Dance With the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller. James Nally

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘snap off’ the dreaming segment of their brain after they wake up, creating a phenomenon known as ‘waking dreams’ that seem terrifyingly real.

      My refusal to accept this prognosis failed to prevent the ambitious shrink publishing a paper about it in a leading science quarterly. There was little scientific about the tabloid-newspaper follow-up, which labelled me a ‘self-proclaimed psychic cop’.

      After that article Commander John Glenn summoned me to his eighth-floor office at New Scotland Yard. ‘No doubt as you will have foreseen yesterday,’ he sneered, ‘I want your warrant card now.’ By the time I’d left him sprawled across his antique desk gasping for air, Heckler & Koch had a bead on all three ground floor lifts. Like Ann Frank in that annex, I came quietly.

      I expected to be charged with assault and sacked on the spot. Instead they suspended me on full pay and assigned me to Darius, a Police Federation solicitor who turned out to be dodgier than most criminals I’d dealt with.

      A week or so later, over several pints at the Feathers, Darius asked me to tell him exactly what had happened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me, ‘what you tell me will never leave these four walls. In an exercise like this, the truth is merely our starting point.’

      I switched into ‘victim’ mode – a skill I’d learned from petty criminals while in uniform. I explained how Commander Glenn had summoned me to HQ on the back of a ‘malicious and libellous’ Sunday newspaper article which had ‘degraded and humiliated me’.

      ‘Of course I’d never made any such claim about possessing psychic powers,’ I bleated on. ‘My mistake had been to confide in a trainee psychologist about the vivid dreams that plagued me after I’d attended a series of gruesome murder scenes.’

      ‘Caused by attending a series of gruesome murder scenes,’ corrected Darius, jotting down my juiciest revelations in an archaic moleskin notebook. ‘Classic symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress.’

      I nodded gravely. ‘Next thing, they’re cracking gags about me in the papers and on TV and radio shows. I couldn’t leave the house for months.’

      I next described Glenn’s ‘unsympathetic and dismissive’ attitude to ‘my crippling sleep disorder’. I finished up with the comment that had caused me to snap: Glenn’s assertion that, as an Irishman, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. Darius seized upon this last line like a drowning man.

      ‘He said what?’

      ‘He was explaining how any suggestion that I’d used “psychic powers” in my police work would give grounds for appeal to anyone whose case I’d ever worked on.’

      ‘Yeah, I get that. But what did he say specifically about you being Irish?’

      ‘He said words to the effect that, as an Irish person, I should know all about miscarriages of justice. I remember his last line: “Haven’t you read about your compatriots, the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six and what not?” I just lost it.’

      Darius blew hard out of his mouth: ‘Any witnesses?’

      I shook my head.

      ‘Did he record it?’

      ‘I don’t think so.’

      ‘Well, guess what –’ dodgy Darius grinned, a gold tooth glinting beneath his leering top lip ‘– it’s your lucky day.’

      I tried not to let his Romanian-beggar oral chic put me off. After all, I needed him to get me back to work. But I couldn’t stop staring at it, or wondering if any personal affectation on the planet could make him look less trustworthy. A toupee perhaps? Or a glass eye. No, the gold tooth still triumphed.

      ‘The Commission for Racial Equality has just announced it’s backing a test case brought by a machinist from County Antrim against his former employer. He’s claiming that Irish jokes on the shop floor made his day-to-day life intolerable.’

      ‘That’s ridiculous, he lives and works in Ireland.’ I laughed. ‘Anyway, how could he hear all these hurtful gags over the racket of his machine?’

      ‘I know.’ Darius shrugged. ‘But it’s going to happen and with the Commission’s support, he can’t lose. If I hint to the Met that we’re talking to the Commission about your case, and specifically Glenn’s near-the-knuckle racial stereo-typing …’

      ‘Hang on a minute, Darius. He wasn’t being racist. If anything …’

      ‘You want to get back to work, don’t you?’

      ‘Is this the only way?’

      ‘It’s the best way.’

      ‘So you … we’re playing the race card?’

      ‘The race card’s the ace card, baby. You only have to show it and the other side folds.’

      While Darius set about rigging the disciplinary deck, he insisted I attend a consultation with one of his preferred psychologists.

      ‘We need to deliver a clean bill of mental health,’ he explained, ‘and this man will help. All you need to show is that you’re not mental now, and he’ll report that whatever episode you suffered in Glenn’s office had been a one-off. He’s even got a name for it, Bouffe Delirante, which translates as ‘a puff of madness’. Bollocks, I know, but because it sounds exotic, they fall for it every time.’

      ‘Right, so I won’t have to go into anything else then, like my insomnia or childhood or any of that stuff?’

      ‘Not unless you want to.’

      Dr Swartz proved to be everything you’d expect from an ageing quack winding down an undistinguished career in leafy Finchley, right down to his Einstein tribute grey thatch, hairy ears and bumbling, distracted disposition.

      I told him that I couldn’t remember anything of the Glenn incident, which seemed to suit him no end. What I hadn’t considered was how we’d fill the remaining 55 minutes of our appointment.

      Like a newborn snuffling out nipples, wily old Swartz instinctively located my crippling insecurities, one by one, then latched on.

      I wouldn’t mind but I knew the psychology mating dance pretty well by then, having tangled with that trainee shrink a few years’ back. They use questions like pawns to manoeuvre you into a vulnerable position, all the while reassuring you that you’re making these moves all by yourself. It goes on and on until, cornered, you run out of patience and invent a fit-all conclusion of your own, just to get the hell out of there.

      ‘What about sleep?’ came his opening gambit, ‘do you get restful, unbroken sleep each night?’

      ‘Who does?’ I quipped, fighting fire with fire.

      ‘How many hours?’

      I suddenly remembered Fintan’s proclamation that he could never trust anyone who is incapable of lying. Now I understood what he meant. Swartz peered imperiously over his double-glazed reading glasses, wordlessly breaking me.

      ‘I’ve never been a great sleeper, to be honest, doctor. Four or five hours a night is plenty.’

      ‘Why СКАЧАТЬ