Serial

by Jim Lusby

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'This is the real Ireland, where pleasure and pain are inextricably linked' Val McDermid A brilliant break-through crime novel from one of the most respected names in the business... SERIAL opens with a haunting first person narrative. A middle-aged male describes picking up a lone girl hitchhiker. Within pages however, her voice disappears from the scene and the man is alone once again... Days later, the body of a man is discovered and within his pockets lies the typed sheets of that first narrative. The Gardai follow the text closely and deduce that the hitchhiker must have been murdered as well. They swiftly find her mutilated body. But this is only the beginning of the mystery. The police are convinced that the two murders are by the same killer. But the first seems to have been committed by a man, the second by a woman... Who is the hunter and who is the victim? The female detective, Kristina Galetti, has her thoughts, but in the end the decision might come down to who best knows the nature of the human soul. As the investigation intensifies and Galetti comes under increasing public and political pressure, the split between her and her recalcitrant colleague threatens to allow this vicious, pathological killer to walk free...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 256

Sample

My father had died unexpectedly.

In the car, squirming uncomfortably on the dampened seat and gasping for breath after running through the heavy rain, I switched on the mobile phone and listened to my sister’s voice, recorded two hours earlier, trembling with the news. He’s gone, she said simply. Will you be coming down for the funeral? For a long time afterwards, until I was startled by a voice and a knocking on my side window, the network messages droned on in loops, asking if I wanted to save or delete this information, exit or repeat the sequence. I paid no attention to them. I sat staring into the darkness beyond me, through the rain cascading down the windscreen.

Hello! I heard then. It was faint. Like a summons from a distant world. Hello! And then that rapping on the glass to my right.

I turned to look. Outside, her head covered by a plastic rain jacket that she held above her like the wingspan of a bat, leaving her shirt and jeans exposed to the driving rain, a young woman named Mary Corbett stooped, mouthing her concerns against the window. Was I all right? she wondered. Had anything unpleasant happened?

Perhaps she has a bad conscience, I thought. And not without reason. After all, it was she who had brought me to Glencree that winter’s night, deep into the heart of the Wicklow Mountains, to deliver a lecture on, of all things, The Trivialization of Death in the Modern Detective Story.

She wasn’t responsible for the foul weather, of course. And no one had leaned on me to accept her invitation. But she might have done more to expand or enliven our audience. And who knows? With a livelier crowd, I might have warmed to the topic. As it was, in a cramped and chilly room at the village’s Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, surrounded by an exhibition of grim photographs from the religious conflict in Northern Ireland and in no mood to encourage cosy exchanges, I had coldly dissected the genre’s faults to eight of its stony-faced aficionados. Of course the detective story trivializes death, I had scoffed. What else can it do? Its conventions insist that a corpse is never a lost human being, mourned by a shattered community of relatives and friends, but always merely a device to start or to keep the plot moving, a cold convenience on a mortuary slab, consisting – depending on the author’s research facilities – either entirely of cardboard or entirely of ligaments and abrasions, stomach contents and exit wounds. And this is inevitable. Death, after all, is only significant as a corrupter of what is living. And what the detective story really trivializes is life itself. Think of it. What value can be claimed by a genre where to pause for depth is always fatal to the plot, where people communicate only by a series of inane questions and answers, where the subtlest of stylistic devices is the paraphrase, where the element of surprise is already built into the package and therefore keenly anticipated, where the manipulation of feeling by crude invention leads ultimately to the death of feeling and to its replacement by sentiment, and where the investigator, the reader’s only companion, the author’s only confidant, is always the same character, always obsessed and alienated, always driven by despair and fuelled by drugs and alcohol, and still far more perceptive than anyone else? Life is cheap in the modern detective story. So cheap that in many cases the only reliable internal guide for distinguishing between the just and the unjust taker of life is the doe-eyed loyalty of the investigator’s lover, who constantly directs our moral judgement from between the creases of sweat-stained sheets. You’re a good man, Dave, she applauds. You’re a good woman, Hetty. As if we wouldn’t otherwise know.

