Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller Read online

  ‘No. Look, honestly,’ I smiled my most reassuring smile, ‘I can explain everything.’

  Chapter 7

  Trinity Road, South London

  Tuesday, July 2, 1991; 23:00

  Aidan cackled mercilessly at my noble attempts to protect Gabby from Dom Rogan. Coming from the most hapless of hopeless romantics, it confirmed that I’d irretrievably fucked up.

  When the house phone rang, we both froze like spinsters. Tragically, this had never happened after eleven p.m. before. The look of mild terror on Aidan’s face as I picked up reinforced my conviction that we both needed to get a life.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi, Donal, it’s Gabby.’

  By the time I recovered my composure, she must have assumed I’d hung up. Or lost consciousness.

  ‘Donal? Donal? HELLO?’

  ‘Hi, Gabby, hi. God, this is a surprise. A pleasant one I mean.’

  Aidan’s eyes sprang out on stalks as I bumbled on.

  ‘Thanks so much for calling, I – I wasn’t expecting it but I’m really glad you did because I really, really wanted to explain everything.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. If that’s okay? I’m amazed you called, and grateful, really grateful. And can I say sorry first, sorry for freaking you out? I can explain. Did they give you my note?’

  ‘Oh yes, the WPC was most insistent.’

  ‘I was so frustrated, leaving you the way we did. I had this horrible feeling he’d come back. I – I’m an insomniac anyway so I thought, well, why not pop round and keep an eye on your place? A spur of the moment thing really. Then I fell asleep in the car and had a nightmare. That must have been why I was shouting.’

  Aidan cringed like a condemned Texan.

  ‘Right. So you shout in your sleep?’

  ‘Only at the moment.’

  ‘Great. Soon I’ll have maniacs queuing up at the front door. What were you planning to do to him?’

  ‘I just thought I’d shake him up a bit, you know, give him a fright. Make him think twice about doing it again.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ she said, her voice breaking in panicked exasperation, ‘that’s not going to work. That’ll just make him really angry. And then he’ll come back and do something awful to me.’

  ‘I won’t let that happen to you, Gabby. I promise.’

  ‘You can’t make that promise. He’ll just carry on doing what he likes.’

  ‘Like I said, Gabby, I suffer from insomnia. It’s no trouble to me to drive over and keep an eye on your place. I can just sit in the car, listen to the radio, even for a few nights until you sort something out.’

  ‘I don’t … why would you do that?’

  ‘Look, you live on my patch. It’s my duty to keep the people on my patch safe.’

  I thought the next silence would never end. But I held my nerve.

  ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I’ve got your number. If he turns up, I’ll call you.’

  ‘I hope you mean that.’

  This silence lasted longer. I lost my nerve.

  ‘Okay, well, I guess I hope I don’t hear from you again then, Gabby,’ I said, as brightly as I could.

  ‘I hope not,’ she said blankly, hanging up.

  Chapter 8

  Wandsworth Common

  Sunday, July 7; 10:15

  A glorious morning deserved a stroll to the Common. On the way, I picked up a copy of the Sunday News. In the cool shade of a gnarled old oak, I settled down to Fintan’s latest journalistic handiwork.

  ‘Cops Hunt South London Ripper’, said the headline, ‘by Fintan Lynch, Deputy Crime Correspondent.’

  The opening paragraph: ‘The maniac who slashed to death a twenty-three-year-old newlywed in her London flat earlier this week is targeting other women in the local area, police believe.’

  A police source confirmed that, on the day of ‘Marion’s slaying’ – surely not the source’s phrase? – a nanny had been pestered by a stranger on the Common ‘less than a mile from the scene of Marion’s brutal murder’.

  A day later, in nearby Clapham South, a woman had been accosted on her doorstep by a stranger. Her ‘would-be attacker’ tried to push her inside, only for the ‘quick-thinking victim’ to scream, forcing him to run away. I marvelled at the poetic licence of ‘would-be attacker’ and the logic that makes screaming a ‘quick-thinking’ response. Mind you, Marion hadn’t screamed: at least not loudly enough for anyone to hear. She kept her head when screaming it off might have saved her.

