Games with the Dead

by James Nally

  I recoil in disbelief.

  ‘For you, putting away a jealous husband who did this to Nathan is really about getting even with Charles by proxy. You’re living vicariously through Nathan’s killer because you’re too spineless to front up Charles yourself.’

  ‘I’m not scared of confronting Charles. I just don’t see how it’s going to help. If it was Joan Carter at the centre of this love triangle, I dare say she’d have an orgasm seeing me knock him out. But this is Zoe. God forbid there should be any unpleasantness.’

  ‘Maybe some unpleasantness is exactly what she wants! Maybe she wants you to make a statement, be decisive, win the day? If you really want her, why don’t you stop whingeing and moaning and go and get her? Show her what you’re made of.’

  ‘I know her better than you, Fintan, and, trust me, she’s not Scarlett O bloody Hara okay? If I confront Charles, she’ll finish with me for good. And, don’t forget, I’m one disciplinary offence away from getting booted out of the force. One rumble in the car park shrubbery with Chuck and they’ll throw the book at me.’

  Fintan shakes his head. ‘You’re like some fucking Poundland Hamlet. Honestly, stop thinking and follow your gut or you’ll never get anywhere.’

  ‘Hang on a second! Your last manly pep talk convinced me to move out, and look how rosy that’s turned out for me. No offence, Fintan, but relationships are a bit too complex for your rousing rhetoric.’

  The teams emerge for the second half in the nick of time. The old hippie barman cranks up the volume to barely audible and we settle in for more heatstroke humiliation.

  Mexico score again, Fintan spews expletives then spots a group of sneering English observers and tells them to fuck off. Luckily, they’re beanie-hatted graphic designer types who promptly flee. But there is a raw, unashamed, unapologetic honesty to Fintan that I’ve somehow lost over the years. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I need to man up, knock out Charles with my fists and Zoe with my unfettered, primal passion.

  Back in the steaming Florida Glades, all seems lost when our striker Tommy Coyne staggers off the pitch and some flabby FIFA official refuses to let substitute John Aldridge on. Aldridge goes batshit. Manager Jack Charlton goes batshit. Fintan’s way beyond batshit, and I fear for the fate of the sixteen-inch TV.

  ‘I’m telling you, they want us out,’ he screams.

  Aldridge has to be forcibly restrained as he unleashes every obscenity known to mankind before a global audience of half a billion people.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ roars Fintan, jabbing his finger at me. ‘Don’t let any fucker walk all over you.’

  A possessed, demonic Aldridge is finally released into the fray and scores almost immediately; not with his left foot, or his right foot or his head, but out of sheer bloody-minded apoplectic rage.

  Fintan erupts as if exorcised.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I shout. ‘We’re still losing.’

  ‘Goal difference. That goal means we only need a draw against Norway to get through to the knock-out stages,’ he bellows in frothing disbelief, as if he’s just cracked relativity.

  I’d promised myself never to let events on a football pitch dictate my private life again. But Fintan’s assertion that I lack backbone followed by his Aldridge-inspired war cry has ignited that long-dormant fire in my belly.

  ‘Fuck it,’ I say to him. ‘She’s had almost a week. If she hasn’t finished it with this Charles fella by now, then we’re through.’

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ says Fintan, giving my shoulder a manly thrashing. ‘Now go get her.’

  I march out of there pumped, stoked, fists beating metaphorical chest. Poundland Hamlet my arse.

  The low evening sun burns holes through my squinting vision and squiffy resolve.

  ‘I’d better ring first, just in case he’s there,’ I instruct myself.

  A surly young female voice answers. It’s Lily, the posh goth, who Zoe insists is qualified to take care of Matt despite her stapled face, neck and unspecified nether regions.

  Zoe must be out, gorging on culture with Chuck, making up for those famine years with philistine me. I visualise pallid Lily in our sitting room, cowering from the sun, picking at her scabs, and recognise a glorious opportunity. I need to know if Zoe’s still seeing Charles, and how serious it is. With no leads, clues or anyone to ask, I decide to do what any desperate detective does in such circumstances: resort to forensics.

