Games with the Dead

by James Nally

  He shakes his head, whether in refusal or disbelief I can’t tell. I keep the verbal going, just in case.

  ‘I trust that a well-informed man such as yourself will have read and heard about all these amazing developments in DNA and forensics. Let’s just say all the pointers are now facing away from Delaney and towards a man with a grudge. This man then went on to kill someone else, a woman, but I can’t tell you any more about that right now. Bottom line is, you’re our best hope of identifying this suspect.’

  He sniffs and sighs, his resistance crumbling.

  ‘The thing is, I was friends with Nathan and Emma, his missus. I don’t want to make things worse for her and the kids, especially when the police seem so convinced that Delaney did it.’

  ‘Like I said, not any longer.’

  He takes a self-psyching deep breath. ‘One woman he mentioned was Yvonne Morris or Morrison. She lived in a cul-de-sac in South Norwood, I don’t know which one. Her husband is the CEO of some tech company. Apparently, she was convinced her husband had been bugging the house and the phone, trying to prove she was having an affair. Nathan told me how he’d found a tiny device under the marital bed which, judging by his expression, he may have planted there himself. Next thing he’s having it away with Yvonne. A few weeks later, he’s knocking off some other bird and he wants rid of Yvonne, so he plants his business card under Yvonne’s marital bed, right next to her husband’s copy of Moby Dick, which he seemed to think hilarious. Sure enough, Mr M finds the card, kicks out Yvonne, gets his solicitor to make a formal complaint to the Association of PIs, whatever that’s called. Nathan tells Yvonne he has to ditch her or he’ll get struck off.’

  ‘Didn’t Nathan’s wife ever suspect anything?’

  ‘I think Emma knew, but they stuck it out for the kids. That’s what decent people do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Decent people,’ I nod, and my guts twinge. Even if Zoe gives me the chance, will I be able to swallow my pride and forgive her, for Matt’s sake? It’s been several days since I discovered her deceit, yet my feelings of wounded betrayal have actually intensified. Decent people? Zoe has always regarded herself as the more decent of us: she’s smarter, better educated, more cultured. But it wasn’t her bit of Irish rough who had sex with someone else.

  ‘He mentioned another married woman, Joan something, who he seemed really keen on, but she went back to her husband in the end, despite the fact he was violent to her. I’ve never understood that.’

  ‘Do you remember Joan’s surname?’

  ‘Carter, I think. It’s been, what, six or seven years …’

  ‘Did he ever mention Karen Moore?’

  He inhales slowly, measuring his words.

  ‘You never knew if Nathan was gilding the lily. He didn’t tell outright porkies, but he had a sort of image of himself which he liked to reinforce, as much to himself as to anyone else. Overweening pride, I suppose you’d call it.’

  I nod impatiently. Everyone thinks they’re Freud these days. I blame Oprah, Springer, Kilroy-Silk and their TV ilk, who’ve elevated bad behaviour to some sort of emotional pseudo-science. In this new touchy-feely world, nobody is ever responsible for their actions. You know the kind of stuff: I shoplift not for the nice clothes but to fulfil an emotional void …

  ‘Can you just tell me what he told you about Karen and I’ll find out which parts of it are true.’

  ‘Yeah alright,’ he sniffs defensively. ‘Nathan and Delaney were in this lunch club. They used to get pissed every second Friday. By all accounts, no one went back to work and it sometimes got pretty out of hand. Nathan and Delaney were very taken with Karen and her friend Stacey. He didn’t tell me either of their surnames but they were both married.’

  Fucking hell, I think, is the whole world engaged in illicit sex, except me?

  ‘According to Nathan, the girls joined them at a hotel bar and they ended up in some presidential suite with a jacuzzi. Cut a long story short, they have a foursome. Nathan, at least in his own mind, proved the superior swordsman. Well, he was in better condition, so I believe it. Delaney wasn’t happy. Male pride and all that. According to Nathan, that was the beginning of the end.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe, does it? It’s your job to find out which parts of it are true.’

  Touché!

  He swings right off the South Circular onto Baring Road, towards Bromley. After about a quarter of a mile, he slows down to a crawl, leans forward and peers about.