  I shuddered. This development changed everything.

  Could the same man have bundled Marion inside her front door, then marched her upstairs at knifepoint? The mail found next to her body seemed to torpedo this scenario – unless the letters had been planted afterwards. If there was a maniac like this on the loose, how long before he strikes again?

  Descriptions of the suspect in the two ‘failed attacks’ tallied, resulting in the usual comedy photo-fit. If we found a simian male with a face wider than was long, with no forehead, a monobrow and tiny, malevolent eyes, then that was our man. If some guy out there really did look like this, then small wonder he’d been forced to opt for non-consensual romantic encounters.

  Tellingly, the impeccably connected police source for this ‘exclusive’ didn’t explicitly say that detectives were linking Marion’s murder to these two incidents. The article simply concluded that Scotland Yard had declined to comment. The entire piece was clearly sensationalist, scaremongering bollocks; opportunist skulduggery of the basest kind. Another look at that photo-fit revealed a certain likeness to Fintan. God knows that fucker would do anything to stand up a story.

  I suppose the Yard didn’t care, so long as the all-important Incident Room number was tagged on at the end. Sometimes, a single call from the public can save months of investigation, and other lives. But everything else in the article had to be a rip-roaring smokescreen, surely?

  I was certain that the ‘Big Dog’ detectives would be sniffing through every aspect of Marion’s life, and that soon they would work out who wanted her dead, and why.

  Thankfully, Marion’s vengeful spirit hadn’t come to me again since her car door slamming escapades the other night. And the more I thought about it, although I had been terrified, I don’t think she had actually meant me harm. She was trying to tell me something. The only thing I could think of were doors – the door she’d slammed in my flat and the car door. But what did that mean?

  I doubted if the Big Dogs would entertain any of this. I doubted any sane person would entertain the notion that Marion was giving me clues to her killer from beyond the grave. So what was I to do with this information? And why had she not come to me in the last five days?

  Suddenly everything around me rustled. A breeze as cold as steel snaked around my neck and shoulders, forcing them to roll together. A daytime moon winked briefly between skidding incoming clouds. Whatever Marion had in store for me would come, as sure as rain and night and death.

  Chapter 9

  Salcott Road, South London

  Sunday, July 7, 1991; 22:00

  That night, I took up my usual position at the alleyway on Salcott Road, more scared of an encounter with Gabby than Dom Rogan.

  As I did so, I realised one other thing connected Marion’s two visits: on both those days I had attended her murder scene. Since then, she’d been a no-show. I could have tested this theory right then – Sangora Road was just five minutes’ walk away – but I had a stalker to stalk.

  It had been four days since Dom’s incursion into Gabby’s back garden. On each of those subsequent nights, I’d waited for him here but he’d failed to show – or at least, I hadn’t seen him. I was worried that he’d clocked me, and was now biding his time until I gave up. We both knew I couldn’t keep coming here indefinitely.

  Although he’d no previous convictions, I had been able to glean all of Dom’s personal details from the police computer. I thought about turning up at Bank of
America in uniform and demanding to see him. When dealing with the middle classes, embarrassment can be our most powerful weapon. But to do this, I’d have to get an official sanction and, of course, write a report.

  I much preferred keeping Dom unofficial business. With him in Gabby’s back garden, face down in the dirt, my arm around his throat, I could much better explain my plans to hit him with charges of trespass, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer if he ever showed up again. Another breach and I’d make it official: magistrates would give him two years’ probation at the very least. Break that and I’d land him in jail quicker than he could say: ‘I want to call my family lawyer.’ I felt certain that the very real threat of prison would straighten him out, no matter how much he might squeal about his rights and his well-connected pals.

  I felt uncomfortable bending the rules, but what else could I do?

  As it was Sunday night, the street’s houselights sparked out even earlier. If New York is the city that never sleeps, London likes an early night.

