Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  I looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Thousands of years ago, wild dogs scavenged around the outskirts of human settlements, eating human waste. We realised how useful these garbage compactors could be and began to let the less aggressive pups get closer. There’s evidence in the Bible, the Koran and the Iliad that dogs ate corpses like any other waste product. I trust you’re a good Catholic boy, Donal?’

  I smiled. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know about crucifixion then. The Romans considered the lower hanging cross a crueller form because it enabled wild dogs to rip the body apart. Some secular historians believe that Jesus Christ was eaten by dogs and that his followers invented the whole tomb and resurrection story as a coping mechanism.’

  ‘I can’t wait to tell my mother.’

  ‘Dogs have been eating human remains for thousands of years. That’s why post-mortem animal depredation isn’t uncommon in forensic autopsy.’

  ‘You’ve come across this before?’

  ‘Yes, quite often, though not on this scale. A colleague of mine had a case where a dog chewed three toes clean off the right foot of its unconscious owner. Turned out the toes were gangrenous. The dog could smell something was wrong and ultimately saved the man’s life.’

  ‘You make it sound like this woman’s dogs did her a favour. I’m not sure she’d see it that way right now.’

  ‘These dogs weren’t waiting for her to drop so that they could pounce on her and gobble her up! They would’ve been starving, right at breaking point. They licked and pawed at the woman’s face to try to wake her up. Eventually, they’d draw blood and that’s when the primeval instinct kicks in. They go for the softest bits on show first, the nose, lips and ears, then the rest of the face, the neck, moving down to the arms.’

  ‘I don’t know, to me, it feels like doggie cannibalism.’

  ‘When they get no response, they recognise only a large piece of meat. What does surprise me here is how thorough they’ve been. There literally wasn’t a drop of blood left. I’ve only heard of that before in cases where the human had been a Class-A drug user. Dogs can become addicted to the drugs still in the corpse’s system, and they keep eating in search of their next hit.’

  ‘So she might have been a drug user?’

  ‘I won’t be saying that. I can’t. I’ve got no decent uncontaminated blood to work with and not enough hair. They didn’t find drugs paraphernalia at the scene. In fact they didn’t find anything at the scene to say who she was or how long she’d been living there.’

  ‘So we’ve got no means of identifying her?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  I followed her to a wall of lockers. She opened a door and stood back. Two shelves heaved with large freezer bags full of what looked like shit.

  ‘Some hardy scene-of-crime officers went through all of the dog faeces and vomit at the scene. They managed to dig out a couple of adult teeth. We made an impression and put it out there, but we haven’t had a positive ID yet.’

  I stared at the bags in utter disbelief. No wonder Zoe had felt down. Fingering through the rancid waste of a pair of man-eating Alsatians would leave me suicidal.

  ‘You’re keeping this?’

  ‘We have to keep everything until the death certificate is signed.’

  She reached in and pulled out a bag.

  ‘Look what’s in here,’ she said and my eyes immediately seized upon it.

  ‘Another A3 battery, this one vomited by one of the dogs. There’s no way of telling where it had been, but my guess is inside the victim’s anus. Now whether the insertion caused perimortem injuries, as it had to Liz Little, we shall never know.’

  ‘Sorry, what injuries, Edwina?’

  ‘It’s in my pathology report. Liz Little suffered perimortem injuries to her coccyx, caused by the violent insertion of the battery into her anus.’

  She read my confusion.

  ‘Perimortem injuries are caused at or close to the time of death because the bone shows no sign of repair. I included this in my brief. The one I prepared especially for you.’

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it, Edwina. So the battery was inserted as an afterthought, almost, to make sure we connected it to Valerie.’

  ‘Who can possibly say, except the person who put it there? But it was definitely inserted close to when she expired.’

  ‘Whereas with Valerie?’

  ‘The battery caused no bone injuries. We don’t know when it was inserted. Are you quite certain Erika didn’t mention this?’

  ‘I was a little blinded by all the science to be honest, Edwina,’ I smiled, ‘I may well have missed it.’

