Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  ‘Wow, that was quick.’

  Fintan’s eyebrows shot skyward.

  ‘We haven’t confirmed it yet but she has a very distinctive rose tattoo on the back of her shoulder with her initials beneath it. And there’s a scar that matches too. The height, weight, it all tallies. You got a pen?’

  Fintan’s notebook and biro stood to attention.

  ‘Yes. Shoot.’

  ‘Elizabeth Phoebe Little, Date of Birth 29/7/70. Single. Originally from Armley in Leeds,’ I repeated after her as Fintan whipped out his laptop and inserted a floppy disc.

  ‘The most recent address we have for her is 14a Princess Road, Richmond. No previous convictions. Profession: Actress.’

  ‘Actress eh?’ I said, as Fintan’s smugometer almost exploded.

  ‘Can’t say I’ve heard of her,’ I added, in an attempt to puncture his euphoria.

  ‘Me neither. That’s all we’ve got so far.’

  ‘That’s so helpful, Zoe. I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘Not a problem. If it helps catch the bastard who did this to her, I’ll feel a little better about today.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘Good, and you’ve got my number now. Don’t hesitate to call if you need anything else.’

  ‘I will, Zoe. Thanks.’

  ‘Oh, and Donal?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I hope it’s okay to ask, but can you let me know when you catch him?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ I said, as long-dead butterflies rose and fluttered about my chest, tickling the edges of my hopeful heart.

  I couldn’t decide which was wilder, Fintan’s driving or his underhand journalistic techniques. As his Mondeo sped us away from Brownswood Road, he made six calls in a row. The first, to his office, went like this:

  ‘John, I’ve got a phone number here for a Rodney and Jean Little in Armley. I want you to call them, say you’re Phil Blackman from the Mirror, tell them you’re contacting them because their daughter Elizabeth has just landed a role in Eastenders. Fillet them for all you can. Don’t give them your number at the end. Got it?’

  ‘What the hell?’ I asked. ‘How did you get their phone number?’

  ‘I’ve got a floppy disc with electoral roll and phone numbers, all perfectly legal and above board.’

  ‘What if they’ve already heard the news?’

  ‘That’ll be John’s problem. He’s work experience so it’ll do him good.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Look, the cops won’t call them until they have something concrete like dental records. At least I’m not making him break the news.’

  ‘Why did you tell him to say he was from the Mirror?’

  ‘They’ll be Northern working-class stock, won’t they? So they’re bound to be Union members and lefties who read the Mirror. When they get the bad news and realise that the Mirror behaved so appallingly, they’ll be putty in my hands. Oldest trick in the book.’

  ‘You’re despicable,’ I spat.

  He dialled another number.

  ‘Yes, hello showbiz desk. Fintan Lynch here. Listen, grab your red pages and tell me who the agent is for an actress called Elizabeth Little.’

  He memorised the number, hung up and dialled again while tackling a roundabout.

  ‘Hello, Roger Alsop please?’

  ‘Hi Roger. My name is Neil Jordan. I’m an Irish film director. You may have heard of me,’ he said in a ridiculously posh Dublin accent.’

  ‘Ha ha, well that’s terribly kind of you, Roger. Bob Hoskins gave me your number and says hello,’ he gushed, giving me a wink.

  ‘Ha ha yes, dear old Bob. Wonderful. Yes.’

  ‘Well, it’s a little delicate, Roger. But I’m told I can count on you being discreet. I’m casting for a new film and I’ve heard great things about a young actress called Elizabeth Little.’

  Fintan listened for a very long time.

  ‘Before I do that, Roger, is there any chance I could get hold of a show reel and some quality photos, you know, studio shots.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll have an assistant pop round within the hour. Thanks, Roger. Ciao.’

  ‘Do you think Neil Jordan says “Ciao”?’

  ‘They all fucking do, don’t they?’

  ‘Well, what’s she been in?’

  ‘She had a bit part in The Bill last year.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Well, it’ll be a major part by the time I’m done.’

  He was dialling again.

  ‘Who are you calling now?’

  ‘The picture desk.’

