Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  Bernie understood only too well, launching into a confessional free-fall like a pregnant nun shot out of a cannon.

  He started with Helen Oldroyd’s murder.

  ‘She’d been helping Jimmy launder money for years, transferring his dirty cash into massive foreign notes, thousand-dollar Canadian bills and thousand Swiss franc bills, to make it easy to smuggle out.

  ‘So whereas one million pounds required ten thousand one-hundred-pound notes, weighing ten kilos, you only needed one kilo of these larger notes. You could stuff a million into a cereal box. The girls were usually too thick to realise they were breaking the law. They just saw themselves as money couriers.’

  ‘Who gets this money?’

  ‘All sorts of people. Drug suppliers, money launderers. He buys dodgy booze for his clubs and restaurants. He’s got investment brokers buying foreign property, art, wine for him. He can’t clean it quickly enough.

  ‘Of course, she got greedy. It’s always the same, isn’t it? She wanted a bigger slice. He told me and Slob to make her see sense. So we came up with a plan.

  ‘Jimmy told Helen to pick up Slob at Kew train station because he had a delivery for her. That usually meant a sports bag full of cash. She always picked up the courier outside that station as there’s no CCTV, then drove onto the leisure centre car park to put the bag in the boot while the courier makes himself scarce, ’cos there’s no CCTV there either.

  ‘The thing is, she loved cash. Loved it. She’d always open the bag in the boot at the leisure centre and stare at it. Every time. It’s like she couldn’t help herself. Except today, we had something else in the bag for her.

  ‘All Slob had to do that day was get into her Jag with his sports bag and accompany her to the car park. She obviously said something to upset him. She could be a right snarky cow. So Slob opens the bag up and shows it to her as she’s driving. It freaks her right out.’

  ‘What was in the bag, Bernie?’

  ‘A load of stuff we’d nicked from her 9-year-old daughter’s bedroom during the night. You know, dolls, photos, shit like that. Like I said, the plan was to shake her up, not hurt her. But according to Slob, she produces a knife from the door pocket on her side and lashes out. Slob grabs the knife, and then they’re wrestling. He manages to jab the blade into her a few times. He finally takes control and gets her to drive into the leisure centre car park.’

  ‘Where were you during all this?’

  ‘I’m parked there already, waiting to pick Slob up. I see her car driving in, weaving all over the place. When it stops, I drive over and park next to her. She’s freaking out, screaming at me to help her. It’s a bad situation. If people start gawping, we’re fucked. I have to make a snap decision. I tell Slob to finish her off. He starts jabbing the knife into her, doing it all wrong. I felt sorry for the cow, I really did. So I get the knife off him and finish her off, proper like. We then get into my car, drive off and call Jimmy.’

  ‘What can you tell us about Liz Little’s murder?’

  Bernie sighed. ‘On a couple of these trips abroad, some suppliers complained that their cereal boxes were a little light. At least one of the girls had been helping themselves to the occasional thousand-dollar or thousand-franc note. Jimmy asked me to find out which one. I already knew Liz was struggling with money on account of this flop of a play she’d invested in. Then I discovered that bank notes had gone missing from all of the girls’ packages, except hers. That’s how she’d unwittingly exposed herself. At least that’s what I thought.

  ‘Jimmy told me to have a word with her. Liz denied taking any money and insisted that the other five girls were in cahoots, ripping Jimmy off. According to Liz, they had openly discussed blackmailing him on several occasions. When I asked her who the ringleader had been in all this, she said Georgie Bell. She also said she’d warned a police officer friend of hers that she was doing something illegal for Jimmy Reilly. If anything ever happened to her, he’d come looking for answers.

  ‘I reported back to Jimmy, stressing that it was all hearsay. Jimmy said that the missing money was proof enough for him that he had to teach the girls a lesson. I thought he’d use Spence to set them up somehow. I’d no idea he’d kill them.’

  ‘So you’re accusing Jimmy Reilly of murdering both Liz Little and Georgie Bell.’

  ‘Yes. He believed that Liz and Georgie were either ripping him off or plotting against him. He wanted to make an example to the other girls. I don’t know how you prove it, but that’s what happened. It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘And what lay behind the barbaric torture of Liz Little?’

