The Dead Tell Lies: an absolutely gripping mystery thriller

by J. F. Kirwan

  Like you would know.

  Greg heard switches click, and the rising hum of an electrical machine gathering power, building up a charge.

  He recalled one of the first talks he’d attended back at university. A psychiatric professor gave an evening guest lecture on the benefits of ECT – Electroconvulsive therapy – to a room full of psychology students. All the psychology lecturers turned up for this one. The students barely got a chance to ask questions as the lecturers went on the attack with anti-ECT arguments – no proven theory as to how or why it works, no truly balanced clinical trials to show that any benefits outweighed the cognitive impairment it caused. The social psychology lecturer swung low, saying it had no more validity than the antiquated procedure known as trepanning, whereby doctors in the Middle Ages made holes in the patient’s skull to ‘let the bad vapours out’. The behavioural psychology lecturer spouted a bunch of statistics she had marshalled on post-procedural relapses and suicides, pointing out that patient-led studies had far more dismal results than those by ECT-practising psychiatrists.

  The guest professor remained unruffled and gave well-practised answers, citing case studies, anecdotal evidence, saying that many of the patients had severe depression in the first place, so some suicides were to be expected. He showed short videos of patients who’d had ECT and who swore it had helped or even cured them, changed their lives for the better. They all spoke slowly, that was for sure. As the debate eased off, Greg raised his hand.

  ‘Yes, young man, what is your question?’ the professor asked.

  All eyes turned to Greg. He felt his heart thump and had to swallow to get the words out. ‘I understand you do it for patients who are severely disturbed or depressed.’

  ‘For the most part.’

  ‘And you must have their consent?’

  ‘Yes, I made that very clear in my opening speech, it’s a key part of the process. They can refuse the treatment. Is there a question, young man?’

  ‘There is. How reliable is the consent of someone who, by definition – in fact, by medical diagnosis – is severely depressed or disturbed?’ Greg stood up at that point and continued before the professor could reply. ‘In fact, wouldn’t any normal person who asked to have their own brain fried be declared a hazard to themselves? So, isn’t the whole consent thing a bit of a nonsense?’

  Greg never received a decent answer from the professor. Formally, the Head of School wasn’t pleased, and Greg got his own one-on-one tutorial the very next day on required etiquette with guest lecturers. Informally, he got distinctions that year in social and behavioural psychology units, though he hadn’t truly merited them.

  Now those words came back to haunt him. He’d not given his consent, there had been no interview since the incident in the cell, and no drugs check, which was not only mandatory but medically critical. Rickard must have pulled strings with this Dr Chalmers. He felt the chill of gel on his temples. Cool metal electrodes were clamped onto his head.

  ‘His heart rate is accelerating, Doctor.’ It was the female voice again. A black nurse’s face appeared over Greg, concern etched across her brow.

  ‘No need to worry,’ Chalmers said to the nurse. ‘It’ll all be over in a minute.’

  Greg knew the side effects. Short-term memory loss, confusion. Or maybe nothing. He might get away with it. This was his first session.

  ‘Shouldn’t it be 800 milliamps, Doctor? It’s set at–’

  ‘Are you questioning me, nurse? Now, stand back.’

  Greg repeated to himself. Fourteen lights, two floors down, five more lights. He heard a clunk, and then…

  Greg awoke on a terrace overlooking a manicured lawn, shrubs and other patients and white-uniformed nursing staff scattered here and there. The autumn sun shone. There was not too much warmth from the orange ball well past its zenith. He was in a wheelchair with a chequered blanket over his knees. He couldn’t remember how he’d got there. In fact, he didn’t remember much. His wife had been murdered by someone called The Dreamer. A shame. He wondered what else he could remember. His name: Greg Adams. Occupation: Psychologist. Address: 22A Mulberry Avenue, Maida Vale. Mother: Margaret Irene Adams. Father: Joseph Francis Adams. No children. No siblings. A bird. A bird? Something about a bird. What kind of bird. What was its name?

  He tilted his head back, closed his eyes and felt the lukewarm rays of the afternoon sun. He felt at peace. Nothing really mattered. Wasn’t that a line from a song? Perhaps. He smelled fresh-baked scones. That would be nice. Maybe with tea. The sun drifted behind a cloud. A shame.

