Dance of Ghosts pjc-1

by Kevin Brooks

Somewhere else? I thought. What the fuck does that mean?

  ‘OK, Mrs Gerrish,’ I said. ‘I’ll need Anna’s phone numbers — landline and mobile, please.’

  She gave me the numbers, I wrote them down.

  ‘Have you got any other recent photos of Anna?’ I asked. ‘Anything a bit more … natural?’

  ‘There’s a few more at home, I think. They’re not very recent — ’

  ‘OK, don’t worry, we’ll sort that out later. How about a key to her flat?’

  ‘The police have Anna’s keys, but I’ve got a spare at home.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to take a look round her flat as soon as possible. Could you drop the key off later?’

  She looked slightly pained. ‘Well, it’s a bit difficult … you see, I don’t drive, and my husband has the car all day — ’

  ‘How about later on this evening?’

  ‘He’s working this evening.’

  ‘All right,’ I sighed. ‘Where do you live, Mrs Gerrish?’

  ‘Stangate Rise.’

  I nodded. ‘How about if I drive out later on and pick up the key myself? Would that be OK?’

  She hesitated again. ‘Well, yes … I suppose …’

  I sighed to myself again. This was already beginning to feel like hard work.

  ‘Would six o’clock be convenient?’

  ‘Yes … six o’clock, that’s fine.’

  ‘Right. Perhaps it’d be best if we leave any more questions until then.’

  ‘Yes … yes, of course. Would you like my address — ?’

  ‘My secretary will take all your details before you go. Just one more thing … do you know the name of the officer in charge of the police investigation?’

  ‘Yes, it’s Detective Chief Inspector Bishop.’

  I paused, momentarily taken aback. ‘Mick Bishop?’

  ‘Yes. Do you know him?’

  ‘My father …’ I began to say, but I had to stop to clear my throat. ‘My father knew DCI Bishop … they used to work together.’

  ‘Your father’s a policeman?’

  ‘He used to be.’

  ‘But not any more?’

  ‘No.’

  She looked at me, waiting for me to go on, but after I’d stared back at her for a while, letting her know that I didn’t want to talk about it, she eventually got the message and reluctantly lowered her eyes.

  ‘I usually charge by the hour,’ I told her, clearing my throat again. ‘But I think it’s probably best in this case if we agree on a set rate for a limited period of time — say, three days — and then we’ll both see how it’s going and take it from there. How does that sound?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Craine. That’s perfectly acceptable.’

  ‘And we’ll need a retainer from you, if that’s all right.’

  ‘Of course. How much would you like?’

  ‘My secretary will detail our rates for you. If you’d like to go through to the main office, she’ll explain everything you need to know and draw up a contract.’

  Mrs Gerrish got to her feet. ‘Well, thank you again, Mr Craine. Really … thank you very much.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I’ll see you at six o’clock.’

  She smiled her humourless smile again, turned round, and started walking out. I watched her go. She was one of those women who scuffle across the ground with small, quick steps, barely lifting their feet, as if they’re somehow embarrassed about the process of walking.

  I was just about to pick up the phone and call Ada to let her know what to put in the contract, when I heard the scuffling stop, and I looked up to see Mrs Gerrish peering back at me.

  ‘Would you mind if I asked you a personal question, Mr Craine?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I smiled at her. ‘I can’t promise to answer it, though.’

  She didn’t return the smile. ‘Have you always lived in Hey?’

  I nodded. ‘Most of my life. Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that … back in 1993, something terrible happened here. A young woman was murdered …’

  I didn’t say anything, I just stared at her.

  This time she didn’t look away. ‘Her name was Craine … Stacy Craine …’

  Inside the house, I drop my keys on the hall table and call out, ‘Stacy! It’s me … Stacy?’

  There’s no reply.

  I look at my watch. It’s 5.35.

  ‘Stacy!’ I call out again, going into the kitchen, then on into the sitting room. ‘Where are you, Stace?’

