Текст книги "Alone with the Dead"

Автор книги: James Nally

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 22 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 9 страниц]

In a flash, everything turned yellow. My squinting eyes finally made out Aidan’s horrified face in the house lights.

‘What the fuck?’ he cried, surveying me in undisguised disgust.

I could smell and feel warm puke on my chest.

‘It’s wine, just red wine,’ I gasped.

‘Jesus, I thought you’d been stabbed or something. What the fuck was all that about?’

I turned to the flat door: it was closed.

‘Just a nightmare.’

‘Jesus,’ he said again, and headed to the kitchen. I heard water pouring out of the tap. I took the glass of water and tea towel from him and wiped my mouth. I realised how grotesque I must have looked and smiled. It was the sheer relief of being alive.

‘It’s no fucking laughing matter,’ he snapped, ‘you’ve got to see someone about this shit. Oh Christ, the smell, get that shirt off, for fuck’s sake.’

As I unbuttoned I tried to convince myself that it really had been a nightmare. But I felt sure I’d been awake the whole time. Sitting here on the couch, everything around Marion in that streetlight orange glow – the lamp, the posters, the table, my jacket on the back of the chair. It had been real.

Aidan returned to the kitchen door, where he stood in judgement for fully three minutes.

‘You have to see someone, Donal. Not sleeping is one thing, but this …’

‘It was Marion, the girl from tonight.’

‘What?’

‘She appeared to me. I thought she was going to kill me. She seemed so angry. Did you hear the door slamming?’

‘All I heard was you howling at the fucking moon.’

‘I thought it was Meehan.’

‘What?’

‘I thought it was Tony Meehan, coming to finish me off.’

‘You’re raving now, Donal. Jesus. That guy’s long gone.’

‘I’ve been expecting him for three fucking years. Every night.’

‘What are you talking about? Why would he be wanting to finish you off?’

‘It’s why I can’t sleep.’

Aidan couldn’t have looked more bewildered.

‘Something weird happened that night, Aidan. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I’ve never told anyone. You’ll think I’m insane.’

‘What with some of the people I deal with? I doubt it,’ Aidan laughed, but kindly. ‘Try me.’

Chapter 2

The Irish Midlands

Thursday, August 18, 1988

I last clapped eyes on Tony Meehan three years ago at Tullamore General Hospital in rural Ireland.

He’d put me there.

We, the class of ’88, had completed the Leaving Cert exams. It was late summer and tomorrow I’d be flying to London, with Eve. Before the exams, I’d asked her to change her plans and come to England with me. After a few days, she had agreed. She told me that her dad, Frank, would put down a deposit on a flat for her in Camden, where we could both live. She’d work for his construction company and, hopefully, so would I. She was waiting for the right time to tell her mum, Mad Mo.

I would have jumped on the next flight out after the exams. But for Eve, this felt too sudden; too final.

‘We have the rest of our lives to work and pay bills,’ she reasoned, ‘let’s spend one last carefree summer at home, with our friends.’ One last carefree summer. How that statement haunts me still.

I had conceded to her demands, as usual, but on the condition that we draw a line at the Leaving Cert results.

And now, finally, we were nearly there. There was just one last hurdle before our flight tomorrow. Never one to knowingly shun a pun, Eve had arranged ‘The Eve of Results Fancy Dress Party’, to be hosted at her sprawling family bungalow.

Eve loved fancy dress as much as I loathed it. Whoever said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit hadn’t seen people over the age of ten dressed up as Disney characters, pop stars or zombies.

This party’s theme: heroes. I could hear myself now: ‘Hang on a minute, you’re a woman dressed as a male singer. You’re blowing my mind. Tell me you don’t have a lightning bolt on the other side of your face? Oh you do! Holy shit, you’re David Bowie – and you’re mad and funny and not remotely tragic.’

I appealed to Eve: ‘Don’t you trust us to get drunk and have fun in normal clothes?’

She was having none of it: ‘Would you not just dress up and have a laugh? What’s wrong with you?’