  ‘Greg.’

  He opened his eyes and saw a large man’s silhouette. Then the man sat down, causing Greg to squint.

  ‘Greg, do you know who I am?’

  ‘Of course I know who you are. You’re…’ The name had been about to come out but seemed to have been snatched from his mouth. ‘Sorry, who are you?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ the man said under his breath.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Greg replied.

  The man spoke. But not to him. ‘Fix him.’ Someone else was speaking, a woman. Greg didn’t catch her reply. He heard the man’s though. ‘Don’t care,’ the man said.

  Greg felt a needle prick his upper arm, and he turned to see the black nurse pressing down the plunger on a syringe.

  ‘You’re pretty,’ Greg said.

  ‘Jesus,’ the large man said again, then said nothing, just sat down and laid his head back. Seemed like a good idea. Greg did the same. He drifted for a while, felt himself twitch as you do when falling asleep, as if you’re cycling and suddenly you lose your footing. Oh well. The sun was still just about warm, and soon it would be scone time.

  The bird. What about the bird? He still couldn’t remember its name. Not to worry. Wait. It’s important. Kate was dead. His wife brutally murdered. Not by The Dreamer. Rickard had said he’d done it. Or had he? He’d said… No, that can’t be right. He’d said he’d… raped Greg’s wife. Raped Kate. Greg could hear her words, the last words she’d said before… Greg, where are you? She was in his head. He could hear her saying it over and over again. Sad, knowing she was going to die. Now she was shouting, angry, screaming at him. He put his hands over his ears, but she was inside his head, screaming. Please, stop! Please stop screaming!

  Greg, where the fuck are you?!

  He fell out of the wheelchair, ending up on the lawn on his hands and knees, and threw up. His fingers clawed the grass and soil to stem an intense bout of vertigo. He gasped for breath in between retches.

  ‘Leave him be,’ the man said. This time Greg knew who it was. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked up. ‘Donaldson,’ he said.

  Donaldson smiled back at him. ‘There you are.’ He nodded to someone behind Greg, who began to help him back into the wheelchair. Matthews.

  ‘No,’ Greg said, pointing instead to a wicker chair to one side. He gathered his breath as he remembered the bird’s name, and spoke urgently.

  ‘Donaldson, they’re going to go after Finch. She’s next on their list.’

  Donaldson didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Told you,’ he said to Matthews. ‘ECT hits some harder than others. Greg’s mind is strong. He’ll recover.’

  Matthews moved in front of Greg, seized him by his shoulders, and shouted in his face.

  ‘Do you know where they took her? Anything? Did Rickard give you any clue?’

  Greg scoured his memory, but it was like staring through warped glass. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Don’t think so isn’t nearly good enough!’ Matthews yelled, causing two male nurses to come over. Donaldson waved them away with his police badge.

  ‘Leave him be, Matthews. We were told he’d be like this. Besides, Rickard covered his tracks pretty well. I doubt he’d have told Greg anything useful.’ Donaldson spoke in a quieter voice to Matthews. ‘Rickard’s one clever bastard, I’ll give him that. Planned ahead. If we do catch him, and we don’t find Finch, it’ll be Greg’s word against Rickard’s,
and any decent defence lawyer will make mincemeat of Greg’s testimony after… this.’

  Greg was staring hard through the warped glass. But Donaldson was right. Rickard hadn’t told him anything useful. No clues. But was his mind really mincemeat now? He found it hard to follow what Donaldson had just said. He needed to make things simpler.

  ‘When did she disappear?’ he asked.

  ‘Monday,’ Donaldson replied.

  ‘What – yesterday?’

  Matthews threw his hands up in the air and cursed the sky. ‘For the love of God!’

  ‘Greg,’ Donaldson said quietly, ‘it’s Saturday.’

  Greg got to his feet. ‘No, that’s not…’ He felt dizzy but remained standing, and turned to the nurse. Her eyes were familiar. The nurse from the ECT room.

  ‘How many sessions?’ The recommended maximum was one every two or three days.

