Ghosts Know

by Ramsey Campbell

  He’s profited from far too much of it, and I could also point out that everybody must have heard the name—and then I’m delighted to hear the woman say “She was called Charlotte.”

  “Sure, that’s right. Didn’t your friends call you Charlie and Charmaine?”

  Charmaine rewards this with a muffled sniff. “Some of them did.”

  “Let me tell you that’s how she still thinks of you both, and she’ll be with you whenever you need her. And I wasn’t wrong to mention charity, was I? She had a lot.”

  “She gave whatever she could.”

  “That’s how I’m hearing it, she liked to be involved with them. Do you know what she’s saying she would love to see? You setting up some kind of Charlie and Charmaine fund for the cause you think she’d most want to support.”

  “It ought to be you, Mr Jasper.”

  “Call me Frank like all my friends do, and I want you to put money right out of your mind while you’re here. I didn’t travel all this way for your dough.”

  I can’t help wishing he were wired up to a polygraph. The memories this rouses inflame my rage, and so does hearing Jasper say “Somebody else wants to be heard now. They’re younger than Charlie, and did they pass this year?”

  He’s met by an uneasy silence in which any restlessness falls short of a nod. Perhaps his listeners are unsure what they’re being asked or afraid to hope too much, but I’m entirely sure of him. He’s playing his most cynical trick to fasten on their emotions—pretending he’s been contacted by a child. “There’s a B with a message for a parent,” he says. “Who’s that who’s here?”

  Is this my cue? Can I really use the death of someone’s child for my own purposes? That’s what Jasper’s doing, after all. In that case I could be said to be as bad as he is, and I haven’t opened my mouth when he says “I’m just about certain I’m hearing B. Is there a B here who’s recently said goodbye to a child?”

  I’m waiting for him to decide he heard a different letter, but as he makes to speak again a woman gasps near the front of the auditorium. “It isn’t Kylie, is it, Mr Jasper? Bob couldn’t come this time.”

  I drop my programme, not just because my fists have twitched open but as an excuse to crouch out of sight. I’d be ashamed if Kylie’s mother realised I was here or why. Remembering all that she’s suffered has confronted me with what I planned to do tonight—to rob her and people like her of perhaps the only belief that sustains them. Whatever my view of it, destroying it would be no better than vindictive, and my rage goes out like a fire that has been swamped with water. “It isn’t, Margaret,” Jasper is saying. “I’d know her. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Margaret Goodchild, Kylie Goodchild’s mother.”

  This earns a burst of applause as well as a sympathetic murmur, and Margaret seems not to know whether to stand up. “Mr Jasper brought our Kylie back to us at her funeral,” she says in an uncontrolled voice.

  I won’t let this provoke me. At least she hasn’t mentioned how he implicated me. I rise from my seat in as much of a crouch as I’m able to maintain and set about muttering apologies all the way along the row. Some of the people who let me pass appear to think I’m too moved to stay, while others frown at my behaviour. No doubt I resemble a child who’s been called up to the stage at a show, but I feel more like a culprit desperate to escape notice. I don’t know if Jasper has recognised me, since the left side of my face is towards the stage. Perhaps my eye-patch renders me unidentifiable. Surely if he knew me he wouldn’t dare to say. “Maybe whoever I’m hearing from is telling those they’ve left behind to be happy,” he suggests. “Maybe that’s the be, but I’m sure there’s a child.”

  As I lurch into the aisle his words almost goad me into confronting him. I’m forcing myself to head for the lobby when a man says gruffly “Our Davina was stung by a bee once in the pram. We reckoned that was why she ended up so weak.”

  “Davina,” Jasper says as if someone other than the member of the audience has told him. “That’s the name, of course it is. Didn’t you call her your little princess?”

