Kitabı oku: «Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller»

Chapter 1

Clapham Junction, London

Monday, July 1, 1991; 21:14

‘It’s a bit like taking a shit, when you think about it,’ said Clive, his mouth grinding away on a Wimpy quarter pounder.

Flanked by over-lit pastel walls and screwed-down metal seats, we could have been in the canteen of a children’s correctional centre. Welcome to the Wimpy burger bar – the British McDonald’s but with a unique selling point: table service.

‘Thank you garçon,’ I said, as I watched my order slide from stained tray to half-wiped melamine.

‘Bon appetit,’ he grunted and I silently congratulated acne for turning his face to pizza.

A quick glance at my chicken burger revealed it to be simply that: no sauce, no salad – just cartoon-flattened white meat clamped between two constipating white buns.

‘Hard to imagine that pecking in the yard,’ I said, ‘landing on this table is probably the furthest it ever flew.’

‘Isn’t it though, Donal?’ said PC Clive Hunt, my forty-something beat partner who came from one of those Northern English towns that begins with either B or W and all sound alike.

Incredibly – at least to me – we’d walked past a McDonald’s to get here. Clive’s nostalgic bond to Wimpy once again had proved unshakeable. This was one of the countless things I failed to understand about the English – they get nostalgic about things that were crap in their time: TV shows with shaky sets like Dr Who and Crossroads; British-made cars that always broke down; the Second World War, for Christ’s sake.

McDonald’s might have been wiping Wimpy off the face of the earth, but it would never get Clive’s custom. You see, no one lamented London’s lack of chips-based meals more than Clive. How many times had I heard how, up North, you can get gravy with your chips, curry with your chips, mushy peas with your chips.

The moment a McDonald’s worker cheerfully informed Clive that they didn’t stock vinegar, his Golden Arches crumbled and fell. After several wordless seconds, he calmly placed his tray back on the counter, turned and marched out, never to return.

I relented. ‘What’s like taking a shit?’

‘Eating burger and chips,’ he said, chewing, his mouth a toothy cement mixer.

Clive swallowed hard, burped urgently into his hand, desperate to enlighten: ‘You eat some chips, then you eat all of the burger, then you finish off yer chips.’

He could see I wasn’t getting it.

‘It’s like you piss a bit, then you take your dump, then you piss again to finish.’ He beamed in satisfaction.

My radio scrambled, its frenzied fuzz cutting short Clive’s scatological musings.

It was a T call demanding immediate response to an incident on Sangora Road, just round the corner. I almost had to beat the burger out of Clive’s hand.

We were the first uniforms on the scene. A young woman with dark curly hair was going bonkers in the street. A crowd had gathered, some panicking, some nosy, some trying to comfort Ms Hysteria. When she saw us, she pointed at a house and gasped in a nasal South East London accent: ‘My friend Marion’s inside. I think she’s dead.’

A surge of adrenaline slowed the world down to a hi-definition dream. The front door to number 21 hung open, but there were no signs of a forced entry. I noticed two buzzers: the property had been divided into flats. Inside the communal hallway, a chiselled, red-haired man in his twenties looked ashen. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said in a remarkably high-pitched Irish accent, pointing to a door.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he squeaked again.

‘Well you’ll know soon enough,’ mumbled Clive.

The door was on the latch. I pulled it open. The door fought back, forcing me to use both hands. I planted an elbow against its over-sprung resistance so Clive could follow me in.

‘Try not to touch anything,’ hissed Clive, and I thought about letting the door slam into his thick head.

I floated up the stairs towards the first floor flat, adrenaline numbing my feet to the carpet beneath.

She lay on the landing, on her side, an untamed red mane of hair sprawled almost ceremonially across the carpet. Her moon-white face lay awkwardly on her outstretched arm; her bloodshot blue eyes staring into nothingness. She looked no more than twenty-five, probably younger.

Her sad mouth had cried blood. One trail made it all the way down to her slender white throat. Her flowery summer dress was laddered with stab wounds – still fresh. My head swooned. I leaned back against the wall of the landing, exhaled hard.

Clive bent down and placed a reluctant finger to her porcelain neck.

‘She put up a hell of a fight,’ he said flatly, ‘but she’s dead.’