‘I’m just saying it’s a big occasion. We don’t need props.’

Her response stunned me: ‘Jesus, Donal, for once in your life can you stop being so … aloof? You think you’re so above it all, don’t you? Just put in some effort and have some fun and don’t be so fucking up yourself.’

She gave the door a Force 10 slam that caused the lights to flicker.

Charitably, I put it down to insecurity. Fancy dress would force people to have fun, thereby guaranteeing a night to remember. And saying a final farewell to lifelong friends would surely be less upsetting when we were all dressed up like eejits.

The day came and, after thirty seconds of deliberation, I opted for Hunter S. Thompson. For one thing, the Doc is easy: all you need are shades, a pork pie hat and a Hawaiian shirt. Like most men, I’d been storing a Hawaiian shirt in my closet for years, unable to offer a single good reason why until that very moment. Mum dug out the rest, somehow even exhuming a plastic cigarette holder.

Hunter got the nod for another reason. It was thanks to the Doc that I first struck up a conversation with Eve Daly.

Having lusted after her for two years, I’d all but given up hope of ever uttering a single word to Eve Daly. Then, in the school library one day, I heard her faux-Dublin accent say: ‘A bit of cult reading then?’

I turned to see her nodding towards the book, already slippery in my quivering hand.

I’d only read about twenty pages of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it scared me and I hated it. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. So I just stood there, reddening, while failing to think of a single thing to say, until I wanted to die of awkwardness.

‘You must be Fintan’s little brother,’ she purred, eyeing me playfully, as a cat might a wounded mouse.

My face was toast now but, somehow, I managed to nod nonchalantly.

‘Yeah, not so little actually.’

For months after, she never missed an opportunity to mock me mercilessly over that line. It became our secret catchphrase. I hoped that my homage to Hunter tonight would propel her back to those giddy early days of illicit cider and snogging; the first sweet breaths of our awakening love. In fact, I was counting on it: things had grown strained between us lately. Waiting didn’t agree with me.

Before I set off, Mum felt compelled to issue those classic Irish maternal warnings.

‘Don’t drink too much now,’ was self-explanatory. ‘No messing,’ she said, which meant no fighting. ‘And no carrying on,’ she added, which meant no shagging.

She cupped my chin: ‘Think once, think twice, then think M-A-M-M-Y.’

I nodded and smiled. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this for the last time.

‘Be good now, and be careful,’ she concluded.

‘Oh I’ll be good, Mammy,’ I quipped, setting off on the bike, ‘it’s up to her to be careful.’

Where the bungalows ceased between Clara and Tullamore, a blood-red sun sank behind the cooling fields, turning sleepy cows into steaming silhouettes. Chirpy birds made their racket on the crooked black power lines, distant African heat urging them onwards. I felt strangely gloomy, unsettled.

Discontented air nibbled at my skin; that damp heavy Midlands air that slides inside your clothes and your bed sheets and chills your bones. I squinted at the winking downtown lights in the distance, trying to picture where Eve’s bungalow sat in the Tullamore ground mist. But the drifting white steam kept deceiving me.

As I dumped the bike behind the tree in her front garden, I assumed she was still waiting for the right opportunity to break the news to her mum. This, surely, could be the only remaining obstacle to our new life together.

Eve answered her front door, a knockout in a Viking helmet, tiny animal-skin mini dress, fishnets, a leather hip holster sporting a shiny little prop dagger and a whale bone on a string around her neck.

‘We can’t stop here, this is bat country,’ I said, in my best American accent.

The Viking heroine looked me up and down, her face crumpling in disdain.

‘You know who I am, right?’ I pleaded.

‘James Joyce?’ she ventured, her top lip curled in disgust.

‘James Joyce? What, on a Caribbean cruise?’

She looked set to burst into tears.

‘Hunter S. Thompson,’ I announced, OD’ing on indignation.

‘Jesus, Donal, you could’ve made a bit more effort,’ she said, shaking her head, then stomping back into the house.