The irony.

Lowering my window to Mary Corbett, who had diligently noted all these sour observations on life and death and the crime novel during my contentious lecture and who was now painfully concerned about my welfare, I suddenly decided to share with her the news of my father’s unexpected death. His corpse, in effect, became a device to start a dialogue between us. And since she had never met the man, her response was to a cold convenience. I’m sorry, she sympathized.

She wasn’t an unattractive young woman, Mary Corbett. Her complexion was a little paler than I usually allow in my fantasies. Her blonde hair was a little thinner and wispier. But her figure was good. Under the wet shirt which, despite the heavy rain, was still unbuttoned at the top, I could see both the outline of her breasts and the soft white flesh below her collarbones. She wore no brassiere. Her nipples were erect from the cold. She had a brown leather belt, fastened by a silver buckle, around her slim waist. Her hips were full, accentuated by very tight jeans. And I particularly liked the firm curve of her bottom whenever she leaned forward.

Where do you live, Mary? I asked her.

I was too old to interest or excite her, of course. She was a young student, in her early-twenties. I’m an embittered old man, already pushing fifty, thinning on top and spreading in the middle. But still, although my teeth are decaying and my joints are stiffening, I also know that suffering animates something in the female. A warmth. A protectiveness. It distorts their vision. And the most potent of these stimuli is the news of another’s personal loss.

I know all this because in the past I’ve often used the death of a parent as a storyline to seduce a reluctant woman. Despicable? Of course. But also understandable. Because in this respect – the manipulation of feeling by invention – I suggest that I’m taken after my mother. She too can never be believed. If it had been my mother’s voice on the mobile’s answering service, for instance, telling me that my father was dead, I would have rigorously checked the story before responding to her news. But it wasn’t her, of course. It was my sister. And let me assure you that you can always believe my sister, who has nothing to gain from such fictions.

I live in Enniskerry, Mary told me.

Enniskerry was the nearest town, nine or ten kilometres to the east, and mention of it brought a moment of indecision. It wasn’t on the route back to my apartment on the north side of Dublin city, but it was actually closer to my family’s home in the south, somewhere I had to pass through to get back home for my father’s funeral. So was it worth it, I wondered, returning to my apartment just to pack an overnight bag? After all, it was already past ten-thirty by then.

Are you driving? I asked Mary Corbett.

She shook her head. No.

How are you getting home? I asked.

There’s a bus, she said.

Would you mind, I suggested, if I drove you there? I think I’d appreciate a little company right now.

Nursing is irresistible to most women. Nurture is in their nature, so to speak. While the male’s aggression inflicts untold carnage on the world, expressing itself in wars and tribal conflicts, rapes and homicidal driving, the female sadly picks up the shattered pieces and lovingly knits them together again, never the assailant but often the victim, driven to violence, in extreme cases, only by the need to protect herself and her children.

Do I exaggerate? Am I being unfair, to either gender?

Within three minutes of accepting my invitation, Mary Corbett had tidied up the loose ends back in the lecture room, pulled on her lightweight rain jacket and was settling into the front passenger seat beside me. She smiled as I started the engine. Turn right, she directed anxiously when we climbed the slight hill to the exit from the centre.

On the road we passed a quartet of dripping aficionados, their heads lowered against the driving rain as they struggled homewards through the wind. Neither of us suggested stopping to rescue them. There are parameters to charity beyond which the gesture is no longer enjoyable.

Because of the dangerous conditions, we drove slowly along the narrow twisting road. At first Mary was quiet. Perhaps she was overawed by the presence of death. Perhaps the poor visibility made her nervous.

Your father, she asked then. What did he do?

I suppose it’s still acceptable, even in an age of such diversity as ours, to define members of the older generation solely in terms of a stable occupation. But I have other memories of my father’s limitations. He reared chickens in our back garden, I told her.

She may have laughed nervously, although very quietly as well, before she said, That was nice.

No, Mary, I assured her. It wasn’t nice at all. In fact, it was intensely embarrassing. Although to appreciate why you’d have to understand the local lifestyle.