  I shouldn’t be worried. She’ll be upstairs taking a nap, that’s all. It’s a sweltering hot day, she’s five months pregnant … she’s been feeling really tired recently. That’s it. That’s where she’ll be. Upstairs, in bed.

  Asleep.

  No, I shouldn’t be worried …

  But I am.

  Something doesn’t feel right. Me, the air, the house … this moment. It’s all wrong. There’s a terrible coldness in my belly. A deadness in my mind. This, right now … this feels like a moment that I’m never going to forget.

  And now I’m half-remembering something, something I’d seen but not registered when I’d entered the house just a minute ago, and with an awful sense of dread in my heart I go back out into the hallway and stare intently at the hall table … and my half-memory is right. The table is slightly askew … not quite flush to the wall … as if someone has knocked against it in passing and not put it back where it belongs. And when I look down at the floor to the right of the table, I can see what I didn’t see before … the antelope’s head. It’s on the floor. Our carved wooden antelope’s head, six inches long, that we bought at a junk shop for 50p … the carving that we use as a paperweight for anything that needs posting …

  It’s on the floor.

  It shouldn’t be on the floor.

  It belongs on the hall table. And if either of us ever knocks it off, we always pick it up and put it back where it belongs.

  Always.

  Without fail.

  It’s one of our stupid little things …

  And now I’m running up the stairs as fast as I can, and my heart is pounding, and I’m shouting at the top of my voice, ‘Stacy! Stacy! STACY!’

  ‘Mr Craine …?’

  I looked up.

  Helen Gerrish was staring at me with a slightly puzzled look on her face. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes … yes, I’m sorry. What were you saying?’

  ‘Stacy Craine … I was just wondering, you know, as it’s quite an unusual name … if she was related to you in any way.’

  ‘She was my wife,’ I said.

  ‘Oh … oh, I’m terribly sorry. I hope you didn’t mind me asking … it’s just … well, I remember it, that’s all. It was such an awful thing.’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  ‘I’m sorry to bring it up. It must be … well, it must be very hard. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Did the police ever find him? The man who did it, I mean. Did they catch him?’

  ‘No …’ I said quietly. ‘No, the police never caught him.’

  3

  While Ada was sorting out the paperwork for Helen Gerrish in the main office, I opened up my laptop, logged on to the Internet, and Googled ‘Anna Gerrish’. There weren’t that many results: three entries from the Hey Gazette, one from the Guardian, and one from the Daily Mail. The first article in the Hey Gazette was dated Wednesday 8 September, two days after Anna was last seen. It was the lead story on the front page, accompanied by the same photograph that her mother had just given to me. The other two articles appeared on the following days — Thursday’s was on page three, Friday’s was relegated to page seven. After that, there was nothing. The stories in the Guardian and the Daily Mail were both no more than a paragraph or two, and neither of them added anything to the reports in the Gazette.

  According to the report, Anna had been a barmaid at The Wyvern for about eighteen months. On the night of Monday 6 September she�
�d worked a late shift, finishing at one o’clock in the morning, and that was the last time anyone had seen her. No one knew where she’d gone after work, whether she was planning to meet someone, or go somewhere, or simply go home. And if she was planning to go home, no one seemed to know how she usually got back after a late shift, whether she walked, or took a taxi, or if anyone ever picked her up. No one, it seemed, knew very much about Anna at all. There were even conflicting reports as to what she’d been wearing when she left. Most of the staff at The Wyvern were fairly sure that she hadn’t got changed out of the jeans and white vest she’d been wearing all night, she’d just thrown on a black leather coat and left. But a barmaid called Genna Raven was convinced that she’d seen Anna getting changed in the toilets. ‘She was definitely wearing heels and a skirt when she left,’ Genna was quoted as saying. ‘And I think she might have put on a black top too.’

