Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

by James Nally

  Yes, Karen and Laura had lied about their whereabouts on the afternoon of the murder. Yes, Karen had lied about ending her affair with Peter in November last year. But none of this proved they killed Marion Ryan. Since day one, Shep’s obsession with Karen Foster had been all-consuming. What if McStay and Barratt and the Big Dogs were right all along? What if she was innocent?

  As the black cab pulled up on Sangora, I ducked down. I didn’t have to wait long. Fintan emerged from the pub, blinking like Barabbas against the light. He raised his collar and set off up Strathblaine, battered leather satchel tucked firmly under his arm. Ten minutes later, Shep stepped out. He looked right, then left, directly at the taxi. He raised his arm to hail it, then registered that the light was off and started walking our way. I got down on all fours and told the driver to step on it to Clapham police station.

  As I stared at the stippled grey plastic flooring, Fintan’s words outside Buckingham Palace that day pealed through my mind.

  People in power want more power. They don’t serve the public, they serve their own agendas.

  ‘I’m off to win hearts and minds,’ Shep had said. What had he told Fintan?

  The smarter ones recognise the power of the press, and use it to put pressure on their own organisation.

  I jumped out at the police station, overpaid my overweight getaway driver and took a look at my beeping pager.

  ‘Lawyer says we haven’t got enough,’ read the group message from Shep.

  As I’d suspected, the CPS brief felt we still lacked that single piece of irrefutable evidence – that elusive smoking gun – to charge Karen.

  I marched back into the incident room, my mind made up. I was going to find out who killed Marion myself, once and for all. I had just scooped up the keys to 21 Sangora Road, when the receptionist walked in.

  ‘Donal Lynch?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you to call Fintan.’

  As I dialled his direct office number, I thought about mentioning that I’d just seen him in Clapham. That’d rattle the smug fucker.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Fintan?’

  ‘Donal, I’m being arse-fucked by a deadline. Can it wait?’

  ‘I just got a message to call you.’

  ‘News to me.’

  ‘Oh. Okay. What time do you knock off?’

  ‘I’ve got, let’s see, twenty-six minutes to write the splash.’

  ‘Meet me after,’ I said, ‘I’ll be at the Roundhouse pub, near Sangora Road in Clapham. You know it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he lied, ‘but I’m sure I’ll find it.’

  I took the overground train to Brixton, bought what I needed on Electric Avenue and headed back to Clapham Junction. By the time I got to the Roundhouse pub, Fintan was waiting.

  ‘Didn’t even know this place was here,’ he smiled, confirming that you shouldn’t even believe his ‘hello’.

  As the barman approached, I remembered one of my dad Martin’s favourite expressions – ‘Beer isn’t drinking’ – and ordered two large scotches. Lame liquor had no place in this enterprise.

  ‘As delightful as it is to see you, Donal, what are you after?’

  I opened the palm of my hand, revealing a set of house keys.

  ‘Let me guess,’ said Fintan, ‘we’ve been invited to a swingers’ party?’

  ‘Try again,’ I said, ‘and think about where we are.’

  ‘They’re not … Holy shit. Isn’t it still a crime scene?’

  ‘No, they’re all done. And I’ve brought along a little something to help me prolong the experience,’ I said, opening my other hand to reveal an eighth of cannabis.

  It must have been about nine when we walked out of the pub into the snug, muffled dusk. At the doorway, Fintan furtively removed the batteries from his pager.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Making sure no one can place me at the scene.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘These things send and receive messages via the nearest transmitter, which means they can work out your location. But not if you take the batteries out.’

  I dreaded how paranoid he’d get after a joint.

  We popped into an off-licence for a bottle of scotch, tobacco, a lighter and extra-long papers.

  As we walked up the steps to 21, I felt giddy, high, fairground-scared. I suddenly understood the buzz that breeds serial burglars. The key clicked sweetly in the lock. An icy chill wafted my neck. I thought of Marion that evening, turning this key, Karen Foster fingering her blade in the gym bag, poised to strike.

  I opened the door and stood aside for Fintan. He looked shaken, lost.

  ‘This is too weird,’ he said, his eyes restless, unsure.

