The Unquiet Dead

by Gay Longworth

  The lifeguard had had nothing to do with the death of Ian Doyle. Police records confirmed that he left the baths in the same ambulance as Jonny Romano and did not return for two years. He was nervous about people knowing his secret, certainly; he was tormented by guilt over the boy’s death, but he wasn’t a murderer. Don’s trouble was that he hadn’t accepted Jonny’s role in his own death, nor that of the man who sold him the amphetamines. As far as Don was concerned, all the accusations stuck, and the boy’s death lay entirely at his feet. Fourteen years on, he could still see the blurred shape of a boy’s body lying twenty feet below him at the bottom of a pool. He drowned. It was an accident. These were hollow words. An ineffectual mantra which meant as little as exonerate. Don would always believe it was his fault, whatever the doctors, psychiatrists and lawyers told him.

  A car door slammed.

  ‘I said we’re here.’ Burrows held open her door, but they didn’t look each other in the eye as she passed him.

  It was a typical London housing estate, built in the thirties with rust-coloured bricks and covered walkways running the length of every floor. Door. Kitchen window. Door. Kitchen window. Door. Kitchen window. As far as the eye could see. Of all the estates in London, Jessie particularly loathed Lisson Grove. If hatred had a smell it would be of rotting rubbish, beer-bottle dregs and cat spray. Here children weren’t children, they were an enemy to be feared.

  The three of them hurried into a stinking stairwell and up the concrete steps to the fourth floor. The usual paraphernalia lined their route: used condoms, scraps of foil, syringes, crack pipes, beer cans, Burger King boxes, dog shit. They continued along the walkway, past the flat doors, the sound of a TV or stereo blasting out from almost every flat. Few had been gentrified. Right-to-buy had not applied to Lisson Grove. Niaz knocked on Flat G and within seconds the door was opened by a thickset man with olive skin and oiled black hair, wearing a thin white shirt and black jeans pulled high around his middle. Mr Romano.

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he said. ‘Please come in.’ They dutifully obliged. ‘Three of you!’ he said, expressing what sounded like delight. ‘Why the uniform?’

  ‘PC Ahmet is part of CID,’ explained Burrows.

  ‘CID, CID. Excellent, excellent. Are you in charge?’

  ‘I am,’ said Jessie. ‘DI Driver. I know it happened a long time ago, but may I express my deepest sympathies. No parent should bury a child.’

  ‘Seems like yesterday,’ said Mr Romano dropping his head. ‘Sometimes I think he’ll still walk through the door, kick off his shoes and demand his spaghetti al funghi. For an English woman, his mother was an excellent cook.’ His expression changed suddenly, his face contorted into a snarl. ‘He’d be blown away not to see his mama in the kitchen. But I make do.’ He offered them coffee and biscuits. Accepting, Jessie made a silent promise to herself to eat a plate of fresh vegetables when she got home that evening.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you’d divorced.’

  ‘The bereavement counsellor said it is not unusual.’ He stared at Jessie with wide black eyes. ‘Grief eats away at you until there is nothing left.’

  Jessie held his gaze uncomfortably. She could recognise grief; she just wasn’t sure it was grief she was looking at.

  ‘Mr Romano, we’d like to talk to you about Ian –’

  ‘Have you found the murdering bastard?’

  ‘Would you be surprised if we had?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t been able to find him.’

  ‘Where have you looked?’ asked Jessie.

  Mr Romano stood up. ‘It would be easier to tell you where I haven’t looked, that’s how hard I’ve been looking.’ He walked over to a pine dresser and began opening drawers and cupboards. Where glasses and plates should have been displayed, there were notebooks and files. ‘It is all documented here. A life’s work, you might say. It certainly gave me reason to get out of bed in the morning. Ian Doyle was a nobody, a vagrant; he lived in a squat in Soho and, according to another of the squatters, he’d been there a good many years. But they wouldn’t talk to the police, only me. Selling the drugs was his idea of getting a job. It’s disgusting what people will do for money. His greed killed my son.’ He looked the dresser over. ‘Everything you want to know is in there,’ he said proudly before turning back to his three visitors. ‘He was a very bright boy, my son. God knows where he got it from, came from nowhere, but he was bright, says so in all his reports.’ He opened another drawer. ‘I’ve got them all here. His mother wanted them, but no way, she wasn’t leaving with those.’