I hauled myself through the front door, wincing at the Dire Straits track booming out of the sitting room to my right. Someone must have commandeered the hi-fi. ‘Twisting by the Pool’? Twisting by the fucking neck would be preferable. I couldn’t resist a smirk of superiority, watching these musically illiterate morons bouncing around the room to this shite. I walked on into the hallway, soothingly dark save for some randomly-draped strings of white fairy lights, giving it a grotto vibe.

‘Good,’ I thought; easier to hide.

The dressing down I’d just received for not dressing up had stripped me of party spirit.

But guilt soon burrowed its way to my frazzled nerve endings: Eve was right, I should have made more of an effort. I thought about going to find her, to say sorry. But, recently, her hair-trigger outbursts were taking longer to pass. I decided to beg for forgiveness later, when the party would be jumping and she’d be less stressed.

I headed to the refuge of the kitchen at the back of the house. To my horror, it was packed too, everyone yelling at the same time. The smug Uni-bound crowd were enjoying one last gleeful blast of ‘points’, ‘grades’, ‘retakes’, and ‘grants’ before tomorrow’s life-defining results. A bottle of gin grinned at me from the top of the fridge. I snaffled it all for myself and headed to the little utility room, tucked away next to the back door. I kept the light off and poured a kamikaze measure. ‘Make it better, Beefeater,’ I demanded, downing it in one.

Sometime later, with Beefy half-empty and me half-cut, a pair of disconnected white eyes suddenly sprang through the doorway. I recoiled. My eyes adjusted to take in a trilby, a checked dickie-bow and pristine white gloves. My brain finally made sense of it: Choker, the mad bastard, being so politically incorrect that it surely constituted a hate crime.

Tony ‘Choker’ Meehan, blacked up as a minstrel. Or was it Al Jolson? Either way, he’d somehow transcended gloriously offensive. As he wallowed in near-the-knuckle notoriety, I pulled a mug off the shelf and poured him a large one. Better to appease him, a fact I knew only too well …

Choker had been brought up by the Jesuit Brothers in the town’s orphanage – as it was still called. Legend has it that, aged four, he saw his dad murder his mum with his bare hands. That’d certainly explain his penchant for strangulation. In primary school, he used to sneak up behind kids and wordlessly throttle them. Some of his victims actually passed out. He even got hold of a pair of black leather gloves, which he touchingly christened his ‘stranglers’ – a development that spread mild alarm through the entire town.

Unchecked, his levels of violence spiralled. A few months ago, he jumped off a stage at the local community hall disco and scissor-kicked a complete stranger in the head. The victim spent three months in hospital, two of them on a liquid diet. Meehan’s solicitor played the ‘poor orphan’ card in court and the judge acquitted him of GBH.

We should have universally ostracised him after that, but we didn’t. We couldn’t. Any group of Irish male teens needed a psycho to call on occasionally, either on the Gaelic football pitch or outside the chippie.

Even the Gardai seemed wary of him, and turned a blind eye to his pot dealing. Some put this down to Choker’s close relationship with Father Devlin, a senior Jesuit who trained the college football team and, reputedly, liked a fiddle with teenage boys. Acutely aware of this, none of his players ever went down injured.

Eve, a true crime nut, was obsessed with the murder of Meehan’s mother. She asked my brother Fintan – a newspaper reporter in Dublin – to get cuttings on the case. I refused to read them. It was difficult enough facing Choker without knowing about his homicidal genetic disposition.

‘Mr Aaaal Jolson,’ he sang, to the tune of ‘Mr Bojangles’ while jazz-wafting his enormous white hands. I stared speechlessly, trying to decide if it would be safer to join in or just carry on feigning delight.

‘Who are you supposed to be?’ he demanded accusingly.

‘James Joyce,’ I said, wanting to keep it simple.

He shook his head mournfully: ‘Jeez, you could have made some effort.’

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, he produced a bottle with no label.

‘I was gonna save this for later,’ said Choker, ‘but I bet you’d like some right now.’ His tone suggested that I should like some, right now.

As the Incredible Hulk-hued green liquid glugged into my glass for way too long, I heard myself warble: ‘What is it?’