Which was what? she wondered.

A road, I said, named after one of the French expressions for the grace of God, but crowded with working people to whom a foreign language and a benevolent deity were equally distant realities. Tiny houses that were too cramped to contain anything larger than the family arguments, with front doorsteps that led directly to the street, but also with enormous back gardens that seemed to stretch away forever from the small yards and into private dreams. And when I was a child, most of those dreams were carried, not on the coxcombs of absurdly strutting chickens, but on the hunched shoulders and bobbing heads of racing greyhounds.

Aren’t we always disappointed by our parents? Mary suggested.

On the same road, I said, only seven doors away from us, but still occupying alien territory as far as my father was concerned, because of some bitter feud I could never understand the reasons for, my two uncles kept racing greyhounds. You’d think the relationship between a dog and a twelve-year-old boy was too innocent, wouldn’t you, too harmless, to be used as a weapon in a war? And yet, my resourceful mother somehow managed it. From the beginning, she was the one who encouraged my involvement with the greyhounds’ arduous training. How was I to know that every hour I spent walking or grooming or feeding an animal was yet another propaganda victory for the forces lined against my father? He himself had nothing to say on the matter. If he experienced my enthusiasm as betrayal, then his resentment was lost among his other silences.

Men, Mary suggested, are not good at expressing their feelings.

Should I have pointed out that women are experts at inventing them? But no. I was wary of digression.

You’re right, I agreed. But even in an age of taciturn men, my father was unusually distant. He always ate his meals alone, for instance, separated from the rest of the family, poring over the black, leather-bound album in which he collected Irish stamps or lost in the latest blockbuster he had bought from the second-hand store. He and my mother never spoke to each other, except to argue. A bitter, ongoing dispute. A tense stand-off that frequently, unpredictably, erupted into violence, and that strained our vulnerable nerves. I’ve always thought of it as an unexploded bomb. Sitting down in its vicinity was unwise. Speaking was particularly dangerous. And to express an opinion or a feeling was inevitably fatal. The only sane thing to do was to minimize the risks. Strangle your emotions, in other words. Pretend to be mute. Bolt your meals and escape as quickly as possible from the house. Do you know what the most efficient form of flight is, Mary? I wondered.

She started slightly. Listening so intently, she hadn’t anticipated another question so soon. Flight? she repeated.

The most efficient form, I said again.

She thought about this. I don’t know, she admitted then. Travel, I suppose.

I shook my head. No, Mary, I told her. The most efficient form of flight is absorption. My dedication to greyhounds, although rich and enjoyable in itself, was really an escape. This is how I am. I always throw myself into things with such initial vigour, such singular focus, that I quickly become good at them. By thirteen, for instance, I was long past the basics and already master of the scams that colour greyhound racing: holding a dog back by over-feeding it before races and then slimming it down to romp home at generous odds, or rigging a puppy’s time trials so that it goes into its first competitive race showing a vital tenth of a second slower than it has actually run. But the downside of flight is that it has its roots in unfaithfulness. And, ultimately, this is where it always returns for inspiration.

I’d intended developing this theme a little further, but the rain was so heavy by then, swirling around our headlights and covering the windscreen, that it was impossible to distinguish either the white markings in the centre of the road or the grass margin to our left. It was probably too dangerous to continue the journey, but for a while, through a series of sharp bends, stopping seemed even more hazardous. There were looming trees on both sides. Occasionally the overhanging branches swayed and flicked against the windows of the car, cracking violently like whips.

I slowed to a crawl. Mary anxiously held her breath. And then, quite suddenly, just as we thought we were past the worst, we came upon another vehicle, stalled in the middle of the road. Its tail lights reared at me, like a monster’s eyes. I swerved immediately, struggling not only to avoid it, but also to keep free from the hedges on our right. Somehow I squeezed through the narrow gap. In the rear-view mirror, as I straightened the car again, I caught a glimpse of a young couple standing in the rain in front of their bonnet, arguing violently with each other. And then we’d negotiated another bend and their headlights had disappeared again behind us. As if they’d never existed.

