out of Clapham police station, I recognised the rodent-like scurrying of her majesty’s press.

Amid the yapping throng surged my brother Fintan, now Deputy Crime Correspondent of the London-based
Sunday News
. If the Chief Crime Correspondent didn’t have a pension plan, he needed to get one, soon.

I followed the hordes into a large conference room, taking a seat near the exit. I wanted to see Peter explain himself. I wanted to see if his in-laws exhibited any kind of suspicion.

Within seconds, my identity had become a talking point among a group of photographers. Fintan joined their chat, clocked me and scuttled over, beaming.

‘I hear you found the body?’ he roared, confirming he’d no shame.

‘Jesus, would you not have some decorum, Fintan.’

‘Maybe we can help each other.’

‘I’m not talking to you.’

‘Come on, Donal.’

‘You know I can’t tell you anything.’

‘Fine. Fine. I wonder though, is a PC like you supposed to be nosing around a cordoned-off crime scene
after
the case has been taken over by a senior detective?’

A red warning light pinged on in my brain.

‘Well I am a police officer, Fintan. That’s pretty much what I do these days.’

‘Oh okay. It’s just … ah nothing, doesn’t matter.’

‘What?’

‘Well, you see that guy over there?’ he said, pointing to a large man cradling a cannon-sized Canon camera.

‘He’s a snapper, from the
Standard
.’

‘Bully for him.’

‘He said he took your photo earlier today, as you came out of the house on Sangora Road.’

My heart set off on a gallop.

‘And guess what? His editor likes it. Donal, you’re going to be on the front page of the
Evening Standard
. Imagine that! You on the front page? I’ll send a copy to Daddy. He’ll be made up.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ I sighed.

Fintan guffawed: ‘You, a lowly PC, sneaking around a live crime scene without DS Glenn’s permission? He’s a real hard ass, Donal. He’ll go apeshit.’

I’d already pissed off DS Glenn – the officer in charge of the case – during our first meeting last night.

‘They can’t just use my picture. I have rights.’

‘Afraid not, bro. It’s a public place. He can snap what he likes. Would you like me to have a word with him?’

‘Please,’ I sighed.

Of course I’d never know if any of this was true. Fintan spent his entire life finagling leverage.

He returned in less than a minute. ‘Sorted,’ he said, ‘you can relax. I told him you’re on an undercover job at the minute, and this photo could blow your cover. He’s on the phone to his picture editor now.’

He sat next to me. ‘You’ve got to be more careful, Donal. Seriously, someone like Glenn could have you consigned to uniform for life.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, wondering if that’s what happened to PC Clive Overtime.

‘Don’t mention it. You can buy me a nice pork salad for lunch.’

DS Glenn entered the room through a side door, followed by a bearded man in an ancient tweed jacket and a haunted, ashen Peter. Ten feet behind, clinging together, were a middle-aged couple who needed no introduction. Cameras whirred, clicked and sprayed like slo-mo machine guns.

‘Her people are from Kilkenny,’ said Fintan, shouting over the camera cacophony.

‘Who’s the tweed?’

‘Professor Richards, a forensic psychologist. He’ll be observing Peter, you know, his body language and all that, see if he’s lying.’

‘He’ll be able to tell?’

‘Glenn swears by him.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s my job! Happily for me, you cops gossip like fishwives.’

Richards sat at the extreme right-hand chair at the top table. Glenn led Peter to the seat next to the Professor then sat Marion’s parents to the left, taking centre stage himself.

He explained who he was, then introduced the Prof, Peter, and Marion’s mum and dad, Mary and John.

The snappers continued to hose them down. Glenn pleaded for restraint. They eased off for fully two seconds.

As Glenn ran through the indisputable facts of the case, I took a good look at Peter, slumped, fumbling busily with his fingers, like a widow with rosary beads.

He looked impressive, handsome, if somewhat vain and self-satisfied. He had an unfortunate perma-smirk which had probably earned him more slaps in life than hugs. His slicked-back auburn hair owed much to Don Johnson and cement-grade gel. He could have been a lower-league professional footballer or a wedding DJ with a name like Dale or Barry.

My eyes drifted over to Mary and John. Mary embodied every Irish mum I’d ever known: small, tough, thick grey hair fixed fast into position, a fighter’s chin. Her face puce, her body bent with grief, she clenched rosary beads in one palm and John’s hand in the other. She didn’t look up from the table once.

I thought about my own mum. I really needed to make that call.

Marion’s dad John sat bolt upright like a guard dog, surveying the room, defending his family, defying the pain. I’d dealt with the parents of murdered people before. They usually split up in the end. The mum always blames the dad, even when she doesn’t want to. It must be hard-wired deep within mothers that the father’s primary role is to protect the family. Even in cases where the dad couldn’t possibly have done anything to save the child – like this – that sense of blame is there. I hoped John and Mary would make it.

