Alone with the Dead: A PC Donal Lynch Thriller Read Online Free PDF

now and the back door was right there.
    As the kitchen clatter came into range, I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead. It seemed to take an age.
Please don’t anyone look. Please don’t anyone see.
I got past. Then – dread – footsteps sounded behind me. I stopped, waited, breathing hard. The footsteps went away. Thank Christ. I leaned my raging forehead against the back door’s cold glass. Relief.
    I slipped the door open. The damp cold jolted me, injecting fresh will into my knotted veins. I dragged the two leaden hunks of meat, formerly known as legs, outside and closed the door quietly. I performed my paralytic can-can across the well-lit crazy paving, towards the lonely black shed, now looking a long thirty feet away. If I could just get to the shed, then round the corner into the black, no one would be able to see me. I could talk myself through this. Get my head together.
    I made it to the middle of the crazy paving, then I couldn’t move my legs another inch. The paralysis had crept up to my hips. I was stuck, stranded under the hottest part of the outside security light, lucid but unable to walk. I felt real fear now. What was wrong with me? But I had to keep going. I couldn’t let anyone see me. Whatever was going on inside my head and body would pass. If I could just make it to that dark shed.
    There was only one thing for it. I went all Sergeant Elias out of
Platoon
and dropped melodramatically to my knees, then frontwards onto my arms. Somehow, elbow after concrete-grinding elbow, I wormed my way across the dewy patio. I hoped to Christ no one was seeing this. I’d never, ever live it down.
    I got to the shed and dragged myself to sitting, my elbows burning.
    I bum-shuffled sideways into the shadows and sat there for I don’t know how long, frozen to the spot, crazy scenes unfolding in my mind. At one stage, I was running away from my own home, where I’d just stabbed someone. I felt myself run. I heard people coming after me, shouting, screaming, a flashing blue light, a police siren. Then, relief when I saw myself still rooted to the same spot, my hands planted against the shed wall.
    I don’t know how long I’d been there when a blinding light criss-crossed my vision, scoring my sight. Next thing I knew, I was floating through a drifting starscape, arse-first like a breeched baby, slowly and in total silence. I found myself inside Eve’s bedroom, but somehow I was hovering a foot off the floor. I saw clearly the details of the room I knew so well. Across from me, illuminated light from the hallway lit the cracks around the closed bedroom door. Beside it, Eve’s clothes sat in a heap on the chair. I could see the top she wore that morning; the bank of photos of Philandering Frank on the wall; the headboard; the garish scarlet duvet cover; the bedside tables. On my side, the ashtray from Majorca, next to the lamp that refused to break no matter how many times we knocked it to the floor. On the far side of the bed blinked the clock radio. It read 01.09. My God, had I been outside for three hours?
    The hallway door opened. Something glinted. It was Eve in her Viking outfit. ‘This is live!’ I thought. She pushed the door shut, placed her helmet and sword on the bedside table next to the clock radio and collapsed dramatically onto the bed. I realised all this was happening in total silence, yet I could tell she was crying.
    I felt this overwhelming urge to go to her, to touch her, to put my arm around her shoulder. To say sorry.
Are you okay, Eve?
I said, but nothing came out. I knew it was hopeless, that I was trapped in some sort of sensory vacuum, there but not there. Here, but only in spirit.
    The door to the hallway opened very slowly. First came yellow light, then a silhouetted head. I couldn’t make out who it belonged to.
    Eve sat up on the bed with a start. I could tell she was asking who was there. She was telling the person to get out, leave her alone. I couldn’t hear her speak, but I