Текст книги "Alone with the Dead"

Автор книги: James Nally

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 9 страниц]

Chapter 9

Salcott Road, South London

Sunday, July 7, 1991; 22:00

That night, I took up my usual position at the alleyway on Salcott Road, more scared of an encounter with Gabby than Dom Rogan.

As I did so, I realised one other thing connected Marion’s two visits: on both those days I had attended her murder scene. Since then, she’d been a no-show. I could have tested this theory right then – Sangora Road was just five minutes’ walk away – but I had a stalker to stalk.

It had been four days since Dom’s incursion into Gabby’s back garden. On each of those subsequent nights, I’d waited for him here but he’d failed to show – or at least, I hadn’t seen him. I was worried that he’d clocked me, and was now biding his time until I gave up. We both knew I couldn’t keep coming here indefinitely.

Although he’d no previous convictions, I had been able to glean all of Dom’s personal details from the police computer. I thought about turning up at Bank of America in uniform and demanding to see him. When dealing with the middle classes, embarrassment can be our most powerful weapon. But to do this, I’d have to get an official sanction and, of course, write a report.

I much preferred keeping Dom unofficial business. With him in Gabby’s back garden, face down in the dirt, my arm around his throat, I could much better explain my plans to hit him with charges of trespass, resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer if he ever showed up again. Another breach and I’d make it official: magistrates would give him two years’ probation at the very least. Break that and I’d land him in jail quicker than he could say: ‘I want to call my family lawyer.’ I felt certain that the very real threat of prison would straighten him out, no matter how much he might squeal about his rights and his well-connected pals.

I felt uncomfortable bending the rules, but what else could I do?

As it was Sunday night, the street’s houselights sparked out even earlier. If New York is the city that never sleeps, London likes an early night.

A sharp rap on the car window lifted me six inches off the seat. Gabby glared down at me, half-cross, half-amused. I unwound the window.

‘We don’t want him thinking he’s got competition,’ she deadpanned, ‘you might as well come in.’

‘Only if you’re sure …’ I started but she’d already marched off.

I caught up with her at the front door.

‘I’ve tidied and everything.’

‘You knew I’d come?’

‘Funnily enough, Donal, because I’m being stalked I tend to keep a bit of an eye out. I can’t believe you park in the same place every night.’

My face burned.

‘I’m not a weirdo, Gabby, I really want to stress that point. I just want to help you get rid of this … problem.’

‘I know that now,’ she said, treating me to a closed-mouth, business-like smile.

She took a quick scan of the street – almost instinctively – then gestured at me to go through first, before treble-locking the door.

I led the way down her hallway into an open-plan sitting room and kitchen. I noticed original numbered canvas artwork, a bank of photos of her world travels, an old Canon Super 8 camera, books galore – lots of Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin.

She showed me to her kitchen table, put the kettle on.

‘Tea, coffee?’

‘Tea would be great.’

She opened her cupboard to reveal a rainbow of exotic brews: Darjeeling, Earl Grey, Cinnamon, Peppermint.

‘What type?’

‘Just normal, thanks.’

‘I’m not sure I have normal.’

‘Surprise me,’ I demanded, pretending to be the spontaneous type.

She put a cup of what smelt like steaming rat piss in front of me and announced: ‘Right, let’s get this over with, shall we?’

My startled look clearly empowered her.

‘You must be dying to know how I ended up with a nutty stalker boyfriend.’

How did she know?

‘Well, he didn’t start out like that. I suppose they never do.’

I shuffled awkwardly. I was still learning how to listen without judgement. It didn’t come naturally.

‘I met him at Uni. He was shy, serious but very dry and funny when you got to know him. And clever. He’s probably the only actual genius I’ve ever met.’

I realised I’d yet to tick a single point on her ‘What I Like in a Man’ list.

‘Of course I was totally bowled over by this tortured and slightly depressive genius. I mean, who wouldn’t be?’

‘Who indeed? Do you have milk by any chance?’

She looked at me as if I’d just cracked a really lame gag, then carried on.

‘After a while, he never wanted to go out or have anyone round. Looking back I can see how he isolated me from my friends and my family. They really didn’t like him at all. We spent more and more time together. I didn’t realise it but I’d become totally dependent on him.