  ‘I remember we were approaching that pub, the Summerfield, when he pointed down one of these roads on the right.’

  ‘What did he say exactly?’

  ‘I can’t give you verbatim, but something like, “if something bad happens to me, and I end up in hospital, it’ll be down to the man who lives at that house.” We were just past the pub and he pointed back.’

  I’m finding this all a bit convenient, and wonder what his game is.

  ‘Where did he point exactly?’

  ‘It was more of a general …’ he mimics the action; an irritatingly vague thumb jab towards Ronver Road.

  ‘I’ll have to make you do that again. Go much slower this time.’

  He swings the van around, repeats the drive-by. I make a mental note.

  ‘Did he say whether it was a jealous husband, a criminal or just someone he’d upset?’

  ‘He didn’t elaborate. Like I say, he was always quite melodramatic about his own activities. A bit of a fantasist, I suppose.’

  ‘You told DI Lambert all this?’

  ‘Not about the affairs, but I showed him this address. He was sat in the van, just like you.’

  ‘Did he follow it up?’

  ‘I don’t know. They never got back to me.’

  ‘Are there any other sexual conquests I need to know about?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Why would I hold back now I’ve spilled the beans? But I’m glad I have, to be honest. I always thought it must’ve been Delaney. But if one of those jealous husbands killed Nathan, I want you to catch the bastard.’

  Chapter 21

  Camden, North London

  Tuesday, June 21 to Friday, June 24, 1994

  An old-school birdcage lift lowers me deep below Camden Town.

  As Northern Line tube trains rumble fifty feet above, helpful Geoff explains how this bunker had been carved out during World War Two to act as a bomb shelter for 8,000 people, one of several across the city.

  By the time they completed the bunkers, the Blitz had ended. Since then, these vast spaces have been used for military exercises, farming, accommodation for the first ‘Windrush’ immigrants from the Caribbean and, more recently, as film sets for Doctor Who and Blake’s 7.

  Geoff leads me down one of countless, seemingly infinite fluorescent-strip tunnels, revealing each to be a quarter of a mile long. Flanked by modern Dexion shelves packed with cardboard boxes, I can’t help thinking we’re headed towards ground zero of the world’s largest fire hazard.

  ‘The Nathan Barry paperwork starts here,’ he says, pointing at box one. ‘It ends … oh my goodness … here,’ he bellows, some forty odd feet away.

  ‘On all levels?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Rather you than me.’

  His clerical hell is my punctilious paradise. Only by ploughing through every sheet of this paperwork can I sift fact from fiction; find out every single action those Nathan Barry detectives have taken since 1988 … and what they’ve missed. I may even unearth Nathan Barry’s killer and connect that crime to the murder of Julie Draper.

  Besides, methodical, brain-numbing labour proves the perfect emotional decoy. In between subterranean days spent at the bunker in subconscious mourning – Jonah in the stomach of the whale – I’m safe from all those everyday reminders of Zoe and Matt and my enigmatic romantic nemesis, Charles. Not for the first time, work saves me. Work saves many men.

  All life outside
this black hole represents a Trojan emotional challenge. The most banal everyday events can set me off; a family merrily gambolling along a pavement; knocking over my coffee in a Wimpy; passing the pub where we first smooched.

  Radio-friendly songs I normally despise start to speak to me. I’m talking real aural arse gravy here: ‘I Wanna Know What Love Is’ by Foreigner, for fuck’s sake. Neil Diamond’s ‘Love on the Rocks’ is almost laughably ‘on the nose’ and about as emotionally subtle as a Hispanic daytime soap opera; it had me sobbing out loud at the traffic lights. I realise for the first time that the entire middle-of-the-road pop canon is devoted to either the joys of illicit sex or the pain of infidelity. I can’t turn it off.

  Suddenly I have evenings free: something I’d fantasised about ever since I moved in with Zoe and Matt. ‘Me Time’ had been the thing I’d missed most. Except now I can’t find anything to do with it. How did I use to fill my evenings? When did I forget how to enjoy doing nothing?