He backed away apologetically. My eyes fastened upon her limp hand, focusing upon the nail hanging from her little finger which had almost been completely ripped off. Sadness flooded me. My stinging eyes blinked and shifted to the floor next to her: a set of keys, a handbag, her jacket, some post.

‘She must have let her killer in,’ I squeaked, sounding every bit as shocked as I felt.

‘Looks like it,’ said Clive, reassuringly unmoved.

‘Right,’ he added brightly, ‘best get back downstairs. We don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.’

A cold breath chilled the right side of my face. I turned to see a small window on the landing, slightly open. ‘Fuck,’ I said. All this time, I’d been standing between her newly dead body and an open window. Where I came from, this spelt doom. I shivered, then snapped myself out of it. There was work to be done.

I’d never understood officers who said that, in really stressful situations, ‘your training kicks in’. I did now. Clive started questioning Chiselled Ginge and taking notes. His name was Peter Ryan. He was twenty-eight. The dead woman was his wife of thirteen months, Marion, aged twenty-three. She usually got home before six. He and Karen – a colleague from work – got back just after nine and found her like that on the landing. Police officers and forensics were wandering in, so I went outside to find Karen.

In the darkening, humming summer night, Sangora Road flashed blue and red, a grotesque carnival of morbid curiosity. Neighbours who’d never shared a word before chatted intently: lots of ‘apparently’ and ‘oh my God’. The petite, curly-haired brunette I assumed to be Karen was being comforted by a group of middle-aged men. One edgy-looking sleaze ball in a wife-beater vest and school-shooter combats rubbed her upper arm vigorously. He looked like a man who spent his life hunting down any kind of a leg-over whatsoever.

‘Karen?’ I asked. She looked up sharply, surprised by the sound of her own name. ‘PC Donal Lynch. Sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you a few questions.’ Her arm rubber – a Poster Boy for Families Need Fathers – glared at me, ready to back up his potential new squeeze against the filth.

Karen took a long deep breath and nodded. Instead of structured questions, I let her ramble. In a quivering, child-like, barely audible voice, she told me the following: her name was Karen Foster, twenty-five, from Lee in South East London, a colleague of Pete’s at the Pines old people’s home in Lambeth. She told me Pete was the gardener there. She’d given him a lift back to his flat tonight to pick up some heavy pots to take back to the home, where she lived in staff accommodation. They’d got here just after nine. He had unlocked the front door, then the door to their flat and went in first. Pete had stopped suddenly on the stairs and screamed, ‘Marion, Marion!’ He went to her. Karen had followed and saw Marion lying there. She checked for signs of life.

She shivered. Arm Rubber gave me a look that said: ‘C’mon mate, I think she’s had enough’, but I hadn’t. I may have been new to murder, but I understood the value of first-hand, untainted, lawyer-free testimony.

‘Go on,’ I demanded.

‘I got her blood on my hands, so I washed them. Then I had to get out of there.’

A shiver rattled her entire frame.

‘Did Pete definitely unlock both doors?’ I asked. She nodded and bowed her head. Her centre parting wobbled and so did I.

‘Look, Karen, I’m sorry, I have to ask … we need to find whoever did this.’

She sniffed hard at the pavement, and I lamented yet another failure to channel my inner bad cop. I fought the urge to place a comforting hand on her quivering shoulder and walked away.

I joined Clive inside the front door just as three hotshot detectives swaggered in. The senior of the trio wore the hangdog expression of a man put out by life. ‘Detective Superintendent Glenn,’ he barked. Clive unloaded the basic detail while DS Glenn nodded impatiently. As I took up the slack, he fixed me with a scowl. Clearly, I was way too excited for his deadpan taste.

They made what seemed to me a cursory inspection of the crime scene: skirting around it as you might a dead bird on the pavement, or a splatter of puke. Then DS Glenn stomped off outside.

‘Is that it?’ I asked Clive.

‘It’s not Magnum P.I.,’ he laughed, ‘they’ll wait for forensics and statements, then they’ll decide what lines of enquiry to take.’

One of Hangdog Glenn’s bitches stopped by on his way out to treat us to a condescending glare: ‘What time do you go off duty, lads?’

‘We finished almost an hour ago at nine,’ said Clive, all chipper, just so he’d know we didn’t mind the inconvenience one bit.

‘Okay, call Clapham. Get them to send an officer to guard the door overnight and an unmarked car to take the husband and woman in to make a statement.’