  I take a mini-cab to Haringey, making him stop up the street a little from our flat. I’m not sure why. Squeezing the key in my hand, I feel giddy, excited. I know exactly what I need to do.

  The key turns satisfyingly in the lock. At least Zoe hasn’t changed it. See, she is planning on having me back, one day. I walk in and tremble at the familiar smell. I next get a whiff of Zoe’s perfume and work hard to quell a full-scale palpitation.

  Goth horror is gassing on the landline. I squeeze the pips and press twenty quid into her protesting paw.

  ‘Now run along before I set some magnets on you, or a nice soapy flannel,’ I say, and she bolts.

  I stalk silently into Matt’s little room. He’s upside down in his cot, as usual, arse in the air, face scrunched into the mattress. Something’s different, but I just can’t put my finger on it. Then I realise; she’s had his hair cut for the first time. My God! This was something we’d planned to do together, at that place in Crouch End where they take a photo and charge by the hair. How could she just press on ahead and do this without me?

  I place my hand on his hot little back; how I miss the feel of him, his honeyed smell and sing-song chatter. But she’s left us both floating in a sort of emotional Limbo.

  No more. Decision-time is nigh.

  ‘Don’t worry, Matty,’ I whisper. ‘Daddy’s coming home soon.’

  I head into our old bedroom high on a sort of fatalistic glee. There’s no turning back now. Time for Acting DC Lynch to find out the truth.

  I switch on the bedroom light, head for her knicker drawer. I know it will take real bottle for me to give her an ultimatum about us, bottle I just don’t possess. That kind of steel can only be forged from more hurt. I want to hurt. Bring on the hurt.

  I riffle gently through some familiar, workaday panties. Then my hand and heart stop at a black, raunchy, see-through thong. I hold the box-fresh garment in the palm of my shaking hand. She never wears stuff like this for me. I rummage some more and find a white lace baby-doll nightie, see-through save for tiny little pink flowers. That Pixies’ lyric blazes through my mind: ‘You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me.’ I marvel at the pretty feminine gloss on such an ugly, black betrayal. But it clears things up. It empowers me. I want more.

  Heart pumping in my ears, I turn my attention to the laundry basket. Not far from the top, a pair of black lacy knickers, one of Zoe’s raunchier numbers I used to peel off myself. ‘Weekend pants’, as we jokingly called them. Except, judging by the state of them, they’re now getting a good work-out on Thursday nights too.

  It’s then that I spot the boxer shorts. His boxer shorts. In our laundry basket. I stagger a little, my heart flapping like a trapped bird. He was in our bed. Last night. The sheer scale of the violation shatters me. I need to sit down, but I can’t bring myself to sit on the bed – our bed – not now they’ve been in it.

  My God has Matt seen them? Does he jump in between them in the mornings like he used to with us? A base, primeval, intolerable hurt scorches through me. I put a hand against the wardrobe to steady myself, taking long, deep breaths. Everything inside me pulses out of time.

  Well, at least her fanny’s better, I console myself as I wobble down the stairs. I grab a bottle of red from the top of the fridge. I down it fast. It fails to numb the shock. I go in search of more. All I can find is a bottle of rosé in the fridge, a quarter down. ‘Oh Zoe, you’re sooo restrained,’ I mumble as I fill a pint glass. ‘Well, I’ve fucking paid for it. And I’m still paying for you,’ I remind the house.

 
I’m busy mentally listing all the gross injustices she’s brought down upon me when the key rattles in the front door. I meet her in the hallway. Thank Christ he isn’t with her, or one of us would be up on a murder charge tonight. She stops dead. I wave an accusatory rosé bottle under her nose. ‘You said you’d finish it, and you haven’t!’

  She eyes the bottle warily.

  ‘Not the rosé! Your affair!’

  She barges past me towards the kitchen. I turn to follow.

  I feel ribs crack, bend open, hatred spewing out. My turn to administer some home truths; I want her to hurt badly.

  ‘Why have you done this to me? To Matt? Why are you so unhappy? What the fuck do you want, Zoe? Explain it to me. Right here, right now.’

  She spins around, eyes wild.

  ‘Maybe I’d prefer to be with someone who doesn’t drink themselves into a stupor every single night, you know, someone with plans and ambitions?’