  ‘Two things. He didn’t like the fact she’d grassed the other girls up. He’s funny that way, Jimmy. He has this psychotic hatred for anyone who rats out anyone else, even if it’s to his benefit. Then when she said she’d told a cop about the racket, well, that signed her death warrant.’

  ‘What about all the signatures at the scene … cutting her in half, her slashed face …?

  ‘One of his great passions is the Black Dahlia murder. He has all the books, the documentaries, the FBI files. That’s why he named the club the Florentine Gardens.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said White.

  Bernie made a ‘don’t tell me this guy’s for real’ face.

  ‘That was the name of the club in Hollywood that the original Black Dahlia worked in.’

  ‘Why did Jimmy have her body dumped at the Brownswood red-light zone?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How did she come to have Valerie Gillespie’s hair in her hands?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  White again: ‘They found a battery inserted into her anus. Any theories as to what the significance of that might be?’

  ‘I have to say that’s not Jimmy’s style.’

  ‘Oh, I see, he has strict standards does he, about how he tortures and murders people?’

  ‘In his own weird way, yes. He’d never rape a woman. Never.’

  ‘Liz Little had been cut, slashed, beaten with hammers. Is that more Jimmy’s style.’

  ‘He would’ve kept going until she told him the truth, you know, about skimming from his cereal boxes,’ said Bernie. He winced suddenly, the weight too much. ‘My worry now is that she’d been telling the truth all along. He just couldn’t accept it.’

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Shep, turning away with a grimace. ‘That poor girl.’

  ‘Where would we find the weapons used to torture and kill Liz Little?’ said Price.

  ‘Under the terrazzo floor. Jimmy always boasts that it can’t be dug up because of a preservation order. God knows what’s under there.’

  ‘Where was Liz Little tortured and killed?’

  ‘I’d say look in the club. Same as Georgie Bell. But neither happened on my watch.’

  ‘Tell me about your connection to 42 Ennerdale House, the flat where dogs ate Georgie Bell’s body.’

  ‘Jimmy asked me to rent a flat for six to eight weeks, somewhere neighbours don’t ask questions. A mate told me about a dodgy lettings agent in Finsbury Park. I paid ’em a grand and they gave me the keys. I went to check it was kosher and gave Jimmy the keys. That’s the sum total of my involvement.’

  ‘So you never returned to that flat again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So who took her there?’

  ‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t ask me because he knew I didn’t agree with what he was doing. Not without proper proof.’

  ‘Who took the dogs there? I thought you took care of them?’

  ‘I wouldn’t do what they did to those dogs,’ he snarled, flushing. ‘Anyone who knows me will tell you that. I loved them fucking dogs.’

  White changed tack. ‘Two Saturdays ago, you asked a police officer on a private visit to the Florentine Gardens to see you up in the club’s VIP area. Why?’

  ‘I wanted to know what he was doing in our club.’

  ‘Had you discussed this with Jimmy Reilly?’

&nb
sp; ‘I pretended Jimmy was on his way, just to shake him up. But he wasn’t. I wanted to talk to him myself. That’s my job, or at least it was.’

  ‘When did you next see this police officer?’

  ‘As he ran out of a fire exit door that night.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘Last Saturday, we picked him up outside Ennerdale House. To go see Jimmy.’

  ‘He says you abducted him.’

  ‘No one laid a finger on him. He came of his own free will.’

  ‘Who told you to go get him?’

  ‘Jimmy told us where he was and to bring him to the club.’

  ‘Jimmy threatened to harm all the girls who spoke to this officer the previous Saturday night. Has he identified those girls?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is important, Bernie. These girls could be in serious danger.’

  ‘He didn’t see any CCTV, I know that much.’

  ‘Explain?’

  ‘I destroyed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s been too much violence. So I got one of the guys to wipe it. I’m head of fucking security. I’m there to protect everyone.’

  ‘How did Jimmy react to the fact it was gone?’

  ‘How do you think? He told me if I didn’t find out which girls Lynch spoke to, he’d fire me. That’s one of the reasons I’m talking to you now.’

