Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller. James Nally

Fintan got to his feet: ‘Is 21 Sangora Road known to police?’

      John glared over. ‘No,’ he roared and I felt myself shrivel.

      ‘No more questions,’ shouted Glenn, summoning Peter to his feet. As Glenn led him out, Mary and John didn’t look his way once.

      ‘I’m off to find a phone,’ said Fintan.

      ‘Grand. See you in Frank’s?’

      ‘Yeah, great. Twenty minutes.’

       Chapter 4

       Frank’s Café, Northcote Road, Clapham

       Tuesday, July 2, 1991; 11:45

      Although he could be toxic, an occasional meeting with Fintan was necessary these days, because he’d become my source of Eve Daly news.

      During my first three months in London, I’d written to Eve four times. I got just one short note back, in which she apologised for not being a letter writer and asked a favour. The list of instructions suggested she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

      As decreed, I met Tara Molloy – a girl from home I barely knew – at Liverpool Street train station and drove her to the job interview in Stepney Green. She didn’t utter a single word, save for, ‘Hi’ when we first met. I sensed her nerves and tried to calm her down: ‘Come on, I’m sure you’ll do great.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled, staring blankly ahead. I hoped she’d think of more to say under questioning.

      ‘What kind of job is it?’ I asked.

      ‘I’d rather not say, in case I jinx it,’ she said quietly.

      Almost two hours later, she emerged, looking even glummer. I didn’t say anything until we got back to Liverpool Street.

      ‘Are you straight back to the airport then?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘No time for a quick drink?’

      I really wanted to tap her up about Eve.

      ‘No. Sorry. I’ve really got to rush. Thanks so much, Donal, for the lift …’

      She climbed out of the work van and marched into Liverpool Street train station without looking back. It was only after she disappeared that I noticed fresh blood on the passenger seat: enough blood to make me realise she’d just had a termination.

      My next letter to Eve confirmed two things – 1: I’d taken Tara to her ‘job interview’; 2: from now on, I’d prefer to communicate by phone.

      Eve sent a note back containing a single quote: ‘If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.’ She signed it: ‘All my love, Eve x.’

      I couldn’t quite work out which one of us had set the other ‘free’. But the quote and her romantic sign-off reassured me: as soon as Eve got her life back on track, we’d give us another go.

      In the meantime, I felt certain that Mum could keep me abreast of all developments in Eve’s case. How wrong I was.

      During my first year in London, I had been ringing home every couple of weeks from a phone box awash with stale piss, cock carvings and IRA slogans. I fed it a pound coin every three minutes while Mum ran through her news – i.e. who had died – followed by the weather – i.e. how much it had rained. She had poor news judgement, sometimes suddenly remembering the death of a friend or family member after my pound coins had run out and the beeping had started. Nothing made you feel more alone than finding out someone you knew well was already cold in the ground. We never seemed to get around to talking about how she was or how I was or the latest on Eve Daly.

      On the few occasions that my dad, Martin, answered, I hung up. He couldn’t be arsed to say goodbye to me before I left the country. Why would he want to chat to me on the phone? Besides, Martin was monosyllabic and opaque in the flesh; the idea that he and I could support a telephone conversation seemed laughable.

      Then, about two years ago, I stopped calling home altogether. The trouble started when the Met police contacted our family GP, Dr Harnett, seeking my medical records. Unburdened by the Hippocratic oath, Harnett mentioned it to his golfing partner – one Martin Lynch – who assumed I’d got myself into some sort of trouble, and called golden son Fintan to find out what was going on. For once, my older brother didn’t enjoy breaking sensational news. He had to tell Martin that his second son had joined ‘the enemy’ – the British police force; the same force that had framed his heroes the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven.

      After a long silence, Martin Lynch very quietly but clearly gave Fintan the following instructions: ‘Tell him never to call here again, or come home here again, as long as I breathe.’

      I lost count of how many times I’d picked up a receiver and dialled that number you never forget, only to hang up because of what he might do to her. I hoped Mum realised that those countless silent phone calls had been from me, that I was thinking of her.

      So, having lost contact with Mum, I had to find another way to keep up with Eve’s ongoing case and work out how our future together would pan out. Until Fintan came to London, my sole source was the Irish newspapers – especially the one that had employed my brother at the time, the Evening Press. Credit to Fintan’s news nose, he sensed right away he had the inside track on the scoop of a lifetime. But even he could not have foreseen just how globally massive the Eve Daly case would become.

      The day after Meehan’s funeral, the Gardai announced that Eve had been charged with his murder and all went quiet. Two weeks later, they released a short statement announcing that they’d dropped the murder charge, pending further enquiries – a development Eve perhaps should have treated with discreet gratitude. Instead, she granted Fintan an exclusive interview, in which she revealed that she’d knifed Meehan with her Viking prop dagger as he tried to force himself upon her.

      No country relishes a divisive story as much as Ireland: this one proved an ideological ‘perfect storm’. There were two passionate, polarised schools of thought. The first: if a woman dresses like a slut and gets into bed with a man, then she knows what she’s getting. The second: no means no, she must have acted in self-defence. I’ve never understood how people can get so worked up about something that doesn’t remotely affect them. None of the impassioned, self-appointed pundits knew the facts behind the case, yet the entire nation engaged in an almighty gender-based ding-dong with undisguised glee.

      Local knowledge and contacts gave Fintan an unassailable edge over rival reporters. It was Fintan who broke the news that Eve had been wearing a sexy Vixen Viking outfit when she stabbed Tony Meehan to death. As Fintan later explained, each great crime in history has its own Penny Dreadful moniker. The Black Dahlia. The Zodiac Killer. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Boston Strangler. Freelance Fintan coined the Vixen Viking Killer, and it stuck.

      He just couldn’t stop generating fresh, juicy new angles.

      He broke the story that Meehan was a drug-peddling orphan with a track record for assault and bedding attached local women.

      He exclusively revealed that, after Mo Daly had heartlessly abandoned her teenage daughter for a new life in New York, the family home had become notorious for wild sex and drugs parties. I found this article particularly hurtful: whoever had been having all this ‘wild sex and drugs’ had managed to keep it well away from me.

      He announced to the world that while Meehan and the Vixen had consensual/non-consensual sex, Eve’s hapless boyfriend had blacked out in the garden from a suspected drugs overdose. Fintan swore he only broke this story because the Independent had got hold of it, and were planning to splash it on their front page the next day. He ‘killed’ the story by burying it on page twelve of that