  ‘I have plans and ambitions. I can quit drinking.’

  ‘Maybe it’d be better for Matt not to be around someone who keeps getting fired and who thinks he speaks to the dead. And maybe it’d be better for Matt to have a dad who’s not going to drop dead suddenly when he’s a teenager, because both you and I know there’s a very real chance that might happen.’

  She’s gone straight for the jugular, the one thing I’ve been too scared to confront. My heart’s banging like a couple of dustbin lids. I can’t breathe.

  Zoe’s gasket has blown. ‘That thing that killed your mum in the end, you haven’t even gone to get it checked out. Well, have you? How unfair is that on me? On Matt? I keep asking you to go and you just ignore me.’

  ‘Well funnily enough, Zoe, I’ve been fairly preoccupied dealing with Mam’s death. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to start coping with my own possibly imminent passing yet. Now had I known you were going to use it as a reason to cheat on me …’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  I snort, in a slightly more demented way than I’d planned.

  I fix her with my meanest Clint squint: ‘If you really loved me, a thing like that wouldn’t matter. You don’t see the husbands and wives of cancer victims swinging in the hospital car park, do you?’

  ‘God you make it sound so … sordid. It really isn’t like that at all.’

  ‘What is it like then, Zoe? I’m clearly a bit slow on the uptake here. Explain to me what it’s really like?’

  ‘I told you when we first met that I’d always put Matt first, and you accepted that. I’m trying to work out what’s best for him right now, because frankly I think he deserves better.’

  ‘Better than me, you mean? You say this now because presumably you think you’ve found someone better than me. Is that it? I seemed to fit the bill fine when no one else would take on a single mum and a child that wasn’t theirs. You think that was easy for me? And yet from day one I’ve treated Matt like my own. This is the thanks I get for it, you running about with this fucking Charles character.’

  ‘His name’s Chris.’

  ‘Jesus that was quick. What happened to Charles?’

  ‘There never was any Charles. It was an in-joke. We went to see that film Four Weddings and a Funeral. He reminds me of the main character Charles.’

  ‘Well whatever his name is, Matty doesn’t need a third dad in fourteen months. If you were really putting him first, you’d realise that.’

  ‘It won’t be his third dad,’ she says quietly, avoiding my eyes now and staring at some faraway floor. ‘It’s his first dad.’

  Her head doesn’t move but her frightened eyeballs peer up to find mine.

  ‘Matthew’s dad, Chris, is back.’

  I lose all feeling. Life loses all meaning. I’m falling off the planet and there’s no one to save me.

  ‘You can’t just take Matt away from me like that. You can’t …’

  My bloodless head swoons. In the eerie strangled silence, her face morphs in and out of focus.

  ‘You can’t,’ I hear my last breath hiss, before my body sheds all of its feeling. Not now, cataplexy. Not now.

  Too late. I turn to liquid and pour to the floor. Any extreme emotion can trigger it, even a joke. My neurological fuse box short-circuits and, pop, everything stops functioning. I’ve had it since my teens, a side-effect of the insomnia and sleep paralysis.

  A firework explodes inside my head. My eyes pop open to the tiled floor and the sound of her snivelling. I’m a useless puddle of bones and flesh, but I manage to look up, see her cry and it feels good.

  She stalks off and I collect my limbs.

  I grab my pint of rosé off the sideboard and take a long sour mouthful.

  All hope is lost now. I know that.

  Yet I feel strangely elated. Released. I realise something – it’s the hope that kills you. The hope that the horse you’ve just plunged all your money on will be first past the post. Ask any serious punter and they’ll tell you – when that horse loses, their gut reaction is relief. Once the money has gone, the hope has gone. You’re free.

  I’ve seen it in the job. People waiting for a missing loved one to walk through the door, when we all know in our hearts that they’re dead. It’s not the tragedy that destroys these people, it’s the futile hope.

  Zoe could never understand why finding the body means so much to relatives in a murder case. I tried to make her see – it’s so they can bury their child, and their futile hopes with it. It’s a release. Acceptance. The last part of DABDA.

  I raise my pint of rosé to the fridge magnet photo of our family trip to Brighton, toast the woman who just trampled my heart into so many pieces that it can never be repaired, and bury our relationship.