Glenn summarised: ‘We would like to appeal to anyone who lives, works or who happened to be in the Clapham Junction area between five and seven p.m. last Monday evening to please call us with any information that may help us find this killer. It doesn’t matter how minor or trivial it may seem, if you saw anything unusual or suspicious, please call us. Finally, I’d like to warn people in London, particularly lone women, to be vigilant and alert.’

It was Peter’s turn to speak. He hadn’t written anything down.

He looked directly at a TV camera and said: ‘I’d like to ask the public to please help find Marion’s killer. Whoever did this is not human … they have to be caught …’ His already high voice reached castrato pitch, before cracking. He squeezed his eyes shut, then his head fell and he sobbed. The cameras swarmed in for the kill.

No one noticed Mary sobbing too, or John squeezing her hand.

Questions rained in from the floor: ‘Are there fears that a maniac is targeting women in their homes?’

Glenn: ‘I’ve nothing to add.’

‘Are you linking this to other crimes?’

Glenn: ‘As part of any investigation, we look for connections to similar crimes.’

Then Fintan got to his feet: ‘Is 21 Sangora Road known to police?’

John glared over. ‘No,’ he roared and I felt myself shrivel.

‘No more questions,’ shouted Glenn, summoning Peter to his feet. As Glenn led him out, Mary and John didn’t look his way once.

‘I’m off to find a phone,’ said Fintan.

‘Grand. See you in Frank’s?’

‘Yeah, great. Twenty minutes.’

Frank’s Café, Northcote Road, Clapham

Tuesday, July 2, 1991; 11:45

Although he could be toxic, an occasional meeting with Fintan was necessary these days, because he’d become my source of Eve Daly news.

During my first three months in London, I’d written to Eve four times. I got just one short note back, in which she apologised for not being a letter writer and asked a favour. The list of instructions suggested she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

As decreed, I met Tara Molloy – a girl from home I barely knew – at Liverpool Street train station and drove her to the job interview in Stepney Green. She didn’t utter a single word, save for, ‘Hi’ when we first met. I sensed her nerves and tried to calm her down: ‘Come on, I’m sure you’ll do great.’

‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled, staring blankly ahead. I hoped she’d think of more to say under questioning.

‘What kind of job is it?’ I asked.

‘I’d rather not say, in case I jinx it,’ she said quietly.

Almost two hours later, she emerged, looking even glummer. I didn’t say anything until we got back to Liverpool Street.

‘Are you straight back to the airport then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘No time for a quick drink?’

I really wanted to tap her up about Eve.

‘No. Sorry. I’ve really got to rush. Thanks so much, Donal, for the lift …’

She climbed out of the work van and marched into Liverpool Street train station without looking back. It was only after she disappeared that I noticed fresh blood on the passenger seat: enough blood to make me realise she’d just had a termination.

My next letter to Eve confirmed two things – 1: I’d taken Tara to her ‘job interview’; 2: from now on, I’d prefer to communicate by phone.

Eve sent a note back containing a single quote: ‘If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.’ She signed it: ‘All my love, Eve x.’

I couldn’t quite work out which one of us had set the other ‘free’. But the quote and her romantic sign-off reassured me: as soon as Eve got her life back on track, we’d give us another go.

In the meantime, I felt certain that Mum could keep me abreast of all developments in Eve’s case. How wrong I was.

During my first year in London, I had been ringing home every couple of weeks from a phone box awash with stale piss, cock carvings and IRA slogans. I fed it a pound coin every three minutes while Mum ran through her news – i.e. who had died – followed by the weather – i.e. how much it had rained. She had poor news judgement, sometimes suddenly remembering the death of a friend or family member after my pound coins had run out and the beeping had started. Nothing made you feel more alone than finding out someone you knew well was already cold in the ground. We never seemed to get around to talking about how she was or how I was or the latest on Eve Daly.

On the few occasions that my dad, Martin, answered, I hung up. He couldn’t be arsed to say goodbye to me before I left the country. Why would he want to chat to me on the phone? Besides, Martin was monosyllabic and opaque in the flesh; the idea that he and I could support a telephone conversation seemed laughable.

Then, about two years ago, I stopped calling home altogether. The trouble started when the Met police contacted our family GP, Dr Harnett, seeking my medical records. Unburdened by the Hippocratic oath, Harnett mentioned it to his golfing partner – one Martin Lynch – who assumed I’d got myself into some sort of trouble, and called golden son Fintan to find out what was going on. For once, my older brother didn’t enjoy breaking sensational news. He had to tell Martin that his second son had joined ‘the enemy’ – the British police force; the same force that had framed his heroes the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.