  Somebody—the father, I assume—responds with a sob. “She’s here with you,” Jasper says, “and she wants you to know—”

  I would rather not hear. I hurry to the doors, which thud shut behind me like a lid, cutting off Jasper’s routine. Usherettes and other personnel glance or stare at me as I cross the foyer, but I won’t react; I just want to be out of the Palace, beyond any risk of causing a scene or worse. Even the hot still night feels like a relief. I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand while I stare at the gap in the wall of the bridge, leading to the steps down to the canal. I’m about to move onwards when the gap seems to jerk into focus, almost regaining perspective. At last I’ve realised what I heard.

  36: At The Garage

  “It’s Derry here again, your lunchtime chum. Today’s Cancel A Crime Day, so let’s be a bit serious. I’m sure all of us mums and dads ought to be concerned with crime, and I expect the rest of you are too, specially all you mature listeners. Let’s see how many of us can make a difference for everyone today. Are the lines buzzing yet, Patsy?”

  “We’ve a few callers waiting.”

  “Slap my wrist and call me wicked. I’ll bet the jury would let you off for provocation. You don’t like anyone calling you Patsy, do you? And nobody who rings my show today is going to be one. So don’t get in a paddy, Patty. Man the switchboard or I should say girl it if you’ll let me, and let’s be hearing from our pals.”

  The one point worth disentangling from this rigmarole is that it must be Christine’s day off, unless she has found another job. She’s one problem I won’t have to solve, supposing that she would have tried to hinder what I need to do. The radio is turned up all the way, and I can hear every word without straining my ears, despite the shouts and metal uproar in the workshop and the traffic noise out here on the road. There’s nowhere to hide unless I move out of earshot of the workshop—the nearest cover is a phone box at least a hundred yards away—and so I’ll have to take the risk.

  As I produce my mobile a speeding lorry pants hot oily fumes into my face, reminding me that I can’t even move away from the road. The fumes that feel like the noon heat rendered thicker and more stagnant are one reason I wipe my forehead while I wait for my call to be answered. By no means immediately a voice says “The Derek Dennison Deal. Who’s calling, please?”

  It isn’t Patty, who must be overseeing the calls, but of course it isn’t Christine either. “Say Graham from the centre,” I tell her.

  “From the centre of Manchester.” As I take her to be typing the details on Dennison’s screen she says “From the centre of Manchester.”

  I have to resist thinking I’ve found a parrot to go with my patch. “Where else,” I confine myself to saying.

  “And what point would you like to make, Graham?”

  I stare towards the garage, which consists largely of an outsize shed full of cars and parts of cars. However many mechanics are at work in there, they aren’t visible from my section of the uneven flagstoned pavement. To my eye the building looks even less substantial than the rest of the perspectiveless road bordered by large old houses split into flats, some with shops on the ground floor. I could imagine the garage as not much more than a cardboard replica, capable of being razed by a well-chosen blow. I’m here to deliver one and, I very much hope, to expose a fake at last. “I’d like to help clear up a crime,” I say not too loud.

  “Could you speak up a little? I’m not quite getting you.”

  I turn my back on the garage before saying “To clear up a crime.”

  “That’s good, Graham. Can you tell me a bit more about it?”

  “I don’t know if I can say it twice.” I’m just wary of losing my chance. “I’ve had to get ready to say it at all,” I tell her, which is true enough.

  “Can you hold on, please? I’ll have to speak to the producer.”

  There’s some mumbling beyond a hand planted over the mou
thpiece, and then a voice I recognise takes over. “What’s it about, please?”

  Patty sounds no more amiable than she did with Dennison. “About a crime,” I say, having glanced back at the garage.

  “I gathered that. What are you asking to do?”

  “To put a few details out on the air. I think they might help to get it solved.” Patty’s silence prompts me to add “They might help your audience figures as well.”

  At once I’m afraid I’ve said too much. Perhaps I’ve betrayed my identity, or suppose Dennison has antagonised her so badly that she’d rather not boost his ratings? As I search for some other way of persuading her to let me on the air she says “Have you got a radio on?”

  “I haven’t, no.”

  “All right, we’ll call you back.”