  ‘Get in for fuck’s sake, before someone sees us.’

  As we stood facing the flat door, I felt his helpless stare.

  ‘Just pretend it’s my place,’ I urged, stepping forward and sliding the key into the lock.

  I pulled the heavy door open, leaned against its weight and nodded at Fintan to enter.

  ‘Why do I have to go first?’

  ‘Jesus just get in the fucking door!’

  He faltered, then crept inside. I took the key out of the lock and followed him.

  Something cracked me in the back.

  ‘Jesus,’ I cried out.

  ‘What?’ squealed Fintan.

  ‘That fucking door just tried to knock me out.’

  I followed him up the stairs and turned on the landing light. The zap of familiar yellow instantly banished my nerves. Sure enough, Marion’s bloodstains had been painted over. I talked him through the crime scene, hoping my breezy tone would normalise this morbid tour.

  ‘So what now?’ he said when I’d finished.

  I led him into the sitting room. He sat on the couch, bolt upright, tense. I plucked two glasses from the kitchen and poured large ones.

  As he glugged greedily, I hoped one bottle of Glenmorangie would be enough. As I knew only too well, numb don’t come cheap.

  We sat there in tortuously stilted silence. But that’s murder scene parties for you. Then I remembered the pot and set to work on a six-sheet Clapham Courgette, as they call them in that neck of the woods. Fintan took an almighty toke: we were both craving levity of any kind. Soon I was entertaining him with imitations of Peter Ryan, Karen Foster and Shep, and had him slapping his knees in helpless hilarity.

  I got back from the loo to find Fintan comatose. I dipped the light and checked the time: 1.12 a.m. My mind shot back to that night in Tullamore, watching Meehan on top of Eve, the clock radio flipping to 1.13. The boffins say you can’t read the time in your dreams: I hadn’t been dreaming.

  Just then, my head jolted back. Pain rang through my face like it was a tuning fork. A starburst of colour cleared to reveal Marion inches from me, her raging bloodshot eyes locked onto mine. I screamed but the vacuum devoured the sound whole. My senses twitched and flinched, sensing that, this time, she’d come to do me real harm.

  I felt her cool flesh against mine as she clasped my right hand. Slowly, she brought it up towards her. She then pressed it, palm-down, on the arm of the sofa. She leaned on it with all her might. My hand tried to fight back, shaking and quivering against her domination.

  Her free left hand pinched my little finger and pulled it apart from the other restrained digits. Something glinted in the palm of her hand. I realised what it was, winced and swooned.

  As the sharpened metal object – a steel ruler, if I wasn’t mistaken – bore down on that lonely little finger on my right hand, my brain clicked into survival mode. I diverted every ounce of my being into that hand to fight her grip. But it felt limp, useless, dead.

  I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t move at all. My eyes fixed upon that descending metal. Without even a nanosecond’s hesitation, the blade pierced the skin, just below the top knuckle. My insides convulsed.

  I felt an instant circuit of scalding white heat from that fing
er to my brain. She struggled to contain my stricken hand’s sudden, frenzied twitching. Then calmly, efficiently, she sliced through my finger’s soft exterior flesh, sending nails of fire bolting through me.

  Now the ruler was bending, under pressure, scraping up against the bone and tendons. I wasn’t expecting it to bend. It slipped, slicing the skin down the front of the finger. The digit disappeared in blood: not spurting blood like in the movies, just endless, welling blood. My head lolled, bloodless.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ my mind pleaded.

  The blade tried again. Real pressure this time. It bent. It slipped under the weight, this time up into the knuckle. I was burning alive now. I wanted my brain to shut down, to cease feeling.

  My finger was minced: a small hunk of gristle with threads of blue running through it. Just bone and red mulch, all puddling blood. The ruler’s sharp tip came in again. Glinting. Determined. It was forced down, full-pelt, on the digit’s bone.

  Now she set about sawing at the bloody lump. My vision rapidly flickered, as if struggling to comprehend the full horror. Finally, my brain went into shutdown.

  My eyes snapped on again, seeing a tiny red lump, wretched, alone, on the arm of that sofa. Everything spun, lurched through black. White exploded, filling my vision, firing me at supersonic speed through more white.

