Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller (4 page)

I slipped the door open. The damp cold jolted me, injecting fresh will into my knotted veins. I dragged the two leaden hunks of meat, formerly known as legs, outside and closed the door quietly. I performed my paralytic can-can across the well-lit crazy paving, towards the lonely black shed, now looking a long thirty feet away. If I could just get to the shed, then round the corner into the black, no one would be able to see me. I could talk myself through this. Get my head together.

I made it to the middle of the crazy paving, then I couldn’t move my legs another inch. The paralysis had crept up to my hips. I was stuck, stranded under the hottest part of the outside security light, lucid but unable to walk. I felt real fear now. What was wrong with me? But I had to keep going. I couldn’t let anyone see me. Whatever was going on inside my head and body would pass. If I could just make it to that dark shed.

There was only one thing for it. I went all Sergeant Elias out of
Platoon
and dropped melodramatically to my knees, then frontwards onto my arms. Somehow, elbow after concrete-grinding elbow, I wormed my way across the dewy patio. I hoped to Christ no one was seeing this. I’d never, ever live it down.

I got to the shed and dragged myself to sitting, my elbows burning.

I bum-shuffled sideways into the shadows and sat there for I don’t know how long, frozen to the spot, crazy scenes unfolding in my mind. At one stage, I was running away from my own home, where I’d just stabbed someone. I felt myself run. I heard people coming after me, shouting, screaming, a flashing blue light, a police siren. Then, relief when I saw myself still rooted to the same spot, my hands planted against the shed wall.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when a blinding light criss-crossed my vision, scoring my sight. Next thing I knew, I was floating through a drifting starscape, arse-first like a breeched baby, slowly and in total silence. I found myself inside Eve’s bedroom, but somehow I was hovering a foot off the floor. I saw clearly the details of the room I knew so well. Across from me, illuminated light from the hallway lit the cracks around the closed bedroom door. Beside it, Eve’s clothes sat in a heap on the chair. I could see the top she wore that morning; the bank of photos of Philandering Frank on the wall; the headboard; the garish scarlet duvet cover; the bedside tables. On my side, the ashtray from Majorca, next to the lamp that refused to break no matter how many times we knocked it to the floor. On the far side of the bed blinked the clock radio. It read 01.09. My God, had I been outside for three hours?

The hallway door opened. Something glinted. It was Eve in her Viking outfit. ‘This is live!’ I thought. She pushed the door shut, placed her helmet and sword on the bedside table next to the clock radio and collapsed dramatically onto the bed. I realised all this was happening in total silence, yet I could tell she was crying.

I felt this overwhelming urge to go to her, to touch her, to put my arm around her shoulder. To say sorry.
Are you okay, Eve?
I said, but nothing came out. I knew it was hopeless, that I was trapped in some sort of sensory vacuum, there but not there. Here, but only in spirit.

The door to the hallway opened very slowly. First came yellow light, then a silhouetted head. I couldn’t make out who it belonged to.

Eve sat up on the bed with a start. I could tell she was asking who was there. She was telling the person to get out, leave her alone. I couldn’t hear her speak, but I could clearly read her body language.

The unidentified person didn’t leave, but shut the door carefully behind him and walked to the bed. I knew that strut, that side profile, that trilby hat. It was Choker Meehan.

Eve sat bolt upright on the bed, as still as a statue.

Choker gently took hold of her hands, sliding his right knee, then his left, onto the bed, so that they were planted between her pale, outstretched legs. He whipped off his hat, tossing it away like a frisbee towards the window. I was bursting to do something, but it was hopeless. Eve pushed back against the headboard defensively. Choker leaned forward, so he was nose to nose with Eve, his hands smothering hers.

He was saying something. Eve remained still, poised, defiant.

He placed his right hand on her left shoulder. ‘Eve,’ my shout was swallowed by black. I tried to lunge, but I was a fly trapped in an invisible web.

Now his right hand moved from her shoulder to the base of her skull, then to her pale neck. His other hand moved in under her cheek. His fingers spread round the back of her neck so that his thumbs sat twitching on her windpipe. ‘Eve, Eve, for fuck’s sake, Eve,’ I cried, but only my guts thrashed about.

Look after Eve for me,
Mo had pleaded into my eyes before she left.

Eve tried to turn her head away. He wouldn’t let her. She wriggled hard. He easily pushed her back on the bed underneath him, his left hand now moving up to cover her mouth, dwarfing her face.