  I could think she hasn’t looked into my intentions thoroughly enough. Perhaps that’s her way of taking a crafty revenge on Dennison. I keep my back to the garage while I make another call, which takes so long that I’m afraid of blocking one from Dennison’s team. At last I’m able to face the garage, where the radio is broadcasting an appeal to her neighbours by a woman whose house keeps being daubed with excreta and racist graffiti. Above the clatter of a drill in the garage a man shouts “If she doesn’t like it she should fuck off where she come from.”

  As if the shout has set it off, the phone vibrates in my hand like an alarm. I’m fast enough to silence all of its new ringtone—Frank Sinatra singing “I Only Have Eyes For You”—except for the first word of the line. Pressing the mobile against the side of my face I can see with, I murmur “Hello?”

  “Is this Graham?”

  For a moment I’m sure I’ve been recognised. “That’s my name.”

  “Leave your radio off, but you’re going to hear it on your phone. Derek will be with you when he’s finished talking to the lady who’s on now.”

  I swing around to look at the traffic. Suppose the response to my other call arrives too soon? I can see only trucks and ordinary cars, oncoming layers of them, and I keep an eye on the garage as Dennison speaks in my ear. “I hope every one of your neighbours who care will stand by you, Swati, and the police will as well. I know they’re listening to us today.”

  I should have realised they might, but Dennison distracts me by saying “Next in for a chat is Graham from the city centre. How are you today, Graham?”

  “Better than some.”

  “Then we’re two of a kind and I’ll bet you good money there’s more. We should give thanks for our blessings and pray other people have the same.”

  I need to answer, however disconcerting it is to hear my voice in the garage. It sounds more unnatural than I expected—louder than I am and so disconnected from me that I could easily imagine it’s beyond my control. I’m also afraid Dennison may hear it and tell me to turn off the radio, and I plant my other hand over the phone as well before saying “I’d like to give someone some of mine.”

  “That’s big of you, Graham. Well, there’s a subject for another day. We should have Count Your, I mean Share Your Blessings Day.”

  “I’m sure that would be your kind of show.”

  “So long as the listener’s the winner.” After a pause that’s filled by the clang of a hub-cap on the floor of the garage, Dennison says “Tell me something, Graham. Where do I know you from?”

  I clasp my hands harder over the mobile on the wholly irrational notion that it will make me inaudible in the garage. “I’ve been on the show.”

  “I’m sure I’ve never spoken to you, but you sound familiar.”

  “Does it matter? Anyway, let me—”

  “Good Lordy. Well, let’s hear it for my ears. My senses haven’t let me down yet.” All this allows me to hope that he may keep his realisation to himself until he says “You’re Graham Wilde.”

  How may this affect my plan? I can’t hear any reaction in the garage, and denying who I am won’t help; it might even get me taken off the air. “You’ve spotted me, Derek.”

  “Call me Deny and I’ll call you Gray. What’s brought you back to us? I should tell listeners in case they don’t know that you used to be in my slot.”

  If he doesn’t mean to be disdainful this must be an unintended innuendo, but I haven’t time to deal with either. “I’m calling on today’s subject.”

  “I should use my peepers, shouldn’t I? It says here what you’re doing.” Having paused as though to give the drill in the garage a moment to clatter, he says “Are you a regular listener?”

  “I won’t pretend I have been.”

  “Only then you mightn’t know— ” This pause is so prolonged it isn’t far from unprofessional. “Forget it for now,” Dennison tells me or himself. “Let’s hear your call.”

  I’m even more aware of my giant voice in the garage. I take a breath that I could imagine is audible above the rapid gunning of a power tool in the workshop and say “You’ll have heard what happened to me.”

  “We all have to move on, Gray, don’t we? I did from the Beeb.”

  “I don’t mean losing my job.” He sounds a shade defensive, but I mustn’t let that divert me. “I mean losing my eye. Go on, tell me that’s careless.”

  “I hope you don’t think I ever would.”

