The Dead Tell Lies: an absolutely gripping mystery thriller

by J. F. Kirwan

  Greg spied Raj exiting the glass doors at ground level. Talking to Maggie fervently. Now her talking. No doubt making promises she couldn’t keep, because Finch would come calling. Raj’s world was about to undergo a seismic event. Greg needed to talk to him first, before lawyers, disciplinary boards and cops forced the vagaries of personal truth into stark, black and white certainty. The post-constructed narrative. That was how everyone reacted when the storm hit. Talking of which, the skies darkened and the downpour began. Black umbrellas sprouted everywhere.

  Greg saw Raj rushing towards Angel tube, and followed him, walking quickly, aware that there might already be a tail on him, or even that the killer might be watching. Trailing someone in a sea of umbrellas at rush hour wasn’t easy, and the electronic tag would go dark down in the Underground until he surfaced again. He closed on his quarry. As he did so, he fumbled with his phone, to feed Finch a sliver of intel now that he’d seen the way Raj and Maggie had been talking. He pulled up her number, typed Raj, then hit ‘send’.

  Raj and Greg had one thing in common – no umbrellas – and they both hustled down the worn, slippery steps. Five yards apart, milling in the crowd as it wove through electronic barriers, they each slapped their Oyster cards on the sensors before heading down the long escalator to the Northern Line, towards Kings Cross. Greg almost didn’t make it into the same carriage, the curving doors sealing right behind him so that he had to bend his head forward a little. He watched Raj, who seemed lost in thought as the steel train clattered through the tunnel.

  Most Londoners don’t make eye contact on the tube. It’s an unspoken social contract. A way to be anonymous, to be alone with one’s thoughts after the daily grind. People hide in books, computer tablets or – more exceptionally these days – newspapers, where there was enough room. They study their phones, or else rest their eyes on the barrage of ads for insurance, travel, hair loss, whatever. As Greg watched the back of Raj’s head of well-groomed, jet-black hair, he suppressed thoughts he was entitled to – Raj and Kate laughing together, holding hands, Raj inside her, Kate digging her nails into his back as she came… Okay, not so suppressed. He steered those thoughts into another room in his mind, as he was trained to do, because with serial killers you had to compartmentalise, to prevent their thoughts and ways of seeing the world from infecting your mind. This, in comparison, was easy.

  Sure.

  They stopped at Kings Cross, and Raj, right next to the sliding doors, was ejected by the throng heading for other tube lines or the twin Kings Cross and St Pancras mainline train stations up above. Greg had to fight to get out as the influx of people boarding the train almost sucked him back in. Several people collided with him and his hand caught on something. He was almost trapped in the closing doors, but just got out, then took the escalator steps two at a time to catch up with Raj, who was heading for the exit.

  Outside it was still raining, and Greg’s head was soon drenched as he threaded the throng on the cracked paving stones towards Euston station. Raj went past the station, took a right, and then a left onto Drummond Street.

  Greg hoped he wasn’t heading to… But he was. One of Greg and Kate’s favourite Indian restaurants. Worse, he stopped right outside, then turned around and stared straight at Greg.

  ‘Let’s do this,’ Raj said, and gestured inside.

  The waiter smiled at Raj, clearly a regular, then searched Greg’s face, a dim recognition crossing his features, because Greg hadn’t been there for over a year. They were offered a table at the back. Greg hooked his soaked jacket over the back of the chair. The seating was uncomfortable, but the food was excellent. A good business model for a restaurant in London, as people rarely lingered after their meal. Southern Indian cuisine, lighter than the usual curries.

  Greg’s phone buzzed. A text message from Finch.

  Where is Raj?

  In front of me

  Greg, where are you!?

  He glanced up at Raj, who looked annoyed, as if he might get up and leave. Greg closed down his phone. He was tagged for fuck’s sake, Finch could find him easy enough.

  ‘Sorry, it’s off now. When did you spot me, by the way?’ Greg asked.