‘Right now?’ I asked.

‘Of course right now,’ he spat, ‘and we’ll need statements from you two before you start your shifts tomorrow.’ He scuttled off down the garden steps, his gumshoe mac flapping in the summer breeze. At the gate, he turned. ‘Make sure you get the front door keys off the husband,’ he shouted, not realising that said husband was stood right there.

As Peter fished around for his keys, Clive and I descended the steps towards him. A sickening dread tugged at my guts. What could I possibly say to him now? I thought back to all those funerals in Ireland, how we always spouted the same stock phrases to mourners. ‘Doesn’t he look peaceful?’ was a classic. I mean what did we expect? Signs of a struggle? Fingernail scratch marks down the side of the coffin?

Then I remembered the one cover-all stock phrase, used by everyone when coming face-to-face with the principal mourners: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’ That line always seemed so anodyne, so emotionally detached, so generic. My brother Fintan and I used to dream up equivalents. ‘Oh dear,’ was his favourite. I liked: ‘Sure, it could be worse.’

Clive took Peter’s keys and spoke first. ‘Who else has a set?’

‘Just me and … Marion,’ said Peter, his voice cracking at the mention of her name.

‘We’re fetching a car for you and your colleague. I’m afraid we need statements from both of you tonight.’

Peter just stared into space.

‘Where can you go after the police station?’ asked Clive. ‘Have you got family near here?’

Peter shook his pale face mournfully. ‘The only place I can go is to Marion’s mum and dad up in Enfield.’

Clive and I exchanged frowns.

‘Do you think that’s wise, son?’ asked Clive. Peter looked at him blankly.

‘Okay,’ said Clive, ‘first I’ve got to get officers round there to tell them the news.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ Peter gasped and we all baulked. Every parent’s worst nightmare: the death knock. Peter walked slowly away from us but I could hear every word. ‘Oh Jesus, Jesus,’ he muttered, over and over.

A sudden deafening bellow made us jump. Peter’s wails were primeval, from the very core of his being. My mind flashed back to the time the Dalys’ prize-winning cow died howling in their shed. I’m sure their mother said she’d developed gangrenous teats. I couldn’t drink milk for a month after.

I turned to Clive: ‘If he did it, he surely wouldn’t go and stay with her family.’

‘He’s either innocent or one hell of an actor,’ said Clive, ‘I mean look at him, he’s shivering like a shitting dog.’

‘Maybe he’s racked with guilt. She must have known her killer. She let him in.’

‘And it must have been a man,’ said Clive, ‘I mean, just from the point of view of strength. It’s always the man, isn’t it?’

‘They were only married thirteen months,’ I said, ‘I just don’t see it.’

‘Neither did she,’ deadpanned Clive, chuckling as he set off across the road. I wondered if that’s what happened to all cops, in the end.

I couldn’t just leave Peter like that, bent double, bawling at the pavement. I walked over and put a hand on his heaving shoulders. He calmed almost instantly. I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I said: ‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

He breathed in deeply.

‘Thank you, Officer,’ he blurted, and I could tell he meant it, before the spasms of grief swept him away once more.

As the car taking Peter and Karen to Clapham police station moved off, a flash of streetlight illuminated the interior. Freeze-framed in the back seat, Peter’s ghostly white face stared straight ahead, as if into an abyss. How I longed for a glimpse inside that mind. On the far side of him, two large teary eyes gazed into his. Then, for a nanosecond, the eyes of Karen Foster locked onto mine, glinting wounded confusion.

The murder scene buzz snapped off like a light. A sense of helplessness gnawed away at my red-raw nerves.

‘Go home, son, you look shattered,’ said Clive, and I lacked the will to argue.

It was less than a mile to the flat I shared with Aidan, an old friend from back home.

Aidan was a psychiatric nurse at the Maudsley hospital, and on ‘earlies’ that week. But I guessed he’d still be up, chain-smoking his Marlboro Reds, noodling on his guitar, crafting a ballad to the latest random woman he’d fallen in love with at the bus stop or in some supermarket queue, the soft eejit.

