The Ghost

by The Ghost (epub)

  He noted the ‘D’ profile name, logged back in as ‘Michael Howell’ and typed out a message containing the address of the house where Eleanor Finch was being held. He tapped ‘return’ twice and wrote:

  DC is here.

  38. Hour of Defeat

  WILLIAM STONE WALKED INTO the Seven Stars and sat at the usual corner bench, opposite his friend and occasional banker. The pub had only been open for ten minutes, and, as the barmaid upturned the chairs, she regarded her sole customers with more pity than irritation.

  “What’s going on, Dor? Bit early for you!”

  Stone took off his jacket and leaned back, opening his body, offering himself to whatever was coming. It was about time for Cook to ask for some kind of repayment. The items he had sourced were specialist and tricky to obtain, but the summoning suggested there was still debt to negotiate. Stone had calculated he could spare a £1000 severance fee without too much pain.

  “Hello, Will,” said Cook, looking up from a cup of black coffee, casting his eyes across the table, around the room – anywhere but Stone’s gaze. “I’m a bit off-kilter with timing at the moment. Not really sure if it’s day or night – or what difference it makes, anyway.”

  Stone reached over and stole a slurp of coffee. “Fuck me, mate. I know it’s hard, but – y’know – crisis/opportunity, all that. Get out there! Fill your boots. Empty your bollocks!”

  Cook smiled and looked up. “Did you read about the murder last week?”

  “Which one? Front cover of Murder Monthly?”

  “The bloke who had his throat cut. He’d been kept at some factory, tied up.”

  Stone brightened at this. He was already starting to assign the £1000 to other debtors. “Yeah. Why?”

  “I was at school with him.”

  The barmaid – drawing blinds, scraping chairs under tables – called over.

  “Can I get you anything, love?”

  “Coffee, please,” said Stone. “White, no sugar.”

  Cook was hardly deflected by the interruption. “Will – how would you feel if…”

  Stone cut him off, surprised at his own irritation. “Happens all the time! He was a name, mate.”

  “What?”

  “You’re talking about Dave Brereton, right? Drugs. Small-time, big in his head. Cocky bastard. We’ve had him on possession a couple of times but he was definitely dealing. I remember he came in a few years ago – speed freak. Maybe even injecting. It’s a big drug with chefs and kitchen staff. They work silly hours. Keeps ‘em flying. Most of ‘em are on shit money so they can’t afford coke. We think he probably had a steady supply network, then as he got higher up, more funds, more time, started dishing it out himself, thought he was untouchable, pissed off somebody he shouldn’t be pissing off – probably one of his dealers went freelance without telling him. That’s how it goes. You mess with someone who’s fucked-up enough to think he can do it without competition and who has a couple of nasty connections, and you might find yourself dead.”

  “Will…”

  “They were probably told to scare him but one of them went too far and they finished him off because it was less risky. Seen it loads of times, mate. Yardies or fucking Armenians – they fly in, spend a weekend whoring, do the business and then fuck off on the next flight out. Always helps when the victim is someone who no-one gives enough of a fuck about to follow up on. Either that, or they’re too scared.”

  The coffee arrived. Stone snatched up the mug, sipped at the milk-foam.

  “Will… It said he was blinded or something.”

  Stone took out a sweetener capsule and clicked a couple of pellets into his drink. “So? What do you want me to do?”

  “Help me!” said Cook, loud enough to divert the barmaid back to the near edge of the bar, within earshot. He softened his voice. “Help me. Well – it’s not me. It’s Alfie and Gina.”

  “And what’s going to happen to them? Dor, you’re sounding mental, mate.”

  “I am not mental. You don’t know what I know.”

  Stone took this partly as an insult. “No. I don’t! I’m not as clever as you – well done for spotting that. I’m just telling you what I think, based on my experience. I don’t know what this has got to do with your family, but it sounds like you’re in a mess. Get away for a bit. Clear your head.”

  “Will. There is no ‘away’.”

  In the evening, Cook dined alone at an obscure Italian restaurant near his temporary home. He sat away from the windows, swivelling spaghetti with one hand, prodding at his laptop with the other. The feed from the Eleanor house was comforting – static and predictable. He pondered the psychology of a captive given hope of rescue, but then abandoned. Would she think of her encounter with him as psychosis? Fantasy? A twisted ruse from her keeper?

  And still, the nightmare loop, round and round on his inner widescreen – Gina jumping, screaming. Alfie sobbing. Panic and trembling. A calm voice asking for information. Confusion and fear. Then a louder, more volatile voice – demanding, threatening. Then, Gina dead. Alfie dead. He had sifted through the detail too many times, refining it beyond recognition, scrutinising the connections for evidence of delusion. But he knew that true insanity was a work in constant progress – it could not be soothed by reason or cured by reflection. Cook was still a man in deep sleep, desperate to wake and welcome the world outside the veil. But, however hard he flexed, he could not give clear and tangible form to his torment. It was a terror that coiled tighter the more he struggled.

