Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  ‘I’ve already told Fintan, neither of ye has anything to worry about.’

  He turned to leave, then came back.

  ‘I’ll make those calls about Conlon,’ he said. ‘Just keep me posted on how it’s going at your end. Oh, and I put a clothes wash on for ye yesterday and it’s still not done. I don’t know what’s wrong with that machine.’

  I got down to investigate. He’d loaded it, switched on the power, poured in the powder and conditioner and set the dials. But he hadn’t pressed start. A bit like tonight’s peace talks, I thought. When it comes to the crunch, he won’t be able to quite bring himself to press the button.

  When sleep came for me, much later, so did those recurring dreams.

  The final time I saw him executed on that mattress, I woke to a startling realisation.

  His offer of help … his speech … his attempt to explain … Mam’s missed call … Da is convinced he’s going to die, real soon.

  Chapter 20

  Vauxhall, South London

  Wednesday, April 7, 1993

  As soon as it turned 9am, I rang the Garda station in Roscrea and asked to speak to the most senior officer on duty.

  Of course Detective Superintendent Ger O’Driscoll already knew about our hunt for Robert Conlon, courtesy of that day’s lead story in the Leinster Express and the ever-reliable Bog Bongos.

  ‘I can assure you, detective,’ he said in a droll, nasal, all-knowing tone, ‘that there is no rapist on the loose here in the Midlands by the name of Robert Conlon, or any other rapists on the loose for that matter. I don’t know where you got your information from, but might I respectfully suggest you check the credibility of your source.’

  I resented this bog hopper’s glib dismissal and decided to let him know it.

  ‘I can assure you, superintendent, that I wouldn’t be making this call if the source wasn’t credible. After all, London is a fairly busy patch, even compared to crazy old Roscrea.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you didn’t get this information from that gurrier of a brother of yours?’

  ‘The information comes from one of your Gardaí actually,’ I snapped, then kicked myself for giving this away. ‘I trust all your officers are credible, superintendent.’

  ‘Well, none of them are claiming to be psychic anyway –’ he laughed ‘– which I take to be a good sign.’

  I couldn’t believe he knew about this.

  ‘I’m an old friend of your father’s, Lynch. I hope you appreciate what you put him through with all that carry on. I, for one, don’t blame him for washing his hands of you.’

  ‘Maybe you need to check the credibility of your own sources, superintendent,’ I said, ‘because he’s over here staying with me right now. As for Conlon, you better be right or my gurrier of a brother will plaster your ugly mug all over his scandalous rag.’

  No sooner had I slammed down the phone than it rang again; Zoe with news. The fingerprint on the torch bulb didn’t match any on the criminal databases, nor did it belong to Reilly, Bernie or Slob.

  It now all pointed to a different killer … and this seemingly non-existent Robert Conlon was our only suspect. Even that seemed the flimsiest of leads, coming as it did from an anonymous source briefly mentioned in a single police report.

  When my phone rang again, I couldn’t bring myself to answer; I’d already had enough bad news for one day.

  ‘Lynch, you muppet! Why aren’t you picking up?’ bellowed a voice from the main door. ‘There’s a pretty young woman at reception who wants to see you.’

  Cue a half-hearted chorus of wolf whistles and yelps.

  ‘And she’s a tart if ever I saw one.’

  ‘Tammy, great to see you,’ I beamed.

  I didn’t know whether to peck her on the cheek or shake hand so I just hovered a safe distance away.

  ‘Jeez, you’re a hard man to find,’ she drawled, all liquor, sex and Blanche DuBois.

  She wore her long brown hair back, a tight-fitting blue gingham shirt with too many open buttons, tighter-still jeans and cute little Western-style ankle boots. Her bright-red mouth looked a few sizes too big for her face and chewed gum defiantly. I could instantly see her as a slouching, petulant horny teenager, so busy thinking about being bad that her gum would stick to her braces.

  But age and hard-living had gently forked the edges, giving her a sense of elegant decay, like a not-long-derelict Georgian plantation.

