Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  She blinked slowly, as if using her eyelids to deflect my gross remark.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ she said, raising her left hand into a forlorn little wave. She wasn’t looking at me as she turned away and walked off.

  ‘Fuck,’ I muttered to myself, ‘what’s all that about?’

  Chapter 12

  Cold Case Unit, Vauxhall, South London

  Monday, April 5, 1993; 14.15

  ‘Lynch,’ called Barrett from his office door, ‘it’s your lucky day.’

  By the time I sat down, he was already installed behind his chaotic desk, engrossed in a piece of paper. He liked to make visitors wait, clearly believing it reinforced his flimsy authority.

  ‘You’re keen to get back onto a live murder squad, Lynch?’ he said finally, not looking up.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ve certainly made that abundantly clear from day one, haven’t you?’ he added, slurring slightly, his strained nasal breathing and flushed face confirming a grape-fuelled lunch.

  ‘I have, sir,’ I said uncertainly, trying to weigh up how much my overt ambition had irked him. Was he now angling a chainsaw to my impudent ambition?

  He looked up at last. ‘How familiar are you with this Valerie Gillespie case?’

  ‘I’d say superficially, guv, to be honest.’

  His closed-mouth sigh grew into a whiney hum, as if he’d swallowed a model World War II fighter plane. He drove home his irritation by noisily smacking and unsmacking his wine-parched lips, over and over.

  ‘You’ve been focussing on these unsolved prostitute murders for quite some time now, Lynch.’

  ‘Yes, sir. But I’ve been looking for trends, links in MO, that kind of thing. I haven’t really dug down deeply into a single case.’

  ‘That’s not quite how I’ve sold it to the Assistant Commissioner.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘As you know, the Yard is keen on us assisting with ongoing cases. As soon as they connected Liz Little to Gillespie, they were on the phone demanding to know how we can help. I’ve told them you’re something of an expert on the Gillespie case.’

  ‘Well, sir, if you give me a couple of days …’

  He stood suddenly and lurched past me. He flung his office door open with such gusto that the breeze rattled his picture frames and rustled my neck hairs.

  ‘DS Spence from the Liz Little murder squad is expecting you tomorrow morning, Holloway Road station, ten o’clock sharp.’

  I stood and turned silently, my air supply zapped off.

  As I walked out, his stale Claret breath hissed into my right ear: ‘We’re all under scrutiny here, Lynch. Don’t let us down.’

  I pulled up the Gillespie murder folder on my computer and checked the time – just after 2.30pm. The content amounted to less than a hundred files. I could grind through this lot in three hours – provided I kept my notes brief, which felt apt. DS Spence would want the baby, not the birth.

  I didn’t require motivation: make a strong impression and Spence might poach me right away. I took a look around at the tired old lions slumbering in the shade. No one else here would take on this extra workload, let alone responsibility. Not while there were bars open. This could be my moment in the sun. I needed to make it count.

  I also needed to find out for myself how the murder of two women at polar ends of the prostitution spectrum could be linked. To me, it simply didn’t stack up.

  The pathology report made me think otherwise.

  Like Liz, Valerie Gillespie had been carved up with considerable expertise, but into six parts – head, torso, two legs, two arms. I jotted down my first point – there can’t be many homicidal maniacs out there with the skills required to expertly dismember a body.

  Other connections to Liz leaped out.

  A grade ‘C’ battery had been found inserted into Valerie’s anus. She’d suffered blunt force trauma to the head, which the pathologist cited as the most likely cause of death.

  But there were marked differences too. Valerie’s killer had used a domestic iron to disfigure her face and breasts when alive, not a knife. There were no mysterious gouges of flesh removed from her body. She’d suffered multiple cigarette burns to her arms and neck. And, whereas Liz had been virtually put on display, Valerie had been expertly weighed in water with the express intention that she’d never be found.

  I switched briefly to an overview of people interviewed. They’d checked out the usual suspects in Valerie’s life: exes, relatives, old friends. All had been eliminated from the enquiry, including her 62-year-old sugar daddy Philip Armstrong. Everything pointed to a punter.

