The Dead Tell Lies: an absolutely gripping mystery thriller

by J. F. Kirwan

  She eyed him a moment. ‘You’re a psychologist?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It never works between psychologists, you know that, don’t you?’

  He’d been divorced from Jennifer for two years. ‘I take people apart, you put them back together. Maybe we’re the exception that breaks the rule.’

  ‘Or proves it,’ she shot back, then shook her head, as if trying to clear it. Greg was momentarily mesmerised by her tousled hair dancing.

  ‘Well, you’re right about backlash, but it’s not the woman. I just broke up with a complete prick.’ She put her hands on her hips, which by sheer coincidence was where he wanted to put his hands. ‘Got any dark stories?’ she asked. ‘I kind of need that right now.’

  ‘If it’s darkness you want, I’m your guy.’

  She scrutinised him. ‘One drink. No names, no cheesy or awkward moments, and definitely no exchange of numbers. Deal?’

  He’d listened carefully to her intonation in that last sentence, the curve and uptick on the last word. Like a ski jump.

  ‘Deal.’

  The lift door opened with a ping. Maggie Moore stepped out and walked straight towards him. A portly, middle-aged woman with greying hair, she was known as the Queen of Hugs, as she not only counselled members of the public, but also the counsellors working under her. As usual with Greg, though, she gave him an unsatisfying handshake that almost left his hand before their palms had traded flesh. She’d never believed he deserved Kate. Yet she had always been straight with him and had told him exactly how she felt. At the wedding, no less. Nice sentiment. Unbelievably crap timing for a counsellor.

  She gestured to a small conference room. He wasn’t sure why they weren’t meeting in her office, and he wasn’t going to ask. Her business, after all. They sat down across a conference table from each other. This was slightly unusual for a counsellor, as the positioning was mildly aggressive, or at least adversarial. As if to reinforce it, she leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingers tucked inside loose fists.

  ‘What can I do for you, Greg?’

  ‘I need to ask you some questions, Maggie. I just want to make it clear from the start that I’m here in a professional capacity.’

  No overt reaction. No retort, either, such as ‘Then you should have made an appointment or at least warned me’. She knew how it worked, knew how he worked. Surprise was part of his process. She was good, though. He’d once told Kate that maybe Maggie should have worked for his side.

  ‘I’m listening,’ she said, wearing her friendly-aunt face, a faint smile on her unpainted mouth. She never wore make-up, not even at the wedding.

  ‘In the six months before she was killed…’ Greg paused involuntarily, then collected himself, ‘was there anything unusual in Kate’s behaviour?’

  ‘We went through all this a year ago, Greg. The answers haven’t changed.’

  ‘The question has, or at least its context.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘We no longer think The Dreamer killed her. Someone else may have murdered her, and made it look like The Dreamer’s handiwork.’

  She stared at the table, but said nothing, her faint smile a distant memory. She looked away for a moment, just a moment. But it was enough for Greg. There was something there, a crack in the facade. He needed to widen it before she sealed it off.

  ‘And he’s just killed again,‘ he said.

  The crack sealed. He’d overplayed it. Her professional smile didn’t return, because what he’d said was grave, but whatever she’d thought in that fleeting second had been locked away again.

  He predicted how the rest would go. A fruitless tennis match of questions and pat answers. They had, after all, done this before, a year ago, and not just him, but two detectives including Donaldson, who took no shit from anyone and was a walking lie detector.

  The silence lingered while Greg considered his options. One was full frontal attack, to stand up and tell her to her face that she was hiding something, in which case this would end very quickly, and he’d never find out what she knew. No one would. He had to play smarter. Yet option two wasn’t easy for him.

  The silence lingered, growing stale. Maggie showed no sign of unease. Like him, she could play this game all day long, though no doubt after a short while her secretary would call her to an important meeting. But the delay wasn’t a tactic on his part. He was simply having a hard time saying what he needed to say. She raised her eyebrows and took a deep breath, about to end their meeting. It was now or never. He let down his guard, became just Greg, a guy with problems, like everyone else in the world. She was already standing.

