Dancing with the Dead

by S.A. Dunphy

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Crime Fiction; YA Fairy Tales & Folklore

Synopsis

She had taken only one step towards the hotel when she heard the car door opening, and then something had her by the shoulders in a grip like steel. Penny tried to fight, but it was no good. The last thing she heard as consciousness drifted away was the whisper of a familiar song…

In a small town on Ireland’s west coast, a young woman named Penelope O’Dwyer leaves a restaurant. It should take five minutes to walk back to where she’s staying. In those five minutes she disappears without a trace.

It’s a few days before the tape arrives. The kidnapper’s face is masked, his voice distorted, but no one doubts for a second he will follow through on his threat: a ritual murder at the end of October – and after that, many more murders to come. Penelope has two weeks to live. And the police don’t have a single lead.

Detective Seamus Keneally insists they need help. Especially when imprisoned murderer Frederick Morgan offers vital information connecting this case to a series of historic murders. But he will only speak to one person: criminal behaviourist Jessie Boyle. Jessie is still grieving after a brutal tragedy that cut her career in London short – but right now, she’s the only chance Penelope has.

Morgan claims this is the work of a serial killer who’s been working in the shadows for longer than the police have ever realised. Now Jessie must use all her instincts and insight to get inside the mind of a criminal more ruthless than any she’s faced in her career – before the evil that has secretly stalked Ireland for decades is unleashed again.

A totally breathtaking and chilling crime thriller that will keep you gripped to the very last page, perfect for fans of Lisa Regan, A.J. Rivers, Tana French and Lisa Gardner.

Release date: September 3, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

September 2018

‘Uruz is the runic symbol of the aurochs, the Scandinavian wild bison. It is a reminder that the untamed powers of creativity are not without danger.’

Poetic Edda 

I left his body where I knew it would be found, nestled gently in the tidal mud of the Thames in the shadow of the Tate Modern in Southwark. He had been a strong one, had William, and breaking him had taken skill and patience. In the last moments of his life, as I brought him to his final crisis, I came to believe we had bonded in a special way, he and I.

I almost loved him, at the end.

And as I released him after such a long struggle, I think he loved me too.

In the dark and quiet hours before dawn, I rowed slowly and silently up the great river, the husk that had once been a man wrapped in a tarpaulin at my feet. I have studied my beloved Thames for years and knew how to guide my craft into a current that would carry it to just the right spot, a point where I could ease the barque out of the channel and allow it to sit atop the silt and filth near the shoreline while I unwrapped my gift and laid it out in all its ragged glory to await the rising sun.

With gentle shifting of my weight, I nudged the boat back into the flow, and then I was gone, William’s bloodied, raw remains enshrined in the freezing, dank-smelling ooze, waiting patiently to be discovered.

And now, here I sit at my vantage point, a quarter of a mile away, my telescope trained on the mudflats as day dawns, and I wait too.

A lone kayaker finds him. She is almost past the body before she realises what she has seen and articulates a wide arc in the water, coming alongside and using her paddle to pause until she is certain. Through my high-powered lens I see her lean over the side and vomit. Then she produces a mobile phone that was Velcroed to her arm and rings it in.

After that everything happens quickly.

Here they come, the police with their flashing lights and their motorboats and their frogmen in scuba equipment. Such a lot of fuss. By now, one would think they’d have learned that all I ever leave is the body. It says all I need to say. William is my work of art, as were all the others. He is my magnum opus. My symphony. They all are.

A cordon is placed around the area. I watch the forensic investigators arrive at Bankside, their white, sterile outfits stark against the grey concrete of the waterfront. And finally, I spy her, the one I have been waiting for, climbing out of her orange 1973 MGB GT – such a flashy vehicle for so spartan a woman.

Jessie Boyle, the criminal behavioural specialist.

This is the investigator who came so close to catching me but was too blinded by her own prejudices to comprehend what was right in front of her.

Now she will know. Today she will see.

I wish I could be closer. I long to hear her breathing quicken as she makes her way down the steps from street level, taking them two, sometimes three, at a time. Jessie has long legs and the jeans she wears show them off to fine effect, even though she is almost always draped in that long, grey woollen overcoat, which I have always believed is meant to make her seem less feminine.