Like so many gifted musicians I’d known, Aidan existed in a perpetual emotional state of either unrequited love or rejection. It was as if he’d absorbed the lyrics of all the epic love songs he’d ever learned so that they became his doomed emotional landscape. Any girl he got off with instantly became ‘the one’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (early era), Stone Roses, The Sugarcubes. Then his intensity would scare her off, making her ‘the one who got away’ – cue a week of Van Morrison (late era), Nick Cave and Tom Waits in his locked smoky bedroom. If music be the food of love, Aidan ate only sweet ’n sour.

His self-inflicted lovelorn existence, coupled with the fact he didn’t drink or take an interest in sport, outcast Aidan from the rest of our circle. But his tendency to get depressed worried me, so I’d always kept in touch. When the cash-in-hand, hard-drinking madness of the North London Irish scene became too much, I ‘retired’ to South London and Aidan’s calm exile. ‘Be good training for when you move in with a woman,’ the lads joked.

Aidan’s emotional pogo would be too much for me tonight. I elected to walk home, nice and steady, so he’d be asleep by the time I got there.

The lightest of rain filled the air, cool and gentle, as if a weary cloud had sunk upon the road. ‘Soft rain, thank God,’ the old boys back home would say. The streets went slick. Car wheels sizzled like frying pans. The night buses groaned and closing time laughs rang hollow.

A lonely phone box cast piss-green light upon the wet pavement. I stared through the scratched glass at the grubby phone inside. I wanted to call her right now, badly. But how could I, at this time of night, after two long years?

I walked on, unable to fathom why seeing Marion’s body had affected me so much. God knows, like any young Irish adult, I’d seen more dead bodies than Ted Bundy’s chest freezer. It’s nothing sinister – at least not to us. It comes down to one stubbornly lingering Irish tradition: the Wake.

I remembered comedian Dave Allen’s line: In Ireland, death is a way of life. Whenever someone dies, we lay them out in their coffin and look at them for a few days. Tradition demands that the body is accompanied at all times until its ‘removal’ to the church. Cue an endless stream of relatives and neighbours through the house, a reservoir of tea, a landfill of sandwiches. From the age of seven or eight, every time a relative croaked it – and my extended clan was massive – you were hauled along to the Wake to say goodbye to someone you didn’t know who was already dead.

Before the corpse is displayed to all and sundry – usually in a bedroom or the sitting room of their home – some poor soul has to wrestle them into their Sunday best, wrench their eyes and mouth shut, apply make-up, and discreetly stuff cotton wool up their nostrils so that they don’t cave in. You never seemed to meet an embalmer socially.

In some homes, clocks are stopped at the time of death and all mirrors turned to the wall. Once the coffin is hauled into its display position, the family opens the window, to allow the deceased person’s spirit to leave. After two hours, they close the window, to ensure that the spirit doesn’t return. If you stand between the window and the body during this time, then God help you.

I shuddered at the memory of that open landing window tonight. Did Marion’s spirit pass through me?

I scolded myself for entertaining such superstitious nonsense. My thoughts turned instead to Marion. I knew that every square inch of her body would be poked and prodded, then photographed, scraped, swabbed or cut open. Body fluids, fingernail dirt and pubic hair would be sealed in plastic or glass and then passed, hand to hand, along the evidential chain; from pathologist to the laboratory, to the prosecution, to the court and to the jury. When you become the central piece of evidence in your own murder, there’s no dignity. Poor Marion – probably worrying about what to make for tea when she got to her front door. I tried to block out how she must have felt the moment she saw the knife. How could someone she knew do this to her?

Then I thought about Eve. Another blazing redhead ambushed by evil.

I rubbed my eyes. The soft rain had made my face all wet.

Eve Daly was more Irish-looking than any woman has a right to be: mischievous green eyes; a pale, sculpted face with just enough freckles; wild hair as red as the flesh of a blood orange. Sexy, curvy, five foot five in heels, her nose crinkled when she laughed, she smelled of pine needles and, when she came, her lips felt as cold and soft as fresh snow. And she was mine.

Eve’s daddy, Philandering Frank, had fled to London with his secretary three years earlier in a scandal that had seemed to delight everyone except his family.

Before his midnight flit, Frank had painstakingly stashed his fortune into a myriad of untraceable off-shore accounts, leaving the family penniless and saddled with a sprawling, heavily mortgaged bungalow. In an effort to save their home – and face – Eve’s mum, Mad Mo, and her two older brothers moved to New York. Once her clan had split, Eve felt like she was in Ireland on borrowed time, which is exactly how I felt. She was going to New York; I was bound for London – neither of us really belonged anymore. And so we became an island. Our romance flourished on a shared musical snobbery and a mutual disdain for pretty much everything and everyone around us.

