Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller

‘I can’t say. Look, the Mirror have already harassed them today so be gentle.’

‘Exactly, as soon as it’s official, I’ll call you.’

‘Get them on a train to London ASAP.’

‘I don’t know. Offer them a ferret or a pair of fucking clogs or a year’s supply of ale. Whatever it takes.’

Another call: ‘Dennis. Pull everything you can about Elizabeth Little, date of birth 29/07/70.’

‘Princess Road, Richmond.’

‘The Full Monty.’

‘Talk later.’

‘Who was that?’ I asked.

‘A helpful ex-copper.’

‘Let me guess, the Full Monty means her bank accounts, health records, criminal records?’

He nodded: ‘Best of all, phone records, everyone she’s called in the past year and the five personal numbers on her “friends and family” deal. That’s where the gold is, everyone who knew her best.’

‘And I suppose you’re going to insist that this is all perfectly legal?’

‘It’s not illegal. Like I’ve told you before, this is all information held on systems that anyone who works for banks, building societies, debt collection agencies or private investigators can get legitimately. Sometime next week, Dennis is laying hands on a floppy disc containing the names and dates of birth of everyone in Anonymous groups in the whole of the UK. He doesn’t collect the data but he can get hold of it and pass it onto me. That’s not illegal.’

‘And I suppose morality doesn’t comes into it?’

He pulled up outside the Cold Case Unit’s non-descript annex off Albert Embankment, just south of the Thames between Vauxhall and Lambeth Bridge.

‘You want my help on this story, right?’ he said. ‘You want to find her killer?’

‘Not if it involves pulling people’s confidential records … that can’t be right.’

‘You do know that there are sales companies out there who routinely access all of our records – financial, medical, everything. There are City banks who employ private investigators full-time to dig the dirt on people. If it’s on a computer system, it’s being sold on.’

I suddenly felt hot and irritable.

‘Look, let me do the journalism. I’ll shake down this story and then you can run with whatever we get out of it, your conscience clear. Okay?’

I opened the passenger door, hauled myself out: ‘Where are you off to now?’

‘Princess Road, Richmond.’ Fintan smiled. ‘With any luck, I can talk my way in and get hold of her post.’

‘Jesus.’ I sighed, slamming the door of his blood red Mondeo and wishing to God I’d never set foot in it.

Chapter 4 (#u8c4e256d-a360-58f7-b0a3-8ef9eed9a2c4)

Vauxhall, South London

Saturday, April 3, 1993; 13.20

I walked into the library-like silence of work and smiled to myself: that’s what they call us out in the real world – the Cemetery. Wind up in the Cold Case Unit and your career is truly dead and buried.

Unusually for a Saturday, a couple of the dirty dozen were in, slumped, brooding, in various states of drink-fuelled disrepair.

The Cold Case Unit seemed to serve as a last refuge for the knackered, disgraced or discredited. By the time of my enforced exile here six months ago, I ticked all three boxes, thanks to a now infamous episode the previous year, 1991.

That summer, plodding the Clapham/Battersea beat in South London, I’d stumbled across my first freshly murdered body. The victim, Marion Ryan, came to me that night and, in the course of scaring me half to death, acted out what I later recognised to be a key clue to her killer.

Of course I didn’t ‘get it’ right away. I was too busy fearing for my mental wellbeing. So she came again and again, until I felt haunted and cursed. The fall-out proved catastrophic, costing me a girlfriend, my job and very nearly my life.

Eventually Marion’s nocturnal charades led me to her killer.

Sounds bonkers, I know. As a devout sceptic, I refused to accept that a dead person could reach me from ‘the other side’; that something supernatural might be occurring. Then it happened again …

I blamed it on my insomnia and an over-active subconscious. A psychologist agreed that the visions had to be coming from within me, attributing them to a rare hallucinatory disorder called Sleep Paralysis. Sufferers of this condition sometimes can’t ‘snap off’ the dreaming segment of their brain after they wake up, creating a phenomenon known as ‘waking dreams’ that seem terrifyingly real.

My refusal to accept this prognosis failed to prevent the ambitious shrink publishing a paper about it in a leading science quarterly. There was little scientific about the tabloid-newspaper follow-up, which labelled me a ‘self-proclaimed psychic cop’.

After that article Commander John Glenn summoned me to his eighth-floor office at New Scotland Yard. ‘No doubt as you will have foreseen yesterday,’ he sneered, ‘I want your warrant card now.’ By the time I’d left him sprawled across his antique desk gasping for air, Heckler & Koch had a bead on all three ground floor lifts. Like Ann Frank in that annex, I came quietly.

I expected to be charged with assault and sacked on the spot. Instead they suspended me on full pay and assigned me to Darius, a Police Federation solicitor who turned out to be dodgier than most criminals I’d dealt with.

A week or so later, over several pints at the Feathers, Darius asked me to tell him exactly what had happened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me, ‘what you tell me will never leave these four walls. In an exercise like this, the truth is merely our starting point.’

I switched into ‘victim’ mode – a skill I’d learned from petty criminals while in uniform. I explained how Commander Glenn had summoned me to HQ on the back of a ‘malicious and libellous’ Sunday newspaper article which had ‘degraded and humiliated me’.

‘Of course I’d never made any such claim about possessing psychic powers,’ I bleated on. ‘My mistake had been to confide in a trainee psychologist about the vivid dreams that plagued me after I’d attended a series of gruesome murder scenes.’

‘Caused by attending a series of gruesome murder scenes,’ corrected Darius, jotting down my juiciest revelations in an archaic moleskin notebook. ‘Classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress.’

I nodded gravely. ‘Next thing, they’re cracking gags about me in the papers and on TV and radio shows. I couldn’t leave the house for months.’

I next described Glenn’s ‘unsympathetic and dismissive’ attitude to ‘my crippling sleep disorder’. I finished up with the comment that had caused me to snap: Glenn’s assertion that, as an Irishman, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. Darius seized upon this last line like a drowning man.

‘He said what?’

‘He was explaining how any suggestion that I’d used “psychic powers” in my police work would give grounds for appeal to anyone whose case I’d ever worked on.’

‘Yeah, I get that. But what did he say specifically about you being Irish?’

‘He said words to the effect that, as an Irish person, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. I remember his last line: “Haven’t you read about your compatriots, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six and what not?” I just lost it.’

Darius blew hard out of his mouth: ‘Any witnesses?’

I shook my head.