I focus my attention on her face: sharp cheekbones, a long, aquiline nose, slate-grey eyes. In the dawn light, her expression is solemn and stoic, but do I discern a slight quiver around the thin-lipped mouth? In another attempt to subvert any perceived softness, Jessie Boyle has cut her hair short and close to her head. There is a smattering of grey if one looks closely – she is forty-five years old, after all – and I know she has the words Is mise an stoirm tattooed in Celtic script on her left shoulder blade. It is a phrase in the native Irish tongue, for Ms Boyle was born in Dublin. The saying has its origins in an ancient Irish fable. Allow me to share it with you.

The Devil comes upon an old Celtic warrior preparing for war. Sneaking up on him as he prepares for battle, the Devil whispers in his ear: ‘You are old and frail. You will never withstand the coming storm.’ And the old warrior turns, looks the Devil in the eye and retorts: ‘Is mise an stoirm!’ I am the storm.

I like that. Today I will teach her that she is wrong, of course. Jessie Boyle has never truly experienced a storm before. This morning, she will feel the full force of the hurricane.

Without so much as a pause, she wades out into the mud, the viscous, black, foul-smelling ooze splashing and staining her clothes as she fights her way forward. On reaching the crime-scene tape she stops. Through my eyepiece I can see she is panting with exertion, her shoulders rising and falling, sweat dappling her brow, even though it is very cold. Those grey eyes are wide as she peers at the flayed body in the mud, now only a few feet away.

I made sure to leave his face untouched. I wanted there to be no doubt as to who this cadaver once was.

As I watch, I see the emotions dance across her features in a shadowplay of horror. She knows it is William Briggs, the man who was her partner, both in the Violent Crime Task Force of the London Metropolitan Police and in a variety of personal and intimate ways too.

I see recognition settle in, followed rapidly by a fierce and immediate denial. It is her partner, friend, lover… but she doesn’t want it to be. The colour runs out of her face as she takes in what I have done to him. She fights to keep her composure, but tears begin to well in her eyes, and she lunges forward, breaking through the tape in a bid to reach him.

One of the police divers grabs at her and brings her up short, but she fights him, driving an elbow into his gut and surging forward again.

Jessie Boyle is almost on top of what is left of the man she loves when she sees the message I left her, and it is beautiful to know that just as I broke William Briggs, so too have I broken her. As far away as I am, I fancy I can hear her screams of anger and pain.

Her beloved William is dead, and she knows that it was me who took it all from her. She knows because I left my signature, my calling card, carved into the plains of his chest.

Just before he died, I cut the Uruz rune – ᚢ – into his flesh. The Uruz is the ancient Scandinavian bison. The symbol speaks of manifestation, regeneration and endurance, the divine power that laces up the skin but can also slash it wide open. Such violence, when correctly channelled, sustains the spirit and can be used to protect the soul from trauma.

And it can be used to inflict trauma too. Such beautiful trauma.

The last thing I see before packing up my telescope and disappearing into the catacomb-like streets of the seething city is Jessie Boyle sinking to her knees in the sludge, tears streaming down her face as the love of her life is zipped into a body bag.

It is an image I will return to time and time again in the time to come. It will give me strength.

It felt like Dublin had been waiting for her to return, as if the city had held its breath while she was away. Jessie couldn’t work out whether the thought was comforting or foreboding, and eventually decided it didn’t matter – she had come home for better or worse, and no amount of navel-gazing was going to change that.

She took a room in the Grand Canal Hotel in Ringsend, a ten-minute walk from where she had grown up. When Jessie was a kid in the Ireland of the 1980s, Ringsend had been a crumbling collection of tiny, terraced houses set amid factories and mills huddled along the southern bank of the River Liffey. Back then, what industry there was in Ringsend was experiencing its death rattles as the economy tipped into free fall. But that had all changed in the boom of the twenty-first century.

Now a large swathe of the suburb was going through a gentrification. The canal that wound down to the Liffey had been cleaned up and adorned with a walkway and a cycle path, and newly opened coffee docks sold almond-milk lattes to the bearded and top-knotted executives who seemed to be everywhere.

But all the luxury apartment blocks in the world couldn’t disguise the area’s true identity from Jessie – this was old Dublin, through and through.

Yet she was unable to take any pleasure from the knowledge. In truth, Jessie had only come home because she didn’t know where else to go.