‘He started getting very snappy and impatient, criticising me all the time. He just chipped away at my self-esteem until I’d lost all sense of who I was and what I believed in, if that makes sense.’

The dainty china cup felt ridiculous in my meaty farmer’s hand. I took a sip, careful to suppress all reaction, and apologised silently to rats.

‘Then my gran got diagnosed with cancer. Dom refused to come with me to see her. She’d only met him a few times but she gave me a really stiff talking to. I was really upset by the things she said but I knew in my heart she was right. So I went home and told him.’

‘And now he can’t accept it’s over?’

She shook her head.

‘You mentioned he could be violent?’

She swallowed, inspected her hands and nodded slowly. It didn’t feel right to press. I tried another tack.

‘Maybe he just can’t stop loving you?’

She laughed bitterly. ‘He never loved me. I’m a possession to him. His ego can’t accept that I finished it. Little old meek me.’

‘Meek? You? Jesus.’

That got a smile.

‘Look, Gabby, you need to move out of here, get a house share so you’ve always got people around you. Stay off the electoral roll so he can’t find you …’

‘But Gran left me this place. I’ve spent the last six months doing it up. I can’t just … leave.’

‘Maybe just for a year … you’d have no trouble renting it out. It’s beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I promise, give it twelve months and he’ll tire of trying to find you.’

‘He knows where I work.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Hopscotch children’s nursery, on Crescent Lane. I’m the manager.’

‘Trust me, stalker or not, he won’t hang around a nursery. He’ll get lynched.’

She laughed, then groaned: ‘Oh God, why do I have to move when he’s the one …?’

‘Look, I don’t want to alarm you, Gabby, but he’s escalating. You need to get away from here right away. By that, I mean tomorrow. Have you family close by?’

She sighed.

‘Mum and Dad live in Maidstone. It’s only an hour on the train. I suppose I could stay there for a while.’

‘Otherwise you’ll have to put up with me every night.’

She looked at me, eyebrow arched, quizzically amused: ‘What’s your story then, Donal? How does an Irishman end up in the British police force? And why do you shout in your sleep?’

‘How long have you got?’ I laughed.

‘I’m not a great sleeper either,’ she smiled, ‘so you can take your time. Another tea?’

‘Er no, thanks. Do you have anything stronger?’

‘I’ve got wine.’

‘Red?’

‘Blimey, you get your feet under the table quick, don’t you?’

‘Bespoke personal protection don’t come cheap.’

I skipped the stuff about Eve and Meehan: none of it showed anyone in a good light. Instead, over too much Merlot, I took her through my three-year journey from North to South London; from Irish rebel to tax-paying member of Her Majesty’s Constabulary.

Put it down to gut instinct or a copper’s mind but, as I poured out my story, I felt sure we were being watched, possibly listened to. I knew too that what I’d started here could end horribly. What if Dom was a disciple of that stalker’s doctrine: ‘If I can’t have you, nobody else will’?

When I first got to Harlesden, I shared a house so crowded that only the door-less bathroom didn’t have a bed. We went home to wash and sleep. We ate, drank, got hired and cashed our paycheques at the Spotted Dog pub on Willesden High Road.

Standing at the bar every night were the men we’d become if we kept this up for another twenty or thirty years, the old boys who came over in the Fifties and Sixties. They had faces like elephant hide and accents even thicker; I’d never heard anyone in Ireland speak with such a strong brogue. I watched them night after night, sinking pint after pint of Guinness, failing to quench terrible thirsts while clutching white polythene bags in their non-drinking hands.

‘What’s in the bags?’ I asked the barman quietly one night.

‘That’s their dinner,’ he whispered. On closer inspection, beneath the polythene I could see the outline of a chop or a ball of mince, potatoes and carrots.

‘Why don’t they get it later? It’s not like the shops round here shut.’

‘Because they’ll have drunk all their money later.’

You’d learn that some of them didn’t go home for Christmas anymore – the lost causes. Two nights a week, a tin collecting for ‘IRA prisoners’ rattled under your nose. No one dared decline. You noticed that the local mini-cab firm only ever sent white drivers. No one ever asked why.

I’d landed regular work feeding cement to a trio of Connemara bricklayers. They worked like savages, as if expunging some inner volcanic rage or demon. ‘Feed me,’ they’d roar, but no matter how fast and hard I’d mix, I could never keep up. It sapped me of the energy I needed to change my pub-based existence. At least that was my excuse.