  A sharp rap on the car window lifted me six inches off the seat. Gabby glared down at me, half-cross, half-amused. I unwound the window.

  ‘We don’t want him thinking he’s got competition,’ she deadpanned, ‘you might as well come in.’

  ‘Only if you’re sure …’ I started but she’d already marched off.

  I caught up with her at the front door.

  ‘I’ve tidied and everything.’

  ‘You knew I’d come?’

  ‘Funnily enough, Donal, because I’m being stalked I tend to keep a bit of an eye out. I can’t believe you park in the same place every night.’

  My face burned.

  ‘I’m not a weirdo, Gabby, I really want to stress that point. I just want to help you get rid of this … problem.’

  ‘I know that now,’ she said, treating me to a closed-mouth, business-like smile.

  She took a quick scan of the street – almost instinctively – then gestured at me to go through first, before treble-locking the door.

  I led the way down her hallway into an open-plan sitting room and kitchen. I noticed original numbered canvas artwork, a bank of photos of her world travels, an old Canon Super 8 camera, books galore – lots of Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin.

  She showed me to her kitchen table, put the kettle on.

  ‘Tea, coffee?’

  ‘Tea would be great.’

  She opened her cupboard to reveal a rainbow of exotic brews: Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Cinnamon, Peppermint.

  ‘What type?’

  ‘Just normal, thanks.’

  ‘I’m not sure I have normal.’

  ‘Surprise me,’ I demanded, pretending to be the spontaneous type.

  She put a cup of what smelt like steaming rat piss in front of me and announced: ‘Right, let’s get this over with, shall we?’

  My startled look clearly empowered her.

  ‘You must be dying to know how I ended up with a nutty stalker boyfriend.’

  How did she know?

  ‘Well, he didn’t start out like that. I suppose they never do.’

  I shuffled awkwardly. I was still learning how to listen without judgement. It didn’t come naturally.

  ‘I met him at Uni. He was shy, serious but very dry and funny when you got to know him. And clever. He’s probably the only actual genius I’ve ever met.’

  I realised I’d yet to tick a single point on her ‘What I Like in a Man’ list.

  ‘Of course I was totally bowled over by this tortured and slightly depressive genius. I mean, who wouldn’t be?’

  ‘Who indeed? Do you have milk by any chance?’

  She looked at me as if I’d just cracked a really lame gag, then carried on.

  ‘After a while, he never wanted to go out or have anyone round. Looking back I can see how he isolated me from my friends and my family. They really didn’t like him at all. We spent more and more time together. I didn’t realise it but I’d become totally dependent on him.

  ‘He started getting very snappy and impatient, criticising me all the time. He just chipped away at my self-esteem until I’d lost all sense of who I was and what I believed in, if that makes sense.’

  The dainty china cup felt ridiculous in my meaty farmer’s hand. I took a sip, careful to suppress all reaction, and apologised silently to rats.

  ‘Then my gran got diagnosed with cancer. Dom refused to come with me to see her. She’d only met him a few times but she gave me a really stiff talking to. I was really upset by the things she said but I knew in my heart she was right. So I went home and told him.’

  ‘And now he can’t accept it’s over?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You mentioned he could be violent?’

  She swallowed, inspected her hands and nodded slowly. It didn’t feel right to press. I tried another tack.

  ‘Maybe he just can’t stop loving you?’

  She laughed bitterly. ‘He never loved me. I’m a possession to him. His ego can’t accept that I finished it. Little old meek me.’

  ‘Meek? You? Jesus.’

  That got a smile.

  ‘Look, Gabby, you need to move out of here, get a house share so you’ve always got people around you. Stay off the electoral roll so he can’t find you …’

  ‘But Gran left me this place. I’ve spent the last six months doing it up. I can’t just … leave.’

  ‘Maybe just for a year … you’d have no trouble renting it out. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I promise, give it twelve months and he’ll tire of trying to find you.’

  ‘He knows where I work.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Hopscotch children’s nursery, on Crescent Lane. I’m the manager.’

  ‘Trust me, stalker or not, he won’t hang around a nursery. He’ll get lynched.’

