Dance With the Dead

by James Nally

  Her mouth attempted to smile but was overtaken by a different emotion, one I couldn’t read. When her hand shot up to her face and a tear broke through, I feared that my initial misgivings had been correct after all … she didn’t want there to be an ‘us’.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whimpered. I felt myself starting to go, so got up and fled to the bar.

  Fuck it, I told myself on the way, for once in my life I’m just going to go for this and give it my very best shot.

  As we left the pub and faced off outside an Athena poster shop, it felt a little awkward – but then pre-planned spontaneity often does. Behind her, in the shop window, the iconic ‘topless muscular man holding a baby’ poster caught my eye.

  That could be me, I thought, if I worked out for a few months and got a chest wax.

  Next to it hung that famous old photo of workmen having lunch on a steel girder dangling high above the Manhattan skyline. I now knew how they felt. My forehead suddenly weighed heavy from all the red wine. I’d need a top-up soon to avoid a full-on splitter.

  ‘I meant it when I said thanks Donal.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For not being shocked or judgemental or well, disappointed I suppose.’

  ‘I’m actually flattered that you told me, you know, so soon. It means you’re serious about us.’

  ‘And you’re not running to the hills …’

  ‘I usually ravish a woman first, then split.’

  ‘Wow. Do you often smooth talk your way out of romantic encounters?’

  ‘All the time.’

  She leaned in and kissed me hard. My heart felt like a shaken bottle of cola mercifully unscrewed. I’d never had a girl take the lead before. I liked it, and decided she’d have to be the one to end this kiss too.

  When her mouth smiled against mine, the yellows and reds of Holborn blurred and melded into the glow of a barely dared-for dream. Zoe and me, why not? My brain embalmed the feeling for all eternity. No matter what else happened in my life, this would be making it into my deathbed clip show.

  As I glided out of Arsenal tube station I heard myself whistle, then realised it was match night and stopped. After all, post soccer game in the UK is a time when any spontaneous show of emotion can result in violent death. I zigzagged through the braying drunks, chippy tat hawkers and onion-reeking burger vans towards Drayton Park and the final leg of my victory parade.

  ‘She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I sang as I fumbled with the gate. ‘Drunk on booze or love, who can tell?’ I bantered the front door.

  I headed straight to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Shiraz, grabbed a glass and trotted back to the sentry point to my insomnia – the sitting room couch.

  I stopped dead at the sitting room door. A figure lay there grunting in the dark, mummified by blankets and whiskey. I squinted hard into the amber streetlight until the heaving lump took on human form.

  I dropped the bottle on the floor and staggered back.

  ‘What the fuck is he doing here?’

  I sat in my bedroom’s chilly gloom, conscious hangover incoming. And, after my earlier handling howler, Wineless in Arsenal.

  The more I speculated on what had brought my Brit-hating Da to London, the less sense it made – unless he was sinking an arms dump for the boyos …

  And why did he have to stay here?

  I fantasised briefly that Mam had thrown him out, but I knew her generation of Irish women never kicked out their men, no matter what they got up to. Dads almost always owned the house, and won the bread.

  With divorce forbidden by law in Catholic Ireland, women had no rights. Only men could afford to leave … for richer, for poorer indeed. Had Da now walked out on our mam? How many times had I fantasised that during my teens, when Councillor Michael Lynch heaped nothing but humiliation on us all with his very public yet disingenuous political stance of Pro-Life and Pro-IRA.

  Following Michael’s stated moral code logically, he’d be willing to die for an illegitimate foetus, but would happily kill any living ‘legitimate target’ for Ireland. These ‘legitimate targets’ included British soldiers, RUC policemen and anyone who provided goods or services to either. You know, normal people … us. Plumbers, electricians, mechanics, bakers, candlestick makers …

  They must have paid those milkmen in Belfast a bloody fortune.