‘Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder,’ smiled Choker, sounding like Shank would, if he’d been brought up in a bog.

I took a sip and fought back tears. Choker nodded, so I took another.

‘The really fit birds love fancy dress, don’t they?’ declared Choker. ‘Gives them a chance to strut their stuff. Put those swotty heifer lumps back in their hay boxes, what?’

He could tell I didn’t follow.

‘All those chubby bitches banging on about their As and Bs and which Uni they’re going to? When they see a woman like Eve in an outfit like that, puts them right back in their place, doesn’t it?’

He grimaced at my confused face, strutted towards the door, then turned.

‘You need to keep an eye on that one.’ Choker smiled to reveal his blinding white teeth, then jazz-wafted his huge white hands again, lingering just a bit too long, like a baddie in a B-movie.

I gulped hard: so hard I could hear it. In my mind flashed Choker’s big white hands, closing in on Eve’s pale and oh-so-thin and snappable neck. My heart felt too big for my chest. My temples throbbed sweat.

I should definitely go and find Eve.

As I turned into the hallway, Dinosaur Jr.’s ‘Freak Scene’ skidded into life. Eve had clearly re-appropriated the hi-fi. I was halfway to the sitting room pondering what, if anything, I could do if the orphan got frisky with the Viking, when my legs started to lose their feeling. With every step, they got heavier and heavier. This rattled me. I’d been pissed before, often enough. This felt different, like my legs were dying.

‘So fucked I can’t believe it,’ drawled J Mascis and he wasn’t wrong. I felt dead-legged, sweat-soaked and zoned-out, as if life itself was leaking out of my feet. Vanity prevented me raising the alarm. I needed Eve not to see me like this. I needed Tullamore’s teen population not to see me like this; not on my final public appearance. I had to get outside. My only hope was the back door.

It took some sort of indefinable judo throw to uproot my dead legs and hoist them around, so that they now faced the rear of the house. I set off in a straight-legged goose-step towards the back door, holding my arms ahead of me in case I fell.

I couldn’t feel my feet or legs now at all. I actually wondered if I was dying. I couldn’t help thinking how gloriously rock ’n’ roll it would be if I dropped dead right here and now, Eve cradling my head, kissing me one last time, Yoko to my John Lennon.

Suddenly one of the closed bedroom doors creaked open. Out of it came a meek-looking Tara Molloy. In the dark behind her, some fella was struggling to get his trousers back on. She stood and stared but said nothing of my dead-legged, metronomic stomp. What did she think I was doing? My own Thriller tribute?

I goose-stepped on like a Nazi on acid. I only had to make it past the kitchen now and the back door was right there.

As the kitchen clatter came into range, I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. It seemed to take an age. Please don’t anyone look. Please don’t anyone see. I got past. Then – dread – footsteps sounded behind me. I stopped, waited, breathing hard. The footsteps went away. Thank Christ. I leaned my raging forehead against the back door’s cold glass. Relief.

I slipped the door open. The damp cold jolted me, injecting fresh will into my knotted veins. I dragged the two leaden hunks of meat, formerly known as legs, outside and closed the door quietly. I performed my paralytic can-can across the well-lit crazy paving, towards the lonely black shed, now looking a long thirty feet away. If I could just get to the shed, then round the corner into the black, no one would be able to see me. I could talk myself through this. Get my head together.

I made it to the middle of the crazy paving, then I couldn’t move my legs another inch. The paralysis had crept up to my hips. I was stuck, stranded under the hottest part of the outside security light, lucid but unable to walk. I felt real fear now. What was wrong with me? But I had to keep going. I couldn’t let anyone see me. Whatever was going on inside my head and body would pass. If I could just make it to that dark shed.

There was only one thing for it. I went all Sergeant Elias out of Platoon and dropped melodramatically to my knees, then frontwards onto my arms. Somehow, elbow after concrete-grinding elbow, I wormed my way across the dewy patio. I hoped to Christ no one was seeing this. I’d never, ever live it down.

