Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

She never doubted for a moment that she would vanquish this monster, and in a remarkably short period of time, she realized he had let go of Geordie and was running for the entrance to the yard. She followed for a few metres, determined to stop him, but then realized that Geordie needed her help.

  She unwound the twisted rope from his neck. His face was blue, and his head and limbs were limp. Marie said his name, felt for the carotid pulse on his neck. He was breathing and his heart was working, but he was unconscious.

  She placed him in the recovery position and ran to the entrance to Stonegate. ‘I need a doctor,’ she yelled. ‘A doctor and an ambulance. And bloody quick!’

  She got neither. What she got was four big lads from the Punch Bowl, all smelling of beer, and a Suzuki jeep. The biggest of the lads drove the jeep along Stonegate, and unloaded a plank of wood. Then all four of them loaded Geordie on to the plank, made him comfortable in the back of the jeep, and drove him and Marie to the emergency ward of the district hospital.

  When they arrived there he still hadn’t regained consciousness, was looking just like a ghost.

  38

  The bell rings downstairs and the door opens. You hear Dr Hillerman shout from the foot of the stairs and Diana goes to meet him. He bustles into the room and listens to your heart through his stethoscope. Bushy eyebrows, sprouting every which way. The iron bar has almost gone from your body. You feel light, like one of Mother’s sponge cakes.

  ‘You’ve had some pain?’ he says.

  You look him in the eye and shake your head. He turns to Sam questioningly.

  Sam laughs. He can’t believe you’ve looked the doctor in the eye and told a big lie. He turns back to the doctor. ‘It seems better now,’ he says.

  The doctor holds your wrist. He is not taking your pulse. He is trying to reassure himself by physical contact. ‘We don’t want to take any chances,’ he says. ‘We’d better have you in the hospital.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you a phone?’ This to Sam.

  ‘She’s all right here, doctor. There’s no need for the hospital.’

  The doctor makes a face. ‘Impossible.’

  Sam crosses him and stands by the bed, his hand on your arm. ‘She’s all right here,’ he repeats. ‘She doesn’t want to go.’

  Silence.

  The moment of decision.

  ‘We can cope,’ Diana tells him.

  The doctor dithers on the spot, but he knows he has lost. He turns his face to you. ‘You’re a stubborn woman,’ he says, but the tone of his voice has softened. He closes his bag. ‘I’ll be off,’ he says. ‘Some of my patients need me.’ You listen to his footsteps on the stairs, and the front door closing behind him. You catch Sam’s eye, and return his smile. He strokes the side of your face.

  Diana places both hands on the bed and shakes her head. ‘You two,’ she says. ‘You two against the whole bloody world.’

  39

  William stood back in the shadows of the street and watched Dora’s house. He saw the Daimler arrive and the man get out with the doctor’s bag. A few minutes later he watched the man leave the house, get back into the Daimler and drive away. Every room in the house was lit. The ground-floor rooms were unoccupied. Upstairs, the curtains to Dora’s room were drawn, but figures, silhouettes, could be seen moving behind them.

  It would be possible, simple even, to go around the back of the house and gain entry through the kitchen door. Then creep up the stairs, give Dora a big surprise. He had a length of green rope in the pocket of his cloak. A warm knife nestling next to it.

  He smiled to himself, then replaced the smile with a furrowed brow. Because things were going wrong now.

  His attempt on the woman in Fishergate had gone wrong. Badly wrong. He had planned it exactly like the others, and the others had gone according to plan. The man wasn’t supposed to return when he did. William couldn’t understand that. He had thought about it over the last couple of days, and it still didn’t make sense.

  Everything had been going right up to that point. He had stalked the woman. Watched her, he knew how she organized her life. There was a man there, a man who lived with her, but when he went out to his club he stayed out of the house until midnight. Always. As long as William had watched them the man had never returned before midnight. And when he returned he staggered and sometimes sang, as the alcohol boiled inside his brain.

  But when William had the rope around the woman’s neck, when her eyes were bulging with disbelief, the man had returned. It was still not ten o’clock. And the man was not staggering or singing, he was quick and alert. He was strong. William only got away because he heard the door to the flat opening. If he hadn’t heard that the man would have trapped him in there.

  That had been the first thing that had gone wrong. Not counting India Blake. The India Blake thing had gone wrong, but it had come out all right in the end.

  The second thing that had gone wrong was Charles Hopper who was still in the chest in William’s house. William had not wanted to put Charles in the chest in his house. He had not wanted Charles to be involved in any way at all. Charles was work, business. William didn’t want to mix business and pleasure. He wanted to keep them separate, like everyone else did.

  And what had made Charles Hopper get involved was the woman detective who was asking questions. William had thought about that as well. And what he had thought was simple. Get rid of the woman detective and everything would stop. Almost. There would still be Charles to deal with, or his body when he died. But that was all. The woman detective was the one who had started things going wrong, so if William dealt with her that would signal the beginning of the end of his troubles.

  Only it went wrong again.

  He’d trapped the woman detective. Was closing in on her. She already had that look of resignation in her eyes. She was whimpering in the doorway, reconciled to the fact that her life was to be sacrificed when the man in the leather jacket had arrived.