Do you play any sports, Mary? I asked.

I played hockey for my school, she confirmed.

Then you’ll understand, I said. Because greyhound racing is like every other sport. It’s mostly dedicated preparation. Mostly slog. The long daily walks in all weathers to build up a dog’s stamina. The uphill gallops to increase its strength. The careful diet to keep its weight steady. Hard work. Repetitious. And humdrum. And to justify it, you need the intoxication, the forgetfulness, of frequent victory. Perhaps I was already tiring of the grind. Perhaps we hadn’t enough success. Perhaps there were wider forces at work.

In the spring of 1968, when I was sixteen years old, when Paris was buckling under student rebellion, when the campaigns for personal liberation and social freedom were advancing everywhere, my uncles handed me a dog to take to the local abattoir. A mild-tempered brindle bitch, she had broken her leg too often to retain the hope of racing and she wasn’t considered good enough to breed from. I walked her, past Gallows Hill, and out to the abattoir, where a fat man in a blood-soaked apron took her from me. And I stood outside, looking in through the open door, while he held a gun to her head and drove a bolt through her brain.

When I got back, my uncles were no longer at home. They’d also taken the rest of the dogs with them, presumably to spare them the trauma of wondering what I had done to their mate. I stood alone in the empty garden, still holding the dangling lead and collar, and I became irritated by the seedy values at work, by the casual abuse of my own labour and by the callous disregard for my feelings.

Beyond the low hedge that separated us from the neighbouring garden, I noticed the clothes line jerking up and down, as if it was being plucked like a guitar string. I thought a bird had settled on it. Something heavy and macabre, I reckoned, like the grim crows I’d often seen feeding on carrion in the country. But then I remembered that I’d actually removed that clothes line some time before. The house next door had been vacant for almost a year. The old man who’d lived there, a veteran of the War of Independence, had recently died in a nursing home, and one of his last, more surreal requests had been for that length of hemp from his garden to be brought to his bedside.

I walked across and looked over the hedge. The garden on the other side was badly overgrown, although a narrow path had been trodden through the weeds and thistles directly under the clothes line. At one end of this, closest to the house, a woman was pegging sheets to the line. I couldn’t see her face. The wind was blowing a sheet against her, almost wrapping it around her. But I could immediately tell from her appearance, not only that she was a stranger, but that she wasn’t even Irish. She was American. She had long blonde hair, very light in colour, very fine in texture, that was being lifted from her shoulders by the breeze. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue cut-away denim shorts, a pair of white sneakers but no socks. Her long bare legs and elegant arms were evenly tanned. Glistening. Golden.

She was, quite simply, the most stunning woman I had ever seen.

But she was more than just a mysterious and sexually attractive woman. For me, she also held the promise of everything our grey and ordinary little lives denied us. Mentally, I compared her to my uncles, those massive working men, slaughterers and boners in the nearby bacon factory, with their hob-nailed boots stuck firmly in the conventions of their generation. Those rough bachelors, who made a political statement out of their inability to boil an egg, a manifesto out of their refusal to learn, and whose attention to personal grooming was, at best, restricted. My dour father, already a laughable figure with his derisory fowl and worthless stamps, his cloth cap and unravelled cardigans stained with flour dust from the mills where he worked, declined now to a burden, a liability. More importantly, I measured her against the local women, against their personal sacrifices to the sentence of bearing and raising children, their weariness, their wariness of beauty, their dull, repetitive complaints.

The headlights picked out a road sign indicating a parking area a hundred metres ahead. If anything, the rain was even heavier now than it had been earlier. A fork of lightning suddenly lit up the darkness and, almost simultaneously, a roll of thunder crashed above us. We were at the centre of the storm. And I no longer felt safe.

Would you mind, I asked Mary, if we pulled into the car park for a while? Until the worst of this blows over.

She laughed anxiously. I think you’d better, she agreed.