  He held up his hand to shut me up: ‘Jim. I need a VHS of an episode of The Bill from last year featuring an actress called Elizabeth Little.’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Call them then.’

  ‘Yes. It’s very fucking important.’

  ‘Now I’ve got to get our Northern stringer out of the pub,’ he said tapping out another number.

  ‘Bob, you fat Northern git.’

  ‘Yeah, not bad. Listen, you and your monkey need to get outside an address in Armley and wait for my call. I’ll text it but start heading there now. And be discreet.’

  ‘Actress. Murdered.’

  ‘The Bill. Stage mostly.’

  ‘It’ll be massive, Bob, trust me.’

  ‘I can’t say. Look, the Mirror have already harassed them today so be gentle.’

  ‘Exactly, as soon as it’s official, I’ll call you.’

  ‘Get them on a train to London ASAP.’

  ‘I don’t know. Offer them a ferret or a pair of fucking clogs or a year’s supply of ale. Whatever it takes.’

  Another call: ‘Dennis. Pull everything you can about Elizabeth Little, date of birth 29/07/70.’

  ‘Princess Road, Richmond.’

  ‘The Full Monty.’

  ‘Talk later.’

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked.

  ‘A helpful ex-copper.’

  ‘Let me guess, the Full Monty means her bank accounts, health records, criminal records?’

  He nodded: ‘Best of all, phone records, everyone she’s called in the past year and the five personal numbers on her “friends and family” deal. That’s where the gold is, everyone who knew her best.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to insist that this is all perfectly legal?’

  ‘It’s not illegal. Like I’ve told you before, this is all information held on systems that anyone who works for banks, building societies, debt collection agencies or private investigators can get legitimately. Sometime next week, Dennis is laying hands on a floppy disc containing the names and dates of birth of everyone in Anonymous groups in the whole of the UK. He doesn’t collect the data but he can get hold of it and pass it onto me. That’s not illegal.’

  ‘And I suppose morality doesn’t comes into it?’

  He pulled up outside the Cold Case Unit’s non-descript annex off Albert Embankment, just south of the Thames between Vauxhall and Lambeth Bridge.

  ‘You want my help on this story, right?’ he said. ‘You want to find her killer?’

  ‘Not if it involves pulling people’s confidential records … that can’t be right.’

  ‘You do know that there are sales companies out there who routinely access all of our records – financial, medical, everything. There are City banks who employ private investigators full-time to dig the dirt on people. If it’s on a computer system, it’s being sold on.’

  I suddenly felt hot and irritable.

  ‘Look, let me do the journalism. I’ll shake down this story and then you can run with whatever we get out of it, your conscience clear. Okay?’

  I opened the passenger door, hauled myself out: ‘Where are you off to now?’

  ‘Princess Road, Richmond.’ Fintan smiled. ‘With any luck, I can talk my way in and get hold of her post.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I sighed, slamming the door of his blood red Mondeo and wishing to God I’d never set foot in it.

 
Chapter 4

  Vauxhall, South London

  Saturday, April 3, 1993; 13.20

  I walked into the library-like silence of work and smiled to myself: that’s what they call us out in the real world – the Cemetery. Wind up in the Cold Case Unit and your career is truly dead and buried.

  Unusually for a Saturday, a couple of the dirty dozen were in, slumped, brooding, in various states of drink-fuelled disrepair.

  The Cold Case Unit seemed to serve as a last refuge for the knackered, disgraced or discredited. By the time of my enforced exile here six months ago, I ticked all three boxes, thanks to a now infamous episode the previous year, 1991.

  That summer, plodding the Clapham/Battersea beat in South London, I’d stumbled across my first freshly murdered body. The victim, Marion Ryan, came to me that night and, in the course of scaring me half to death, acted out what I later recognised to be a key clue to her killer.

  Of course I didn’t ‘get it’ right away. I was too busy fearing for my mental wellbeing. So she came again and again, until I felt haunted and cursed. The fall-out proved catastrophic, costing me a girlfriend, my job and very nearly my life.

  Eventually Marion’s nocturnal charades led me to her killer.