  Will had provided a contact – Avi Ackner, a friend who ran a private security firm. The phone-call had been cordial – Ackner sounded wise and well aged, clearly accustomed to troubled clients. Cook was heartened at how his requirements were absorbed without suspicion.

  For two weeks, his family home would be watched, round the clock, by two guards in unmarked cars – one at the front, one round the back.

  “Other methods of access?” asked Ackner.

  “Not that I know of,” said Cook.

  “And this is your house, yes?”

  Cook resented the implication – of sloppy security awareness, or worse. “Of course. There’s a front door and a back door, that’s it.”

  “Any side entrance? Alley? Cut-through?”

  “No. Can I ask – what do they do all day?”

  “The operatives? They’ll vary their routine, swap positions, plan patrol routes. They won’t just sit there – that would obviously attract interest. Don’t worry. They’re all ex-army. They’re used to it.”

  “Do they just watch? How do they see detail at night? Binoculars, or infra-red…”

  Ackner chuckled. “Some of them use pinhole cameras. Hook them up to the cars. Blends in very well. A lot of employers use them – embedded into ceilings, walls. They can monitor live, images can be reviewed, memory flushed every few days.”

  “Yes,” said Cook with a half-smile. “I think I’ve heard of that.”

  They agreed on ‘alert criteria’ and exchanged a couple of emails – a disclaimer, photographs of Gina and Alfie. Cook transferred £8500 to Frontline Protection and, shortly after, received a text message informing him that the payment had been processed and the ‘operation’ would begin the next day. Cook now had a fourteen-day window of opportunity. As ever, his reaction to a solid deadline was a mixture of reassurance and panic.

  The restaurant was approaching closing time, and Cook realised he was the only patron remaining, apart from an elderly couple chatting to the owner in tipsy Italian. His waiter approached and offered a scripted endorsement of the chef’s ‘special’ tiramisu. Cook declined and ordered coffee. He logged into PastLives.com on his laptop. The Michael Howell account showed one new message – from the ‘D’ profile (status ‘Online’).

  how do I know your MH

  With a flush of smugness, Cook logged out – and back in, via his own account. He swept the messages and profile detail for anything that seemed out of place or indiscreet, reset the password t
o ‘bethesda’ and logged back in to the Howell account. The site offered a live-chat window which could be accessed with a profile-to-profile request. Cook sent:

  chat in 2 mins?

  Almost immediately, a window popped up.

  You have received a request for private live messaging from user >D<. Do you accept?

  Cook, light-headed now, accessed the chat window, exclusively shared between ‘Michael Howell’ and ‘>D<’. There was a conversation thread already open – a repeat of the inbox message.

  how do I know your MH

  Cook typed:

  Jungle Juice

  Instantly, a reply.

  ?

  Cook’s stomach lurched. He had mentally rehearsed this encounter, but only after seeing the words on-screen did he realise that Darren Ray (if that was who he was talking to) had arrived after the bottle-pissing and so wouldn’t get the reference. He typed:

  I saw the dogs but ran away

  “Would you like anything else?”

  The waiter reappeared with coffee. Cook flinched and almost snapped the laptop shut. “Uh, no. Just the bill, please.”

  In the corner of the chat window, a looping animation showed fingers fluttering above a section of computer keyboard and, redundantly, the word ‘Typing’. Cook stared at it, nauseous.

  how did you get my profile

  Back on-script now, Cook typed:

  Hacked DC account. ‘doriancook’. Password too obvious!

  Typing fingers.

  ?

  Cook replied:

  School name

  No typing fingers.

  Cook drank the tepid coffee in a couple of gulps. Darren Ray was big enough and scary enough back then. What would he look like now – hunting through Cook’s profile, walking over his grave?

  Typing fingers.

  ok

  With a couple of authentic errors, Cook typed:

  I didnt knwo about anything else honest

  The ‘>D<’ profile status changed to ‘Offline’.

  39. Final Cut

  “ZOMBIES EAT YOUR BRAINS,” said Alfie. “But it doesn’t make them clever.”

  “I can’t imagine it would do you much good, though!” said Cook.

  Alfie pondered, draining his milkshake. “It might – if they ate the stupid part of your brain.”

  “Let’s not talk about eating brains, any more.”