  I knew only too well how easy it was for someone to murder a streetwalker. The tricky part … getting rid of her body. I returned to the pathology report to note all the key facts relating to her disposal.

  Body changes showed she’d been dead for about a week, but the insects present suggested she’d been exposed to air for just two or three days. Her killer had stored her dead body somewhere, for a matter of days.

  No mention had been made of hair ripped from her head. Perhaps it didn’t seem significant at the time, especially in light of her other heinous injuries. But now two murder investigations hinged on this bizarre little detail. I noted this at the top of my page, circling it twice.

  According to witness statements, the last people to see Valerie alive had been a couple of streetwalkers at King’s Cross, ten days before her body had been found. CCTV captured the trio engaged in a ferocious catfight. When questioned, the women accused Valerie of encroaching on their territory. Valerie’s ‘big mistake’, they explained, had been to tout for business without a pimp. The same CCTV alibied the pair; their punishing punter/crack score routine accounted for virtually every hour of their days and nights throughout that time.

  As far as I could see, scant effort had been made to trace Valerie’s movements during the ‘lost four days’ between her vanishing from King’s Cross and getting killed. Officers had scoured CCTV footage taken around King’s Cross, found nothing and given up. Where had she spent that time, and with whom? Presumably she still needed cash and crack.

  Those ‘lost’ days were absolutely critical to tracing her killer. At some point during that period, she’d been abducted, held somewhere, tortured and dumped. Someone must have seen something.

  I moved onto the scene of crime reports.

  The black plastic bags and bricks used to dump her body parts could be bought at any hardware store and didn’t carry reference numbers.

  A couple of hundred yards from the reservoir, detectives discovered a bird watcher’s hut containing a transistor radio, blankets and a torch, all wiped clean of prints. Burnt pieces of wooden pallet, food cans and cigarettes were found on an outside fire dated less than a week old, again minus anything evidential. Whoever killed her had been forensically aware. Experienced.

  He’d murdered before.

  The forensic psychologist’s report drew the same conclusion. Typically, the bulk of his observations could have been delivered by anyone with a taste for True Crime.

  The suspect will be aged between 35 and 50 … he has loathed women since puberty, possibly through an unwilling early sexual encounter, possibly with a relative … he will have sexually assaulted and raped women before, and had ‘built up’ to murder … he has poor education, a menial job, an interest in porn, hunting and fishing, a record for petty crimes.

  However, he added a series of general observations about sexual sadistic murders that could prove useful.

  First: Offenders subject the victim to anal rape, forced fellatio, vaginal rape and foreign object penetration, in decreasing order. The majority of offenders force their victims to engage in three or more of these acts.

  I couldn’t help concluding that, as A3 batteries had been found inside Liz and Valerie, they’d suffered all four. I read on.

  The primary cause of pleasure for the offender isn’t these sex acts but the pain caused to the victim.
<
br />   Physical violence is focussed on the sex organs, genitalia and breasts.

  Sexually sadistic acts may include biting of areas with sexual associations, including thighs, buttocks, neck and abdomen.

  He topped this off with personal observations of his own. The most relevant to these cases being: The offender’s vehicle will be altered for use in abduction and torture, including disabled windows and doors, sound proofing and installing police scanners.

  Occasionally, the body may be transported to a location that increases the chances of discovery because the offender wants the excitement derived from the publicity that the body’s discovery generates. This is known as ‘staging’.

  With foreign object insertion, sexual arousal occurs most frequently with the victim’s expression of pain, and is evidenced by sexual fluids or possibly defecation at the scene.

  He then added a note regarding the specific object inserted into Valerie.

  ‘The symbolism of the battery shouldn’t be overlooked or ruled out. It may be an expression of what the offender considers his, as yet, untapped power. Or of the total control he believes he can exert over the women he selects. It appears to be a personation or signature and will likely feature in his next attack.’