I’m counting on you, Donal.

I went apeshit; screaming, thrashing, fighting with all my might. But no one could hear me. She had lost her fight and just lay there, her skirt above her waist, her white panties yanked to one side. He fiddled furiously with his trousers while I just hovered, in hell.

Of course, Mrs Daly.

He pounded now, rhythmically. His downward motion revealed the clock radio on the far side of the bed, its luminous green digits flipping casually to 01.13.

Except all our lives stopped dead right then, never to be the same again.

I woke to my own screaming voice, loud, desperate, primeval. I saw blood glistening on the pebbledash, the skin on my hands, minced. I was breathing hard but I still couldn’t lift my feet. Slowly, sounds formed. The nearby church bells clanged twelve times.

But it’s after one a.m. right? Why are they chiming midnight?

Trapped birds flapped and flailed inside my skull. A ball of nausea inflated my chest. I still had time to get back inside, to save Eve. I went to move but my legs stuck to the earth. I refused to believe I was gravity’s prisoner. I lurched forward; determined, incensed, but went into free fall through cold, streaking lights into dark, darker black.

I woke up in darkness, to an unfamiliar bed, my guts clanking like an out-of-tune bass.

Flash-frame images of Meehan forcing himself upon Eve flipped through my mind, a rolodex of horrors. I fought an aching neck to sit up. All hopes that it had been some sort of horrific nightmare fled when I saw my bandaged hands, remembering how I’d minced them against the shed’s pebbledash wall.

Far away, I could hear the click-clack of retreating footsteps and a swinging door. Shapes formed in the gloom. Weird patterns became curtains, closed around beds opposite. I hadn’t spent a night in hospital since I was a kid.

They’d left the curtains around my bed open, presumably to keep me under observation. I sensed someone watching me. Sure enough, a silhouette stood beyond the end of my metal bed, in the middle of the ward, as still as a corpse. I strained to see the face, but it was too dark.

‘Who are you?’ I said. The person didn’t move a muscle.

A current of unease zapped through me.

‘What do you want?’ I called.

The figure started moving towards me, slowly, silently, with intent.

I backed up against the metal frame of the bed, the cold steel reminding me I was awake. Still he came, steady, unflinching, unstoppable.

‘What do you want?’ I shouted.

The head tilted up to reveal coal-black pupils glistening inside caked white spots. Meehan’s bloodshot eyes glared hate.

I scrambled to get up, to fight. But I was frozen, helpless.

Those unblinking murderous eyes kept coming, closer, closer, until we were nose to nose. I felt his gloved hands on my throat, his putrid breath on my face.

He leaned all his weight on my neck until my chest caved in and my eyes bulged. My head pounded as dots bounced off the edges of my fading vision. My head drifted, I was floating off.

I knew this was it. I wanted the end.
Sorry, Eve.

Then screaming white light gored at my clenched eyelids. I thought: ‘Christ no, don’t tell me all that shit about God and heaven is true.’

Something made me defy the hot white needles and haul my eyelids open. Shapes formed. A face swooned and flickered, eventually settling to reveal Mum’s fretting smile. It was morning and I was alive. Relief overwhelmed me. Someone must have caught him, stopped him, in the nick of time.

‘Meehan tried to kill me,’ I croaked.

She tiptoed slowly to my left side, warily, uncertain. She squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt.

‘Shhh, don’t get yourself upset now, Donal. Try to relax,’ she said.

I defied her Vulcan death grip to sit up. I didn’t know who the man was to my right, but his snow-white, side-parted hair, fuzzy eyebrows, formal grey suit and hooked nose screamed cop, doc, lawyer; professional busybody.

My neck hurt and my throat burned when I swallowed. I wondered how close Meehan had come to finishing me off.

‘Eve?’ I gasped at Mum, desperate to know if she was okay; desperate to hear that what I’d seen last night wasn’t real, but some sort of absinthe-induced hallucination.

‘Take it easy,’ said Mum, shoulder-crushing again, ‘everything’s okay, love.’ I pulled away before she snapped my collarbone.

‘Everything’s far from okay.’ I jumped at the man’s guttural, knowing voice. I turned to him, confused.

His piercing blue eyes seemed to be searching inside my face: a cop, for sure. ‘We found you unconscious, having imbibed some sort of substance, no doubt illicit,’ he snapped. ‘I trust you won’t object to answering a few questions.’