On Saturday nights, we cemented our superiority at Rocky’s in Tullamore – ‘the Midlands’ hottest nightspot’ – where we perfected our disaffection and snorted with laughter and contempt at the music, the dancing and the fashion.

The girls sat on one side of the empty dance floor, dressed to repel adverse weather and stray hands. The DJ never warned them of ‘a slow set’ in case they scattered to the toilets. We’d watch in horrified fascination as local men walked the line in vain, seemingly immune to serial rejection.

On the other side of the dance floor, we identified two clear tribes of men: the Posers and the Poodles. The motto of the Posers seemed to be: if a piece of clothing rolls, then roll it. They wore Miami Vice-style pastel suit jackets (sleeves rolledup to the elbow), pink or blue t-shirts (arm sleeves rolled up to the pit), pegged jeans (scrunched up at the bottom, then rolled up: always twice), slip-on shoes (Oxblood moccasins with the natty little tassels), no socks (inexplicably spurning two glorious rolling opportunities) and mullet hair-dos.

On the other end of the scale: the heavy rocker types known as the ‘hard chaws’ who rode Honda 50s, head-banged (even during slow sets) and preferred to end the evening with a brawl. The Chaws had wholeheartedly embraced American Poodle Rock, which involved wearing your hair big and your denim bleached. The jeans were so tight they required zips in the lower leg to get on, or off, while the denim jackets were oversized, with obligatory rolled-up sleeves and US band badges on the back: Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses.

At the end of the night, we’d dare each other to order curry chips from Mrs Maguire’s rancid van: baulking at the peeled spuds in the rusty sink, her crusted black fingernails and the ringworm on her grease-creased forehead. But at two a.m., nothing in the world tasted better and, as exhaustive research had taught me, no one ever hits you when you’re holding a punnet of chips.

We’d walk back to hers, singing ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight’ while checking out the big sky for shooting stars. I didn’t know if I loved Eve, or if she loved me. But I loved life with her in it.

Before it all went so horribly wrong.

I got home just after eleven p.m., registered Aidan’s closed bedroom door with a silent fist pump and uncorked a bottle of red.

I flopped onto the couch without even switching on a lamp. My mood deserved the streetlight’s soothing amber gloom. I knew I’d have to ration my Shiraz and my irrational emotions for a longer stretch than usual tonight.

The worst part about insomnia is all the empty time you have to fill. I’m awake four or five hours longer than you each day – up to thirty-five hours every week: that’s twenty-three soccer matches, twelve The Godfathers, an entire French working week. Each year, I’ve got seventy-six extra days to kill when hardly anyone else is awake and nothing is open. These stats alone prove that I’ve far too much time on my hands.

When an inability to ‘drop off’ first struck me three years ago, I was scorching through three books a week. I read everything I could lay my hands on about sleep, dreams, insomnia. All I learned was how little we know about any of it: the scientific world has yet to even figure out why we dream.

Just because you can’t sleep doesn’t mean you don’t need sleep and little by little my ability to concentrate ebbed away, leaving me with just the one trusty sedative. Someone clever once said: ‘Time, Motion and Wine Cause Sleep.’ I could rely only on the latter. I opted for Shiraz – that charred fruit flavour making it the hardest to drink fast – and I tried to limit my intake to two bottles a night. That might sound excessive but, spread normally over eight hours – eight p.m. until four a.m. – it’s less than a glass an hour. Trust me, it felt moderate. More often than not, I dropped off somewhere between three and four a.m., congratulating myself on the quarter of a bottle left.

Some nights, regardless of grape intake, I knew sleep wouldn’t take me. This would be one of those nights.

‘Well, Van Winkle, how are they hanging?’ Aidan’s voice startled me.

‘Before you display the deep personal concern typical of you,’ he added, sitting beside me on the couch, ‘you didn’t wake me up. I just can’t seem to nod off tonight. It must be catching.’

After a while, he spoke again. ‘Why don’t you watch telly? That’d help pass the time.’

‘Have you seen late-night TV? Their target audience must be Travis Bickle. You have to like your rock soft and your porn hard.’

‘And your university open. Speaking of which, what happened to that home course you were doing?’