  If the unaborted kids of ‘legitimate targets’ got in the way, as 500 or so had to date during ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, then so be it. Sacrifices have to be made in war. Omelettes, eggs and all that …

  Where he stood on aborting the foetuses of ‘legitimate targets’ remained unclear …

  During last year’s General Election in the Republic, Michael ran as Sinn Fein candidate in our home constituency of Laois/Offaly. ‘The ArmaLite and the Ballot Box’ had been one of their catchier slogans, making it clear that they were keeping both options open. It remains unique in political history as the only campaign promise to threaten physical violence against the electorate.

  Sinn Fein’s muddled take on the core principles of democracy earned Michael a paltry 432 votes – several thousand shy of his nearest rival – and cost him a hefty deposit. But even such a crushing public rejection of his core beliefs failed to detract from the singular high point of his doomed campaign.

  He told Fintan that the proudest day of his life had been when Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams travelled to Tullamore to canvass on his behalf. Dream-maker Gerry then topped this gesture by accepting Da’s invitation home for a bite to eat. Mam told me how her hands shook as she served them tea and Victoria Sponge, terrified that the latter might somehow offend.

  I needed to call Mam tomorrow, find out what the hell is going on.

  Michael’s strangled snores downstairs raged at the air like disgruntled ghosts. Whatever had brought him to our place tonight, I felt certain about two things: Fintan knew more than he was letting on, and he’d now put the three of us in grave danger.

  Wildly awake in the absence of wine, I tiptoed past my whiskey-wasted dad towards Aidan’s stash of hash.

  ‘Levity of any kind required,’ I thought plucking pot and papers from his trusty old tin and spiriting it all upstairs.

  In less than five hours’ time, I’d be shrinking beneath DS Spence’s pitiless scowl so I settled on a skinny single leafer, just to pumice my fraying edges.

  All night, my mind had laboured and ground like a knackered old cement mixer, turning over the same lumpen imponderables. What the hell had brought Da to London? Could I actually handle the responsibilities of being a stepdad? Why would Jimmy Reilly kill a skanky street ho like Valerie Gillespie and plant her hair on Liz Little? I banked a lungful, lay back on my bed and let the invasion of calm commence.

  I sense someone in the room, watching me. The air fizzes with the certainty of imminent violence. I can hear my breathing getting faster, my heart banging against my ribs.

  Had Da awoken to one of his whiskey rages, demanding to be violently expunged? Had he lumbered up here to reacquaint himself with his pathetic, punch bag of a son? I realised something startling recently … he’d never once touched me non-violently.

  ‘Da,’ I call, but it’s swallowed by the dense black. I try to move but my body’s rooted to the spot. Dread swallows me whole. This time, he’s come to do me real harm.

  A cold fluorescent light buzzes on and off, sending steam rising. I see what looks like the lid of a chest freezer open falteringly, reluctantly.

  A head rises up within the steam. The eyes are gone but I recognise Valerie Gillespie’s rim-lit blue profile. Up and up that head rises, revealing a severed neck that soon dangles directly above my face. She’s suspended by her long hair, so that her head swings in the wind, yet I feel and hear nothing. Suddenly, her head drops like a stone. Her hair stays where it is, blowing wildly now against my bedroom ceiling.

  I look down to see her bald head wobbling above the open chest freezer door. The blue light now seeps through her empty eye sockets
, buzzing, irregular.

  I can’t let that light go out.

  It gets weaker and weaker, flickers then buzzes off.

  ‘Hang on,’ I mutter to the empty bedroom, ‘I’ve never been anywhere near Valerie Gillespie’s dead body. What the hell is going on?’

  Chapter 14

  North London

  Tuesday, April 6, 1993; 07.40

  I set off for Holloway police station ridiculously early, determined to avoid that newly assembled domestic lynch mob of two. Striding fast somehow ground the cogs of my tired mind into action. They’d a lot of catching up to do.

  Firstly, I tipped my hat to Valerie Gillespie for her grandstand cabaret performance last night. I then wondered how in hell she’d reached me. Until now, murder victims had only ever ‘appeared’ to me after I’d been close to their dead bodies that same day. I derived some comfort from this … it gave me a certain level of control. If I avoided a fresh corpse, I couldn’t be tormented by its spirit. That was the deal.