  Then I was looking down at myself asleep on the couch, jabbering in tongues, Fintan perched on the edge of the sofa, taking snaps with a tiny stills camera. I could hear the shutter. I could smell the weed. I felt no terror, no pain: just high, ecstatic, free.

  ‘Whatcha doing, Donal?’ I asked myself, inspecting my floating, unbutchered hand.

  ‘Just hanging,’ I replied.

  I realised I could tilt side-to-side. I willed myself forward through the air and floated on cue, in control, my brain now a jet pack. I thought about performing a Red Arrows-style full roll, when I got distracted by a loud bang downstairs, followed by another, and another.

  I laughed in the face of the door and glided through the wall to the landing. Marion’s body lay there, lifeless, just as I had seen her that night. The rhythmic banging continued – boom, boom, boom – as a chill rustled my face. I turned to see the open landing window.

  I looked towards the banging at the bottom of the stairs. The flat door crashed shut, over and over. What was I not getting about that fucking door? I floated down, determined to stop the banging, to close that door once and for all.

  At the foot of the stairs I reached out, but the door passed straight through my arm, again and again, boom, boom. I turned and looked up the stairs. Marion’s eyes stared directly into mine: bloodshot, betrayed, accusing. I floated up towards those eyes and made my vow: whatever it was on that door, I’d find it.

  I snapped back inside my body to find myself sitting cold, calm and sweat-soaked on the couch. Mercifully, my little finger appeared to be intact and the banging had stopped. All I could hear were the crunching metal clicks of Fintan’s camera.

  ‘Tell me what just happened?’ he demanded.

  I looked around at the closed sitting room door, wild spatters of whisky all over my shirt and jeans, the couch, the carpet.

  I told him everything, from the impromptu finger amputation to the flat door’s ghosting back and forth through my outstretched arm.

  ‘What is she trying to say?’

  ‘Well she’s clearly telling me that the pared-down ruler we found in the Foster family’s garage is the murder weapon.’

  ‘Why did she cut off your finger?’

  ‘When she first came to me, she kept slamming my sitting room door, over and over. I thought she must be leading me to a clue on a door. I assumed that clue must be her killer’s fingerprint.’

  ‘And what do you think now?’

  ‘Well I think she just let me know in the most graphic way possible that I shouldn’t be looking for a fingerprint, I should be looking for some other sort of clue to do with the door.’

  ‘What could that be?’

  ‘I haven’t the foggiest. Hey, you didn’t say you were bringing a camera?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I take this with me everywhere. You never know, do you? I’ll get them developed tomorrow, should give us a right laugh.’

  ‘What was I doing?’

  ‘You were growling and sort of gurning with your teeth clamped together, like a horse on a motorbike.’

  I desperately needed to pee and got to my feet. My head sprung stars as I stumbled into the bathroom.

  My water-splashed pale face inspected itself in the mirror. Spidery red cracks had turned the whites of my eyes into low-grade marble. They looked lifeless, jaundiced: two decades older than me. When I blinked, my mother’s eyes stared back. I shivered, then batted the image away and returned to the couch.

  ‘Lilian was right about one thing. Once I came out of my body, I felt sensational.’

  ‘Did you consciously decide to come out or go back into your body?’

  ‘No to both. And I won’t sleep at all now unless I get another drink. There’s that all-night off-licence near Clapham Junction. I’m starving too.’

  ‘Thing is, Donal, I’m not actually an insomniac or an alky. I’m going to grab a taxi home. You should go home too,’ he said.

  ‘Okay.’

  We strolled silently through the sultry night, London’s buried hum soothing our frazzled nerves.

  ‘Safe home,’ Fintan said, hopping into a cab. I watched until the car turned the corner, then walked back towards Sangora.

  Chapter 36

  Sangora Road, South London

  Sunday, August 18, 1991; 09:00

  A slamming door jolted my eyes open to dazzling sunlight. I sat up, recognised the sitting room of 21 Sangora Road and my own naked body.