  Now I’ve antagonised him. My huge voice in the unnaturally flattened shed is making me say things I never planned to say. I’m about to reclaim control when the presenter says “Have they found whoever was responsible?”

  “Not yet and maybe never. That’s not the crime I want to help with.”

  “Then give it to us, Gray, but just be sure to remember how we have to work.’”

  He’s advising me to stay professional. I haven’t time to resent that; I need to keep my rage in focus. “I’m guessing you listened to some of my shows or you wouldn’t have recognised me.”

  “I was listening because—I did hear some.”

  “Maybe you heard some people thought I gave a psychic reading on the air.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  He sounds eager to believe, which is an advantage I didn’t predict. “They thought I did it without knowing,” I tell him. “I expect they’d say I could have developed it since, maybe to compensate for my eye.’”

  “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Let me tell you what I see and you can tell me what you think.”

  I’ve come to it at last. He shouldn’t interrupt me much if he wants to give his other callers their time on the air. “I believe I can see what happened to the girl who was killed by the canal.”

  I’ve barely said this when I hear a shout and a door slamming in the garage, though the man’s words are indistinguishable. “You mean Kylie Goodchild,” Dennison says in my ear.

  His voice in the garage has lost volume. Through a grimy window that’s open a few inches in the side of the building I see a bulky figure lurch into an office decorated with a nude girl on a calendar. As I turn away to hide my face I glimpse him at the window. I feel as though he’s watching me, even if just sunlight is glaring at my back. I have to keep talking, and I say “That’s who I mean. I told the police I thought her boyfriend was responsible, but now I know it wasn’t him.”

  “Don’t name any names.”

  Dennison’s other voice and my equally distant one are muffled now, because the man at the window has dragged the sash down. When I risk a sidelong glance I find he’s out of sight, presumably at his desk. “I won’t be doing that,” I assure Dennison. “You won’t have to cut me off.”

  “Go on then, but be careful.”

  “I thought the man responsible objected to her trying to see me, but it wasn’t only that. I don’t think it was even mainly me.”

  I’m frustrated by the suffocated mumble of my dislodged voice. I can’t make out a word it says, despite hearing them all in my mobile. More important, if there’s any reaction in the office of the garage I won’t be able to hear. “I’ll tell you this much, Derek,” I say and pace towards the buildin
g, which appears to squeeze it even flatter. “The man used to call up my show.”

  “No names, remember.”

  “No need. He knows who he is.” I have to free one hand to dab my wet prickling forehead. “That’s why Kylie took to me,” I say, “and why she wanted to talk to me the night she died. Because I argued with him on the air about issues they disagreed over.”

  “Make sure you don’t name anyone, but are you saying he still rings in?”

  “I’m certain he still listens.” I found that out yesterday as I loitered near the garage. “He only called me once after that night,” I tell Dennison. “He must have been afraid of being recognised.”

  “Why would he be? I don’t understand.”

  I’m on the edge of saying, but Dennison would take me off the air, and I have more to broadcast. “Let me tell you what I see and maybe you will.”

  “We’re all waiting, so can I ask you to come to the point?”

  “I think they had an argument that night about his problem and she ran off to see me. Or maybe she wasn’t coming to see me at first, she couldn’t have been sure I’d be there, but then she thought of me once she was downtown.” Suppose Dennison cuts me off because he finds this too indefinite? How much more will I have to say to provoke the reaction I’m after? “We know he followed her,” I say and take another step towards the side of the garage—in a minute I’ll be able to dodge out of sight and stay close to the wall of the building. “I don’t know how he explained where he went unless there was nobody else around to see him go.’”

  “Excuse me, Gray, but you sound as if you’re guessing.”

  “It isn’t just a guess.” I’m beside the house next to the garage, and within yards of darting into the gap between them, though that’s wider than it looked. “I see him chasing her away from Waves,” I say and hear my own words beyond the office window. “Maybe she was trying to hide by the canal until he went away, but he found her. And then she stood her ground. That’s how she was.”

  “Hold on a moment. Is there a radio on near you?”