I turned left at the opening, into a circular clearing that was surfaced with loose gravel. A carved wooden sign told us that we were in Cloon Car Park, one of the halting points along a popular tourist trail that took hillwalkers through the Wicklow Mountains in summer. Beyond the sign, I passed a steel gate, a barbed-wire fence, and then a narrow clearing that led to the approved footpath, which was muddy and waterlogged now, and almost impassable. I parked facing the road and left the engine idling to run the heater in the car. And there we sat, listening to the rain pelting against the bodywork.

Did you ever see her again? Mary asked eventually. Your American.

Yes, I said. Actually I met her on the street the next day. I was returning to school after lunch. She was walking towards me, ambling up the hill, wearing a bright red summer dress and carrying a shopping bag from one of the city’s department stores. She seemed to recognize me, although we hadn’t greeted each other the previous day. As we talked, she explained that she needed someone to clear and re-seed her garden and she asked if I was interested in the job. I felt uncertain. I simply didn’t know what she was suggesting here. My own hopes, of friendship, of romance, perhaps of intimacy, were probably a crude distortion. And what I dreaded most with this sophisticated, educated woman was appearing provincial. I hedged.

I’m studying for exams, I said. They’re only two weeks away.

I meant in your vacation, she explained. When you’re free.

I don’t know …

I became awkward, tongued-tied. Suddenly I was aware of my age, my inexperience, the high colour and uncomfortable warmth in my cheeks.

She smiled. But only for herself, I think. Ruefully. My name is Sarah, by the way, she said. Sarah Kleisner.

In the end, I changed my plans that summer. A group of friends, most of them still at school, but some already working in the local bacon factory, had the use of a large caravan that was pitched at a seaside resort, about eight miles south of the city. The idea was to swim, lounge, chat up girls and play football on the beach by day, eat and drink by a camp fire at night. As relaxation after my exams, and as a break from the tension in the house, it would have been ideal. Instead, I stayed at home.

I was bored a great deal, irritated the rest of the time. The heat raised tempers among those still trapped in the city and imprisoned in their overcrowded houses. My parents intensified their eternal conflict. His silence against her garrulity. My father was constantly goaded by noise, by taunts, by sly insults, all meant for him but not directly addressed to him, and all prodding him towards the error of response. My mother, on the other hand, threatened with exhaustion from her own unceasing efforts, and with a fatal collapse into resting for a breath, was infuriated by his stoicism. But above all, with both of them, there was the terrifying sense that even victory would be worthless, or defeat insignificant, a sense that their world was already declining, that life had passed them anyway and that they had fallen too far behind.

It was a fear that was shared by my uncles. Throughout the summer, they argued with the living and the dead. Intolerant of each other and impatient with the dogs, they were also dangerously short-tempered with me. They seemed to forget that I was doing them a favour, that I was working for them without pay.

Late in July, I simply abandoned the greyhounds, walked out of my uncles’ front door, took a single step to my right, and rang Sarah Kleisner’s doorbell.

Your back garden is still overgrown, I said. And repeated. Until the words finally struck a chord in her memory.

Right, she recalled. The garden. You still want the job of clearing it?

Yes, I said.

When can you start? she asked.

Any time, really, I insisted.

Monday? she suggested. Is Monday okay?

Monday?

Is it too soon?

I had no talent for gardening, no interest in acquiring the skills. My great-grandparents, on my mother’s side at least, had once been subsistence farmers, but they clearly hadn’t torn their fingertips on stony soil, slaving to establish their children in more profitable occupations, only for their descendants to pervert their torment into a hobby. Under a baking sun, I hacked away crudely at the thistles and nettles and brambles in Sarah’s garden, mostly in poor humour. It took me four weeks to clear the space. And since destruction was the limit of my abilities and I was reluctant to admit it, I passed another week just raking over the turned soil.

That Friday afternoon, in mid-August now, I waited anxiously for Sarah to return from her work. Anxiously, because she’d promised to discuss the design and character of the new garden. Usually, she came straight through the house to greet me, still dressed in one of the expensive business suits of which she seemed to have an unlimited wardrobe.