We spent almost the entire weekend in the Dog, drinking away our aches and gains, frittering money on horses, football and pool. We’d end up at the Gresham on Holloway Road, a vast hangar of drunken oblivion where Irish people of all ages drank, ate, danced and fought. And they always fought. The red-faced middle-aged men in ripped shirts knew they only had to land one good one to win. The police never came. You were too pissed to wonder why.

Then Fintan moved over, saw how low I’d sunk and set about breaking me out of my bad routine. But not before first establishing himself as a cut-throat tabloid hack.

Within months of his arrival in London, under the expert tutelage of the Sunday News, he’d sunk to the challenge of becoming one of Fleet Street’s most lethal ‘operators’. Both his drinking capacity and expenses account appeared bottomless, as he set about getting half of Scotland Yard well-oiled and onside. His connections didn’t end there. When I’d had my fill of labouring, he told me to go see Seamus Horan, manager of the Feathers pub, near St James’s Park underground station in central London. I jumped at the chance: every organ within me felt like it needed a change.

In Seamus, I found another immigrant turned to granite by hardship. He explained bluntly that he employed Irish staff because they expected a pub to stay open till three or four in the morning, every morning.

I quickly discovered that the Feathers had become the favoured watering hole of officers working at nearby Scotland Yard. Boy could they drink. And, because it was patronised by the law, it was above the law.

We never closed before three a.m. No wonder there was a permanent vacancy. It helped that I could take a room upstairs.

The insomnia that had tormented me since I arrived in London finally proved useful. By the time I talked the last drunks down from their stools each morning, only medicated mini-cab drivers and demented birds were still up. I never heard a bird singing at night until I came to London. Those nightingales on Berkeley Square must be fucking knackered.

Gabby laughed. But I had an acute boredom sensor. It was time to wrap up.

‘So I got to know a few of the officers and they persuaded me to join up,’ I said, skipping the murky truth about how I became a cop. That would have to wait for another day.

‘Do you have ambitions, you know, to make detective?’

‘Yeah, you could say that. I’m desperate, to be honest.’

‘Don’t you worry that your insomnia will eventually catch up with you, make you ill?’

‘Of course. I’ve seen specialists. I’ve read books. No one seems to have an answer.’

‘I’ve got a friend about to begin her final year of a psychology degree. I remember her saying she’d like to specialise in sleep disorders. She’s looking for a case right now …’

‘Oh I don’t know,’ I laughed, ‘it’s all a bit embarrassing.’

‘I tell you what,’ said Gabby, ‘if you agree to help Lily, I’ll go stay with my parents.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘Deal,’ I smiled, shaking her hand and hoping I was the only one lying.

I pulled open the phone box door, sampled the air inside and nodded gratefully. It couldn’t have been pissed in for at least three days.

I shovelled in three pound coins and poked those digits you never forget. On the third ring, I realised I hadn’t planned what to say. I slammed the receiver down and heard the three coins clatter down to the tray.

‘Hi, Mum,’ I said to the stale air, ‘how are you?’

Chapter 10

King’s College Hospital, South London

Thursday, July 11, 1991; 09:55

The following Thursday morning – ten days after Marion’s murder – I clocked the sign that read King’s College’s Institute of Psychiatry and winced.

Psychiatry sounded so judgemental, so incurable. But I’d come here voluntarily. They wouldn’t shoot a dart in my arse and cart me off indefinitely for the good of society. Of that I felt almost certain.

Besides, Lilian Krul hadn’t yet qualified. And this face-to-face with the wannabe shrink had been slated for just sixty minutes: barely enough time for her to knock the shine off my well-polished veneer of sanity, let alone scratch it.

Of course, I’d fully intended to renege on my deal with Gabby as soon as she’d moved back to her family’s home in Kent. But I hadn’t counted on her academic friend’s tireless perseverance. I was left in no doubt that Lilian could give Dom Rogan a real run for his money in the stalking stakes. She must have left ten messages over two days to make this happen. I caved in because, if this was all it took to keep Gabby out of harm’s way, then it had to be worth every second.