I got to the shed and dragged myself to sitting, my elbows burning.

I bum-shuffled sideways into the shadows and sat there for I don’t know how long, frozen to the spot, crazy scenes unfolding in my mind. At one stage, I was running away from my own home, where I’d just stabbed someone. I felt myself run. I heard people coming after me, shouting, screaming, a flashing blue light, a police siren. Then, relief when I saw myself still rooted to the same spot, my hands planted against the shed wall.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when a blinding light criss-crossed my vision, scoring my sight. Next thing I knew, I was floating through a drifting starscape, arse-first like a breeched baby, slowly and in total silence. I found myself inside Eve’s bedroom, but somehow I was hovering a foot off the floor. I saw clearly the details of the room I knew so well. Across from me, illuminated light from the hallway lit the cracks around the closed bedroom door. Beside it, Eve’s clothes sat in a heap on the chair. I could see the top she wore that morning; the bank of photos of Philandering Frank on the wall; the headboard; the garish scarlet duvet cover; the bedside tables. On my side, the ashtray from Majorca, next to the lamp that refused to break no matter how many times we knocked it to the floor. On the far side of the bed blinked the clock radio. It read 01.09. My God, had I been outside for three hours?

The hallway door opened. Something glinted. It was Eve in her Viking outfit. ‘This is live!’ I thought. She pushed the door shut, placed her helmet and sword on the bedside table next to the clock radio and collapsed dramatically onto the bed. I realised all this was happening in total silence, yet I could tell she was crying.

I felt this overwhelming urge to go to her, to touch her, to put my arm around her shoulder. To say sorry. Are you okay, Eve? I said, but nothing came out. I knew it was hopeless, that I was trapped in some sort of sensory vacuum, there but not there. Here, but only in spirit.

The door to the hallway opened very slowly. First came yellow light, then a silhouetted head. I couldn’t make out who it belonged to.

Eve sat up on the bed with a start. I could tell she was asking who was there. She was telling the person to get out, leave her alone. I couldn’t hear her speak, but I could clearly read her body language.

The unidentified person didn’t leave, but shut the door carefully behind him and walked to the bed. I knew that strut, that side profile, that trilby hat. It was Choker Meehan.

Eve sat bolt upright on the bed, as still as a statue.

Choker gently took hold of her hands, sliding his right knee, then his left, onto the bed, so that they were planted between her pale, outstretched legs. He whipped off his hat, tossing it away like a frisbee towards the window. I was bursting to do something, but it was hopeless. Eve pushed back against the headboard defensively. Choker leaned forward, so he was nose to nose with Eve, his hands smothering hers.

He was saying something. Eve remained still, poised, defiant.

He placed his right hand on her left shoulder. ‘Eve,’ my shout was swallowed by black. I tried to lunge, but I was a fly trapped in an invisible web.

Now his right hand moved from her shoulder to the base of her skull, then to her pale neck. His other hand moved in under her cheek. His fingers spread round the back of her neck so that his thumbs sat twitching on her windpipe. ‘Eve, Eve, for fuck’s sake, Eve,’ I cried, but only my guts thrashed about.

Look after Eve for me, Mo had pleaded into my eyes before she left.

Eve tried to turn her head away. He wouldn’t let her. She wriggled hard. He easily pushed her back on the bed underneath him, his left hand now moving up to cover her mouth, dwarfing her face.

I’m counting on you, Donal.

I went apeshit; screaming, thrashing, fighting with all my might. But no one could hear me. She had lost her fight and just lay there, her skirt above her waist, her white panties yanked to one side. He fiddled furiously with his trousers while I just hovered, in hell.

Of course, Mrs Daly.

He pounded now, rhythmically. His downward motion revealed the clock radio on the far side of the bed, its luminous green digits flipping casually to 01.13.

Except all our lives stopped dead right then, never to be the same again.

I woke to my own screaming voice, loud, desperate, primeval. I saw blood glistening on the pebbledash, the skin on my hands, minced. I was breathing hard but I still couldn’t lift my feet. Slowly, sounds formed. The nearby church bells clanged twelve times.