A case she had been working had gone badly wrong. A man she cared for, possibly more than she cared for herself, had died horribly. It took her all of five days after she helped pull his body from the sludge of the Thames to realise that police work had lost all its pleasure for her. That, in fact, she could not stand to be around the buildings and people and locales she had once relished.

Every single one of them now carried memories she wanted to forget. She would open a door to a room she had been in hundreds of times before and be assailed by a recollection of a conversation or a joke or simply a sense of being with Will, and she would be reduced to a trembling wreck.

It was intolerable. And more than that, it was unsustainable.

She fought it for another week, but she already knew what she needed to do. A fortnight to the day after they found Will’s body, she handed in her resignation, and that night she was on a plane bound for Dublin.

After Jessie had booked into the hotel, she slept for two days straight, the welcome cloak of oblivion keeping the self-recrimination and anger that were the mental soundtrack to her waking hours at bay.

On the third day, she slowly drifted back to consciousness and was surprised to find she was starving – she’d had no appetite since Will died.

In the breakfast room of the hotel, she ate mechanically, barely aware of what she was consuming, and when the meal was finished, she realised that, for the first time in two decades, she had nothing to do.

So she walked.

Jessie wandered the city of her birth for hours, first making her way along the river until she hit O’Connell Bridge. She paused for a moment, looking to her left towards her old alma mater, Trinity College, before crossing the river to the Northside, still following the Liffey’s curve until it brought her to the Phoenix Park, where she lost herself among the trees for a time. As the shadows grew longer, she left the green coolness and crossed back over the river before executing a wide loop past St James’s Hospital, by the Guinness Brewery and finally back to the docks.

She had just arrived in the lobby of her hotel when her mobile phone buzzed in her pocket: a text message. She opened it as she got into the elevator. It was from a number she didn’t recognise.

I want you to know that William screamed. In the final moments, he begged for it to end. And I was glad to grant his wish – eventually. Bye for now. ᚢ

Jessie Boyle, applied social psychologist and criminal behavioural specialist, late of the Violent Crime Task Force of the London Metropolitan Police, read the message as she walked to her room on the second floor of the hotel. She closed the door behind her, sank to the floor, buried her head in her hands and wept.

Jessie woke two hours later to someone knocking on the door of her room.

Fumbling for her phone in the dark, she checked the time and found it was nine thirty. She listened for a moment, wondering if she might have dreamed the banging, but within moments three smart raps sounded again, so she dragged herself upright and switched on the lamp.

Jessie peered through the door’s peephole, wondering who her visitor might be, seeing as no one knew she was even in Ireland. The individual she saw on the other side of the door was probably the last person she would have expected, and for a moment she thought about pretending she wasn’t in and just going back to bed.

‘Jessie, I know you’re in there,’ the visitor said sharply in a pronounced Northern Irish accent. ‘Open the fucking door. I need to talk to you.’

Heaving a deep sigh, Jessie turned the handle.

Dawn Wilson was the same age as Jessie at forty-five and an inch and a half taller at six foot two. Her long red hair was brought up in a neat bun at the back of her head, and even though she had recently been appointed Police Commissioner of Ireland, tonight she was dressed in plain clothes – a modest black trouser suit over a blue shirt.

‘You look like shit,’ she told Jessie, who was clad in a baggy Dire Straits T-shirt and leggings.

‘Thanks.’

‘Can I come in? I’ve got a bottle of Bushmills in my handbag.’

‘When you put it like that, how could I refuse?’

Grinning, the commissioner pushed past her.

When they were seated at the room’s small table with large whiskeys in two waterglasses, Jessie asked, ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘I called the Met looking for you. They told me you’d resigned.’

‘Did they tell you why?’

‘I’d like to hear it from you.’

Jessie swallowed the contents of her glass and poured another.

‘How’d you find me?’

‘You’ve been working in law enforcement at one level or another for more than two decades, so you know as well as I do that phone you’ve got on your bedside locker is effectively a tracking device. It wasn’t hard to work out you were in Dublin, and I figured that if you were here, you’d probably be drawn to your old stomping grounds. It was a simple enough matter to ring the few hotels in the area to find out which one you were staying at. I think the whole process took me ten minutes. Possibly even less.’

‘Very clever.’

‘Not really. Why’d you pack in the job at the Met?’

‘I’d had enough.’

‘You and I have known one another a long time, Jessie. This was your dream job.’