  ‘My office window looks out over the street. Maggie had told me of your visit yesterday, and I was staring towards Nero’s where your wife and I used to meet for coffee in the mornings. I saw you arrive.’

  Used to meet for coffee in the mornings… Greg’s stomach tightened. His appetite deserted him. Compartmentalise.

  ‘Why?’ he said, as a general, all-encompassing question.

  Raj answered in a lilting Indian accent, his dark eyes piercing. Dashing, Kate had said.

  ‘I loved her, who could not?’ Raj’s eyes clouded. ‘But she was loyal to you. I never had a chance. The night she–’ his voice splintered and he grew silent, staring through the table. A passing waiter dropped two menus on the table without even slowing down.

  ‘You were saying,’ Greg said, trying to keep his voice level – no, more than that, conciliatory. The way Kate sometimes spoke. An unconditional kindness. Why did he feel that now, of all times? With Raj, of all people?

  ‘That night, she broke up with me.’

  A lifeline. Greg grabbed it with both hands.

  Raj continued. ‘Our… affair… had been short, and wonderful, but she always said it would be a fling, no more. I know she felt something for me, but you…’ He looked up, straight at Greg. He steeled his voice. ‘She said that she needed to focus on you, get her marriage back on track.’

  Greg hadn’t even known it had left the tracks. But Raj looked angry, hurt. Greg could empathise – just – though sympathy wasn’t on the menu. But he wasn’t here for either of them to have therapy. He needed answers, or at least better questions. He recalled what Maggie had said and got back to the matter in hand. ‘But you were out of the country that night, Raj.’

  ‘Yes, in Seattle. A wedding. My sister’s. The one saving grace for me was that Kathryn said she couldn’t bring herself to break up face-to-face. By the time I returned, we would both be used to the idea.’ He turned around, hailed the waiter. ‘A coffee, please.’ He turned towards Greg, who nodded for the same.

  ‘Why did she–’ Greg began.

  Raj’s eyes flashed. ‘Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead? She always said you never knew when to stop digging. Said it was both your greatest strength and weakness.’

  Greg said nothing, and Raj sighed, exasperated, as if being asked to state the bloody obvious.

  ‘Your darkness. The world you inhabit. Do you honestly think discussing serial murders makes for good foreplay? She needed some light.’ His voice lost its exuberance. ‘Someone light.’

  The coffees arrived, a cinnamon biscuit balancing precariously on each saucer. Greg hated cinnamon. Kate loved it. He’d always given her his. He took the biscuit, dunked it in the coffee, and bit a piece off.

  It didn’t kill him.

  He sat back, his mind clearing, previously disconnected fragments slotting into place. The morning before Kate had been… murdered… she’d suggested he work late because she’d known she would have this conversation with Raj. The Seattle–London time zone difference would be about right. The Kathryn part was a nice touch, too. Kate to him, Kathryn to Raj.

  Greg pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and fingertips. It was a lot to process. He tried to focus, but his internal firewalls were crumbling. He had to stay the course. He was here on business.

  ‘You were the last person to speak to her, then,’ Greg said, stirring his coffee for the sake of something to do with his hands.

  ‘Not the last. Towards the end, she said another call was incoming.’

  Greg looked up. ‘Wait a minute… who was calling?’

  ‘She didn’t say, just that she had to take it.’

  ‘It’s important, Raj, think!’ Greg blurted out. People around them stopped eating and stared, including the waiter, wearing a concerned frown. Greg took a breath, lo
wered his voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, Raj. Listen, was there any hint of who it might have been? Did it seem like she knew the caller?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, a little agitated. ‘But the police must have records of the calls, no?’

  Greg sat back. Something was wrong. If Raj was telling the truth – and all Greg’s instincts told him he was – then a call had gone unnoticed. How was that possible? And if it had been the killer, then it sounded like she had known him. Unless it was a convenient excuse for Kate to bow out of a difficult conversation with Raj, but that wasn’t her style. Whoever it was, it could be an important lead. Hell, it could be a breakthrough.

  Raj glanced at his watch. ‘I need to go,’ he said. ‘I am meeting somebody.’

