JAMES NALLY
Alone With the Dead
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © James Nally 2015
Cover Design © Jem Butcher 2015
James Nally asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008139506
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008139513
Version: 2015-09-07
For Bridget, James and Emma
Epigraph
Who looks outside, dreams;
Who looks inside, awakes.
CARL JUNG
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading
About the Author
About the Publisher
Prologue
Occasionally, we experience things that make no sense.
You hum an old song, only to hear it moments later on the radio. You think of someone out of the blue and they call. You get the feeling you’re being watched, turn and meet the stare you’d somehow felt.
Sometimes, it’s life changing. A driver swerves to avoid a pedestrian. He doesn’t remember reacting. A firefighter pulls his team out of a burning building. Seconds later, it collapses. Two strangers’ eyes meet over a crowded room. Somehow, right away, both know the other is THE ONE.
Some credit these experiences to extra-sensory perception – our so-called sixth sense. Others put it down to gut instinct, animal intuition. The point is, we know things but we don’t know why we know them.
I don’t know why the recent dead come to me, or if the things they show me are clues as to how they died. I don’t know why it happens, but it must be the reason I became a murder detective. That – and what happened to Eve.
It’s my unconscious mind, of course, piecing together fragments of information and presenting answers to me in a novel way. Isn’t it?
‘I See Dead People,’ says the creepy little boy in The Sixth Sense. Cole Sear he’s called. Cole Queer, my brother calls me. That and ‘Hormonal Donal’.
I don’t care. I’ve got more important things to worry about, now I’m the go-to guy for the recently murdered.
Chapter 1
Clapham Junction, London
Monday, July 1, 1991; 21:14
‘It’s a bit like taking a shit, when you think about it,’ said Clive, his mouth grinding away on a Wimpy quarter pounder.
Flanked by over-lit pastel walls and screwed-down metal seats, we could have been in the canteen of a children’s correctional centre. Welcome to the Wimpy burger bar – the British McDonald’s but with a unique selling point: table service.
‘Thank you garçon,’ I said, as I watched my order slide from stained tray to half-wiped melamine.
‘Bon appetit,’ he grunted and I silently congratulated acne for turning his face to pizza.
A quick glance at my chicken burger revealed it to be simply that: no sauce, no salad – just cartoon-flattened white meat clamped between two constipating white buns.
‘Hard to imagine that pecking in the yard,’ I said, ‘landing on this table is probably the furthest it ever flew.’
‘Isn’t it though, Donal?’ said PC Clive Hunt, my forty-something beat partner who came from one of those Northern English towns that begins with either B or W and all sound alike.
Incredibly – at least to me – we’d walked past a McDonald’s to get here. Clive’s nostalgic bond to Wimpy once again had proved unshakeable. This was one of the countless things I failed to understand about the English – they get nostalgic about things that were crap in their time: TV shows with shaky sets like Dr Who and Crossroads; British-made cars that always broke down; the Second World War, for Christ’s sake.
McDonald’s might have been wiping Wimpy off the face of the earth, but it would never get Clive’s custom. You see, no one lamented London’s lack of chips-based meals more than Clive. How many times had I heard how, up North, you can get gravy with your chips, curry with your chips, mushy peas with your chips.
The moment a McDonald’s worker cheerfully informed Clive that they didn’t stock vinegar, his Golden Arches crumbled and fell. After several wordless seconds, he calmly placed his tray back on the counter, turned and marched out, never to return.
I relented. ‘What’s like taking a shit?’
‘Eating burger and chips,’ he said, chewing, his mouth a toothy cement mixer.
Clive swallowed hard, burped urgently into his hand, desperate to enlighten: ‘You eat some chips, then you eat all of the burger, then you finish off yer chips.’
He could see I wasn’t getting it.
‘It’s like you piss a bit, then you take your dump, then you piss again to finish.’ He beamed in satisfaction.
My radio scrambled, its frenzied fuzz cutting short Clive’s scatological musings.
It was a T call demanding immediate response to an incident on Sangora Road, just round the corner. I almost had to beat the burger out of Clive’s hand.
We were the first uniforms on the scene. A young woman with dark curly hair was going bonkers in the street. A crowd had gathered, some panicking, some nosy, some trying to comfort Ms Hysteria. When she saw us, she pointed at a house and gasped in a nasal South East London accent: ‘My friend Marion’s inside. I think she’s dead.’
A surge of adrenaline slowed the world down to a hi-definition dream. The front door to number 21 hung open, but there were no signs of a forced entry. I noticed two buzzers: the property had been divided into flats. Inside the communal hallway, a chiselled, red-haired man in his twenties looked ashen. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said in a remarkably high-pitched Irish accent, pointing to a door.