  ‘I tried to kill myself on Monday evening,’ he said, hearing the wavering instability in his voice.

  There was a short delay while she processed, probably deciding whether this was a ploy on his part, but she sat down again and shifted into caring mode.

  ‘You should talk to one of my people.’

  ‘I’m talking to you.’

  ‘You know that’s not a good idea. Things between us have never been–’

  ‘Russian Roulette, Maggie. I pulled the trigger twice, was about to pull it a third time when the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Greg!’

  He’d never heard her swear. He guessed it was displaced emotion. Maggie had loved Kate like a daughter.

  ‘Kate would never have wanted–’ she began.

  ‘Then why did she say it? At our wedding?’ He’d never understood that, deep down. Her exact words, after the ceremony, in a mock toast: Till Russian Roulette doth us part. He predicted Maggie’s reply.

  ‘It was a joke, the champagne talking, The Deer Hunter was her favourite movie.’ She got up, walked towards the frosted window where the morning sun was trying to break through London’s cloud cover. ‘But you’re right. She should never have said it.’

  Validation, from Maggie-bloody-Moore of all people. She went to the door, opened it. ‘A pot of coffee, Karen, two cups. And break out the cookies, the good ones.’ She closed it again.

  Maggie sat down heavily, at the head of the table, so she was at a right angle to him. Where she should have been from the start.

  ‘All right, Greg, we do this, but off the books, neither one of us using our tools. Can you agree to that?’

  ‘If you tell me what you were thinking five minutes ago.’

  She leaned forward again, palms flat on the table top. ‘I can’t, Greg. But I will give you something if it stays just between you and me. Not Donaldson, or anyone else.’

  ‘This is a fresh murder case, Maggie. I’m convinced he’ll kill again.’

  ‘And I’m convinced that what I’m considering telling you has nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Then why tell me anything?’

  ‘Because I know how it works. It may lead you somewhere else, to finding the killer.’

  ‘And you think it will help me with my shooting problem?’

  She made a face, leaned back. ‘I always told Kate you were a dark horse, not in the usual sense, more like a rider for the apocalypse. You work with serial killers, you go inside twisted minds. You speak their language.’ Her voice grew teeth. ‘Do you really think you can come out clean and wholesome again?’

  ‘Someone has to do it,’ he said, knowing what he’d said was lame.

  Maggie slammed a palm down on the table. ‘I saw the photos of Kate, Greg.’ She was shouting, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘You think I don’t miss her? And, when I say what I’m about to say, it’s breaking every principle I’ve been trained to uphold, and I’m sorry for saying it because it’s not logical, not necessarily true, and it can’t be unsaid. But it’s how I feel: It’s your fault! If it wasn’t for your damned job, I really think this would never have happened.’

  He stared at her. He felt he’d been shot, not with a bullet, but with an arrow, because it doesn’t pass through you, and you can’t rip it out without tearing a chu
nk out of yourself. Was she right? Was it true?

  The door opened. The receptionist, Karen, scuttled in with a tray. Maggie stood up, faced the window, and pointed behind her to the table. Karen must have heard shouting – if not the words, the raw emotion – from her boss. She scurried back out again without a word.

  Neither of them spoke for a while. Greg poured coffee for them both. He broke off a piece of caramel cookie and dunked it in his coffee, let it dissolve in his mouth, then washed it down.

  He broke the silence. ‘Interesting anti-suicide counselling technique, by the way.’

  Maggie came back to the table and stirred her coffee noisily with a spoon, though she’d added neither milk nor sugar. She plonked a cookie into it and then ate the whole thing quickly. She wiped her mouth on a handkerchief.

  ‘We all have our off-days.’ Her voice was back to normal. ‘Besides, that wasn’t the worst of it.’

  He tried to keep it light. ‘That was your warm-up line?’

  Her face grew wrinkles, and suddenly she looked older without being any wiser. Someone defeated by life, by people never living up to her expectations. She reached across the table and took his hand.