  She glanced around furtively, like someone who’d been caught shoplifting. She stared at the ground, then back at him. ‘Seven,’ she said, and then turned on her heel and scampered back into the main building.

  Greg sat down again.

  ‘Not her fault,’ Donaldson said. ‘Doctor Chalmers, on the other hand, has been taken in for questioning. We don’t think he knew about Rickard. Probably just doing him a favour. Old Boys’ Club; all that crap.’ Donaldson leaned forward. ‘I’m going to make it my personal mission to ensure he goes to jail, sees what it’s like to be locked up.’

  Matthews shifted on his feet. ‘We should go! We’re burning Finch’s air.’

  Greg agreed, because the next kill-mode on the list was The Gravedigger. ‘Rickard?’

  Donaldson put his hands in his pockets. ‘Gone to ground. Bolted with Finch before we could arrest him.’

  ‘What tipped you off?’

  Donaldson nodded to Matthews, who told Greg about Alfred Ellerton, Mrs Appleby, Finch’s visit to Rickard’s home, texting her about Christopher Ellerton, aka The Dreamer. He showed him a photo of the note to E. R.

  ‘But it was also your ex, Jennifer,’ Donaldson interjected. ‘Called me on a secure line, said she wanted to come in. That’s where I was when… Anyway, after she met you in Birmingham, on the way home she stopped in a store almost opposite, and spotted Rickard in a parked car, waiting for her with another man.’

  Christ!

  ‘She wasn’t sure what it meant, but played it safe anyway, not going home, went to stay with a new…’ He paused a beat, then resumed. ‘Given that Rickard was in Scotland Yard but also had connections in Birmingham, she didn’t know who to trust. She stayed offline for two whole days before contacting me.’

  Matthews stepped in. ‘If she’d called you earlier, Finch might still–’

  Donaldson shot him a look. Matthews bit off what he was about to say.

  Greg felt a momentary wash of relief that Jennifer had escaped. But Finch had taken her place. He recalled the crime scene photos of The Gravedigger’s victims. The ones they’d found, that is. The residual vertigo caused by whatever they’d injected him with threatened to tip his mind into free fall.

  ‘We need you back on the case, Greg,’ Donaldson said. ‘If you’re up to it.’

  ‘I’m discharged?’

  ‘More than that. You’re in the clear. But like Matthews says, Finch is running out of time.’

  ‘If she’s still–’ Greg began, but didn’t get to finish his sentence because Matthews was right in his face again.

  ‘She’s still alive, Adams! Has to be. Now, let’s move.’ Matthews held something out to Greg, his voice returning to a normal level. ‘Your phone. Rickard had cloned it. Saw all your text messages, all the calls you made, always knew where you were.’ There was an accusatory ring to Matthews’ words, as if Greg was supposed to have detected that, somehow. Greg stared at it as if it was cursed. It had led to the demise of Fergus and Raj, and almost Jennifer. Rickard had played him well, kept him off balance, always one step ahead.

  No more.

  He recalled Raj’s parting words. ‘Be the man Kate believed you to be.’

  ‘It’s clean now,’ Matthews said.

  Greg accepted it. He glanced back towards the building. ‘There’s something I have to do first, before I leave, before I can be any use to you – to Finch. Do you have a pen and paper?’

  Matthews muttered something while Donaldson handed Greg a scrap of paper and reached inside his jacket. There was an expensive pen and a cheap biro.

  Greg got the biro. He wrote down three numbers. He still didn’t know whether he could trust his memory, and needed to know if there was any cognitive impairment. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  They made their way back to his room, where he changed into his own clothes. Then he walked down the corridor, counted the fourteen lights in a low voice as he went, turned right. They then rode the elevator down two floors, walked for five more lights, then stopped outside a room with double doors.

  ‘Wait outside, please,’ he said to Donaldson and Matthews.

  He pushed through the swing doors into a room full of medical equipment surrounding a lone metal surgical table under umbrella-like lights. He paced around the room, searching for something heavy, found a smallish oxygen cylinder marked ‘empty’. He located the ECT machine, a boxy affair with old-style knobs and dials. He didn’t hesitate. Raising the cylinder high above his head, he brought it crashing down onto the machine. Matthews burst in, weapon drawn, followed by Donaldson.