  I turned to see the female receptionists gazing at her with a mixture of damning pity and undisguised envy. I couldn’t help thinking how difficult it must be for beautiful women, constantly ogled by lusting men and despising women.

  ‘Shall we step outside for a chat,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ boomed Tammy, and I wondered why Americans seem incapable of going unnoticed in any situation.

  Without a word, we began walking through the car park towards Spring Gardens, an ill-named, dismal patch of no-man’s-land between the police buildings and spiky local estates.

  ‘I can’t believe you tracked me down, Tammy. I’m impressed.’

  ‘When I saw the reports about Liz on Sunday morning, it totally freaked me out. But it made me realise, I had to do something. It took real chutzpah to do what you did and come to Jimmy’s club. I remembered your name – Donal, like Bonal. I called the number at the end of the article and asked to speak with you. The guy said that they had no one on the team called Donal. So I asked if they had any Irish cop. He said no to that too so I sorta gave up.

  ‘Then I read an article which said they were linking what happened to Liz to this other case, Valerie something. It mentioned the Cold Case Unit, so I found the address and decided to give it one more go …’

  ‘So you came down here in person … on the off-chance?’

  ‘Well, I don’t live too far from here. And I’d only speak to you about this one-to-one anyway. Like I said, I have to do something. So I thought “what the hell?” If you weren’t here, I’d just play the dumb American. God, the Brits love that. Sorry about running out on you Saturday.’

  ‘Yeah, what happened?’

  ‘Rules of the house. We’re all told from day one, if management offers someone a complimentary Moët, within five minutes you make your excuses and leave. If they offer Krug, you get out of there right away. But I made sure you got outta there too.’

  I stopped. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I keep a can of pepper spray in my bag. It’s the real fucking deal, like the shit they use in North Korea? So I waited until no one was looking, slipped outside to the alley and sprayed it into the air-con vents. I didn’t have a clue if it would work.’

  ‘Work? You saved my arse, Tammy. I was sitting upstairs waiting for Jimmy Reilly to turn up and torture me.’

  ‘You certainly gave Slob a headache.’

  ‘I feel bad about that …’

  ‘Don’t. He’s a surly creep.’

  ‘What were you going to tell me, Tammy?’

  ‘I was in shock. God knows what I would have blurted out. In a way it’s good that I’ve had a few days to think it over.’

  ‘You wanna relax and start from the beginning?’ I said, pointing to a bench suspiciously free of graffiti and bird shit.

  ‘Before I say another word, Donal, I need you to understand a few things. I’ve come to you because I trust you. I want to do the right thing, but I know what Jimmy is capable of. If he gets even a whiff of this, I’m dead meat, so I’m placing my life in your hands, okay?

  ‘He’s always bragging about how many bent cops he has working for him, so I won’t be making a statement. I won’t be appearing in any court proceedings. I won’t be speaking to you or any other cop about this ever again. Either you agree to this and give me your word that you’ll protect my identity at all costs, or I walk right now.’

  ‘You have my word, Tammy.’

  We sat. She talked.

  ‘Okay. To be honest, when Liz first arrived last year, I didn’t really conn
ect with her, like at all. She couldn’t wait to let us all know how dancing at the Florentine was beneath her, a stopgap until her acting career took off. I snapped one day and said, “you think we don’t have dreams too? You think you’re the only one here with talent? You think I haven’t seen girls with more talent than you show up here saying the same thing?” Then I said … oh God.’

  She closed her eyes and bowed her head to let a shudder through.

  ‘I said to her “let’s see where you are in six months.” I’m such a bitch.’

  Her top teeth gripped her bottom lip hard. She pushed through until that loose tear somehow re-joined her moist right eye. Suddenly, a laugh burst out.

  ‘I remember her first night. She got up on that stage and started twirling around like Kate fucking Bush, all quick little tippy-toes, swaying hair and arms. One of the girls told her to save her energy and just bend over. She didn’t like that.’

  Her laugh lost all its heart, shrinking to a rueful smile.