  Which was a first.

  He waited for it. How bad could it be, after everything else that had happened in the past year and just recently, and after what she’d just said.

  Maggie grew tense, withdrew her hand. ‘I’m sorry, Greg, there’s no easy way to say this.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Kate was having an affair.’

  10

  The wallpaper, as they called it, in Evidence Room 3B, had changed. Photos of Fergus were now plastered to the right of Kate. The leader-lines were few between Fergus and the rest of the patchwork. But that wasn’t what Greg was staring at. It was a photo of himself, Greg Adams, above and to the right of Kate, and above and to the left of Fergus, with lines to both of them. It made sense. He’d been the last person to see Fergus alive – correction, the last but one. He wasn’t there as a suspect. Not even necessarily a person of interest. Still, it jarred him.

  He’d never appeared on an evidence board before.

  Donaldson had already called him earlier about it. Finch wanted him off the case, in any capacity. Greg could see her point, as, of course, could Donaldson. Greg had said he had some new evidence. Donaldson had said it had better be good. Which was why Greg was here now, trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat before the door to room 3B was permanently locked out of his reach.

  It was late. Or very early. He took his watch off when working in here, because time wasn’t a useful marker. Insight or inspiration could come in a flash, after hours, days, or weeks. Or never. He thought of Kate, then stopped the thought dead in its tracks, because of what Maggie had told him. He knew the coping strategy well enough. Denial and anger were the first two stages, but he felt neither. Numb? No. Hollow. He’d gutted himself over her death and then some, due to his guilt about not being there when it had mattered most. He’d almost put a bullet in his brain, only to find out… He seemed to have skipped denial. Where was anger?

  Actually, there was plenty, stoking his cold fire back into life. But not about Kate or whoever the other guy had been – Maggie wouldn’t disclose it, though she’d said enough about him to make Greg believe he worked for her organisation. She’d said it would jeopardise his career. Recently there had been a spate of illicit work-based affairs, tried and convicted in the tabloids, a spin-off from the #MeToo campaign. In Maggie’s organisation, all staff contracts stipulated no sexual liaisons with colleagues. So, whoever it was, if – when – it came out, he’d face a disciplinary committee, and probably be forced to resign, to limit the reputation damage to the firm. Maggie, like any CEO, had a Board to deal with. But until that moment came, she’d try to protect him. Maggie’s employees were like children to her.

  Greg had made no promises, and Maggie knew full well he’d have to tell Donaldson sooner or later – sooner in fact, because there was a chance the guy knew something, possibly a detail that would seem insignificant to him but not to the investigators. And at the end of the day, the secret lover of a murdered woman was always a suspect, even if he had a cast-iron alibi. According to Maggie, the guy had been out of the country at the time.

  He glanced back to his own photo, and the full realisation hit him. He, too, would have to be treated as a suspect in Fergus’s murder. His mind did the uncomfortable maths: if Fergus knew something about Kate’s murder, and Greg might be suspected of killing Fergus, and Kate was having an affair… Shit! It was quite a leap, but Greg realised he could somehow be linked to his own wife’s murder. Obviously not the actual murder, because he’d been elsewhere, but as an accomplice. He thought back to that night, to what The Divine had said to him. No one else, not even Donaldson, had properly heard what he’d said to Greg.

  Wrong place.

  He wanted to put The Divine up there on the board. Somehow he’d known what was going to happen. But he was tucked away in a psychiatric hospital in a deep coma, old age slowly claiming him. Zero leads on The Divine, zero connections to known felons or practically anybody.

  He got up, made himself a coffee, and stared at the board. He wondered who exactly had put the new work up there, Finch or Matthews? No doubt he’d see them in the morning. But they were going to get a surprise when they arrived. He’d put it off long enough. It lay there before him on the table, a stack of six cases of those he’d helped put away, in tan folders held together with string. Daytime nightmares, just a loosely tied knot away.

