Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  ‘Is that right?’ I snapped, challenging his stare. ‘What you’re about to hear now, Fintan, is Da turning up unexpectedly at Conlon’s safe house.’

  I thought I’d feel intimidated. I didn’t. And so I asked.

  ‘How did you find it, Da?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘I found Conlon’s Volvo parked outside,’ I said, addressing Fintan. ‘At first I thought Da must have trailed him there, you know, after Conlon picked up his car at the Manor House pub on Sunday night. Or he’d put some sort of a tracker on it. Now, I’m not so sure. You’ll hear Conlon answering his phone first.’

  I set off the recorder.

  CONLON: How the fuck did you find me here?

  CONLON: Ah, I may as well tell you. Hang on.

  MICHAEL: So, you’ve gone with them then, judging by the look of this place?

  CONLON: I did a deal, Michael. I’d nowhere left to turn.

  MARTIN: You’ve given them the footage?

  CONLON: What can I say? They can protect me, you can’t. New identity, house abroad, the lot. There’s a car picking me up any minute. You’re not going to make a scene now, are you, Michael?

  MICHAEL: It’s too late for that.

  KNOX: Oh, what a tangled web we weave, gentlemen.

  CONLON: What in the name of … did ye come here together? Are ye …

  KNOX: It’s all worked out beautifully. Michael, don’t you see? You can now go back to Conor, tell him you tracked down Bob, found out he’d handed the footage to the dastardly Brits so you whacked him. They’ll see you in a new light then, won’t they? Sorry, Bob. Heads you lose. You’d better start taking your clothes off. I’ll make sure it’s instant.

  MICHAEL: Bob, I didn’t know he was coming here. I swear to God.

  KNOX: Poor Michael. You still haven’t got it, have you? We run this war now. In fact, we’ve run it all along.

  ‘That’s the last thing on the tape,’ I said, snapping it off. ‘Da, you said to Conlon: “It’s too late for that”. What did you mean by that?’

  ‘I meant that I wasn’t going to make a scene. I was letting him go.’

  ‘It sounded like the opposite to me, like you’d already decided to kill him. Did you?’

  ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘Of course not. I didn’t have a gun. Even if I had … what do you think I am?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to establish. Tell us, Da, what did Knox mean, about it working out beautifully?’

  He took a long, almost ceremonial breath, as if relishing his last as the man we thought we knew.

  ‘They set me up,’ he said quietly, staring aghast into the middle distance. ‘They made sure I tracked him down so that they could get rid of him, you know, and make it look like I’d done it. It saves them a fortune. They don’t have to cough up what they promised him for the footage.’

  Fintan’s voice thinned into the whine of a disappointed boy. ‘But why would they want to make it look like you shot him, Da?’

  He dry coughed, rubbed his mouth and looked at us both in shamed resignation.

  ‘Because it boosts my standing within the IRA. I’d no idea I was being played. I fucking hate working for those bastards.’

  Fintan recoiled. ‘You’ve been working for British intelligence? You?’

  Da found that spot on the table surface again. ‘Yes. For the past couple of years. They forced me into it. God knows I didn’t want to.’

  I watched his sulking, helpless, bullish pride wither and realised I could never hate him. Fuck it. I loved him. All I needed was for him to like me back. To not hate me would do …

  ‘It’s the last thing I’ll do for them,’ he blurted, ‘I don’t care what they threaten. We’re nearly there now with peace anyhow.’

  Fintan had caught up. ‘So they turned you, Da. How?’

  He didn’t move. His eyes flicked into defocus as his world caved in.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Fintan. ‘What the fuck’s been going on?’

  He tried to clear his throat but failed, so that he sounded like a man crying inside.

  ‘Bob used to have these parties …’ he began croakily. I didn’t want to hear the sordid details, stood and walked out that front door.

  I crushed the cassette tape under the heel of my shoe and lobbed the shattered remains into a ditch. I then drove to Mullingar.

  We needed Mam back where she belonged. At home.

  Postscript

  Ironing out the plots intertwined by the Gillespie and Little murder cases sustained us all the way back to London.