After a long silence, Martin Lynch very quietly but clearly gave Fintan the following instructions: ‘Tell him never to call here again, or come home here again, as long as I breathe.’

I lost count of how many times I’d picked up a receiver and dialled that number you never forget, only to hang up because of what he might do to her. I hoped Mum realised that those countless silent phone calls had been from me, that I was thinking of her.

So, having lost contact with Mum, I had to find another way to keep up with Eve’s ongoing case and work out how our future together would pan out. Until Fintan came to London, my sole source was the Irish newspapers – especially the one that had employed my brother at the time, the
Evening Press
. Credit to Fintan’s news nose, he sensed right away he had the inside track on the scoop of a lifetime. But even he could not have foreseen just how globally massive the Eve Daly case would become.

The day after Meehan’s funeral, the Gardai announced that Eve had been charged with his murder and all went quiet. Two weeks later, they released a short statement announcing that they’d dropped the murder charge, pending further enquiries – a development Eve perhaps should have treated with discreet gratitude. Instead, she granted Fintan an exclusive interview, in which she revealed that she’d knifed Meehan with her Viking prop dagger as he tried to force himself upon her.

No country relishes a divisive story as much as Ireland: this one proved an ideological ‘perfect storm’. There were two passionate, polarised schools of thought. The first: if a woman dresses like a slut and gets into bed with a man, then she knows what she’s getting. The second: no means no, she must have acted in self-defence. I’ve never understood how people can get so worked up about something that doesn’t remotely affect them. None of the impassioned, self-appointed pundits knew the facts behind the case, yet the entire nation engaged in an almighty gender-based ding-dong with undisguised glee.

Local knowledge and contacts gave Fintan an unassailable edge over rival reporters. It was Fintan who broke the news that Eve had been wearing a sexy Vixen Viking outfit when she stabbed Tony Meehan to death. As Fintan later explained, each great crime in history has its own Penny Dreadful moniker. The Black Dahlia. The Zodiac Killer. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Boston Strangler. Freelance Fintan coined the Vixen Viking Killer, and it stuck.

He just couldn’t stop generating fresh, juicy new angles.

He broke the story that Meehan was a drug-peddling orphan with a track record for assault and bedding attached local women.

He exclusively revealed that, after Mo Daly had heartlessly abandoned her teenage daughter for a new life in New York, the family home had become notorious for wild sex and drugs parties. I found this article particularly hurtful: whoever had been having all this ‘wild sex and drugs’ had managed to keep it well away from me.

He announced to the world that while Meehan and the Vixen had consensual/non-consensual sex, Eve’s hapless boyfriend had blacked out in the garden from a suspected drugs overdose. Fintan swore he only broke this story because the
Independent
had got hold of it, and were planning to splash it on their front page the next day. He ‘killed’ the story by burying it on page twelve of that evening’s
Press
– ‘not even a facing page!’ – adding, albeit in the last line, the small but significant fact that: ‘Gardai confirmed at the time that Lynch, eighteen, had fallen victim to an alcoholic drink “spiked” with an unidentified substance.’

In yet another scoop, Fintan reported that the company which manufactured the Vixen Viking range were withdrawing their metal prop daggers, replacing them with reassuringly unrealistic plastic models. Sales went through the roof.

Thanks to a leaked pathology report, he scooped his rivals again with news that – in the course of her struggle with Meehan – Eve had stabbed him in the balls. This sent the story into orbit, globally. Sales of Vixen Viking costumes nosedived.

Gardai charged Eve with murder – again. She received the immediate and vocal backing of Dublin’s militant feminist group, RAG (Revolutionary Anarcha-feminist Group), who announced that if she was pregnant with Meehan’s rape child, they would finance her abortion in the UK.

The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) went apeshit. They immediately lodged a High Court injunction which banned Eve Daly from travelling outside the Irish Republic. Abortion was illegal in Ireland: if Eve couldn’t travel, she couldn’t terminate the pregnancy.

SPUC was backed by the Catholic church and the governing political party, Fianna Fáil. In an off-the-record chat with Fintan, Tullamore’s most famous son, Tourism Minister Phil Flynn – an old pal of Dad’s – accused young women of ‘provoking rape by dressing like Jezebels’. He went on to describe RAG as ‘a bunch of hairy lezzers who need a good root up the hole’. Fintan later admitted that Flynn had been half cut at the time, but he ran it anyway.

All hell broke loose. The opposition parties demanded Flynn’s resignation: he demanded to know what he’d ‘done wrong’. To this day, Flynn is credited for the election of liberal feminist Mary Robinson to the role of President of Ireland in 1990.

