31
Let’s get one thing straight – I’m not a ‘psychic cop’. I can’t predict the future. God knows if I could, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in right now.
Nor do I possess some macabre ability to contact the dead, and I feel nothing but contempt for those chancers who claim that they can. You know who you are … psychics, mediums, men of the cloth.
But something’s not right. Every time I get close to the body of a murder victim, they appear to me in the middle of the night. I’d like to say they turn up in my dreams. That would neatly explain it away. But they don’t. They appear when I’m awake, and engage with me. At first, it scared me half to death. Until I realised they were trying to tell me something.
They’re always trying to tell me something.
It’s got to be my subconscious mind, right? Presenting clues to me in a novel fashion? To a devout sceptic like me, anything else is unthinkable.
I told three people about my ‘visits’ from the other side. My brother thought I’d ‘lost it’. My shrink almost destroyed my fledgling cop career. My ex-girlfriend tried to kill me.
So I’m not telling anyone else. If this cursed ‘gift’ helps me crack more murder cases, then I’ll reap that benefit in secret.
No one else needs to know about my occasional Dance with the Dead.
Manor House, North London
Saturday, April 10, 1993; 13.30
The Woodberry housing estate’s basketball courts heaved, the thudding of balls and squealing of trainers sounding like a massacre at a school for mice. A car alarm’s shrill whistle pinged about the tired old tower blocks, like the yelps of a seagull strapped to a high-speed propeller. A souped-up, blacked-out Ford Escort growled past, its drum ’n’ bass heart spreading Kiss FM and fresh defiance.
As I got close to my car, two large men in dark clothes appeared. One leaned against my driver’s door while the other walked towards me.
‘Donal Lynch?’
‘Not me,’ I lied, veering sharply to my left and taking a route between two rows of parked cars.
The car leaner read it well, heading me off where the final two vehicles stood off, face to face, like duelling cowboys.
So did we …
Behind him, a large, blacked-out jeep pulled up. The back door ghosted open.
‘Get in,’ his strong Dublin accent insisted, and I found myself hoping to God this was the IRA. At least I had some leverage with the boyos.
But the acid sizzling my gut told me these were Jimmy Reilly’s grunts, and that he’d dreamed up something diabolical for them to do to me today.
One week earlier …
Arsenal, North London
Saturday, April 3, 1993
My drunken mistake hadn’t been falling asleep fully clothed – God knows I’d survived that often enough – but forgetting to remove the pager from my front left trouser pocket. Its sudden vibration sent an electroconvulsive blast through my piss–filled nads, forcing my unconscious mind to perform a urethral emergency stop. I woke to the sound of my own desperate yelps.
‘Tom, Brownswood Red-Light Zone N4 – Check MO’ flickered the blunt paged message. My clock radio’s Martian digits glowered 0754. Below me, a stricken wine bottle spewed red across the cheap laminate. I saluted Shiraz, my fallen night nurse, for delivering almost three whole hours of sleep.
My grudging slumber had been broken only once, by a recurring nightmare that hadn’t afflicted me for weeks. Why did it come back last night? Was he in some sort of danger?
To banish my angst, I flicked on the radio.
Lost in the Milky Way
Smile at the empty sky and wait for