  In terms of what actually happened that night, that was about all the newspaper reports had to offer. The rest of it was all padding: speculation, quotes from Mrs Gerrish and DCI Bishop, biographical information about Anna — where she’d gone to school, her modelling hopes, that kind of thing.

  Reading between the lines, and judging by the way the newspapers had quickly lost interest in the story, I got the impression that apart from Helen Gerrish, who I guessed was the driving force behind getting the story printed in the first place, no one really believed that Anna had come to any harm.

  And they were probably right.

  But, unlike the media, I don’t get paid to speculate.

  So I went through the newspaper reports again, noting down any relevant information, and I put all that together with the photograph and the details that Helen Gerrish had given me, and I was just about to start making a few preliminary phone calls when I heard the outer office door open and close, followed by Helen Gerrish’s tiny footsteps shuffling down the stairs, and a few moments later my door swung open and Ada came in.

  ‘Phew,’ she said, blowing out her cheeks and shaking her head. ‘She’s hard work, that one.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Any problems with the contract or anything?’

  Ada shrugged. ‘I don’t think she even read it, to be honest. Just signed it and gave me the cheque.’ Ada took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and threw one over to me, and we both went over to the battered old settee beneath the window. I opened the window, and we sat down and lit our cigarettes.

  Ada looked at me. ‘You know Mick Bishop is the SIO on the Anna Gerrish case, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right with that?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  She held my gaze for a moment or two, giving me her ‘are you sure about that?’ look, then she just nodded slowly and took a long drag on her cigarette. ‘So,’ she said, blowing out smoke. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘I don’t know … I’m going to look round Anna’s flat this evening, and then I’ll just take it from there, I suppose. Go and see Bishop, talk to Anna’s work colleagues … see if anything turns up.’

  ‘Do you think it will?’

  I shrugged. ‘Probably not.’

  Ada tapped ash from her cigarette. ‘If I had a mother like Helen Gerrish, I think I’d have run away years ago.’

  I smiled. ‘Me too.’

  She took another puff on her cigarette. ‘Do you want me to call Bishop and set up a meeting?’

  ‘Yeah, please. Tomorrow if possible.’

  ‘OK. Anything else?’

  ‘Did you get a chance to try that memory card yet?’

  ‘Yeah, but I couldn’t get anything from it. It might be worth asking Cal to have a look.’

  I nodded. Callum Franks was Stacy’s nephew. Over the years he’d often helped me out whenever I needed an extra pair of eyes or legs. He was a quick learner, and very reliable, and when it came to anything technical — computers, phones, recording equipment — Cal was in a league of his own. He could do virtually anything with a laptop … and when I say anything, I mean anything. Legal or otherwise.

  ‘OK,’ I said, putting out my cigarette. ‘Remind me to pick up the memory card before I go. I’ll give it to Cal the next time I see him.’

  Ada stood up. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Did you get through to the garage about the car window?’

  She nodded. ‘They said they’d send someone out straight away.’

  ‘Straight away garage time?’

  ‘I’d imagine so.’

  ‘What’s that in real time?’

  ‘Probably about two hours.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, stifling a yawn.

  ‘Why don’t you go home for a bit?’ Ada said gently. ‘Take a bath, change your clothes … get some rest. I don’t mind staying on for the rest of the day.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll call you a taxi.’

  ‘You’re an angel, Ada.’

  ‘I know.’ She looked at me, suddenly quite serious. ‘Are you all right, John? I mean, you know … in yourself, generally. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah … I’m fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She looked at me for a long moment, seeking the truth in my eyes, and then — with a far from convincing nod of her head — she reached up and gently took hold of my chin, angling it to get a better look at the swelling on my face.

  ‘You need to put some ice on that when you get home,’ she said. ‘Have you got any ice in that hovel of yours?’

  ‘It’s not a hovel — ’

  ‘Put a few ice cubes in a towel or a flannel, crush them up, and hold it against your face. It should help the swelling to go down. All right?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  She looked at me again, genuine concern showing in her eyes, then she said, ‘I’ll go and call you that taxi.’