Pissed off by Robinson’s triumph, the judiciary revoked Eve’s bail. As a security van drove her through the gates of Dublin’s notorious Mountjoy prison, a photographer snatched a shot of her in the back – crying, her hair in bunches, clutching a teddy bear. This secured her martyr status in the eyes of the martyr-loving Irish Left, prompting Christy Moore to write ‘The Ballad of Eve Daly’.

A week or so later, Eve called Fintan and confirmed she was not – repeat, not – pregnant with rape child. Abortion groups, pro and anti – could barely hide their disappointment at the loss of such a deliciously fleshy flashpoint. They dropped Eve faster than a smoking hornet.

Fintan too began to feel ostracised. According to his own undoubtedly self-aggrandising claims, he’d exposed too many of Ireland’s gilded inner circle: politicians, the judiciary, lawyers, the Catholic church, lackey journalists. Buckling under a barrage of legal writs, personal attacks and cronyism, he fled to London.

At least
he
could escape. Three years on from Meehan’s death, Eve remained locked in political and legal limbo: neither tried nor acquitted. I couldn’t understand why, until Fintan helpfully put me straight a few weeks back: ‘It’s like all these public inquiries and judicial tribunals. They’ll drag it out until people get so bored they don’t give a fuck anymore.’

Two teas slid across the pink Formica just as Fintan strode through the café door, mac over his arm, fag on, pasty-faced – a film noir wannabe.

‘You’ll never guess who’s just landed in Tullamore?’ he smiled, mincing into the screwed-down plastic seat opposite mine before answering his own riddle.

‘Only Larry fucking King!’

I frowned.

‘Legendary CNN anchor man? Biggest name in American current affairs?’

‘What’s he doing in Tullamore?’

‘You heard about Mike Tyson, right?’

Who hadn’t? Police had arrested the self-proclaimed ‘Baddest Man on the Planet’ in Connecticut that week and charged him with rape.

Fintan took a violent slurp of his tea and continued: ‘And you know one of the Kennedys was charged with rape earlier this year? Well, CNN has picked up on Eve’s story. They’re saying it’s a landmark case for a woman’s right to say no.’

‘Will this help Eve?’

‘Christ, no. Her best hope was that it would all peter out. Now it’s an international news story, Ireland’s politicians must be seen to be doing the right thing.’

‘And that is?’

‘Bush and the Republicans are in power, Donal. They’d have fried her by now! She’ll get a stretch for sure. It’s just a question of how long.’

Fintan seemed delighted with this development, the twisted fuck.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ I snapped, ‘she so obviously acted in self-defence. In any civilised country she’d have been given a medal for getting rid of that menace.’

‘You need to forget about her now anyway, Donal, once and for all. There’s a good chance you’ll never clap eyes on her again.’

I refused to believe that. My heart knew, somehow, that Eve Daly was unfinished business.

My pork-based bribe landed. Fintan tore into it ravenously.

‘So what’s so interesting about this case?’ I asked.

Half his fry-up already savaged, Fintan turned his attention to the open-spouted sugar jar, emptying the equivalent of five or six teaspoons into his muddy brew. He then lit another cigarette.

‘There’s two murders a week in London,’ I pointed out, ‘what makes Marion Ryan good copy?’

Fintan smiled and shook his head in disbelief at my obvious stupidity.

‘She’s white, she’s pretty, she’s a newlywed, she lives on a respectable street. Truth is, if Marion had been black, or Asian, or a single mum in a council block in, I dunno, Deptford, with a little brown baby, I wouldn’t be here.’

‘Christ, so class and social status dictate whether or not your murder merits coverage,’ I sighed, suddenly feeling hot and tired.

‘Don’t blame me. This is who the readership identifies with, and the fact she was butchered in her own home by a crazed maniac, well, that just about ticks all our boxes.’

‘Why do you say it was a crazed maniac?’

‘Forty-nine stab wounds. Speak to any pathologist, they’ll tell you the most stab wounds they’ve ever seen in a domestic is ten or twelve. And, if it’s domestic, why was she killed in a frenzy like that? There are a hundred more efficient ways he could have done it. It’s got to be a nutter. Hey, you’re supposed to be the copper.’

I tried not to visibly bristle as Fintan pressed on.

‘Maybe he charged through the door, forced her upstairs at knifepoint?’

‘That’s ridiculous. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Fint, but there is no Bride Ripper out there on the loose, roaming the streets in search of his next pretty ABC1 target.’

‘How can you be so certain, Donal?’

‘Well, she opened the door and let this
nutter
in,’ I pointed out, ‘we found her on the landing with her mail, her keys, her handbag all untouched. So where does that leave your ripper theory?’

He stubbed out his cigarette, leaned back and took a notebook and pen out of his inside pocket. ‘Post, keys and handbag,’ he said, busily writing.