  I could sense she’d saved the best for last. ‘Then there’s this,’ she said, pulling out a smaller forensic bag. ‘Erika is specialising in hair identification. Well, her expertise has struck again. She managed to extract human hair from the dog waste and found that it’s a direct match to Valerie Gillespie. Whoever killed this woman planted strands of Valerie’s hair at the scene, just as he did at the Liz Little murder scene.’

  ‘Wow. You say Erika struck again …’

  ‘She was the one who recognised Valerie’s hair last time round. She’d studied it a few months earlier when we were struggling to identify Valerie’s body. That’s not how we identified her body. We actually sourced her breast implants through their serial number. But Erika remembered Valerie’s hair because it has a very distinctive medulla and pigment dispersal.’

  ‘Wow, that’s impressive.’

  ‘That’s what I said. But she remained stoically Teutonic about it all, insisting that it had all been the happiest of academic accidents. She’s a solid girl, but a bit of a cold fish. I can’t imagine her in any other line of work to be honest.’

  I figured Zoe would be at the murder scene so headed there. I wanted to find out if anything else of evidential value had popped out of those case-cracking German Shepherd sphincters.

  The flat was just north of Finsbury Park, on the Woodberry Down estate, which began where a notorious section of Green Lanes ended. As I inched through its eye-watering 24/7 congestion, my mind wound back to that intelligence lecture about organised crime in London. They’d described Green Lanes as an enclave … the Republic of Heroin. Everything east and directly south of here – Finsbury Park, Arsenal, Islington – was controlled by the Evans brothers from Islington. Everything east of that belonged to Jimmy Reilly.

  I drove into Woodberry, past brutalist blocks and fruitless knots of slouching youth, all watching. This vast 42-acre estate had recently been officially recognised as cinematically grim. Steven Spielberg filmed here for his upcoming movie Schindler’s List – using it to double for the war-ravaged Warsaw Ghettos. Locals agreed that seemed a little harsh. On war-ravaged Warsaw.

  I pulled up outside Ennerdale House, a classic five-storey brick and balconied council block freckled with white satellite dishes, bad graffiti and, on a top-floor balcony, a bustle of busy white forensic suits.

  As I walked across the quadrangle, I became aware of countless windows watching my progress. I remembered a line from that Yeats’ poem … great hatred, little room.

  The main door hung open apologetically, having long-since been stripped of its purpose. A flickering piss-green light buzzed on and off irritably. The door to the lift looked scorched and bruised, as if some thwarted pyromaniac had set about it with a sledgehammer. On closer inspection, every pore of that door’s thick metal armour had been scratched and scraped so that it resembled a skating rink. The whole place screamed simmering, tinder-box rage.

  Some unidentified purple substance covered the call button. I looked around for a fake finger and spied burnt coke cans and improvised crack pipes in the corner. That shit must be good, I thought, for someone to sit and smoke it right there, in a perma-puddle of piss.

  I found an empty box of Superkings, scrunched the cardboard into a point and jabbed it against the call button. A clattering shudder echoed somewhere above, as if I’d just
delivered an electric prod to an enormous metal monster. The lift’s wake-up cough was followed by an ominous hum and convulsive splutter.

  ‘It hasn’t worked for months,’ rasped an elderly lady’s voice. I turned to see her gingerly descending the concrete steps, shopping cart bouncing in her wake.

  ‘Thanks. Can I help?’

  ‘I don’t need help,’ she wheezed, refusing to look at me. I wondered if she’d look anyone in the eye today.

  I couldn’t help thinking … what a place to end your days. Then I thought about Mam in that Gothic horror house. Tonight, I’d call her sisters again, make sure they’ve sprung into action. I wanted Mam back in the garden, medicated to the gills, pulling weeds and tutting at the talk-in show on her little transistor radio. As I tackled endless steps, breathless and slightly dizzy, I batted away those worries about how she’d cope after Da goes.

  Or when he’s away visiting some relations …

  Zoe stood smiling at the summit, my Sherpa. She must’ve spotted me parking up. A tiny part of me dared to hope she’d been keeping an eye out. I wished she hadn’t now. Sweaty palpitations were never my best look.