  Price sighed. ‘I want to move on to something that’s baffled everyone: these spoon-sized gouges of flesh that had been removed from Liz Little’s body prior to her death. The pathologist can’t identify the cause. Forensics can’t identify the cause. Can you enlighten us?’

  Bernie shifted in his seat. ‘Jimmy has two Holy Grails. Making that terrazzo floor damage-proof, and being able to make a dead body disappear. I mean without having to chop it up, bury it in lime or at sea, feed it to pigs or smuggle it into an incinerator. He’s obsessed with it, especially now with DNA profiling. That’s got people like Jimmy really shaken up.

  ‘He’s always fancied himself as a chemist. Or an alchemist. He owns labs and takes a real interest in that side of things. When he found out I did a chemistry A-level, he started telling me all about it. Literally every day he updates me.

  ‘It turns out that his efforts to protect the terrazzo floor using epoxy products led to his lab technicians discovering something terrifying.’

  He shuffled and coughed. ‘Look, you’re going to find what I’m about to tell you incredible, but I saw it with my own eyes. And he’s got to be stopped. He told me that they’d isolated the single chemical component in blood that creates the metallic scent that drives carnivores wild, and that it derives from the epoxy they’d been working with for years. I remember he said it’s an organic aldehyde compound called trans epoxy something.

  ‘I didn’t believe him. He got the hump and brought it in one day. He spread some on the floor, because it worked as a floor sealant as well. He took an enormous sniff and he said to me “what does that remind you of, Bernie?” He said “come on, breathe it in”. He was stoked. So I sucked on it hard and he said “it smells like blood, doesn’t it?” And it did, I have to say. It was metallic, like blood. I recognised it as soon as he said so.

  ‘He looked at me with this crazed expression. “Get the dogs in,” he said. They can’t sniff that stuff, I said, or they’ll do themselves harm. He turned and shouted in my face “get them fackin’ dogs in here, now”.

  ‘I brought them in from the yard and they went nuts, pawing and licking at the floor, yelping and frothing at the mouth. They wanted to eat the fucking floor. Jimmy says something like “if we can get some of that into the veins of a corpse, they’ll fucking devour it for us”. I told him to try it out on some other fucking dogs. I meant it too. I’d take on Jimmy and all his armies if it came to defending a defenceless animal. That’s just the way I am.

  ‘He didn’t even hear me. He says “I’ll tell you what, Bernie, my piranhas are carnivores. This’ll drive ’em fackin’ mental. Think about it. They can strip a cow to a fackin’ skeleton in two minutes. They’d hoover up a human corpse in thirty fackin’ seconds.”’

  ‘He owns piranhas?’

  ‘He has a tank full of them, in his office, upstairs at the Florentine.’

  Bernie stretched out his arms across the table, as if breaking free from some imaginary shackle.

  ‘I thought he was raving. Then one morning, Slob told me what he’d seen the night before. Jimmy had isolated a piranha into its own tank, injected some of that resin into a body that was still alive, so that it got pumped around her veins. Then he had Slob and some of the boys place her in the tank. The Piranha went wild, taking out lumps. I now realise that the guinea pig must’ve been Liz Little.

  ‘As soon as I heard about Georgie, I realised he must’ve injected her with this epoxy stuff too. He then effectively fed her to my fucking dogs. The way they went at that floor … I know they wouldn’t have waited ’til she was dead. Jimmy would’ve loved that, the sick fuck, watching her getting torn asunder like a piece of fucking KFC. He would’ve laughed his head off too. “Look at those dumb fackin’ dogs, eating all the evidence”. I’m telling you, he’s the fucking animal.’

  ‘I believe Bernie,’ said Shep, ‘and I want to dig up that terrazzo floor and discover Jimmy’s secret vampire formula. But …’

  He turned to us all, widow stern …

  ‘… we don’t have anything solid on Reilly except money laundering. As we all know, that has to go through the Fraud Squad, taking years. If he lives long enough to get charged, his lawyers will spend three years bamboozling the jury with jargon and he’ll walk. If all else fails, he’ll get some dodgy prognosis of early on-set Alzheimer’s or dementia. So we have to charge Reilly with murder or no dice.