  I could hear people coming up the stairs, chatting. I jumped up to grab my clothes but could see only fried chicken-themed carnage: greasy cardboard boxes, half-eaten drummers, a corn-on-the-cob. Beyond that: joint butts, beer can ashtrays, splattered whisky and red wine, but no fucking clothes. The chatting got to the door just as I spotted my boxers near the window. I hurdled the puddles of filth to reach them, then realised I wasn’t going to make it.

  The door opened slowly, almost ceremoniously. I stood in the middle of the room, both hands over my knackers.

  ‘It’s surprisingly spacious …’ said a voice. The estate agent saw me, dropped her clipboard and emitted a horror movie scream. Her two would-be tenants stared for an age, frozen in shock, then wordlessly ran away.

  The estate agent bent down slowly to pick up her clipboard without taking her eyes off me.

  ‘Is this leasehold?’ I asked, trying to suppress my reawakened pot-based euphoria.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Oh, so it’s freehold,’ I said, ‘a bit like this.’

  I lifted my hands and wiggled. She screwed up her face in utter disgust, then bolted.

  I popped into a corner shop for a diabetic fizz fix but failed to get as far as the fridge.

  Blaring out from today’s Sunday News: ‘Judas Kiss’ by Fintan Lynch, over a photo of Karen Foster kissing Peter Ryan fully on the lips. Peter’s wearing a morning suit because the grainy image is a still from his wedding video.

  Tender embrace … the lovers share a kiss just a few feet from Marion, Peter’s new wife. Now Peter’s mistress Karen is prime suspect in the hunt for Marion’s killer …

  My hands shook as I read a couple of the more damning revelations from Karen Foster’s police interview. I couldn’t believe it: Shep had leaked her statement and the wedding video to Fintan. A scene replayed in my mind from Thursday night: Shep signing for two packages, one from Woolwich CID, the other from a data transfer company. He must have got a copy of Marion and Peter’s wedding video made to give to Fintan.

  Clever Shep. How could the CPS lawyer not charge Karen Foster, now that the world knew the truth?

  Another realisation abruptly stopped me applauding Shep’s ingenuity. Th
e team – and the Met Commissioner – would want to know how Fintan Lynch of the Sunday News got his hands on not one, but two pieces of evidence critical to an ongoing murder enquiry. Well, Commissioner, guess who works on the team? Step forward Donal Lynch, younger brother of the journalist who broke the story.

  My mind was spinning. Shep knew everyone would suspect me of supplying this material to Fintan. He leaked it anyway. Fintan knew everyone would assume that I was his snout. He ran it anyway. Judas Kiss indeed.

  By the time I got to Fintan’s street in North London, I’d convinced myself that he and Shep had plotted this from the very start. My very invitation to join the investigating team had been a ploy cooked up in their Machiavellian imaginations. Both were chess players: they knew they’d find a way to prosper while letting me take the fall. What they couldn’t have anticipated was that I knew the identity of the real leaker.

  I couldn’t wait to deliver this little checkmate.

  I rang Fintan’s doorbell over and over. Finally he appeared, dishevelled in shorts and my Sonic Youth ‘Goo’ t-shirt. Fucker.

  ‘What do you want?’ he squawked.

  ‘You’ve really fucking done it this time,’ I muttered through gritted teeth, barging past him into his barely-furnished bachelor pad.

  ‘Hey,’ Fintan called after me as I stormed into the tiny nightclub that passed for his kitchen.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Instantly I recognised her voice, coming from his trendy mezzanine bedroom. Fintan stopped dead in his tracks, opening his arms in a pleading gesture.

  ‘Look, we were going to tell you,’ he began.

  Eve appeared at the top of the metal staircase, wearing my best white linen shirt. I almost expected a serpent and an apple tree. By the time I managed to close my mouth, I’d forgotten why I came here.

  ‘You’ve been … all along,’ I said, my voice shaking.

  ‘We never planned it,’ said Eve, quietly.

  The sheer scale of their deceit, their betrayal, was too much to take in.

  ‘Jesus,’ was all I could say.

  ‘You,’ I said, pointing up at Eve, ‘get the fuck out of my sight, right now.’

  ‘You,’ I said, pointing at Fintan, ‘outside.’