  Jennifer had said it must be personal: either to do with him or Kate. The Kate angle hadn’t led anywhere useful yet, so he had to explore the other option. Revenge would be the most obvious motive, linked to somebody he’d helped put away. Maybe a relative, or just a sick admirer. But for sure it was someone who had killed before, because The Dreamer-copycat killing had been so professional. A new spider on the scene, one that had evaded police radar up till now.

  He stared down at the batch of files marked ‘SSK’: Signature Serial Killers. Most serial killers didn’t care that much how they killed. It could be random, whatever was at hand. But in the past decade there had been a new, increasing trend, first noticed in the US and then in the UK. Serial killers who followed a distinct modus operandi or MO. The way they killed their victims was more ritualistic. Rickard had once even applied the word ‘artistic’, in an attempt to fathom their motivation. Whereas most serial killers could literally get away with murder, because they were so unpredictable and their targets so random, SSKs had more chance of being tracked down. Which was where Greg had come in. He’d brought six of them to justice.

  Opening up each file, he laid the mugshots on the table in case order. His very own ‘Hall of Fame’, as Kate had called it. His evidence-base for reinstating the death penalty for serial killers, as he thought of it. None of them would ever see freedom. None of them ever should, because if they did, they would kill again for sure. ‘Killing is an acquired taste’, the first one had told him. ‘A rush, nothing like it’, another had said, ‘The ultimate power over someone, rendering you godlike’. And those were the lucid ones. The others were more twisted, living in their personal worlds where killing was necessary, a means to some dreamed-of calling. Several didn’t even think of it as killing. Instead they were saving people’s souls, usually by transforming them.

  He pinned The Reaper to the empty wall opposite the official board, the nickname bestowed by the media on account of the scythe-like blades he’d used on his victims’ necks. His modus operandi was surprise. His parents had been killed in a car crash when he’d been a young boy, after a birthday trip to McDonald’s. He’d been in the back of the car, trapped in his kid’s seatbelt and relatively unhurt. He’d had to endure watching his parents bleed out from neck wounds before anyone arrived on the scene. The Reaper liked to relax his victims first, usually by telling them they’d won a cash prize, and then, in mid-sentence, he would whip out two razor-thin blades a
nd slash through their carotids and larynx – it was important they couldn’t speak. He’d watch the life pour from their veins. Sometimes he held their hands right before the end, as he had with the only survivor the day he was caught, literally red-handed. During the subsequent interview with Greg, he’d stated it was the only time he was at peace.

  At least his victims went quickly.

  Not so with number two, The Surgeon, who dismembered his victims. Greg took a thick felt-tip pen and drew a big cross over The Surgeon’s face, because he was dead, killed in a prison canteen fight, so Greg couldn’t interview him. Nevertheless he pinned the photo to the wall just in case the new spider was a relative or a fan.

  Number three, The Painter, was very much alive in Reedmoor Mental Hospital’s special ward for the criminally insane. The Painter used to dress as a priest, seduce young men at gay bars, take them home and murder them. Then he’d paint them in scenes reminiscent of certain contemporary artists.

  Number four, The Torch, liked to burn people alive, but had perished in a fire, which many saw as not-so-rough justice. Greg put a big red cross over his face as well.

  Number five was The Gravedigger. Dead, killed during his arrest. Another red cross.

  Number Six was The Divine, also in Reedmoor. Greg hesitated a moment then drew another red cross.

  Greg pinned all six photos on the wall, then rearranged them so that The Surgeon, The Torch, The Gravedigger and The Divine – the ones already dead or mentally defunct – were to the left of the other two still pacing their cells at Her Majesty’s pleasure in Reedmoor: The Painter and The Reaper.

  Since they were behind bars, and had been when Kate was murdered, it had to be someone else on the outside. There were three main types of candidate: somebody related, or someone who knew the serial killer personally, were the two most likely candidates, and the easiest to track down. Donaldson’s team would take care of those lines of inquiry, which required solid detective work and an experienced sleuth’s instincts. Finch, for example.