  Since the 1970s, Robert Conlon had risen through the ranks of the IRA and grown close to our da, Michael Lynch. All that time, Conlon had been secretly working for British intelligence. But that wasn’t his only dark secret. Conlon also organised sordid sex parties deep in the Irish countryside, attended by underage, vulnerable girls and predatory, influential men. Conlon subsequently blackmailed these powerful figures to avoid exposure and prosecution, leaving him free to carry on his important work for British national security.

  But weasel Conlon had kept one ace card up his sleeve … evidence that implicated the brother of Conor Scanlon in paedophile activity. If Conlon found himself in dire emergency, he’d use this dynamite material to shake down either the British authorities or the IRA … maybe even both.

  His sloppy murders of Valerie Gillespie and Melinda Marshall proved to be that dire emergency. Conlon had two things to fear. Firstly, the IRA took a dim view of ‘volunteers’ committing sex crimes, at least publicly. To prevent getting whacked, he told his IRA pal Michael Lynch about his smoking-gun evidence and indicated he’d be willing to do a deal directly with Conor Scanlon.

  The second thing Conlon had to fear: prosecution by the British State. But Conlon knew how desperate the Brits were to force Scanlon to the table for peace talks. He gambled that the ‘dark forces’ who run Britain would give him anything he demanded in return for that game-changing footage.

  What Conlon didn’t know was that his old pal Michael Lynch had recently been ‘turned’ by British intelligence, ironically because of his presence at a number of Conlon’s sex parties, captured on covert cameras. Neither man knew the other worked for the Brits or would ever admit it. Conlon believed he could use Michael to stall the IRA while agreeing a ‘package’ with the Brits. But the Brits had other ideas. Conlon had made the mistake of giving them the footage before he’d received his ‘package’. He was suddenly of no value to them. Worse than that, his package would set them back millions.

  They made sure Michael tracked down Conlon. Knox then whacked Conlon, knowing Michael had no choice but to ‘take the credit’. At a stroke, these ingenious spooks had eliminated the messy, costly burden of Conlon, boosted the standing of their other secret agent, Michael Lynch within the IRA and gained possession of the means to blackmail the IRA … all for the price of a single bullet.

  Epilogue

  In December 1993, the British and Irish governments went public about their ‘secret’ peace talks, paving the way for the 1994 IRA ceasefire. That announcement pleased no one more than the fraught and war-fatigued Martin and Dolores Lynch from Clara, Co. Offaly.

  Bernie Moss survived Jimmy’s vicious knife attack, just. He sued the Met police, winning sufficient compensation to retire and live incognito. He now writes True Crime books under the pseudonym Dean S Sombrero and works as a consultant on British TV documentary series Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men.

  Under Jimmy Reilly’s terrazzo floor, forensics found blood belonging to Liz Little and Georgina Bell and the ball-peen hammer used to ‘subdue’ both women. Reilly was convicted of conspiracy to murder, manslaughter and money laundering and sentenced to sixteen years. His daughter, Barbara, currently runs his empire.

  The Forensic Science Service discovered that Reilly and his dodgy labs had indeed isolated the single metallic chemical compound in blood that attracts carnivores, giving it the official name: trans-45-epoxy (e)-2-decenal.

  The Flore
ntine Garden’s terrazzo floor was seized by the Criminal Assets Bureau and rehoused in the British Museum.

  Mortuary assistant Erika the Viking, aka Erika Ellstrom, was convicted of perverting the course of justice and sentenced to seven years. She refused to speak during the entire judicial process.

  Fintan Lynch’s string of exclusives about Jimmy Reilly’s downfall secured him the UK Press Gazette’s coveted Reporter of the Year and Scoop of the Year awards. His book about Jimmy, Life of Reilly, made it onto the Sunday Times’ bestseller list.

  ‘Tammy’ relocated to Seattle and used her £20,000 reward for the conviction of Reilly to buy a cocktail bar, which she renamed ‘The Princess Anne’.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks Ed Wilson, my literary agent at Johnson and Alcock, for your energy, wisdom and lacerating wit.