  William didn’t like fighting. He especially didn’t like fighting with men. He knew all about it, of course, how to do it. He’d learned all that when he worked as a bouncer. But he didn’t like it. It was true that the man didn’t put up much of a fight. Probably because his arm was broken. And it was also true that William’d won the fight. He’d killed the man, or nearly killed him when the woman detective had begun her attack.

  William had had to flee again. What should have happened, he should have been able to frighten the woman detective. He should have killed the man who had come to her rescue, and then killed her. But it all took too long. By the time he’d subdued the man, the woman detective had turned into a fireball. William looked at his right hand. There was a clear outline of her teeth there; you could see where she had sunk them into the flesh. If William hadn’t wrenched himself free at that point she would have bitten part of his hand away. He explored the perimeter of the bite with the fingers of his left hand. It was sore. The blood had begun to clot now, but if he applied a little pressure it would start to flow again.

  He should go home and treat it. He had a first-aid kit, with antiseptic ointment, sterile pads and plasters. He could take something for his headache.

  He looked up at Dora’s window.

  There was a choice to be made here.

  Something he had to decide. Only he couldn’t remember what it was.

  He had played this part in life. There were no parts like this in the theatre. Not that he’d been offered, anyway. The parts that were on offer in the theatre all required a leading lady. And William didn’t want a leading lady. That’s what had led him to specialize in make-up. All those leading ladies he did not require.

  The problem was the words in all the plays, the words where you had to tell the leading lady that you loved her. William had been able to say all the other words convincingly. But those words where you tell the leading lady that you love her had stuck in his throat.

  At first he’d told himself he had to conform. That other people mana
ged those words, and that he should be able to manage them as well. He’d tried with Pammy. With Pammy he’d said the words, spilt them out, so they stood there between them. And the words had given rise to a huge silence. The words had been unconvincing. Pammy didn’t believe them at all. And neither did William. The words were empty shells, filled with the sound of the world’s oceans. The silence had risen up and engulfed William and Pammy. And that was the moment when Pammy began to fade, to gradually metamorphose into Dora.

  William realized that people didn’t love and hate. There were no passions. He realized that nothing mattered. That it was all play. That there were good actors who survived, and bad actors who fell by the wayside. And he decided that he’d be a good actor.

  A good actor was one who played the parts he was best at. William was never going to be a romantic lead. He knew that. He had insight.

  He was going to play a loner.

  An invisible loner with his own script. He would be a man who lived by night, a man who was unremarkable. Occasionally, from time to time he would audition a leading lady. But only for a very short part. She would not have any lines as such. What you might call a walk-on part.

  William held two images in his head. The first was of a howling wind, his cloak whipping around his legs. The second image was of a black Daimler. He promised himself that he wouldn’t move until he’d worked out what connected these two images. He couldn’t remember how long a time had passed since he’d made that promise. It might have been a few minutes, or it might have been several hours.

  He knew why he couldn’t work out the connection between the two images. It was because the images were decoys. They had been put there to distract his attention from something else that he should be concentrating on. He didn’t know what the something else was. Once he’d worked out the connection between the wind and the Daimler he’d be free to concentrate on the other.

  The light in Dora’s room shone. The silhouettes behind the curtain moved.

  The promise that William had made, about not moving. There had been a reason for that, but the reason wasn’t obvious any more. He pushed his left foot forward, and took a step toward the light in Dora’s room.

  They called him the Surgeon.

  Because he cut out his mother’s eyes.

  Who would stop him?

  There were silhouettes in the room with her, but the Surgeon would remove them. That’s what a surgeon did. He cut away the bad, the evil, so that the good could grow and flourish.

  William stepped into the road. The rope and the knife were there, safe in his pocket. She’d be drinking up there, he thought. Sucking on a bottle. William didn’t like his mother drinking, but it was the only thing she could do.

  He had the house in his sights now. The very house where everything had happened. He remembered seeing his daddy hanging there, outside in the garden, and how he had been so small at the time, and frozen with grief. And he remembered thinking it was the end of the world, because his daddy was dead, and how it would be impossible for the world to carry on without him.

  Almost everything about his mother disgusted him.

  A car turned into the street and William retreated back into the shadows. It wasn’t a Daimler. It was a taxi, and it parked outside Dora’s house. William watched and saw the woman detective get out of the back. She was wearing the same lilac-coloured suit as earlier. She paid the taxi driver and went into Dora’s house.

  William was paralysed again.

  He looked up at the harvest moon and tried to remember what happened next.

  He listened for a prompt.

  His head was like a bucket with holes punched in the sides. As soon as he thought something the thought slid through one of the holes and was gone. There was a real connection between the woman detective and Dora, there had to be. But what was it?

  The taxi got to the end of the street, turned the corner and was gone. He looked back at the house.

  An ordinary house in an ordinary street. There was nothing to distinguish it from the houses on either side. People passing by would not give it another look. But behind it, hidden from the world, was a pear tree. And in the branches of that tree William had discovered the knowledge of good and evil.

  His mother had hired the woman detective. In phase one his mother had killed Arthur. Phase two would be the death of William.