‘Substance?’ I rasped. ‘What are you on about?’

As I spoke, the pieces clicked together. Absinthe alone couldn’t have done that to me. Choker, the fucker, had spiked me.

I told the cop about the weird green drink, the dead legs, the shed.

I sensed Mum shaking her head sadly. I couldn’t bear to look her way. Instead, my eyes met the nurse’s disgusted glare. What was her problem? Unwelcome, my eyes drifted back to the cop’s piercing blue sparklers.

I asked again: ‘Eve, is she okay?’

I sensed he was holding something back. I vowed there and then that if Meehan
had
attacked her, I’d kill him myself.

‘Well,’ said the cop, ‘you were out of it, so I guess that rules you out as a potential suspect, or indeed as a witness.’

Suspect? Witness? Christ, no. Say it didn’t happen. Say what I saw wasn’t real …

The cop carried on, measured, enjoying his moment, even producing one of those black flip notebooks you see only in cop shows.

‘We are investigating a very serious crime,’ he began.

‘What the fuck happened?’ I felt like screaming.

‘Someone dialled 999 from the house phone, but refused to give their name. Medics removed you from the garden of the house at 01.52 a.m.’

‘Removed …?’ I couldn’t help picturing the scene; a bloodied and half-frozen Hunter S. Thompson, flat out on a stretcher, hands covered in blood, the glasses skewwhiff on my face. I was sure to hear every last detail soon, if I could ever face them again.

The cop went on, impassively: ‘You were unconscious. An officer at the scene found the bottle of absinthe. It’s gone to Dublin for tests but my bet is it’d been mixed with some sort of tranquilliser or cannabis, possibly both.’

He stopped for effect. I nodded gravely, because I felt that’s what he wanted me to do. Finally, he continued.

‘Whatever substance was in that drink caused a rapid drop in your blood pressure, which explains why you felt paralysed. The good news is, there’s no long-term damage.’

Good news, but not the news I most wanted to hear, so I nodded rapidly.

He got to his feet and started pacing about the room, Poirot-style. The gobshite. Then his throaty ‘ahem’, and my mother’s averted gaze confirmed my worst fear: what I’d heard so far was merely the preamble to this morning’s Main Story. I swallowed hard. God, it hurt.

‘Look,’ said the cop, ‘I might as well tell you. Your girlfriend, Eve Daly …’

I shivered, froze.

‘She’s under arrest.’

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.

‘For stabbing Anthony Meehan to death.’

From somewhere deep, deep inside me spewed a hideous, cackling, panto-laugh. She did it. She nailed that fucker. My Viking!

The cop looked at me in shock, then disgust. ‘What’s so fucking funny, son?’ he spat. ‘There’s a young man downstairs in the basement on a slab.’

‘No, God, no, sorry,’ I said, ‘it’s just the shock.’

He turned to Mum and the nurse: ‘I’m not sure he’s in a fit state to hear any more,’ he said, pocketing his fancy notebook.

He turned back to me with a scowl: ‘I’ll be back to ask you more questions later.’ He flicked his top coat, matador-style, off the back of the bedside chair.

My mind flailed, trying to make sense of it all. Somehow she’d fought back. But how? She must have stabbed him with the Viking prop dagger. Self-defence of course. I’d seen him attack her. I’d seen the preamble to Meehan’s murder!

Or was that what I had seen? My mind recoiled at the insanity of the idea. Surely it must have been some sort of bad trip? A drug-induced nightmare out of the dark corners of my twisted, paranoid mind? Or maybe, while I was lying here out of it, I’d heard them talking about the crime. My brain had supplied pictures to what I’d unconsciously learned.

Yet I knew what I’d seen. I saw Meehan attack Eve.

But if Meehan was dead, then who had tried to kill me later, when I was already in the hospital? Surely not …

I had to ask the question.

‘Sir?’

He turned, surprised.

‘What time did you get the call, you know, about Tony?’

Lieutenant Dumbo looked at me, frowned and sighed. He reached back into his breast pocket.

‘Ah let’s see,’ he said, his agricultural thumb dwarfing the notebook’s inky pages.

‘We got that call at … 1.17 a.m.’

My brain flashed back to the scene, to the clock radio turning 1.13. Watching Meehan forcing himself upon Eve. Witnessing the preamble to Meehan’s murder. But that made no sense. ‘And when did he die?’ I croaked.