  Despite the fact Valerie had been targeted by a serial killing maniac, her case failed to get any national media attention. Fintan’s brutal words chimed:

  It’s different when a ‘good’ woman is murdered … that creates a threat to all women. That sells papers.

  Paucity of publicity meant a scarcity of calls to the incident room – less than a dozen in total. One of them caught my eye. A man claiming to be a Garda in Birr, Co. Offaly, in Southern Ireland, called anonymously and advised the team to check out a rapist with convictions in the Republic called Robert Conlon, in his 40s and originally from Foxburrow, near Roscrea.

  An officer from the team contacted the regional Garda headquarters in Birr and spoke to Detective Superintendent John Keegan, who claimed that no record of a convicted rapist of this name or anything similar existed.

  Three days later, the mysterious Garda informant made a second call to the incident room. Once again, he refused to reveal his identity but claimed that Conlon was staying in the Camden Town area of North London and getting help from the local Irish centre. Why did the Garda not give his name? Why hadn’t the squad checked out this second, specific lead? And surely a call to the police station closest to Conlon’s original home in Foxburrow, Roscrea would’ve been the best bet for background information?

  I dialled Fintan’s mobile. Before moving to London, he’d been a crime reporter for the Irish Press in Dublin. If, over the last quarter of a century, a sadistic rapist called Robert Conlon had been operating in the Republic, he’d know about it.

  ‘Hang on ’til I get outside,’ he shouted above the unmistakable din of a bar. I’d forgotten how Sunday newspaper journalists spent Monday to Wednesdays getting pissed.

  ‘You’re working late,’ he said finally, drawing on a cigarette.

  ‘You’re drinking early, more like. Listen, I’ve been asked to put together a precis of the Valerie Gillespie case for Spence tomorrow morning. Get this. The Gillespie investigation received an anonymous tip off about a rapist from Foxburrow in Offaly called Robert Conlon. Any bells ringing?’

  ‘Convicted in Ireland?’

  ‘Yes, of rape, according to the source.’

  ‘Unless it was a long, long time ago, I’d have heard of him. Jesus, I covered that patch as a local reporter.’

  ‘Well, it can’t be that long ago. He’s supposedly in his 40s.’

  Had someone taken a sledgehammer to a tank, I thought, or was that the sound of a gargantuan ego being violently dented?

  ‘Robert Conlon, normal spelling?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, no middle name given.’

  ‘If this Conlon exists,’ he snapped, ‘I’ll find him. Leave it with me.’

  Chapter 13

  Holborn, London

  Monday, April 5, 1993; 18.00

  Zoe failed to call so I did, casually suggesting that we meet in the Princess Louise pub near her office. Of course it had been anything but a casual suggestion. I was already there.

  I’d left work early to scope out all the local boozers for romantic potential. With its etched glass, bar lamps and dark, wooden panels, this temple to Victorian London won hands down. I’d even got there early enough to bag an intimate little booth down the back, where I battled nervous hands to pace my drinking.

  She turned up with her hair down, lips scarlet and a skirt so tight it would make a dead Bishop kick a hole through his coffin lid.

  ‘Wow, you look absolutely knock-out,’ I said, perhaps a little too surprised for it to be a total compliment.

  ‘Thanks,’ she smiled and I loved her for just taking the praise. In my experience, anything else can get horribly complicated.

  ‘I see you’ve already got the red-wine lip camo in place,’ I joked, as she slid gracefully into the seat opposite.

  ‘You make me sound like an alky! It’s just that I don’t get out very often.’

  ‘You’ve mentioned that before,’ I said. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Get me a small glass of red wine and I’ll tell you all about it.’

  I got her a large Rioja because the small one looked mean. I got me a pint of weak lager because I already felt drunk on promise.

  ‘How’s the case going?’ she asked before I’d even sat down.

  I kicked off with an imitation of Barrett’s slurred post-lunch hospital pass, which had us both in stitches.

  ‘I hate to bring the mood down,’ she said suddenly, her hands abandoning the glass and clasping together. ‘There’s something you need to know and I want to tell you before I have any more to drink.’