  ‘Over a few weeks, those spotlights in her eyes started to snap off, one by one. I’ve seen it before. She hardened, you know? Like each night she surrendered a little bit more of herself to her club persona, the one earning all the money, the dirty little girl-next-door. You have to become someone else right? That’s how we get through it.’

  ‘Well, you seem the same to me now as you did Saturday night,’ I said.

  ‘That’s because only Tammy’s left.’ She looked at me and smiled lamely. ‘Us Americans and our therapists huh?’

  I smiled back. ‘At least you probably attended yours voluntarily.’

  We shared a look, borderline nutjob to borderline nutjob, which somehow cemented our bond. They didn’t teach that at Hendon’s police training college.

  ‘She spent every penny on her dream, you know, the high-profile agent, the professionally shot portfolio, the Super 16 showreel. I know she didn’t get paid a cent for that role in The Bill. When that led to nothing, she got involved in some pretentious art-house play that gave her a role in return for her investment. Not only did that suck up the rest of her money, she had to reduce her nights at the club to play in this thing.’

  She uncrossed and re-crossed her legs under the bench.

  ‘My God, is that a working bar?’ she said, nodding over to the boarded-up, fortified and graffiti-ravaged Queen Anne pub.

  ‘It’s a strip bar,’ I said. ‘From what I hear, at the polar opposite end of the scale to the Florentine.’

  ‘That’s a working strip joint? My God, it looks like something outta Beirut. We’ve gotta check it out,’ she said, getting to her feet.

  Every single outside window had been replaced with unpainted chipboard. An indestructible CCTV camera eyed us from over the barred and war-scarred front door, the only indication of life inside the squat-like shack.

  ‘Before Saturday, I’d never been to a strip joint,’ I said, opening the door for her, ‘now I’m walking into my second one in four days.’

  ‘Don’t give me all that “good Catholic boy” spiel, Donal. You guys are the filthiest of all.’

  I stopped to let my eyes adjust. The few working ceiling lights all pointed to a tiny triangular stage to the left. Tammy led me to the right.

  ‘I bet the cocktails here are special,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll have a water, but only if it comes in its own sealed bottle.’

  I risked a lager and suggested we take a table well out of earshot.

  As soon as we sat, the opening beats of ‘Killer’ by Seal pumped through the floor. A chubby blonde woman in her late thirties mounted the stage on all fours before wobbling to full height on her six-inch stilettoes, like a newborn giraffe. She spent half the song getting out of her cheap underwear, the rest gamely gyrating out of tune.

  ‘My God,’ gasped Tammy, transfixed.

  A huddle of six men sat between her and the bar, disturbingly close to the door marked ‘Gents’.

  Tammy had spotted this too. ‘You’d hope that rest room is for conventional relief only, right?’

  ‘Well, I’m not going in there.’

  ‘I might.’ She smiled, and I didn’t doubt her for a second.

  Another very large man had somehow earned the ‘Golden Ticket’ – a seat behind the stage. After getting naked, the stripper backed right up to his face, bent over and waggled her arse. He returned the favour by closing his eyes and inhaling deeply.

  Tammy whooped and hollered in delight. ‘My God,’ she said again.

  Within seconds, the stripper who murdered ‘Killer’ waved a rusty cigar tin under our noses. Close up, she looked to be approaching 50.

  ‘Hey, love that ass sniffing, girl,’ balled Tammy, poking a fiver in on top of all the loose change. ‘My friend here was wondering how he can get a seat behind the stage.’

  ‘I can do a private show for you out the back, dahling,’ she said, and I shrivelled like a nuked daisy.

  The earnest opening piano notes of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)’ surged in and another scantily clad porker grappled with the edge of the stage.

  ‘So Liz was strapped for cash then?’

  ‘For a while, yes, until she became one of the IT girls. There’s a group of them, a sort of inner core, who Jimmy sends on little holidays. I don’t know how they were picked or what qualities they have that earned them a place in this clique. I’ve never been invited to join it and neither have quite a few of the girls I’m close to. But Liz became part of it around the start of the year.