  She laughed, then groaned: ‘Oh God, why do I have to move when he’s the one …?’

  ‘Look, I don’t want to alarm you, Gabby, but he’s escalating. You need to get away from here right away. By that, I mean tomorrow. Have you family close by?’

  She sighed.

  ‘Mum and Dad live in Maidstone. It’s only an hour on the train. I suppose I could stay there for a while.’

  ‘Otherwise you’ll have to put up with me every night.’

  She looked at me, eyebrow arched, quizzically amused: ‘What’s your story then, Donal? How does an Irishman end up in the British police force? And why do you shout in your sleep?’

  ‘How long have you got?’ I laughed.

  ‘I’m not a great sleeper either,’ she smiled, ‘so you can take your time. Another tea?’

  ‘Er no, thanks. Do you have anything stronger?’

  ‘I’ve got wine.’

  ‘Red?’

  ‘Blimey, you get your feet under the table quick, don’t you?’

  ‘Bespoke personal protection don’t come cheap.’

  I skipped the stuff about Eve and Meehan: none of it showed anyone in a good light. Instead, over too much Merlot, I took her through my three-year journey from North to South London; from Irish rebel to tax-paying member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

  Put it down to gut instinct or a copper’s mind but, as I poured out my story, I felt sure we were being watched, possibly listened to. I knew too that what I’d started here could end horribly. What if Dom was a disciple of that stalker’s doctrine: ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else will’?

  When I first got to Harlesden, I shared a house so crowded that only the door-less bathroom didn’t have a bed. We went home to wash and sleep. We ate, drank, got hired and cashed our paycheques at the Spotted Dog pub on Willesden High Road.

  Standing at the bar every night were the men we’d become if we kept this up for another twenty or thirty years, the old boys who came over in the Fifties and Sixties. They had faces like elephant hide and accents even thicker; I’d never heard anyone in Ireland speak with such a str
ong brogue. I watched them night after night, sinking pint after pint of Guinness, failing to quench terrible thirsts while clutching white polythene bags in their non-drinking hands.

  ‘What’s in the bags?’ I asked the barman quietly one night.

  ‘That’s their dinner,’ he whispered. On closer inspection, beneath the polythene I could see the outline of a chop or a ball of mince, potatoes and carrots.

  ‘Why don’t they get it later? It’s not like the shops round here shut.’

  ‘Because they’ll have drunk all their money later.’

  You’d learn that some of them didn’t go home for Christmas anymore – the lost causes. Two nights a week, a tin collecting for ‘IRA prisoners’ rattled under your nose. No one dared decline. You noticed that the local mini-cab firm only ever sent white drivers. No one ever asked why.

  I’d landed regular work feeding cement to a trio of Connemara bricklayers. They worked like savages, as if expunging some inner volcanic rage or demon. ‘Feed me,’ they’d roar, but no matter how fast and hard I’d mix, I could never keep up. It sapped me of the energy I needed to change my pub-based existence. At least that was my excuse.

  We spent almost the entire weekend in the Dog, drinking away our aches and gains, frittering money on horses, football and pool. We’d end up at the Gresham on Holloway Road, a vast hangar of drunken oblivion where Irish people of all ages drank, ate, danced and fought. And they always fought. The red-faced middle-aged men in ripped shirts knew they only had to land one good one to win. The police never came. You were too pissed to wonder why.

  Then Fintan moved over, saw how low I’d sunk and set about breaking me out of my bad routine. But not before first establishing himself as a cut-throat tabloid hack.

  Within months of his arrival in London, under the expert tutelage of the Sunday News, he’d sunk to the challenge of becoming one of Fleet Street’s most lethal ‘operators’. Both his drinking capacity and expenses account appeared bottomless, as he set about getting half of Scotland Yard well-oiled and onside. His connections didn’t end there. When I’d had my fill of labouring, he told me to go see Seamus Horan, manager of the Feathers pub, near St James’s Park underground station in central London. I jumped at the chance: every organ within me felt like it needed a change.