  My house — or my hovel, as Ada likes to call it — is in an old terraced street on the south side of town. It was originally a factory house, as were all the homes in Paxman Street, built over a century ago by the owners of the neighbouring engineering plant to accommodate the company’s workers. For a hundred years or more, the mist and steam from the factory across the road has been breathed in by the bricks of the house, and on a hot day, or when a thunderstorm is coming, the walls give out a faint scent of oil. Sometimes, too, in the middle of the night, I think I can smell the tired skin of the factory hands who once lived here. I imagine them as short, dark, melancholy people, with sooted faces and small bitter eyes … and as I lie in bed, listening to their illusive whispers, I wonder if they’re happier now, in their dreams of death, than they were in the toil of their lives.

  It’s not much, my house — upstairs, downstairs, two separate flats, a small back garden and an even smaller front yard — but it’s mine, for what it’s worth, and I feel safe and comfortable within the sanctuary of its stained old walls.

  I live alone.

  But I’m not alone.

  When my mother died in 1997, she left me both the family home — the house where I was born and brought up — and the house in Paxman Street, which she’d bought with my father some years ago as a buy-to-let investment. At the time she died, there was only the one tenant in the house, a young woman called Bridget Moran, who lived in the upstairs flat, and as I’d already decided to sell the family home and use the money to set up my own investigation business, it just seemed sensible, and convenient, to move into the downstairs flat.

  So that’s what I did.

  And I’m still here.

  And so is Bridget Moran.

  As the taxi dropped me off outside the house, Bridget was just coming out, and I was momentarily stunned to see that she’d had most of her chestnut-brown shoulder-length hair cut off and was now sporting a boyishly short peroxide-blonde crop. My sense of shock was only partly caused by how different — and how amazing — she looked with her new haircut. The main reason, the t
hing that just for a second had stopped my heart and turned me inside out, was that Stacy used to wear her hair in exactly the same style — short, blonde, spikily cute — and just for a moment, when I’d seen Bridget coming out of the house …

  The moment soon passed.

  Bridget was with her boyfriend, a vapid piece of meat called Dave. I’d never liked Dave. He had a confident smile, nice teeth, sideburns, an expensive suit and an equally expensive watch. He was the kind of man who keeps a golf umbrella in the back of his company car, the kind of man who wears shoes that squeak. I didn’t know his surname, but I liked to think that it was Dave. ‘Hi,’ I could imagine him saying. ‘Dave Dave, pleased to meet you. Yeah, right, absolutely …’

  No, I didn’t like Dave at all.

  Not that it mattered …

  ‘Hey, John,’ Bridget said breezily as we met at the front gate. Then, ‘Shit! What happened to your face?’

  ‘Oh, nothing … just a stupid accident,’ I muttered, trying not to stare too obviously at her hair. ‘I fell over … down some steps.’

  ‘You need to put some ice on that,’ she said, looking closer.

  ‘So I’ve been told.’ I looked at her. ‘I like what you’ve done to your hair.’

  She smiled broadly, running her fingers through her hair. ‘Really? You don’t think it’s too much, do you?’

  ‘No … it really suits you.’

  Dave Dave, who’d been gazing idly around the front yard as we talked, feigning indifference, suddenly butted in. ‘Come on, Bridge,’ he grunted, taking her by the arm. ‘We’d better get going.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ She flashed a smile at me. ‘See you later, John. And don’t forget the ice.’

  I smiled at her, nodding perfunctorily at Dave, and stepped aside to let them pass. I paused for a moment, wondering if I should turn round and wave goodbye … but after I’d thought about it for a while, I decided not to bother, and I just went on into the house instead.

  Bridget’s dog, Walter, was waiting in the hallway when I opened the front door. A big old greyhound, he was sitting at the foot of the stairs with a chewed rubber bone in his mouth. I reached down and scratched his head.