  Greg lowered the cylinder to the floor and pulled out the piece of paper where he’d earlier scrawled three figures: 14 – 2 – 5. He scrunched it up, tossed it onto the slab, and turned to his colleagues.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’m good to go.’

  28

  Eating wasn’t allowed in the Evidence Room. A habitually flouted rule. Not this time. Not for Greg, or Donaldson, not even for Matthews. Not while Finch was dying of starvation somewhere. Matthews had put up a chart he’d obtained from God-knew-where, showing declining survival likelihood according to days without food or water, with three curves representing different levels of fitness and body mass index. Today was day five. The best record without water was eleven days, but that had been an outlier, way beyond the norm. Finch had one or two days left, tops.

  And they had nothing. Surrounded by photos of serial killers, officially dead or behind bars. Greg had the feeling all of them, both alive and dead, were laughing at the hapless trio.

  Muriel helped them cheat a little, bringing in flasks of sugary cappuccino. Just as well; they needed to think. Greg’s mind remained jumbled – he knew it, and could tell Donaldson suspected it – no, expected it – after the intensive rounds of ECT. Donaldson had been called out by a phone call half an hour earlier and hadn’t returned, leaving Greg and Matthews flailing around in Clueless Central, with no idea how to put the pieces together.

  Greg listened as Matthews recounted Finch’s last briefing in the Bromley pub. Greg didn’t take any notes. That wasn’t the way his mind solved cases. He didn’t employ any scientific method. Jennifer had once quipped that he was a fraud, just a very lucky one. He’d never known how serious she’d been about that particular jibe; with her it had always been hard to tell. What he did know was that he had to keep turning things over in his mind until they slotted into place, like Alan Turing’s Bombe, the machine used in the Second World War to crack the Enigma code. Eventually things would click into place. The question was whether it would happen in time.

  Matthews stopped talking and paced, not that there was much room for it. He looked like hell. Greg doubted he’d slept well since Finch’s disappearance. Correction: abduction. Who was he kidding? Since her burial. She was almost certainly walled up somewhere, slowly starving to death, though thirst and systemic dehydration would kill her first. She’d hallucinate towards the end, a shitty way to go.

  Greg could have told Matthews he was no good to anybody like this, least of all Finch, that he needed rest, to let his sizzled mind cool down, regroup.r />
  But he didn’t.

  ‘We don’t have enough information,’ Matthews said, as though it was unfair.

  Greg disagreed. They were drowning in information. What they were missing were connections. He needed to see things from a different perspective. Actually, from two perspectives: Rickard’s, and the other killer’s. Greg preferred to work alone. But Donaldson had left Matthews with him. Keep him busy had been his parting words to Greg. For once he followed orders.

  ‘Did you find out what Rickard was doing on his sabbatical straight after university?’

  ‘Not what,’ Matthews answered, ‘where. He spent a year in South America. A remote village a few hundred miles south of Quito in Ecuador. Does that help?’

  ‘Was there a medical centre there?’

  Matthews stopped pacing. ‘Some kind of research lab.’

  ‘What kind of research?’

  Matthews threw his arms wide. ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  Greg kept his voice calm. ‘You’re a detective, aren’t you?’

  ‘Are you just trying to keep me busy?’

  ‘Depends on what you find.’

  Matthews hands went to his head and tugged at tufts of his bushy hair. Then he sat down, flicked open his laptop and began bashing keys.

  Good. Matthews had told him earlier about Finch’s way of thinking, and had produced a neatly typed version of the original piece of paper he’d swallowed, with its four quadrants. But Greg worked differently. His workbench was the human mind. That meant there were few – if any – hard facts. Instead there were perceptions and interpretations. Nothing was ever really truly locked down because relationships changed, and so did perspectives. Memories got updated, personal histories rewritten. Cops had statements and forensic evidence. Psychologists had observations, interviews and narratives. To a psychologist, especially in Greg’s line of work, truth was a slippery, almost mythical subject. And often irrelevant. In the human psyche, perceptions ruled.