Jessie had met Dawn Wilson when they were students of the applied psychology department at Trinity College, Dublin, in the mid-1990s. They had quickly bonded – both were from working-class backgrounds, and they had each secured their places through scholarships – Jessie’s from Dublin City Council, Dawn’s through the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, which had been established to build relations between the communities on either side of the border.

Despite their friendship and mutual respect, their relationship always had a sharp edge, one honed by competition. They had been the only female students in their degree class, and, friends or not, each had declared that they wanted to work in the field of policing.

Painfully aware their gender would limit their career options, they had to be ruthless in their ambitions. It was one of the reasons Jessie had decided to move to London for her postgraduate studies.

‘I screwed up,’ Jessie told her old friend. ‘Badly.’

‘How so?’

Jessie sighed, running her fingers through her short dark hair. ‘I made a stupid mistake, and someone I cared about died as a result.’

Dawn stood up, went to the window and pushed it open. As they were on the second floor it didn’t open much, barely a crack really, and Dawn looked at it glumly.

‘William Briggs.’

‘He was lead investigator for my unit.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Jessie waved the condolence away.

‘If you stay in this job for any length of time, you lose people,’ Dawn continued. ‘Police officers put themselves in harm’s way every single day. Policing is one of the few professions where you’re trained to run towards danger, not away from it. Your DI Briggs would have known that.’

Jessie shook her head. ‘He died hard, Dawn,’ she said. ‘And it was my fault.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ The commissioner took a pack of Silk Cut Purple cigarettes from her jacket pocket and tapped one out. ‘You worked as part of a team – we all do on the force. And with good reason. If I fuck up, there are three people standing behind me whose job it is to catch that error and fix it.’

‘Did I say you could smoke?’

‘Did I ask?’

‘For God’s sake, Dawn, will you leave me alone? I’m not looking for a shoulder to cry on.’

‘What are you looking for then?’

‘I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t even know who I am anymore.’

‘You’re the best fucking profiler I’ve ever met,’ Dawn said, lighting her smoke using a bronze Zippo. ‘That’s who you are.’

‘The facts suggest otherwise,’ Jessie said. ‘This man – this predator – was right under my nose and I didn’t see it. Looking back, it was so obvious. But I was focused on another suspect, and I didn’t realise my mistake until it was too late. And by then, William was already gone.’

‘I spoke with your bosses,’ Dawn said, blowing smoke rings at the gap created by the small open window – some went out; most didn’t. ‘Whatever you did or didn’t do, no one is bringing charges of negligence or dereliction of duty against you. In fact, I talked to your chief inspector earlier today, and he told me how disappointed he is you’ve packed in your job. So it seems the only person who blames you for whatever happened is you.’

Jessie laughed bitterly. ‘Maybe they just don’t want to see the truth.’

The commissioner took a final pull on her smoke, and flicking the butt into the night, she closed the window.

‘I think you’re hurt, and you’re angry,’ she said, sitting back down opposite Jessie, ‘and I’m sorry you’re feeling like that. But I’m here because I need your help.’

‘To do what?’

‘To do what you do best – I need you to look at a case for me.’

Jessie gasped in surprised horror. ‘Jesus Christ, Dawn. Haven’t you listened to a single word I’ve said? I’m done. I have nothing left.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘No!’ Jessie was almost shouting. ‘I am declining your request!’

Dawn poured them both another drink, pushing Jessie’s glass across the table so it was right in front of her.

‘I don’t think you’ve understood me very clearly,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not asking you.’

‘What?’

‘You owe me, Jessie Boyle. You owe me fucking big, and you know it. I’m really, really sorry to have to do this, but you haven’t given me any choice.’

Jessie looked at the commissioner in disbelief. ‘Tell me you’re not doing this.’

‘I am. I’m calling in that debt.’

Jessie opened her mouth to respond, but no words came.

‘Let’s you and me catch a very bad man,’ Dawn said, and raised her glass in a toast to the venture.

She had been an outsider all her life.

Growing up in rural Antrim in the 1980s, surrounded by political and religious division, Dawn made the decision to remain removed from the Troubles as far as was practically possible.

The fact was, she had troubles of her own to contend with.

Dawn’s father was a devout Catholic: he believed there was an all-forgiving God of love who held people in the palm of his hand, sheltering them from harm. He was also, without the vaguest sense of irony, free and easy with his fists.