  Fintan is always out drinking with ‘contacts’ or chasing some scoop, and Aidan on ‘nights’, so I find myself alone in empty pubs, watching obscure first round World Cup games between nations I couldn’t pick out on a globe. I usually get so pissed that I need to check the score next morning. I start playing the slots. Or I sit near the machines and spy on other players, marking the pattern of cherries and lemons, the nearest I get to fruit these days. I learn the signals: I know just when the burbling box is ready to spew. I wake up on the sofa, pockets leaking greasy pound coins that smell vaguely of piss, oblivious to how much I’ve won or lost.

  I don’t call any friends or colleagues. Nobody calls me. Where is even a basic level of concern? ‘Are you okay, Donal, it’s just that no one’s heard from you for nearly a week?’

  Where are they? Fuck them all.

  But I can’t stand the uncertainty. Craving some sort of sign; any sort of sign, I cave in and call Luke, boyfriend of Sophie, Zoe’s best friend. We know girls tell their best friends everything. Sophie, in turn, tells Luke everything and Luke is a man refreshingly incapable of a) lying and b) keeping a secret.

  He seems his normal self, even asking after Zoe. Relief flushes through me. Clearly the news hasn’t broken in our circle yet. There’s still a chance. Zoe hasn’t told Sophie, because she’s going to dump Charles.

  Of course …

  Charles is a mistake she doesn’t even want her friends to know about. A blip. That’s all. Why else wouldn’t she tell her best friend? I know in my heart she’ll finish it. She just needs time and space to do the deed, like she said. I need to trust her, as ironic as that might seem.

  The woes of the outside world evaporate as soon as I climb back into that caged lift. Like Clark Kent in his phone box, that thirty-second descent below ground transforms me from hobo to Robocop.

  I discover boxes of alternative evidence that officers deemed irrelevant to the CPS or Delaney’s defence team. Of course, these days they’d have to disclose it but, just six years ago, police could rig the game any way they liked.

  Happily, the entire felled rainforest has been indexed with clerical zeal. I riffle through until I find what I need to check out; Danny Bremner’s statements and the resulting police ‘actions’.

  Angry husband number one – Moby Dick Morrison – had a watertight alibi that checked out.

  I find no reference to Nathan’s next married conquest – Joan Carter – so move onto the third, Karen Moore; Nathan’s ex and Delaney’s current wife.

  In her statement, she describes having a ‘brief fling’ with Nathan just after Christmas ’86, four months before his murder.

  ‘I didn’t consider it a serious relationship,’ she says. ‘I think perhaps he thought it was more serious. I had to be quite firm with him about the fact I didn’t want it to develop into anything more.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘How many times did you sleep with Nathan?’

  KAREN: ‘On two, maybe three occasions.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘Where did these liaisons take place?’

  KAREN: ‘Do I really have to answer that?’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘Yes you do.’

  KAREN: ‘I remember the first time was at the Croydon Park Hotel.’

  I wonder if this had been the gruesome foursome, as relayed to Danny Bremner. If so, then clearly Nathan’s self-proclaimed ‘expert swordsmanship’ hadn’t proven enough to slay either woman. Come to think of it, any man who refers to his cock as a sword is, by definition, deluded. I suppose ‘pink penknife’ just doesn’t quite cut it.

  DI LAMBERT: ‘And after that?’

  KAREN: ‘One night we met in his office at BD.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘You had full intercourse in his office?’

  KAREN: ‘Yes.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘When was the last time you had sex with Nathan Barry?’

  KAREN: ‘It would’ve been sometime during that Christmas holiday, before the New Year. He popped round to my home one evening. My husband, Walter, works nights as a chauffeur.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘We’ll come to Walter later. And how did you end it with Nathan?’

  KAREN: ‘Early in the New Year, I told him I didn’t want anything serious. I was just coming out of a twenty-one-year-marriage and needed some freedom and space.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘How did he respond to this?’

  KAREN: ‘He seemed quite hurt. He asked me several times to reconsider, but I said no each time.’