  ‘Hey,’ she called, coming in for an embrace which I skilfully fended off, a snub she took alarmingly well.

  ‘Count yourself lucky you’re a day late.’

  ‘I trust Matthew won’t be getting a puppy for Christmas.’

  ‘I’ll never turn my back on a German Shepherd again.’

  ‘That’s what German sheep have been saying for years. But no one listens.’

  Her eyes drifted to a middle-distance stare. She wouldn’t be forgetting yesterday’s dog’s dinner in a hurry.

  ‘They dismembered her and dragged the bits all over the flat,’ she said quietly, transfixed by the memory. ‘They must’ve been desperate by the end, because they kept trying to eat bits that they couldn’t digest, like some of the larger bones, the very bilious parts of her intestine, her hair. There were pools of vomit and diarrhoea everywhere.’

  ‘And you had to go through that?’

  She nodded sadly. ‘We were told to extract anything that appeared inconsistent with typical stomach contents. It’s bad enough dealing with human waste, and I’ve had it all, faeces, semen, urine, even earwax. But dog shit and vomit is a new low. I would’ve quit yesterday, if I didn’t need the money so bloody badly.’

  ‘You poor thing. Honestly, I couldn’t do it. What happened to the dogs?’

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘I’ve heard that once they taste human blood, because it’s saltier, they’re more likely to go for it again, if they get the chance.’

  She laughed. ‘Do you reckon they’ll start snatching kids off the street and out of playgrounds now, like man-eating lions? Who told you that?’

  ‘My dad. He kept dogs all his life.’

  ‘Oh. And did your dad have your dog put down, by any chance, for this very reason?’

  ‘Yes, actually he did. He took him out the back and …’

  ‘What? He shot your dog?’

  ‘What can I say, country life. He did bite the postman!’

  ‘That’s awful. I mean about the dog.’

  ‘I was devastated,’ I said, the buried sense of injustice erupting, swiftly followed by the sinking realisation he’d conned me. ‘So you’re saying that’s not true?’

  ‘Of course it’s not true, Donal.’

  ‘What about that Nazi guard, you know, the Hyena of Auschwitz, Irma Grese. She used to set her dogs on prisoners.’

  ‘She kept them half-starved. That’s the only way a dog will eat a human, if they’re starving and if the human is dead. Even then they don’t usually. We’ve come across dogs who starved to death rather than eat their owners. German Shepherds are the exception.’

  ‘Well, I have to say I’m relieved to hear that, even if it has come eleven years too late for poor old Mandela.’

  ‘You called your dog Mandela?’

  ‘Yeah, well he was black, and mostly locked up.’

  She looked around conspiratorially. ‘On the plus side, I did find this.’

  She opened her hand to reveal a tiny vial.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She slid it back into her pocket and nodded to the stairs.

  Up clomped Fintan, totally unruffled by the climb, and I wondered why nature always seems to favour the evil. A chubby snapper laboured in his wake, nodding like a knackered old beach donkey.

  ‘You can’t take photos,’ announced Zoe.

  Fintan shrugged. ‘Don’t worry. He follows me round because I feed him biscuits. This is purely social. Your boyfriend invited me.’

  She turned her frown to me.

  ‘I thought he might be useful.’

  ‘Okay, well, there’s nothing left to see so you may as well come in. Except him,’ she said, pointing to the lens man swaying up the final step. He stopped, open mouthed and sagged.

  She led us through the front door. ‘No one actually lived here. Not properly.’

  Sure enough, a single wooden chair proved the sitting room’s solitary feature. The kitchen had cupboards and an oven, but no crockery, cutlery or utensils. The bathroom featured a water-free toilet. ‘The dogs drank it,’ she explained.

  Naked light bulbs blazed in every room, and each window had been blacked out with opaque sheets.

  ‘Someone must have been paying bills here, gas, electricity,’ I said.

  ‘All metered,’ said Zoe, pointing to a pair of archaic metal boxes skew whiff on the hallway wall.

  ‘Who owns this place?’ I asked.

  Fintan chirped up. ‘An elderly couple. They bought it under the right-to-buy scheme three years ago and relocated up north. They let it through a management agency, Osmond and Co on Blackstock Road. They must have some details about the current tenant. And I, personally, never miss an opportunity to persecute an estate agent.’