  ‘These girls travel abroad, a lot. Every few weeks, a group of them will be in Malaga, or Marakesh or Amsterdam, you know, druggie places. They usually travel when the club isn’t open, Sunday to Tuesday. I assumed they were out there to hostess parties for Jimmy or his friends, you know, keeping clients happy.

  ‘I got drunk with a couple of them one night and asked them outright: what’s with these trips? Liz told me there was no catch. Jimmy’s never there and, even though they get invited to parties, they’re not expected to work, if you know what I mean. They basically have a good time at a four-star hotel for a couple of days and come home again. She said she’d try to get me in. I remember her exact words: “It’s like he gets these free flights and hotels and doesn’t know what to do with them, so he gives them to us.” I mean who wouldn’t want a piece of that?’

  ‘They must be doing something for these free holidays. Carrying drugs or cigarettes …’

  ‘They denied that right off the bat. Look, these girls don’t need to do stuff like that. They’re already loaded.’

  As Neil Tennant whinnied about looks, brains and making lots of money, I couldn’t help feeling that all three must have played a role in whatever caper Liz had got herself involved in.

  ‘Are these girls, you know, special to Jimmy somehow?’

  She laughed. ‘I’ve been there almost three years and I’ve never seen him even talk to one of us girls. I assumed he was gay.’

  ‘So how did Liz qualify for this club? Can you at least tell me the names of the other girls involved?’

  She leaned into her pocket and pulled out a typed sheet.

  ‘Everything I know about them is here, names, ages, some addresses, some phone numbers. When I slide this over, that’s the end of me and this whole thing, okay?’

  ‘You can count on me, Tammy, you really can. But I need to know you’re gonna be okay. Is there some way I can check that doesn’t involve returning to the Florentine?’

  She took a sip of water and sampled her options.

  ‘You got a pen?’ she said, finally.

  She folded the bottom of the sheet over, scrawled a mobile number but no name and ripped it off.

  ‘This person knows me but nothing about me, so don’t even bother trying to shake him down. If you leave a message, I’ll get it.’

  She stood, signalling with her hand that I should stay.

  ‘You say you didn’t much care for Liz. Why are you taking this risk?�
�

  ‘Let’s just say I’m planning to kill off Tammy one day soon, and I’d like her to go out with a bang, metaphorically speaking of course.’

  Chapter 21

  Vauxhall, South London

  Wednesday, April 7, 1993; 16.10

  Jacket collar up, head down, I strode out of the squalid Queen Anne as if I’d just machine-gunned everyone inside. I dreaded being spotted by a colleague, so continued my ‘fleeing assassin’ speed-walk away from strip pub and office towards Black Prince Road.

  As I turned left towards the Thames, the sinking mid-afternoon sun scored my sight like two red-hot darning needles. My tired head pounded; how it hated those dual torments of blinding light and heat, of uncertainty and pressure.

  I had a lot to think about. Firstly, could I trust Tammy? As Bernie said the other night, these girls lie and act for a living. What if she’d been sent here by Reilly, to set me up?

  I didn’t know her name, address or anything about her past. Of course, I couldn’t blame her for wanting to remain off-grid. How many people would have the balls to make a statement against Jimmy Reilly? But I should have pressed for her real name, at least. That would’ve been enough to build some sort of profile, road test her credibility, excavate any hidden ulterior motives.

  ‘Do the right thing,’ she’d said. But any confidence trickster could say the same. Jingo bingo.

  As it stood, I had to take her word for it, and only her word. What if she turned out to be a fantasist, a pathological liar or a scorned woman bent on getting back at Reilly? At best, I’d be a laughing stock, consigned to The Cemetery for all eternity. At worst, that laugh would be carved, ear-to-ear, into my cold dead face.

  But I had to acknowledge her claim that, just by talking to me, she’d placed her life in my hands. If Reilly found out we’d met, she’d die. I felt certain of that.

  As cloud rallied around the sun to protect my sore head, I decided to trust Tammy. I now had a list of women who held the key to this entire case, possibly to taking down one of London’s most infamous crime lords. As I strode back through the Unit’s front door, I fingered the piece of paper in my trouser pocket, certain it was my ticket out of here.