  ‘When did your wife leave, Mr Romano?’

  ‘Two years after Jonny was killed. She wanted to move on. “Move on?” I said. “How can you move on from something like that?” She said I was caught in the past, I had to choose between Jonny and her – daft cow. He was dead, wasn’t he. I think she had some psychological problems.’ He twirled a thick finger around by his temple. ‘She wanted me to stop searching. How could I stop? I wouldn’t do that to Jonny. One day I came home and she’d tidied out his room. Can you imagine? Not been dead two full years and she throws all his stuff out. Thank God I came home early that day from the search. I saw his stuff on the landing out there. I went ballistic, I can tell you.’ He shook his head. ‘I put it all back, don’t worry. I knew exactly where everything went.’ He beckoned to Jessie. ‘You can come and have a look if you like, get more of a feel of him.’ Mr Romano pushed open one of the doors off the central hallway to reveal a museum to the eighties. A shrine to his son. The bed was unmade, there were shoes and socks spread on the floor. A poster of Duran Duran curled off the wall. Mr Romano patiently pushed the corner back up. ‘The Blue Tack has lost a bit of its stick.’ He stood back. ‘It’s exactly like when he left for school. Lucky I’ve got a photographic memory,’ said Mr Romano. ‘So maybe he did get his brains from my side of the family.’

  ‘Mr Romano, did you ever see Ian Doyle?’

  ‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘He disappeared fast.’

  ‘So how did you know who you were searching for?’

  ‘Description from Jonny’s friends. Friends – ha! I blame that black kid, Pete Boateng. Bad family, the Boatengs, you could tell. So called best friend, didn’t do anything to stop Jonny taking those drugs, did he?’

  Jessie smelled the pungent air of racism.

  ‘The kids said Doyle hung around the pool a lot, and they weren’t the only ones who remembered him. I asked everyone who left the pool that day. Everyone. And I kept notes.’

  ‘May I see?’ said Jessie.

  ‘Of course. It’s nice to have someone take an interest after all these years.’

  Jessie flicked through a blue schoolbook. It had Jonny’s name and his class number on the front. Inside was a long list of names and descriptions of people, the time they left the baths and what answers they gave to Mr Romano’s questions.

  ‘What did you ask them?’

  ‘Had they seen the devil who killed my son? A lot of people had.’

  Jessie glanced back at the book. 15.19: Swimming teacher in tears, no. 15.25: Woman in white coat, ponytail, no English. 15.40: Fat lady, too upset to talk. 15.42: Spotty girl, hook nose, yes – frightening man, black hair … Jessie placed the book down. The notes were nonsense but they told her one interesting thing.

  ‘’Course it’s much easier now with the internet. It has done a lot to help my cause. I’ve even been to Spain after a tip-off. Wasn’t him, though. But it will be one day. He can’t run from me forever. The police may have forgotten about it, but he knows he won’t escape me. I bet he thinks about where I am every night before he falls asleep. I’m waiting for him to show his face. This time I’ll be ready.’

  Jessie could sense that Burrows wanted to tell him about the body, put him out of his misery, but she wasn’t yet convinced that Mr Romano hadn’t concocted a great alibi in his unrelenting search for a man he knew would never be found.

  ‘This time?’ asked Jessie.

 
; ‘I saw him once,’ said Mr Romano. ‘He stood right outside the kitchen window. I don’t know what made me pull back the blind. Some sixth sense, I think. There he was, just the other side of the glass, staring back at me. He gave me the slip during the chase.’

  ‘Mr Romano, it says in your report that you were at the baths before Jonny’s body was removed. How did you get there so quickly?’

  ‘I worked for a company in Soho very close to the baths – Vision Inc. Italians make good security men. Jonny had come over with his friends before. The lad was still wet when he reached me.’