  ‘You have no idea who–’

  It was Raj’s turn to raise his voice. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t have come forward if I had any useful information? Screw my career. I loved her. I want her killer found as much as you do.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Almost as much. I’m sorry. I must go.’

  The manager appeared, standing next to the waiter.

  ‘It’s okay, we’re done,’ Greg said to Raj. ‘You’ll get a visit from the police in the coming days, for sure.’

  He nodded. ‘My career’s finished, I know that. Maybe it’s time it all came out. Never mind.’ He reached for his wallet.

  ‘This one’s on me,’ Greg said.

  Raj nodded, pulled on his coat, then paused. ‘Did she suffer? It wasn’t clear in the press, and there was no way I could find out.’

  ‘No,’ Greg lied. ‘It was over quickly.’

  Raj’s eyes misted for a moment. He coughed and stood up straight. ‘Catch the man who did this. Be the man Kathryn believed you to be.’

  Their eyes met one last time, then Raj walked out.

  Greg finished his coffee and left a generous tip.

  He took the long way home, walking the length of Tottenham Court Road down to Centre Point, continuing on Charing Cross Road, where he made a pit stop at the National Portrait Gallery, because she’d loved it and it was open late. Then he meandered through Leicester Square which she hated, to Piccadilly, then back onto the tube.

  Maida Vale was quiet. It was late. He ambled along leafy pavements until he reached home. He hadn’t showered since yesterday, so he stripped, put his clothes into the washer and switched it on, and took a long one, steaming hot at first, then prickly cold.

  It was while towelling off that he noticed it, and he froze while staring at his wrist.

  The electronic bracelet was gone.

  13

  Greg sat alone at the back of his local Starbucks in Maida Vale. His house was being searched. Whether that was to see if the killer had installed some kind of bug or video surveillance, or whether it was to look for evidence against Greg, or both – well, sometimes you don’t ask, you just let people get on with their job. Donaldson had met him earlier and given him a file from Matthews, containing notes and photos from a dozen unsolved murder cases during the past year. ‘Pleasant reading,’ he’d quipped, then left.

  Certain detectives and criminologists whom Greg knew well confessed to no longer reacting to crime scene photos, unless they were especially novel or gruesome. ‘After the first twenty, you get used to them,’ one had said. ‘Like reading too much porn,’ he’d added. So often the second thing people said was the more telling of their personality.

  It had become one of Greg’s techniques. Get people relaxed, go through the questions, say that’s it, put the pen down, the notepad back in the bag. That’s when the truth that had been holding its breath dared to show its face.

  It was a variant of how Greg had unmasked the serial killer known as The Surgeon, who liked to anaesthetise his victims – always athletes – and then perform surgery on them, dismembering them before waking them up underneath a full-length mirror. In court he claimed every one of them had begged him to kill them, so it wasn’t technically murder, rather it was euthanasia. Thankfully, judges aren’t dense. Before The Surgeon’s capture, Donaldson had narrowed the suspect list down to three, and asked Greg to interview one of them, a portly doctor who performed cosmetic surgery at his practice on Harley Street. He seemed inoffensive enough. Greg had gone there ostensibly for a lump on his shoulder due to a fall from an apple tree as a child. During the physical examination, Greg had talked about his yoga, how important it was to him to be fit and to have the perfect body, hence the removal of the lump. Each time Greg talked about physical fitness, he detected the doctor’s look of fascination, but also repugnance. As the consultation was finishing, Greg mentioned the most recent murder by The Surgeon that had leaked into the press, adding that he wondered what he was doing with the limbs, none of which had been found.

  The doctor had grimaced, saying that it was indeed a grisly business, and that he prayed the killer would soon be brought to justice. But it was all too pat, and Greg’s radar told him the guy was hiding something, so Greg joked that it would take a lot of acid to get rid of all those limbs.

  As he was leaving, Greg pulled out his phone and earplugs, as if about to listen to a message from a missed call, and the doctor said, as if to himself, ‘Acid is the great leveller in a way – once it boils away the flesh and muscle, your tibia and mine look much the same.’