  Thanks Kate Ellis and Natasha Harding at Avon for coaxing and cajoling this book out of me with such chutzpah and guile.

  Thanks editor Donna Hillyer for painstakingly weeding out the chaff.

  Thanks Caroline Kirkpatrick of Avon for all your encouragement. Thanks Helena Sheffield, Avon’s digital and marketing guru, for so ingeniously spreading the word. Thanks Louis Patel for so expertly handling the production side. Thanks cover designer Andrew Smith for capturing the essence.

  Thanks Kate Stephenson, Avon’s Commissioning Editor, for making all this happen with such verve and passion. I truly don’t deserve any of you fine people.

  Thanks literary agent Ben Mason, now in the US, and Katy Loftus, now at Viking, for believing in this series from the very start. I miss you both.

  Thanks reviewers, reporters, editors and writers for heroically backing my debut, Alone with the Dead; including Raven crime reads, Anne Cater, Deirdre O’Brien and my dear friend Nigel Atkins of the Mirror, my old mucker John Sturgis and the brilliant Boo Findlay of the Sun, Brook Cottage Books, Killing Time, Killer Reads, Writing.ie, Books and Writers, Rachel Millard of the Brighton Argus and Eilis Ryan of the Westmeath Examiner.

  Thanks Brighton contingent for all your ongoing support, including Matt and Clare Crosby-Adams, Bob and Sally Sherlock, JP and Sally Hamilton-Savory and Peter Roemmele.

  Thanks fellow TV troupers Bruce Goodison, Paul Crompton, Emma Shaw, Jeremy Hall, Andrew Mason, Laura Jones, Andy Wells, Alex Wood, Kathryn Johnson and Laura Dunne.

  Thanks old friends for inadvertently providing so much priceless raw material. Step forward Fleet Street legends Ian Gallagher and Dennis Rice; Dublin media stalwarts Frank Roche and Vincent Cribben; Tom Larkin; David Hayes and the Bracken clan from the town of Moate and Alison Clements of Brighton.

  Thanks indomitable in-laws, the McGraths, for your Trojan backing; Jim and Anita, Rebecca, Philippe and Raphael, Mike and Laura, Brian and Meaghan.

  Special thanks to the Nally clan – Jim, Bunny, Helen, Jacqui, Claire, Lee, Greg Woods – and our myriad extensions for rowing in behind this project … it really means a lot. Even more special thanks to my sister Claire for single-handedly doubling sales of the debut.

  Thanks daughter Emma Nally, aged one and a bit, for instilling new drive in my tired old bones.

  Thanks son James for all your ingenious ideas, energy and positivity. It means the world.

  Thanks finally to my soulmate and backbone, Bridget McGrath.

  Want more of PC Donal Lynch?

  Chilling, brutal, addictive – if you like Tim Weaver and James Oswald, you will LOVE James Nally.

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  About the Author

  James ‘Jim’ Nally began his reporting career at the Westmeath Independent in the Irish Midlands before moving to London and working for National News Press Agency in the early 1990s.

  As the agency’s crime reporter, he covered Old Bailey trials and prepared in-depth ‘backgrounders’ for the national newspapers on all major cases in Southern England between ’92 and ’94.

  His unfortunate expertise in the case of serial killer Rose West saw Nally recruited as a TV researcher by Channel 4’s Dispatches. Since then he has directed documentaries on a gallery of rogues that include Kenneth Noye, Charles Bronson (the one from Luton), a set of unhinged Swedish twins who ran amok on the M1 (one of Louis Theroux’s must-see docs), prison escapees, gem hunters and charity fundraising companies.

  Nally has ghost written a number of books about yet more rogues, including IRA infiltrator ‘Kevin Fulton’ and the mercenary Simon Mann.

  Although his official address is in Brighton, he spends most of his time at Southern Rail’s pleasure, battling in and out of London. He has a partner, Bridget, and two children, James and Emma.

  By the same author

  Alone with the Dead

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