  ‘And how soon did you know to look for Ian Doyle?’

  ‘One of the girls squealed about the speed there and then. She said she’d even seen Jonny take it. If that man hadn’t forced his drugs on my boy …’ He mumbled the rest of the sentence.

  ‘But, according to the paper, it wasn’t known that he had taken anything until the autopsy three days later.’

  ‘No. I didn’t believe her, I didn’t believe my son would do something that stupid. He was leaving that dump of a school, he’d got a scholarship. He was getting out.’

  ‘But you did believe it. You started searching for Doyle that day. It’s all here, neatly logged.’

  Mr Romano’s eyes flitted to each of them in turn. ‘What do you think she is getting at?’ he asked Burrows.

  ‘Just trying to establish the facts. If you had told the authorities about the drugs and Ian Doyle that day, they might have been able to catch him.’

  ‘Please, the police do the “I-ties” a favour? Don’t be fucking ridiculous. Back then they didn’t bother answering calls in this area.’

  ‘So you didn’t trust them to find him?’

  ‘I know what you are doing – you’re trying to pin this on me. You’re saying it’s my fault he got away, just like it was my poor boy’s fault he drowned. Oh yeah, you’re all the same.’

  ‘So you went looking for Doyle?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you found him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Mr Romano laughed.

  ‘Well, someone did.’

  Mr Romano stopped laughing.

  ‘Doyle never left Marshall Street Baths. He’s been buried in a boiler room for fourteen years.’

  Mr Romano stopped breathing.

  ‘The man you’ve been searching for died the same day your son did, and the only person who knew he’d had anything to do with it was you. Everyone else blamed the lifeguard.’

  Jessie felt the buzz of the job race through her as she drove her bike through Central London. The traffic was thin; she and the other petrol heads around her were the new kings of the road. She parked the bike outside St Mary’s Hospital and went in. The morgue was three floors below ground; she took the lift down and eventually emerged into the cool quiet corridor. As she pushed through the swing door, she saw Dominic Rivers bent over a corpse. He looked up and smiled.

  ‘Finally. Where have you been?’

  ‘Sorry, temporarily lost my phone and I haven’t been to the office to check my e-mails. What have you got?’

  ‘You’ve obviously been busy. So, let’s see – science versus slog. You first.’

  Jessie wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to show off. When she had last seen Dominic all they’d had was a stiff, no ID, no cause of death, no nothing.

  ‘Well, he went by the name Ian Doyle. He was a vagrant, living in Soho, selling drugs to kids. On February 23rd, he sold some speed to a sixteen-year-old called Jonny Romano at Marshall Street Baths. The boy subsequently drowned after having some sort of epileptic reaction to the drug. I believe he was taken to the boiler room, or was found hiding in the boiler room by someone who sought quick retribution. He was chained up and dropped into a narrow, deep pit, which at the time was full of rainwater. He drowned, yes, but not in the pool. When he was dead, whoever killed him moved him from the flooded pit to the dry pit, which could be sealed with a lid. And there he has remained, slowly drying out, ever since. Am I right?’

  ‘You’re right in that he didn’t drown in the pool. I found no traces of chlorine in his lungs. What I found was not as innocuous as London rainwater.’

  ‘Human faeces?’

  Dominic grimaced. ‘That couldn’t be a random guess.’

  ‘No. High rainfall causes the sewage system below the boiler room to back up, filling two of the four pits with sewage.’

  ‘And that explains the scratches …’

  Jessie nodded. ‘Rats.’

  ‘They didn’t just get him on the arms; the scratches go all the way up his body.’ Dominic pulled the covering sheet off the corpse. ‘The material of the trousers protected him at first, when the water level was low and the rats were not particularly active.’

  ‘So the pit wasn’t full of water when he went in?’

  ‘No. As the water level began to rise, the rats reacted more aggressively. Which is why the scratches get more intense as you get nearer to the head.’

  ‘Hang on – you think he was alive when the room was flooding?’