The back door was already wide open that day. Through it, a little after five-thirty, I heard her unlock the street door and close it behind her again after entering. I imagined her picking up the post from where I’d left it that morning on the old mahogany stand in the hallway. There were three local letters, I remember, and one with a New York postmark and an American stamp.

Leaning against the trunk of an apple tree, one of the few surviving features of the old garden, I watched her pass by the large kitchen window. She was absorbed, reading one of the letters. She didn’t notice me. Even when she stopped at the window, facing the garden, she didn’t look out. Because her head was lowered, her blonde hair kept falling across her eyes and she kept lifting it with her right hand and folding it again behind her ear.

There was only a single sheet of paper in her other hand. Later I discovered its envelope, along with the unopened other letters, on the floor in the front hallway. She seemed to have gathered the entire bundle, but then dropped everything else while reading the first letter. She stared at this single page, or re-read it, for perhaps three or four minutes. And then, quite calmly and deliberately, she folded it and tore it repeatedly into small pieces. I’m not certain where she left the fragments. She moved towards the open back door and possibly threw them on the surface of the old pine table that was placed next to it, but I didn’t see her doing this. She may also have burned most of them on the gas cooker or washed them away in the sink.

I expected her to step out, into the narrow yard between the house and the garden, if only to let me know that she was home. She didn’t. Perhaps she intended to. A second or two after I lost sight of her through the window, her front doorbell rang. When she answered this, she must have stood for a while in the hallway, talking to the caller, because the draught between the two open doors whipped up the surviving fragments of the torn letter and blew them into the yard and garden, before the back door itself slammed shut. Some of the pieces stuck on the rough stone surface of the yard. Most fluttered into the exposed soil in the garden. None was large enough to contain more than a few hand-written or typewritten characters, meaningless in themselves.

At this stage, some instinctive apprehension made me retreat behind the cover of the apple tree, transforming myself with a single step from participant to spectator. It is, perhaps, the role contemporary western man is now most completely comfortable with, a role which began, for me, with the television coverage that year of both the riots in Paris and the civil rights disturbances in Northern Ireland, and with the death of Sarah Kleisner.

When I saw Sarah again, through the kitchen window, she was backing away, clearly from someone who was advancing on her, and clearly frightened by the approach. I couldn’t see who was there. I waited for them to reach the window and reveal themselves. But Sarah stopped. She gestured, at first uncertainly, helplessly, throwing her hands in the air and shrugging her shoulders, but then angrily, pointing her finger aggressively, warning, threatening. It was only when she suddenly swivelled, turning her back on the caller, rejecting any further discussion, that the other, a small unshaven man, finally came into view, stepping forward to lay a hand on her right shoulder.

Instantly recognizing my father, still in his working clothes, with the steel bicycle clips pinning the trouser legs to the tops of his heavy black boots and the soiled cloth cap tugged low on his forehead, I felt as if an abrasive cord was sharply tightened around my stomach, a distinctive band of pain that has stayed with me throughout all the other shocks and traumas of my life.

Naturally, I assumed that he was there because of me. Like Adam cowering from his displeased God in the biblical myth, I desperately tried to shrink out of sight, even though I was already crouched behind the only decent cover in the garden.

I have no idea how much time passed. Perhaps none at all. Perhaps as soon as my father laid his hand on her shoulder, Sarah swung back towards him and struck out, slashing her long nails down his left cheek and leaving him with the trail of scratches that would mark the rest of his life. At the time, he didn’t even raise his hand to protect himself or to wipe the blood from his face. He stared at Sarah. He said something to her. As with all their other exchanges, the meaning was lost to me.

When my father turned to leave, I ducked out of sight and waited for him to come to the garden and argue with me. He never appeared. And by the time I risked checking again, I found that Sarah too had vanished.

I stepped out and cautiously approached the back door, watching for any signs of movement inside the house, listening for the sound of voices. I opened the door, still wary. The draught I immediately felt indicated that the street door was still open, and suggested that there was no one left in the house. I stepped in. In the front hallway, the three unopened letters and the envelope with the New York postmark . . .