  I turned to Zoe and spoke quietly. ‘Do you need to talk to me now, you know, about what you found?’

  ‘No need.’ She smiled. ‘The wheels are in motion. Let’s just say this could be your red-letter day.’

  A quick scan of the properties emblazoned across the front window of Osmond’s confirmed they specialised in the Warsaw Ghetto end of the market. Inside, a pair of Burton-suited spivs in their twenties sat jabbering on their phones. Fintan and I peered in and resumed our ongoing wager: ‘Guess their Christian names’.

  ‘Jason and Dazza,’ I ventured.

  ‘I’m going more aspirational. Dale and Kenny.’

  They blanked us as we walked in. Fintan turned to me, pointed to his left nipple and nodded smugly towards the guy on the right. His name tag said Kenny. The fucker was good. Or he’d checked earlier. I wouldn’t have put it past him.

  Gaz, the older one to the left, was busy telling someone they needed to commit right now or the property would be snapped up by someone else offering more.

  ‘Gaz … ump by name …’ smiled Fintan.

  Meanwhile, Kenny was telling the woman on the other end why she wouldn’t be getting her deposit back, despite having had her former rental property professionally deep-cleaned.

  ‘Kenny … Rogers tenants,’ I said.

  ‘Nice,’ said Fintan.

  Gaz hung up first, writing a series of notes in a diary without even looking up. Welcome to the fag end of the rental market – no manners required. I looked forward to giving this property pimp a right good jolt.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said finally, briefly glancing up from his diary.

  ‘DC Donal Lynch,’ I said, producing my warrant card.

  He looked up now alright.

  ‘How can I help you, officer?’ he said urgently.

  I gave it a few seconds, cranking his ulcer to bursting.

  ‘Number 42 Ennerdale House. I need to know who was renting the property.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Let’s just say you’ll be putting it back on the market again soon, once they finish scraping up
the current tenant’s body.’

  His mouth fell open. ‘What?’ he squeaked.

  ‘A woman’s been murdered at that property. We’ve spoken to the owners. They say you’ll have the records of the current tenant.’

  Gaz was on his feet before I’d finished the sentence. As he rifled through a filing cabinet, colleague Kenny suddenly folded on the disputed deposit and hung up. Fintan gave me the eye, the scent of fresh prey tickling his nostrils.

  Gaz returned with a file.

  ‘That property hasn’t been rented for five months,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘Let me see,’ I said.

  He placed the file on the desk and spun it round to my favour. The bank record showed a series of monthly direct debit transfers into Osmond’s account, ending last November.

  ‘It’s been on the market since then?’

  ‘It’s not a very sought-after area,’ said Gaz with a dismissive sniff.

  ‘That’s strange,’ I said, ‘I keep reading about this housing crisis, how there’s not enough rental properties now that all the council homes have been sold off. How many empty properties do you have on your books?’

  ‘Not many –’ he laughed a little nervously ‘– but some people won’t move into an estate like Woodberry, no matter what.’

  Fintan turned to me. ‘Do you remember your old friends in South London, the Dentons?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I never thought I’d be thanking them for inspiration.’

  He turned back to Gaz. ‘Can you give me the addresses of these empty properties on your books?’

  ‘We’re not at liberty to give out that information, Data Protection and all that.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off Gaz.’ He laughed, waving his mobile. ‘I can dial up a warrant right now.’

  Fintan shot to his feet suddenly and walked out. I turned to see him scanning the window. He came back in sporting a knowing grimace.

  ‘I don’t see 42 Ennerdale House on that window. And I’d bet the other empty properties on your books aren’t up there either.’

  Gaz glanced over at Kenny. I sensed some sort of ‘checkmate’ moment.

  Fintan smelt the kill. ‘Tell me about these empty properties, Gaz. I bet they all have absentee landlords, based far away, in places like Yorkshire and Glasgow. Elderly people, so not likely to come down and check. In fact they probably feel a little guilty about this sudden windfall in their lives, so not the types to be greedy and push too hard.’