  Those swordsmen and their feelings! I’m struggling to work out if Nathan had been a heartless philandering hound or some perennially lovelorn fool. Can you be both?

  Karen insists she and John Delaney ‘didn’t become an item’ until ‘several months after Nathan’s death’. Her interrogator, DI Lambert, clearly believes otherwise, reciting the vast number of calls Delaney had made to her and the frequent sightings of them together in the days and weeks after Nathan’s murder. She refuses to budge.

  My mind turns again to her husband Walter; if she was taking calls on their home phone at weekends from Delaney and Nathan, he must have known. I make a note to track down his statement.

  Back to Karen; next comes her insistence that meeting Nathan just after 6pm on the evening of his murder had been ‘purely by chance’.

  KAREN: ‘I was locking up my office when he came out of his across the road. I waved and he came over. He said he had an appointment later, did I fancy a drink. We went to Silvers wine bar and shared a bottle of white wine.’

  DI LAMBERT: ‘Did John Delaney know you were meeting him?’

  KAREN: ‘No. Like I said, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. It hadn’t been planned.’

  She insists Nathan seemed his normal self and made no mention of any concerns or problems. Statements from employees at DB Investigations paint a different picture; relations between the business partners had hit an all-time low. Nathan complained that Delaney wasn’t pulling his weight; Delaney complained that Nathan was pulling all of their vulnerable female clients.

  One document lists all ‘known’ disgruntled men who’d complained about Nathan’s behaviour. Their alibis for the night had all checked out, but I can’t help wondering how rigorously they’d been examined, especially once DI Lambert donned his Delaney goggles.

  Three months after the murder, BBC’s flagship Crimewatch programme featured a hammy reconstruction of the murder and appeal for information. I run through the 416 calls that came in, aware from experience that at least 400 of them will be useless.

  The first name to catch my eye is DC Neil Rooney; intelligence from current or former officers tends to be the most useful. The female officer who took his call wrote the following: DC Rooney explained that he was the first CID on the scene on the night of Mr Barry’s murder and still serves in East Croydon. He complained that senior officers on the murder squad are not running it properly, accusing them of ignoring good suspects put forward by junior officers and other sources.

  I’d never known a call like this before and add Rooney to my urgent ‘people to se
e’ list.

  One other call catches my eye. The officer who took it wrote: ‘IC1 female called in, saying she believed her husband had carried out the murder but refusing to reveal her identity. When I pressed her, she said she feared that he’d kill her next if he found out she’d made this call. I explained that we can’t follow up a lead unless we have at least some basic information. She said her name was Joan, got distressed and hung up. We were able to trace her number to a public phone box on Baring Road, SE9.’

  My mind races. The caller had said her name was Joan; Danny Bremner had named Joan Carter as one of the married women Nathan had been having an affair with. The address Nathan had warned Bremner about – ‘if something bad happens to me, check out the man at that address’ – had been just off Baring Road. But back in ’87, cops knew nothing of Nathan’s affair with Joan Carter.

  ‘Holy shit,’ I yelp, my voice echoing through the bunker. ‘I’ve just found our prime suspect.’

  Chapter 22

  Camden, North London

  Friday, June 24, 1994; 13.00

  As the archaic birdcage lift hoists me noisily back to civilisation, my mobile pings. It’s a text from Zoe: Breakthrough re block, call asap.

  I still cringe at mistaking that silver-painted concrete block for some sort of sensor at the Julie Draper ransom drop-off. In my defence, it had been pitch black, and the kidnapper had clearly set out to make it look like part of some hi-tech, ransom-securing contraption. It would still be sitting on that bridge had Julie not come to me that night and dangled it in my face. I can’t even imagine why it might be significant, but if anyone can determine its provenance, it’ll be Zoe. When that girl gets the bit between her teeth …

  She launches straight into it. ‘I managed to trace retired mould-maker David Baskin who’s now in his eighties. He recalls designing this block back in the 1960s to be used in road gutters. It was produced by a brick-making firm called Metallic & Masonry near Stoke-on-Trent but, get this, they only made 40,000. And it was manufactured for Wettern Brothers, who were a Croydon-based builders’ merchants.