  I’d never been anywhere near Valerie Gillespie’s corpse, fresh or otherwise. Nor would I ever be; she’d been dead now for four months and either buried or cremated. So what happened last night? A sickening thud of dread shook my guts. Surely the scope of my dubious ‘gift’ couldn’t be expanding? My sanity could barely cope with the old ‘arrangement’.

  I declared it time for a ‘logic amnesty’. It didn’t matter how Valerie had reached me, at least for now. What I needed to take on board were the clues she’d presented. I had to presume they were key to the identity of her killer.

  I then allowed my logic amnesty to dwell on another mystery … why had Liz and Valerie been so serene and measured during their ‘visits’? All my previous imposters ‘from the other side’ had been vengeful and violent.

  Then it clicked. Those ‘angels of rage’ had been killed in frenzied attacks lasting a matter of minutes. Each had fought back with all of their might. As their hearts pumped one last time, their fading brains had raged in blind, terrified furies. That’s how they’d entered the spirit world, before taking it out on me.

  Conversely, Liz and Valerie had suffered slow, painful demises. Their deaths had come as sweet blessed relief. They weren’t fighting at the end. Poor girls.

  Maybe they’d ditched the ‘slasher movie’ approach for another reason; I didn’t need shaking out of my scepticism any more. Although I hated myself for it, and wished it wasn’t happening to me, I now believed.

  Suddenly, I see myself in black tux and tails, stranded in the middle of a dancefloor packed with hollow-eyed, waltzing corpses, all dressed in white. I’m trapped, flustered. The odd one out. Too many couples are spinning past for me to bolt. I must wait for a girl to come free. I must accept a Dance with the Dead. It’s my only chance of escape.

  A corner shop’s newspaper rack snapped me back to the present. Sure enough, Valerie Gillespie’s murder had become newsworthy for the first time, now it could be linked to ‘the sensational slaying of rising TV star Liz Little’.

  I wondered how they’d gloss over Valerie’s sordid final months as ‘a desperate skank’, only to discover that they hadn’t bothered reporting any of that at all. Instead, they based the entire piece on two photos, taken well over a year ago, of the ‘surgically enhanced good-time girl on the arm of property magnate Phil Armstrong at a London society ball’.

  One article concluded with a single oblique reference to her months working the streets: ‘Following struggles with cocaine addiction, Valerie split with Armstrong late last year and vanished from London’s social scene.’

  The piece then niftily skewed back to the Little case, quoting a ‘co-star’ from The Bill delivering bereavement’s High Priestess of Inanity: ‘Only the good die young.’

  A supporting article quoted DS Spence ‘denying’ that a serial killer had murdered both women and was still out there, on the loose, hunting his next victim. It was a classic journalistic shakedown. As Fintan put it: ‘Believe nothing until it has been officially denied.’

  If Fintan can’t get someone in authority to confirm something, he makes them deny it. That gets the angle or accusation out there into the open, where it takes on a life of its own. ‘High Court Judge Denies Child Sex Allegations’, for example. Or ‘Politician Denies Plan to Raise Taxes’.

  Spence would never have mentioned a ‘serial killer’, had he not been forced to deny it. But now the genie had been released from the lamp, the prospect of a serial killer firmly planted into the public psyche.

  Spence then played further into their doom-mongering hands by warning London’s women ‘to use common sense, avoid walking alone at night and to remain vigilant at all times’.

  But the media didn’t have it all their own way. He held back the clues that connected both cases – Valerie’s hair at both scenes and the A3 batteries. He would have done this for numerous sound policing reasons. Firstly, he didn’t want to provoke a copycat killer to ‘get in on the act’. Secondly, it deprived the killer the pleasure of glorying in his own signatures. Thirdly, if these facts were known only to the actual killer and the men hunting him, they could use it later to trip him up.

  But who was that killer? Courtesy of my Liz Little apparition Saturday night and her non-appearance Sunday, I felt certain that her murder had to be connected to the Florentine Gardens Club. Perhaps lazily, I’d assumed Liz had been directing me towards Jimmy Reilly.