  Sounds bonkers, I know. As a devout sceptic, I refused to accept that a dead person could reach me from ‘the other side’; that something supernatural might be occurring. Then it happened again …

  I blamed it on my insomnia and an over-active subconscious. A psychologist agreed that the visions had to be coming from within me, attributing them to a rare hallucinatory disorder called Sleep Paralysis. Sufferers of this condition sometimes can’t ‘snap off’ the dreaming segment of their brain after they wake up, creating a phenomenon known as ‘waking dreams’ that seem terrifyingly real.

  My refusal to accept this prognosis failed to prevent the ambitious shrink publishing a paper about it in a leading science quarterly. There was little scientific about the tabloid-newspaper follow-up, which labelled me a ‘self-proclaimed psychic cop’.

  After that article Commander John Glenn summoned me to his eighth-floor office at New Scotland Yard. ‘No doubt as you will have foreseen yesterday,’ he sneered, ‘I want your warrant card now.’ By the time I’d left him sprawled across his antique desk gasping for air, Heckler & Koch had a bead on all three ground floor lifts. Like Ann Frank in that annex, I came quietly.

  I expected to be charged with assault and sacked on the spot. Instead they suspended me on full pay and assigned me to Darius, a Police Federation solicitor who turned out to be dodgier than most criminals I’d dealt with.

  A week or so later, over several pints at the Feathers, Darius asked me to tell him exactly what had happened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me, ‘what you tell me will never leave these four walls. In an exercise like this, the truth is merely our starting point.’

  I switched into ‘victim’ mode – a skill I’d learned from petty criminals while in uniform. I explained how Commander Glenn had summoned me to HQ on the back of a ‘malicious and libellous’ Sunday newspaper article which had ‘degraded and humiliated me’.

  ‘Of course I’d never made any such claim about possessing psychic powers,’ I bleated on. ‘My mistake had been to confide in a trainee psychologist about the vivid dreams that plagued me after I’d attended a series of gruesome murder scenes.’

  ‘Caused by attending a series of gruesome murder scenes,’ corrected Darius, jotting down my juiciest revelations in an archaic moleskin notebook. ‘Classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress.’

  I nodded gravely. ‘Next thing, they’re cracking gags about me in the papers and on TV and radio shows. I couldn’t leave the house for months.’

  I next described Glenn’s ‘unsympathetic and dismissive’ attitude to ‘my crippling sleep disorder’. I finished up with the comment that had caused me to snap: Glenn’s assertion that, as an Irishman, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. Darius seized upon this last line like a drowning man.

  ‘He said what?’

  ‘He was explaining how any suggestion that I’d used “psychic powers” in my police work would give grounds for appeal to anyone whose case I’d ever worked on.’

  ‘Yeah, I get that. But what did he say specifically about you being Irish?’

  ‘He said words to the effect that, as an Irish person, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. I remember his last line: “Haven’t you read about your compatriots, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six and what not?” I just lost it.’

  Darius blew hard out of his mouth: ‘Any witnesses?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did he record it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, guess what –’ dodgy Darius grinned, a gold tooth glinting beneath his leering top lip ‘– it’s your lucky day.’

  I tried not to let his Romanian-beggar oral chic put me off. After all, I needed him to get me back to work. But I couldn’t stop staring at it, or wondering if any personal affectation on the planet could make him look less trustworthy. A toupee perhaps? Or a glass eye. No, the gold tooth still triumphed.

  ‘The Commission for Racial Equality has just announced it’s backing a test case brought by a machinist from County Antrim against his former employer. He’s claiming that Irish jokes on the shop floor made his day-to-day life intolerable.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, he lives and works in Ireland.’ I laughed. ‘Anyway, how could he hear all these hurtful gags over the racket of his machine?’

  ‘I know.’ Darius shrugged. ‘But it’s going to happen and with the Commission’s support, he can’t lose. If I hint to the Met that we’re talking to the Commission about your case, and specifically Glenn’s near-the-knuckle racial stereo-typing …’

  ‘Hang on a minute, Darius. He wasn’t being racist. If anything …’

  ‘You want to get back to work, don’t you?’