  ‘Yes. The wounds bled significantly.’

  Jessie knew how it worked. Dead people didn’t bleed. ‘I can double check with the Met Office. If it rained before February 23rd, then the room would already be under water. If it started raining afterwards, then it flooded after he was chained up.’

  ‘The injuries to his wrists are consistent with the room flooding after he was chained up. He was twisting and turning right up to his last breath.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he twist and turn anyway?’

  ‘Not that frenetically. He’d have to have been a very frightened man to cause such a high level of injury to himself.’

  The scene materialised against the backdrop of her closed eyelids. ‘He’s trying to fight off the rats,’ she said quietly. ‘The water level is rising, it’s pitch black and no one can hear him screaming because the baths are closed. When the water is up to his neck, the rats swarm him. He’s their last island.’ Jessie opened her eyes and looked at Dominic. ‘He drowns slowly, overrun by vermin, in other people’s waste.’

  The doctor nodded. ‘His fingers weren’t cut off by anything manmade.’

  Jessie put her hands together and raised them above her head. ‘The water stopped rising, and all that was left sticking above the surface was his fingers.’

  ‘Rats are carrion-eaters. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  Jessie lowered her arms slowly and tried to rid her mind of the image.

  Dominic pulled the sheet back over the dead man’s chewed body. ‘You got caught down there, didn’t you?’

  She pulled up her sleeves. Blood had seeped through the cotton bandages in a few places. ‘I got stuck in the boiler room during a rainstorm. Suddenly the lights went out and water was pouring in. They were everywhere. Hundreds of them. I couldn’t get them off me.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ said Dominic, instinctively walking up to Jessie and putting his arm around her. ‘Are you all right?’

  Jessie shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said honestly.

  He turned her bandaged arms over. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I meant to go to casualty, but there were so many people and I wasn’t really top priority. I waited for hours and when the scratches started hurting I decided that only one form of medication would suffice.’

  Dominic had been slowly unravelling the bandage. ‘Tell me you stayed long enough to get a tetanus injection.’

  Slowly she shook her head, then grimaced as he pulled the sticky cloth away from the now oozing scratches.

  ‘And the medication?’

  ‘Whisky.’

  ‘Detective, whisky is not an antiseptic.’

  ‘This I now know.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to give you a tetanus injection right now. Wait here; don’t touch anything, and don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back in a moment.’

  ‘I should be going –’

  He cut
her off. ‘Have you ever heard of the Black Death?’

  ‘Don’t be daft, that doesn’t exist any more.’

  He looked at her very seriously. ‘You want to take that chance? The rat population is out of control in this city. You know what they say: you’re never more than ten feet away from a Starbucks or six feet away from a rat – and who knows what strains of disease either are carrying. Now wait here.’

  Jessie unwound the bandage on the other arm while she waited. She was glad he hadn’t seen her first attempt at a field dressing. Three o’clock in the morning, after a lot of neat whisky, she and the one person she’d promised herself she wouldn’t call, had tried to dress her wounds. Sluicing TCP on to her arms had not done the trick. She could see from the yellowing flesh that they were already infected. Of course she hadn’t felt a thing at the time. It was only in the morning, when she realised what she’d done, that it began to hurt.

  ‘I’m never drinking again,’ she promised quietly to herself. What had she been thinking? After so many months of resisting the temptation to call. She’d even managed to turn him down to his face. Jessie stared forlornly at her arms. She could have blamed it on the shock or the booze, but the truth was, secretly, tucked away in the recesses of her mind, she knew, she still liked P. J. Dean. The rats, the fear and the whisky were merely the excuse she’d been waiting for. Weak and delirious, she’d run to him; weak and delirious she’d stayed; weak and delirious, she’d crept away at dawn.

  The door opened again and Dominic walked in holding a packaged syringe and a glass vial of clear liquid.

  ‘Bet you’re feeling stupid now,’ he said, looking at her arms.

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Jessie.

  ‘Right. Bend over,’ he ordered, peeling back the plastic. ‘Got to put the anus in tetanus.’