  Now that we knew one man killed both women, I needed to think again.

  The idea that Jimmy Reilly randomly picked up a crackhead streetwalker like Valerie, killed her, chopped her up and dumped her in a reservoir seemed, frankly, laughable. It just didn’t stack up.

  This left our mysterious Irish suspect, Robert Conlon. Perhaps he had some connection to the Florentine Gardens? Unless we tracked him down, we’d never know.

  I decided to forget about both ‘suspects’ for now and focus instead on potential leads in each case.

  With Liz Little, our best hope had to be identifying the mysterious ‘T’ who left that note of sympathy at her murder scene. Our only other outstanding clue came in the form of a microscopic fragment of red material found inside her head wounds. I wouldn’t have bothered with this had Liz not attempted to drown me in some mysterious metallic red substance Saturday night. Her message couldn’t have been clearer … bet on red.

  As for Valerie Gillespie, all I had to work with were the visuals from last night’s chilling hair ’n’ freezer-themed cabaret. At least one of her clues had been specific enough to pursue right away. I just needed a certain someone to help, so I stepped into a phone box and dialled a number I now knew by heart.

  ‘Guess who’s on the scrounge?’ I said.

  ‘I’m beginning to think you only love me for my lab.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll find a few other reasons to love you Zoe, eventually.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can help you with that particular request, detective.’

  ‘Well, for once, my other request is official and above board.’

  ‘That’s a shame. My boss isn’t in today. I prefer working undercover for you.’

  ‘Well, so long as you don’t mind being my secret little lab squirrel …’

  ‘Hey, that better not be a reference to my teeth.’

  ‘I could’ve said lab rat. Come on, girl. I’m working my arse off here!’

  ‘Okay, Mr Hot-shot Detective. Shoot.’

  ‘I need you to re-examine the exhibits recovered from the scene where Valerie Gillespie’s body was found, at the reservoir.’

  ‘Why didn’t you ask me last night?’

  ‘I only got the idea this morning. Long story. There was a torch and a transistor radio found in a twitching den. The forensics report says they were clean. What it doesn’t state clearly is whether they dusted the insides of these objects. Would they have done that, as a matter of course?’

  ‘What, you mean the component parts?’

  ‘No, the batteries, the bulb in the torch, a
nything that could have been inserted by hand.’

  ‘I’d like to say yes, Donal. But sometimes exhibits from cases that aren’t deemed top priority get delegated to less-experienced staff. I can make sure it gets done properly today.’

  ‘That’d be amazing, Zoe. Thank you. I just feel if I can offer up some fresh leads to Spence, make a good impression … well, you never know.’

  ‘Are you gonna mention the whole Reilly thing …?’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’ve got one shot to make an impression on Spence. You should tell him. It shows you’ve got initiative and desire. He’d be a fool not to snap you up.

  I tried Mam next. Her message on Saturday had to be connected to Da’s sudden appearance last night. When the answerphone clicked in I hung up and gave it ten minutes. Second time round, the machine’s piercing beep got straight through to my guts. She never went anywhere without Da. She can’t drive for God’s sake! So where the hell was she?

  Chapter 15

  Holloway, North London

  Tuesday, April 6, 1993; 09.15

  I asked for DS Spence at reception, hoping that my early arrival didn’t smack of desperation.

  Within seconds, I found myself jogging along a school-type corridor behind a bustling, generously mulleted woman who could’ve stunt-doubled for Mrs Doubtfire.

  As she gave the steep staircase bannister its sternest test yet, I gasped: ‘I thought I was early.’

  ‘As you’re here anyway, you may as well sit in on the briefing.’

  ‘Which briefing is this?’

  ‘The one about how to catch a serial killer.’

  ‘I didn’t realise we were looking for a serial killer?’

  ‘Two bodies in four months? Of course we are. But we can’t panic the public. And we don’t want the papers offering reward money because of all the chaos that caused last time round. So we don’t speak of it outside of this building. Understood?’