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