  Chapter 25

  Arsenal, North London

  Saturday, June 25, 1994; 09.00

  ‘I’m not letting you mope about in here all day,’ says Fintan, yanking open my bedroom curtains. ‘And, don’t forget, you’ve an appointment with Crimewatch’s most unlikely tipster, DC Neil Rooney.’

  I’d completely forgotten about calling Rooney yesterday. He’s the officer who, six years ago, complained to Crimewatch that the Nathan Barry murder squad was so focussed on John Delaney that they were ignoring other ‘good’ suspects.

  I sit up, hunt around for my mobile. ‘I’ll call him up and cancel.’

  ‘No you won’t,’ says Fintan, waving my phone in his hand. ‘You need to keep busy and I’m coming with you.’

  ‘What are you doing with my phone?’

  He sniggers and frowns at the same time.

  ‘She’s got back with Matt’s dad. Can you believe it?’

  ‘I know,’ says Fintan. ‘Forget about her. She wasn’t your type anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean, you know?’

  ‘You came crashing into my room last night. Remember? It was all very dramatic. I had to take your phone off you because you kept trying to call her, then her parents. You kept asking me to look into this Chris St. John Green guy, find any skeletons in his cupboard, which I thought was ironic, bearing in mind the disdain you usually reserve for such scurrilous antics.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Sorry,’ I say but I don’t remember much after slamming her front door behind me. The last thing I heard was Matt crying out for me, almost as if he knew. ‘Dong! Dong!’ he called and I wailed along with him, all the way back to the Arsenal.

  ‘By the way, have you seen Dusko Popov anywhere?’ he asks, referring to his tiny bugging device.

  ‘No,’ I lie and he can tell.

  ‘You didn’t use it on Zoe did you?’

  ‘It’s under a table at the Harp bar in Croydon. At least that’s where I left it on Monday. ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘John Delaney and Phil Ware took me there for a drink.’

  ‘Five days ago? Why the hell haven’t you gone back to get it?’

  ‘Gary Warner said he’d break my legs if he ever saw me again. Don’t worry it’ll still be there. They haven’t cleaned that place in centuri
es.’

  ‘Right,’ he says, shaking his head and checking his watch. ‘Let’s go see DC Rooney first. I’ll pop into the Harp on the way back and retrieve it. If it’s still there.’

  ‘It’ll be there. And you don’t have to babysit me, Fintan. I’m okay, honestly.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘But this Rooney character sounds fascinating. You don’t get many cops breaking rank like that.’

  Like DI Lambert last week, Rooney insists on meeting us at the murder scene.

  ‘I’ve checked Rooney out,’ says Fintan. ‘He’s a bit of a maverick. Not afraid to take on bosses or kick up a fuss. He’s paid the price though. He’s still a DC despite being a very good detective.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s bizarre, him calling up Crimewatch like that?’

  ‘I’ve never heard anything like it before. He wasn’t even on the Nathan Barry murder squad, he just attended the scene on the night, so I’m not sure how seriously we can take it.’

  We park behind the pub, right where Nathan did six years ago. Before we go in through the rear entrance, we take a look through a window. Rooney’s inside, half a Guinness down and it’s not yet 11.15am.

  ‘Amazing how many mavericks are alkies,’ says Fintan. ‘Nothing like a permanent banging hangover to make you bolshie.’

  I introduce myself, then Fintan as a mature student shadowing me on work experience, which makes both of them bristle. Rooney’s a Dubliner, so we connect immediately over Ireland’s World Cup exploits and the furore at home about new, stricter drink-drive laws.

  ‘What people don’t understand is that drinking and driving to the rural Irish is like guns to the Americans,’ says Rooney. ‘Despite the odd tragedy, they see it as a sort of birth right. Now, phones on the table please, gents, and batteries out.’

  We obey. ‘Why the secrecy?’

  ‘I get a police pension. I don’t want anything changing that. And this case is riddled with snakes.’

  ‘So, you were first on the scene here, on the night of Nathan’s murder?’

  ‘I was first CID on the scene. There were a couple of uniforms flapping about panicking. One of them had never seen a dead body before.’