But it’s after one a.m. right? Why are they chiming midnight?

Trapped birds flapped and flailed inside my skull. A ball of nausea inflated my chest. I still had time to get back inside, to save Eve. I went to move but my legs stuck to the earth. I refused to believe I was gravity’s prisoner. I lurched forward; determined, incensed, but went into free fall through cold, streaking lights into dark, darker black.

I woke up in darkness, to an unfamiliar bed, my guts clanking like an out-of-tune bass.

Flash-frame images of Meehan forcing himself upon Eve flipped through my mind, a rolodex of horrors. I fought an aching neck to sit up. All hopes that it had been some sort of horrific nightmare fled when I saw my bandaged hands, remembering how I’d minced them against the shed’s pebbledash wall.

Far away, I could hear the click-clack of retreating footsteps and a swinging door. Shapes formed in the gloom. Weird patterns became curtains, closed around beds opposite. I hadn’t spent a night in hospital since I was a kid.

They’d left the curtains around my bed open, presumably to keep me under observation. I sensed someone watching me. Sure enough, a silhouette stood beyond the end of my metal bed, in the middle of the ward, as still as a corpse. I strained to see the face, but it was too dark.

‘Who are you?’ I said. The person didn’t move a muscle.

A current of unease zapped through me.

‘What do you want?’ I called.

The figure started moving towards me, slowly, silently, with intent.

I backed up against the metal frame of the bed, the cold steel reminding me I was awake. Still he came, steady, unflinching, unstoppable.

‘What do you want?’ I shouted.

The head tilted up to reveal coal-black pupils glistening inside caked white spots. Meehan’s bloodshot eyes glared hate.

I scrambled to get up, to fight. But I was frozen, helpless.

Those unblinking murderous eyes kept coming, closer, closer, until we were nose to nose. I felt his gloved hands on my throat, his putrid breath on my face.

He leaned all his weight on my neck until my chest caved in and my eyes bulged. My head pounded as dots bounced off the edges of my fading vision. My head drifted, I was floating off.

I knew this was it. I wanted the end. Sorry, Eve.

Then screaming white light gored at my clenched eyelids. I thought: ‘Christ no, don’t tell me all that shit about God and heaven is true.’

Something made me defy the hot white needles and haul my eyelids open. Shapes formed. A face swooned and flickered, eventually settling to reveal Mum’s fretting smile. It was morning and I was alive. Relief overwhelmed me. Someone must have caught him, stopped him, in the nick of time.

‘Meehan tried to kill me,’ I croaked.

She tiptoed slowly to my left side, warily, uncertain. She squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt.

‘Shhh, don’t get yourself upset now, Donal. Try to relax,’ she said.

I defied her Vulcan death grip to sit up. I didn’t know who the man was to my right, but his snow-white, side-parted hair, fuzzy eyebrows, formal grey suit and hooked nose screamed cop, doc, lawyer; professional busybody.

My neck hurt and my throat burned when I swallowed. I wondered how close Meehan had come to finishing me off.

‘Eve?’ I gasped at Mum, desperate to know if she was okay; desperate to hear that what I’d seen last night wasn’t real, but some sort of absinthe-induced hallucination.

‘Take it easy,’ said Mum, shoulder-crushing again, ‘everything’s okay, love.’ I pulled away before she snapped my collarbone.

‘Everything’s far from okay.’ I jumped at the man’s guttural, knowing voice. I turned to him, confused.

His piercing blue eyes seemed to be searching inside my face: a cop, for sure. ‘We found you unconscious, having imbibed some sort of substance, no doubt illicit,’ he snapped. ‘I trust you won’t object to answering a few questions.’

‘Substance?’ I rasped. ‘What are you on about?’

As I spoke, the pieces clicked together. Absinthe alone couldn’t have done that to me. Choker, the fucker, had spiked me.

I told the cop about the weird green drink, the dead legs, the shed.