  Unless, somehow, Arthur and William together could devise a plan to wipe her from the face of the earth.

  40

  Sam watched the bedroom door open. Celia was standing in the doorway. She mouthed the word: ‘Marie.’ He looked down at Dora, who was sleeping. He smoothed the cover near her shoulder and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him. ‘It’s Marie,’ Celia said. ‘Sounds important.’

  He looked at Celia, placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘You look worn out,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go home? Get some rest?’

  ‘I’ll hang on a little longer,’ she said. ‘See what Marie wants. If you have to go out you’ll need me here.’

  ‘What about Diana?’

  ‘She’s sleeping.’

  Sam followed her down the stairs. Marie got to her feet as they walked into the living room. She was dishevelled, her hair stuck to her head, her skirt and tights scuffed and torn. He went to her and put his arms around her. ‘You all right? What happened?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine. But Geordie’s in the hospital.’ She quickly told him what had happened. How she’d gone to enquire at Charles Hopper’s house, and how she and Geordie had been attacked by the character in the cloak.

  ‘Geordie,’ said Sam. ‘Is he conscious?’

  ‘Yes, Janet’s with him. It’s a compound fracture, broken two bones in his forearm. The radius and the ulna; it’s nasty, the upper part of the radius came through the skin. No wonder he passed out.’

  Sam flinched. ‘But it’ll mend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about his neck?’

  ‘It looks terrible where the rope has burned the skin. But it’s superficial. He’ll come through.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  Marie smiled. ‘Yeah. He said, “Tell Sam I’m sorry, and tell him to nail the bastard.” ’

  ‘And Janet? She can cope?’

  ‘I got them a private room. She can stay there with him. Be like a honeymoon. I told the hospital you’d pick up the tab.’

  ‘I’m stunned,’ Sam said. He cocked his head to one side, listened to the sound of a distant cash register.

  ‘I thought you’d want to make a gesture.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘What the hell. It’s better to give than lend, and it costs about the same.’

  ‘We didn’t get a look at the guy,’ said Marie. ‘He wore a hood. Like a medieval monk. But he was deadly serious.’ Sam turned back to Celia. ‘Get on the phone to J.D. Tell him thanks a lot for his letter, but I need him over here now. I don’t want to leave you unprotected. As soon as we leave, lock the doors and make sure the windows are all fastened.’

  ‘We going somewhere?’ asked Marie.

  ‘The guy who attacked you,’ Sam said. ‘I know where he lives. You game for a bit of house breaking?’

  ‘Will I need a note from my mother?’

  They detoured to the hospital. They walked through the main entrance and took a lift to the second floor. Marie led the way on to the ward, past the nurses’ station to a private room. Geordie was flat on his back, Janet sitting in a chair by the side of his bed.

  ‘Great security system here,’ Sam said.

  Marie laughed. ‘Yeah, you can walk in and smother all the patients. Kill the doctors if you like. No one will stop you unless you’re smoking.’

  Sam went to the bed and placed his hand over Geordie’s, looked down into his face.

  ‘It was weird,’ Geordie said. His voice was faint and hoarse. Didn’t sound like him at all. ‘I knew I was dying and I was really pissed off. I didn’t see all my life pass in front of my eyes. Nothing
like that. It was like being drowned, like being in an ocean, being dragged down into the depths, all alone. Up on the surface there was Janet and Barney in the sunlight, you and Marie and Celia. And down below it was pitch black. I didn’t want to go but there was no way round it. It was so disappointing.’

  Marie took a step towards the bed. ‘But you didn’t die, Geordie.’

  He put something like a grin on his face. ‘Thanks to you.’ He reached out his good hand and she took it, leaned over the bed and put her cheek next to his. When she pulled away Geordie looked exhausted.

  ‘We’d better be on our way,’ Sam said.

  ‘You gonna get him, Sam?’ Geordie asked. His face was whiter than snow, his eyes huge and black.

  ‘Yeah. We’ll wrap it up tonight.’

  ‘Careful. He’s Radio Rental. He’s not big but he’s stronger than you think. I tried to kick him in the grapes.’ Sam nodded. Glanced at Janet, then snapped back to Geordie. ‘You gonna be OK?’

  Janet said, ‘The doctors and nurses are really good. They could put scrambled eggs back into the shell.’

  Geordie did something with his face, another stab at a smile, but not much better than the last one. ‘I could use some grapes,’ he said. ‘I thought that’s what’s supposed to happen. People come and visit you and tell old jokes and feed you grapes.’

  Sam got up and headed for the door. ‘Don’t be a sprout,’ he said.

  *

  St Mary’s was quiet. The moon was bright but the wind had dropped away. Billy’s attic room was lit with a flickering glow that could only have come from a candle. The other windows were in darkness.

  ‘We’ll go in the back way,’ Sam said. He led Marie through the pedestrian passage to Marygate Lane, and from there to a brick wall and tall wooden gate which led to the back of Billy’s house. The gate was locked from the inside. Sam asked Marie to hold his torch. He put a dustbin against the wall to give him a start, went over the wall and unbolted the gate so Marie could follow. The bolt on the gate hadn’t been used for some time.