  ‘Is this the only way?’

  ‘It’s the best way.’

  ‘So you … we’re playing the race card?’

  ‘The race card’s the ace card, baby. You only have to show it and the other side folds.’

  While Darius set about rigging the disciplinary deck, he insisted I attend a consultation with one of his preferred psychologists.

  ‘We need to deliver a clean bill of mental health,’ he explained, ‘and this man will help. All you need to show is that you’re not mental now, and he’ll report that whatever episode you suffered in Glenn’s office had been a one-off. He’s even got a name for it, Bouffe Delirante, which translates as ‘a puff of madness’. Bollocks, I know, but because it sounds exotic, they fall for it every time.’

  ‘Right, so I won’t have to go into anything else then, like my insomnia or childhood or any of that stuff?’

  ‘Not unless you want to.’

  Dr Swartz proved to be everything you’d expect from an ageing quack winding down an undistinguished career in leafy Finchley, right down to his Einstein tribute grey thatch, hairy ears and bumbling, distracted disposition.

  I told him that I couldn’t remember anything of the Glenn incident, which seemed to suit him no end. What I hadn’t considered was how we’d fill the remaining 55 minutes of our appointment.

  Like a newborn snuffling out nipples, wily old Swartz instinctively located my crippling insecurities, one by one, then latched on.

  I wouldn’t mind but I knew the psychology mating dance pretty well by then, having tangled with that trainee shrink a few years’ back. They use questions like pawns to manoeuvre you into a vulnerable position, all the while reassuring you that you’re making these moves all by yourself. It goes on and on until, cornered, you run out of patience and invent a fit-all conclusion of your own, just to get the hell out of there.

  ‘What about sleep?’ came his opening gambit, ‘do you get restful, unbroken sleep each night?’

  ‘Who does?’ I quipped, fighting fire with fire.

  ‘Ho
w many hours?’

  I suddenly remembered Fintan’s proclamation that he could never trust anyone who is incapable of lying. Now I understood what he meant. Swartz peered imperiously over his double-glazed reading glasses, wordlessly breaking me.

  ‘I’ve never been a great sleeper, to be honest, doctor. Four or five hours a night is plenty.’

  ‘Why obfuscate, young man? How much sleep do you get, on average, each night?’

  I pictured a puff of madness swirling about the room like a mini-tornado, waiting to pounce.

  ‘Three hours,’ I muttered.

  ‘Would you say that’s down to a specific anxiety, or a more general malaise?’

  ‘I had it down as insomnia, sir. I’ve had it all my life, off and on.’

  He shuffled uncomfortably in his leather seat.

  ‘Have you read Percy Pig?’

  I looked at him in amused disbelief.

  ‘I thought they just did sweets, sir. Do you mean the back of the packet?’

  He frowned. ‘No … Pirsig. In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig writes: “It’s a puzzling thing. The truth knocks at the door and you say ‘go away, I’m looking for the truth’. And so it goes away. Puzzling.” I’m asking you, Donal, why don’t you answer the knock on your door?’

  ‘Interesting hypothesis,’ was all I could think to say, playing for time.

  He smiled in satisfaction, as if we’d just shared some sort of intellectual in-joke: ‘Very good. I suspect you’re toying with me now.’

  I smiled back, because I felt it would anger him less than looking bewildered.

  He stood suddenly, making me start. ‘Damned seat. There’s no purchase in the leather. I have to perch upon it, like I’m sitting on the blasted lavatory.’

  ‘If you can suffer another hypothesis, Lynch,’ he declared, flouncing off towards his Georgian window, ‘I introduce clients with sleep troubles to my old friend, the worry worm, that niggling little creature that burrows its way into your brain at night and wriggles about so that you can’t drop off. The W–O–R–M in my worm stands for work, old or overweight, relationships and money. When it comes down to it, one or more of these is the source of almost all human anxiety. So allow me to dissect your little wriggler. This work incident … clearly you suffered insomnia long before it, so I’m discounting that. You’re not getting old or overweight, so that rules out the ‘o’. It’s got to be either relations or money. Are you in debt?’