It didn’t happen every day, or even every week. To the outside eye, Benjie Wilson was a kind, gently spoken, spiritual man. But a couple of times a year, frustration and anger would build up, and when that happened, he would turn into something terrifying, and Dawn and her mother would bear the brunt of it.

The experience made Fiona Wilson a timid, nervous creature who jumped at shadows.

It just made Dawn angry and determined never to compromise.

Probably in an attempt to hurt her father, religion was one of the first aspects of her life where she drew a line in the sand.

Dawn saw no evidence of a benevolent being who offered succour and comfort. If anything, the pain and poverty and conflict she observed as she went about her life in this small pocket of the British Empire led her to conclude that, if there was a God, he was at best an absentee landlord, at worst wilfully perverse.

She wanted no part of any collective that laid their trust in something so apparently arbitrary, and after a series of rows that became increasingly bitter and culminated in her father beating her senseless on her fourteenth birthday, there was an unspoken agreement that she was no longer required to attend Mass.

It was a relief for all of them.

The beatings didn’t stop, but Dawn’s lack of faith was no longer one of the sparks that set Benjie off.

Individualism and independence of thought became Dawn’s defining personality traits. The other young people in her community were drawn to careers in agriculture or teaching or community development. For her, it was always going to be the law.

Policing seemed the only way she could effect the changes she wanted to make. The heroes in the comic books she read by torchlight in the evenings were vigilantes: Wonder Woman and Black Canary and the Huntress – they struck a blow for the disenfranchised and the oppressed, and they did it without allying themselves with any formally endorsed command structure.

In the Northern Ireland of the 1980s, they had a different name for someone who responded to social tensions in that way: they called them paramilitaries. The newsreaders called them terrorists.

Dawn Wilson was damned if she was ever going to be one of those. If she was going to alter the institutions of her world, it would have to be from within, and to stand any chance of achieving a high rank, she needed a degree.

Her family barely made enough money to survive. The only way for Dawn to get to college was through a scholarship, and the local librarian – the same one who loaned her graphic novels – helped her to complete an application for just such an award under the cross-border initiative for peace and reconciliation.

She never thought she would actually be successful.

When the letter arrived informing her she was being offered a place, it was in Dublin, in the lower twenty-six counties of what her father referred to as the ‘Free State’.

She felt guilty leaving her mother behind, but despite that, a sense of wild abandon filled her heart as the bus pulled away from the kerb in Antrim Town and headed south. She came home the first three weekends, but her father barely acknowledged her, and her mother seemed unsure how to behave.

Finally, a Friday came, and when it was her turn to step onto the bus, her legs wouldn’t move. As she watched it drive away up Nassau Street, she knew it was the right decision. From then on Dawn made her grant money stretch and got a job in a bar on Dame Street, and her new life began.

It was twelve years before she saw Antrim again.

Attending Trinity College was like living a bizarre dream of how her life might have been. There was only one other female student in her class, but Dawn was used to being singled out as unusual, so having someone in a similar situation made the whole experience much easier.

She and Jessie Boyle became firm friends.

It was the third week of their course when she noted Jessie arriving into class with a black eye hastily – and unsuccessfully – hidden behind some concealer.

‘What the fuck happened to you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh, right. So you’re just trying out some new cosmetic techniques, are you?’

Jessie fell quiet before saying, ‘If I wanted to talk about it, I would, okay?’

Dawn looked at her friend and said softly, ‘If this was just a one-off thing – you were in a brawl in a pub or you got mugged – tell me to fuck off and I will not be offended.’

Jessie looked away, but Dawn knew she was listening.

‘If someone who is a constant in your life did it – your da or your boyfriend or your brother – that’s a different thing. You can’t let that go, because they’ll keep doing it. They’ll promise they won’t, but I’m here to tell you they will.’

That was the end of the conversation. That time.

Two weeks later, Jessie came in with her arm in a sling and her eye so swollen no amount of make-up could cover it.

Dawn looked at her long and hard. She didn’t have to say anything. Jessie stared back, and over lunch, she told her friend what was going on at home.

They drank several cups of the strong tea they brewed in the student canteen while they made a plan.

What followed changed their lives irrevocably.

Ten thirty the following morning found Jessie seated in a conference room in police headquarters in Harcourt Street. The HQ complex was situated only a five-minute walk from Grafton Street, a hugely popular pedestriani. . .