I told Aidan I had gone to a vinyl sale; I couldn’t bring myself to admit I’d found professional help outside his place of work, the pre-eminent Maudsley . He’d been on at me for months about ‘seeing someone’ there. I tried to explain that every time I’d visited a specialist, I wound up prescribed some sort of medieval haymaker sleeping tablet that turned me into a slack-jawed halfwit.

Aidan had even described my case in detail to a leading sleep specialist, which put me right off. For one thing, he was prone to exaggeration. God knows what he’d told them. On top of that, when confronted by shrinks, I reserved the right to edit my own symptoms and lunacy.

I would never admit to any fully qualified member of the medical establishment the true extent of my insomnia. I dreaded being labelled schizophrenic or bi-polar and carted off to some screaming Gothic madhouse where – drugged, drooling and helpless – I’d get arse-fucked daily by some sick, cackling chaplain.

As an Irish male, I had a scientific right to be scared. Studies have found that four per cent of the Irish population are schizophrenic; that’s four times higher than any other nation in the world.

They looked for historical reasons behind Ireland’s reluctant success in producing champion nutters. In-breeding turned out not to be a factor, thankfully. After all, over the centuries all manner of imposter – Viking, Norman, Spanish, English, to name a few – had turned the Irish gene pool into alphabet soup. Our women have a proud record of welcoming exotic strangers. It felt reassuring to know that our inadequacy in the eyes of the Irish female was historical.

Another theory had been the traditional ‘emigration of the strongest’, but they found similarly high levels of schizophrenia in Irish emigrant groups across the US.

The experts eventually agreed that it came down to a combination of three historical reasons: maternal malnourishment during pregnancy, alcoholism and ageing sperm. In at least two of these disciplines, my auld fella Martin scored top marks.

He’d already turned fifty by the time my older brother and I came along. Like so many men in rural Ireland, that was the price he paid for inheriting the family farm a couple of decades earlier. It came equipped with his mother, May Lynch – a ringing bitch still spoken about in tones of mild terror and awe. And, like most of these narcissistic matriarchs, she wouldn’t tolerate another woman in the house so he had to wait for her to die.

That was the ‘ageing sperm’ condition covered. As for ‘the drink’, Martin insisted he did so only socially. But being a local politician, auctioneer and IRA facilitator, he tended to be social every evening of the week. And he’d always wrap up the night with a few whiskies on the couch, considered so anti-social by the rest of us that we’d feel the need to hide.

So, no one could accuse Martin Lynch of not doing his bit to sire a schizo. Maybe he wanted one to join him fighting for ‘the cause’. Thankfully, no matter how knackered and godawful I felt, I never heard voices. But I still felt a little paranoid about that particular prognosis, so strenuously avoided the only people who could help me. Today’s ‘consultation’ with Lilian was an aberration, and I planned to make sure of that by telling her fuck all.

‘Donal?’ came a soft voice. ‘Hi, I’m Lilian.’

I was expecting someone sterner with less make-up and more gravitas.

I tried not to look too shocked: she looked surprised enough for the both of us. Her hair was scraped back into a ponytail with such severity that her eyebrows were arched, making her seem permanently startled. Gigantic, thick-rimmed black spectacles made her already large pupils look like a pair of well-polished conkers. Her pronounced cheekbones glowed pink beneath war paint.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but had gone to considerable lengths to appear older. She wore a dark grey trouser suit a couple of sizes too big, as if she’d been playing in her father’s clothes chest. Her shoes would’ve made Freud weep.

‘Come with me, please,’ she instructed, shutting my inspection down.

I followed her into a small room that smelt of handwash and leather.

‘Let me take your coat, Donal,’ she said, pronouncing it Donald but with a silent ‘d’ on the end. ‘Please, get comfortable.’

She sat down opposite me, staring hard at her notes.

Finally, she took a deep breath and spoke: ‘Okay, so Gabby told me the basics. What I’d like you to do today is run through your entire sleep history, from as far back as you can remember.’

I started, a little reluctantly. Then – like one of my dad’s middle-of-the-night pisses – it just went on and on. The knowledge that this woman hadn’t the authority to prescribe either drugs or indefinite incarceration seemed to liberate me.

