Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller
‘IMPECCABLE DESCRIPTIONS MADE THE STORY COME ALIVE … EXHILARATING STUFF’ THE SUN*The first in an electrifying new British detective series starring PC Donal Lynch.*Meet PC Donal Lynch.Irish runaway. Insomniac. Functioning alcoholic.Donal is new to working the beat in London, trying hisbest to forget that night. After all, there aren’t many policeofficers who can say they have a convicted murdererfor an ex-girlfriend.So when a woman is murdered on his patch, Donal throwshimself into the case. As the first person on the scene,Donal can’t forget the horrific sight that faced him – andhe knows this case can’t go unsolved. But how do yousolve a case with no lead suspect and no evidence?As his past catches up with him, Donal is forced to confronthis demons and the girl he left behind. But what will crackfirst, the case or Donal?Chilling, brutal, addictive – if you like Tim Weaver and James Oswald, you will LOVE James Nally.
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JAMES NALLY
Alone With the Dead
Published by Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
The News Building
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London SE1 9GF
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.
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Source ISBN: 9780008139506
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 9780008139513
Version: 2018-07-24
For Bridget, James and Emma
Contents
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.
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