  My subconscious planted knowing hands on its hips and gloated: See, told you this would happen. She’s WAY out of your league.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, and she frowned in confusion. ‘I know the drill. You like me as a friend but …’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Morrissey. Can you let someone else provide the melodrama, just this once?’

  I laughed but my ego went foetal, bracing itself for a no-doubt infuriatingly reasonable argument about how we, as a couple, couldn’t possibly work.

  ‘I’ve got a 14-month-old son, called Matthew,’ she said.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard my voice say.

  I recovered in time to bolt on … ‘You’d never know it by looking at you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  With all brain cogs locked in shock, I skidded on: ‘All the women I know with kids look fucked. Honestly, I’d never have guessed.’

  She hit me with her trademark worried/amused frown: ‘Maybe I should be made to wear some sort of sign around my neck, you know, “fallen woman” kind of thing?’

  ‘Oh, I’m with the Tories and the Daily Mail on this one.’ I smiled. ‘Chastity belt, facial branding, the whole hog. I presume you did it for a council flat, and that the baby’s brown and the dad’s nowhere to be seen?’

  ‘Well, you got the last part right,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Oh. Sorry to hear it,’ I lied, as my ego performed a series of black flips before declaring ‘drinks on the house’.

  ‘Why so?’ I ventured quietly.

  ‘He’s no longer involved in any way. He’s not a bad person. He just couldn’t deal with the idea of settling down, so we agreed that he should go.’

  ‘So he doesn’t see either of ye, at all?’

  She shook her head blankly, all emotions in lockdown. ‘He’s in Australia.’

  I desperately wanted to ask if she still had feelings for him. Had they been in love? What if he suddenly announces he wants to play dad again? But I managed to disguise my selfish insecurities by focussing on mundane practicalities.

  ‘How do you manage, with childcare and things?’

  ‘My mum and dad are saints, basically. They even make me go out one or two nig
hts a week. They’re desperate for me to meet a man, of course, so that they can offload us.’ She laughed, a little bitterly.

  ‘Well, if desperation’s the only qualification,’ I said, raising my glass.

  She smiled but suddenly looked tired, anxious – and quite a bit older.

  ‘The thing is, Donal, you need to understand what this means. Matthew demands, and gets, most of my energy. I’m in bed by ten most nights and up at six. I’m constantly knackered and, since he started nursery, lurching from one lurgy to the next.’

  ‘Wow, you should make that your Lonely Hearts ad.’

  ‘Don’t joke, Donal. Any man I meet now will have to play second fiddle to Matthew. His welfare has to be my priority and will always come first. And the only clubs I’ll be going to are run by the NCT.’

  She softened, offering me a ‘no hard feelings’ look of benevolent resignation.

  ‘You’ve got a great life as a single bloke, Donal. You can come and go as you please. And you’re funny and handsome, in an unconventional way, of course. And you could charm the knickers of a nun. I don’t want to take your glory days away from you. You’d end up hating me for it.’ Her eyes smiled forgivingly, giving me the chance, finally, to properly explore them, for as long as I wanted to. I could see that they sought nothing but absolute honesty, from the very core of me, without angles or strings or conditions.

  So I got honest with myself. Could I really handle the responsibility of being a surrogate uncle/prospective stepdad to a kid who didn’t know me and may resent my very presence? I loved kids. They seemed to like me. But could I really do the sleepless nights, the long monotonous days, the sober weekends that parenting demanded? Of course not. Jesus.

  Fintan’s words from Sunday broke in again. A lump of driftwood … dawdling along aimlessly … no purpose … you need to make things happen in life …

  ‘I’m going to the bar now,’ I announced, grabbing her fidgety little hand. ‘And I’m going to buy us the best bottle of red wine they have. When I come back, I want to hear all about this fantastic little man called Matthew. And at the end of the night, right out there on that pavement, you’re going to kiss me goodnight and let me fall a little more in love with you. Understood?’