  ‘Even if we find weapons under that terrazzo floor bearing his prints, or bodies bearing his thumb marks, his own cock up a dead woman’s arse … he’ll just blame it on his uncouth Eastern European employees. They’ll make like they’ll take the rap, then vanish. We just don’t have that smoking-gun evidence.’

  ‘Bernie must know much more,’ argued Price. ‘Maybe we can get Reilly on less-serious charges to start with … assault, kidnap.’

  ‘No,’ said Shep decisively. ‘We release Bernie back into the wild. Frankly, he hasn’t produced an incriminating pot for us to piss in.’

  ‘What about conspiracy?’ White argued.

  ‘A term usually followed by “theory”, in my experience,’ said Shep.

  ‘Guv, you make it sound like unless we actually catch Reilly in the act of killing someone, we can never get a conviction.’

  ‘Bang to rights is what we’re after,’ said Shep.

  Bang to Rights. The words instantly summoned the stilted horror of Sunday night’s drama production at the Hen and Chickens.

  As I recalled the ludicrous plotline, an outlandish idea took hold.

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘we know Jimmy’s a maniac, Bernie’s desperate. We’ve got Tammy on side. I’ve just had an idea …’

  Chapter 42

  Conduit Street, Central London

  Wednesday, April 14, 1993; 22.40

  ‘Fucking hell,’ I gasped, as that familiar twang of dread strummed my nerve endings, ‘I never thought we’d darken this doorway again.’

  ‘Carousing at the taxpayers’ expense,’ beamed Fintan. ‘This might actually be the single greatest night of my life.’

  Fintan bristled with confidence as he strode past the dead-eyed meat rack of bouncers into the Florentine Gardens Club. My heart flapped so wildly, I felt certain Shep must be picking it up over my shirt’s button bug.

  Fintan’s peace-hating spooks had been only too willing to showcase their talents to the Regional Crime Squad, replacing one of my single shirt buttons with a listening device boasting a range of 500 yards. A small army of plain-clothes cops surrounded the club. More were inside; Operation Tammy had no shortage of male volunteers.

  Now we just had
to hope Jimmy would bite.

  Fintan insisted on ordering the £750 Dom Perignon, but agreed to draw the line at a £50 bowl of soggy McCain oven chips. ‘That’s taking the piss,’ declared Bob fucking Geldof.

  ‘What I still don’t get is how Valerie Gillespie’s hair ended up at the other two murder scenes,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘That makes me think Jimmy Reilly can’t be the killer.’

  ‘Please tell me you didn’t buy those cigarettes out of your Met Police per diems?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ he protested. ‘It’s a crucial component to my undercover persona.’

  ‘But you smoke anyway.’

  ‘Yes, but now I’m smoking on police time. I’m not donating my own cigarettes to the cause. Jesus. So, Valerie’s hair? Theories?’

  ‘It must have been planted at both scenes.’

  ‘By who? She was cremated in March!’

  ‘Maybe the girl at the mortuary made a mistake,’ I said. ‘She is only an assistant. And they say hair isn’t an exact science.’

  ‘So many loose ends …’ he said and I smiled. He didn’t know the half of it …

  How did Valerie get into my head that night when I’d never been anywhere near her dead body? The A3-battery connection? Liz Little’s ‘after thought’ perimortem injury to her coccyx, inflicted moments before her death?

  The champagne landed, and so did the first girls. Even live broadcast failed to thwart Fintan from giving full vent to his infantile fantasies. Tonight, he elected to play the part of a Harley Street plastic surgeon, specialising in ‘breast augmentation’ and ‘designer vaginas’. I couldn’t even bring myself to listen.

  Instead I scanned the club. ‘Come on, Tammy,’ I muttered, fighting the urge to guzzle my £200 glass of fizz. I took a quick look up to the VIP area. A back-lit figure stood there, still and alone. Bernie needed this more than anyone. I wondered how he felt right now, staring down at that blood-red terrazzo floor. His life depended on what lay under it. At best, he’d be relocated to a rent-free house in some Northern town, knowing that one slip or chance encounter could lead to exposure and certain violent death. At worst, Shep will declare ‘no deal’, abandoning him to a criminal limbo of paranoia and dread, a life spent waiting for that horrible moment when Jimmy Reilly finds out he talked and turns on him.