I explained how, as a child, I used to wake in the dark, wide-eyed, unable to move, already choking on an ‘I’m going to die’ level of terror. The slinky black figure would soundlessly appear five or six feet from the end of my bed. Suddenly he’d be on my chest, strangling me. I’d have to fight against the swirling black liquid of his evil eyes. Then, he’d snap off, vanish … just like that.

I’d be out of bed, gasping for breath, scared for my life. And that would be it for another night: too scared to go back to sleep, too tired to do anything but loll on the sofa. Most times, I’d find Mum already there.

As far back as I could remember, Mum’s eyes looked dead, as if fixed upon some distant regret. Her criss-crossed skin hung loose on sharp cheekbones, like whittled oak. She was forty-seven now; you would have guessed closer to seventy-four. A life spent almost always awake was killing her. That, and all the medication they kept prescribing.

She made light of my ‘attacks’, telling me it was St Giles, patron saint of bad dreams, protecting me from nightmares. Quite why this messenger of God felt the need to throttle me, we never fully explored.

The lack of sleep made me constantly ill. Dad told me not to tell the doctor about my phantom tormentor. I’m sure his primary concern was how it might sound to the local GP, a man he played golf with. Back then, men in black lying on top of defenceless little boys in the middle of the night was the sole preserve of the Holy Orders. He didn’t want Dr Harnett thinking he was some sort of pervert.

I’d sometimes catch my dad looking at me with an expression that I could read, even back then, as contempt.

‘What the hell is wrong with that child?’ I’d hear him ask my mother. I grew up with the unshakeable certainty that, somehow, I’d ruined his life.

When I turned twelve, the visions stopped, just like that.

‘But now it’s started again?’

I took her through the fancy dress party and Meehan’s attack – right up to my bloodcurdling encounters with Marion Ryan outside Gabby’s flat.

Lilian scribbled feverishly. She interrupted me once more, to declare that our time was up.

‘I’d love to go on but the room’s been booked.’

‘I don’t think I could, Lilian, I’m spent,’ I said, getting to my feet, wobbling a little from a light head.

‘Are you okay, Donal(d)?’

‘I feel a bit … giddy. It’s like how I used to feel coming out of confession as a kid. That was cathartic, I suppose. Thank you.’

‘I should be thanking you,’ she said, ‘for opening up like that. I get the feeling you’ve not done that before?’

I shrugged.

‘I’m looking for a case study, Donal, and your condition is fascinating,’ she said, tucking her notes under her arm and standing.

‘Thanks,’ I said, wondering why I felt flattered, ‘but I’m not sure what else I can tell you. That’s it, really.’

She smiled: ‘You’ve no idea how interesting all this is to someone like me. I have a thousand questions.’

I felt myself giggling coquettishly and wondered if I had self-esteem issues.

‘You said yourself you found it cathartic. Maybe we can help each other?’

My guard shot up.

‘I’m not sure, Lilian, I mean I really have told you everything.’

‘I need something new and original for my dissertation. Your case would be perfect.’

‘How long does a dissertation take? I’m pretty busy.’

‘What if I only ask you to keep seeing me for as long as you feel you’re getting something out of it?’

She’d reduced me to one last excuse.

‘The thing is, Lilian, I can’t have people knowing about this condition, not in my job. If any of this came out, it’d be the end of my career.’

‘I don’t need to use your name. You can be anonymous, even in my support notes. That’s not a problem at all.’

Her giant eyes blinked into mine, pleadingly.

‘No mention of my real name, at all, anywhere near it?’

‘I promise, Donal,’ she almost cheeped in desperation.

‘Okay,’ I said and her stretched face crumpled with relief, ‘but I’m only committing to a few sessions, see how we go.’

‘You won’t regret it, Donal, honestly,’ she beamed. ‘Now I just need you to sign a couple of documents so that I can clear it with my tutor and apply for your medical records.’

She turned and picked up two documents from the table.

‘If you could sign here … and here,’ she said, her scarlet fingernails tapping at two tiny white squares amid a torrent of text. I scrawled, both impressed and alarmed by the fact she seemed to have pre-empted my agreement.

‘Great,’ she said, whipping the papers away, ‘Gabby was worried you wouldn’t take very kindly to being my guinea pig.’

‘Hey, less of the pig … quack,’ I said, strolling out and thinking: I was pretty cool there.

‘Oh, Donal!’ she called after me, ‘you’ve forgotten your coat.’