I sensed Mum shaking her head sadly. I couldn’t bear to look her way. Instead, my eyes met the nurse’s disgusted glare. What was her problem? Unwelcome, my eyes drifted back to the cop’s piercing blue sparklers.

I asked again: ‘Eve, is she okay?’

I sensed he was holding something back. I vowed there and then that if Meehan had attacked her, I’d kill him myself.

‘Well,’ said the cop, ‘you were out of it, so I guess that rules you out as a potential suspect, or indeed as a witness.’

Suspect? Witness? Christ, no. Say it didn’t happen. Say what I saw wasn’t real …

The cop carried on, measured, enjoying his moment, even producing one of those black flip notebooks you see only in cop shows.

‘We are investigating a very serious crime,’ he began.

‘What the fuck happened?’ I felt like screaming.

‘Someone dialled 999 from the house phone, but refused to give their name. Medics removed you from the garden of the house at 01.52 a.m.’

‘Removed …?’ I couldn’t help picturing the scene; a bloodied and half-frozen Hunter S. Thompson, flat out on a stretcher, hands covered in blood, the glasses skewwhiff on my face. I was sure to hear every last detail soon, if I could ever face them again.

The cop went on, impassively: ‘You were unconscious. An officer at the scene found the bottle of absinthe. It’s gone to Dublin for tests but my bet is it’d been mixed with some sort of tranquilliser or cannabis, possibly both.’

He stopped for effect. I nodded gravely, because I felt that’s what he wanted me to do. Finally, he continued.

‘Whatever substance was in that drink caused a rapid drop in your blood pressure, which explains why you felt paralysed. The good news is, there’s no long-term damage.’

Good news, but not the news I most wanted to hear, so I nodded rapidly.

He got to his feet and started pacing about the room, Poirot-style. The gobshite. Then his throaty ‘ahem’, and my mother’s averted gaze confirmed my worst fear: what I’d heard so far was merely the preamble to this morning’s Main Story. I swallowed hard. God, it hurt.

‘Look,’ said the cop, ‘I might as well tell you. Your girlfriend, Eve Daly …’

I shivered, froze.

‘She’s under arrest.’

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.

‘For stabbing Anthony Meehan to death.’

From somewhere deep, deep inside me spewed a hideous, cackling, panto-laugh. She did it. She nailed that fucker. My Viking!

The cop looked at me in shock, then disgust. ‘What’s so fucking funny, son?’ he spat. ‘There’s a young man downstairs in the basement on a slab.’

‘No, God, no, sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s just the shock.’

He turned to Mum and the nurse: ‘I’m not sure he’s in a fit state to hear any more,’ he said, pocketing his fancy notebook.

He turned back to me with a scowl: ‘I’ll be back to ask you more questions later.’ He flicked his top coat, matador-style, off the back of the bedside chair.

My mind flailed, trying to make sense of it all. Somehow she’d fought back. But how? She must have stabbed him with the Viking prop dagger. Self-defence of course. I’d seen him attack her. I’d seen the preamble to Meehan’s murder!

Or was that what I had seen? My mind recoiled at the insanity of the idea. Surely it must have been some sort of bad trip? A drug-induced nightmare out of the dark corners of my twisted, paranoid mind? Or maybe, while I was lying here out of it, I’d heard them talking about the crime. My brain had supplied pictures to what I’d unconsciously learned.

Yet I knew what I’d seen. I saw Meehan attack Eve.

But if Meehan was dead, then who had tried to kill me later, when I was already in the hospital? Surely not …

I had to ask the question.

‘Sir?’

He turned, surprised.

‘What time did you get the call, you know, about Tony?’

Lieutenant Dumbo looked at me, frowned and sighed. He reached back into his breast pocket.

‘Ah let’s see,’ he said, his agricultural thumb dwarfing the notebook’s inky pages.

‘We got that call at … 1.17 a.m.’

My brain flashed back to the scene, to the clock radio turning 1.13. Watching Meehan forcing himself upon Eve. Witnessing the preamble to Meehan’s murder. But that made no sense. ‘And when did he die?’ I croaked.