  After that, Donaldson’s investigation focused relentlessly on the doctor, and they eventually found a rented basement apartment with a large vat. Greg heard that the first detective who arrived on the scene threw up. He wasn’t the last. Apparently the porn analogy to crime scenes only stretched so far.

  Greg shivered. He opened the file, poring over each matter-of-fact clinical description of cause of death, each photo. He reacted to them all, even when the cause of death wasn’t visually obvious. Kate had said it was why he was good at his job, and that perhaps he had a rogue counsellor chromosome hiding somewhere in his DNA.

  What did he feel? He wasn’t sure anymore. He used to think of serial killers as an aberration, a cancer that needed to be cut out, because if you didn’t, it would spread. Kate, a natural empath, had always felt anguish for those left behind. She’d done some counselling for some of the victims’ relatives, and he’d seen the toll it had taken on her. The worst was when the killer was never found. Those close to the victims rarely got over it. You just needed to scratch beneath the surface, and the grief-become-smouldering-rage ignited.

  Kate had counselled the mother of The Dreamer’s fourth victim, a teenage boy. Afterwards, she’d come home late and opened up his bottle of Talisker. She’d drunk in silence, then said to him, before going to bed, ‘Find The Dreamer, Greg. Put him away forever.’

  Greg had stayed up all night, focusing on one question: who was next? By the morning he had a theory. It was never proven because Donaldson acted on it, warned the individual concerned – a low-level politician suspected of corruption – that he might be in The Dreamer’s sights. As was often the case, the guy didn’t take it seriously, so when Greg told Kate the next day she broke all the rules and went to see the politician’s wife. By the evening the couple had taken an unplanned sabbatical. Greg never knew a hundred per cent whether the guy had been the target, but the next Dreamer victim was after a considerably longer delay than usual. Kate was sure, though, and Greg knew she’d needed this one ‘save’ to be able to continue with her job.

  Back to the photos. He was tucked away at the back of the café where there was an unruly assortment of chairs and tables, and nobody else around. He’d already dismissed four of the cases. Nothing out of the ordinary: circumstantial evidence relating to drugs, or infidelity. In one case, office rivalry. The others were more interesting, in the blurry area between homicide and serial killer territory. What Kate used to call ‘the creepy zone’.

  He closed the file for a moment. The night the politician and his wife had discreetly disappeared, Kate had made love to him with a passion – almost a vengeance – he’d never known in her before. Afterwards she’d laughed,
and said they were an effective team. Another line from a movie they’d seen – sci-fi for once. As usual he couldn’t remember the name of the film, one of Tom Cruise’s. A sudden wave of sadness washed over him, through him, leaving him drained in its wake. He still missed her, despite the recent revelation.

  Donaldson arrived, his expression crushing the moment. He knew how to drop bombshells. He glanced at Greg’s empty cup. ‘You’re going to need something a lot stronger than cappuccino.’

  They were back at the Yard, in an interview room with a one-way mirror, Donaldson giving Greg a semi-formal interview. Greg had a new electronic bracelet. It looked tougher. Greg talked through the encounter with Raj. Twice. The interview was coming to an end. Greg turned the bracelet around his wrist. It felt tight.

  ‘That one won’t come off so easily,’ Donaldson said, looking grumpy.

  ‘Heard that before,’ Greg said. ‘How could–?’

  ‘Don’t go there. I’m working on it.’

  The ‘there’ in question was unsavoury. Both bracelets looked like copper but were titanium-plated steel. To cut it off would require a bolt cutter. Greg would have felt and seen such an overt operation, no matter the hustle and bustle of the disembarking passengers on the tube yesterday. To release it so easily – and imperceptibly – required the right magnetic code, which had only been set the previous day. It was either a hacker, or an insider. Maybe both. Donaldson would have to trigger an Internal Affairs investigation, something he’d once described as giving yourself an enema with a flaming cactus.

  ‘For now, let’s focus on the camera someone planted in your home,’ Donaldson said.