  Cook and son were gnawing their way through functional cheese-rolls at a cafe near the cinema entrance. Cook was still faintly traumatised by the film – The Dancing Dead – about a troupe of stage-school kids fighting off a zombie invasion. (After being bitten, the group’s alpha-teen realises that the only way to defeat the infection is to keep his blood pumping – by dancing. The kids rally around him, working to spread the positive message of dance-based counter-attack quicker than the zombies can overcome the population.)

  “What about ghosts, Alfie? How do they work?”

  “They don’t eat. They are floating souls. If you see one and it knows you’ve seen it, then it haunts you forever.”

  “How does it haunt you?”

  “They haunt you,” said Alfie, with exaggerated impatience, “by making monsters scratch on the door and doing red eyes in the dark.”

  Cook smiled. “Can you kill them?”

  “Dad!” He sighed – a glimpse of the teenager to come. “They’re already dead!”

  Cook had collected his son just after breakfast, releasing Gina to an early work meeting. As he approached the house, he had expected to see a burly brute in an armoured van, skulking behind tinted sunglasses. Instead, he passed a slight-looking character in a scruffy suit, pacing – with little urgency – around a dark blue Ford Focus, speaking quietly into his mobile. Five minutes later, as he left the house with Alfie, the man was sitting in his car, still on the phone. This was either an illustration of Frontline Protection’s mastery of blended surveillance, or Cook had spent close to £10,000 on glorified babysitters. It was now the second week of the ‘operation’, and Ackner’s daily updates had offered nothing to raise concern. Cook had spent the first three nights parked at Peakvale Avenue, monitoring his live feed, seeing little outside the usual routine.

  As he dropped Alfie back with Gina in the early evening, Cook saw that the Ford Focus had re-parked further up the road, and that the man inside had been replaced by a reassuringly broad colleague, shaven head bowed to his lap where he seemed to be jotting notes. To the curious eye, this activity would raise slight interest, but the variation made it difficult to pin down as unusual and, Cook supposed, that was the point – not too visible, not too invisible.

  For another two nights, Cook hovered around in a state of calculated insanity, monitoring the house on the corner from the discomfort of his proxy home. He walked from room to room with his phone held up at head height – a sterile spirit guide. He propped his laptop on top of the television, balanced it on the toilet-seat lid as he bathed. With tablet PC and live feed on his bedside table, he slept late and woke early, gambling that ‘D’ would not approach the house between 3am and 6am. Cook had estimated that he would be able to make the drive in around twenty minutes, as long as he reacted quickly to any movement.

  On Monday morning, for the first time since leaving the magazine, Cook sneaked a look at his bank balance. He could afford to live without income for another couple of months, as long as he didn’t need to extend the surveillance. The tracks were rumbling. A kind of closure, he felt, was inbound. It would either rattle on in regardless or, ideally, arrive as a result of his own action. He couldn’t allow himself to stumble now – to succumb to a craving for an ending. He had set his scene. Now he had to ensure that his players found their marks.

  In the evening, an hour after the lights had gone out – at 11.30pm, as usual – Cook’s lips paused at the rim of his tea-mug, as he watched the fence at the back of the house dapple with torchlight. He was up and out and on the road in minutes, laptop on the passenger seat – feed window showing more of nothing and then flickers of torch-beam and then, as he left the motorway and slowed into the deserted slip-road, a tall and unfamiliar figure lingering near the back door. By the time he had parked – a little further down Peakvale Avenue than usual – the figure had gone. He killed the engine and sat there – in the darkness, in withering silence – leering at the screen. He was disturbed by his arousal, but also irritated by the sense of masturbatory seclusion. He pined for an observer.

  A low light flicked on upstairs. A ground-floor light – almost as dim – followed soon after, and was instantly extinguished. Cook launched the camera app on his phone and connected to the feed. He closed his laptop and slid the bump-keys out of the dashboard. The other item received from William Stone had been with him constantly since the day he had discovered Eleanor. Outside, he kept it in his inside jacket pocket. At home, it moved around with him – beside his phone on the coffee table, within reach on a glass shelf when he was in the shower, next to his digital radio in the kitchen. Depending on the rhythm and volume of the house’s night-creaks, he occasionally stuffed it under the pillow.

  He slotted his laptop under the passenger seat, pulled on the leather gloves and stepped out of the car. His heart was neither hammering in his chest nor did it leap into his mouth. If this was the end – if he was striding into his final escape – then there was always Alfie, and the love he would leave behind. At least he would succeed where his own father had failed.

  It was almost late enough to be early. Cook walked slowly and quietly to the house, glancing at his phone. The feed was now a reflection of his reality – it showed the upstairs light still on and a shadowed figure at the back door, examining a phone. He was quite the auteur – writer, producer, camera-man, director and, now, star.

  The door had been clumsily forced – there was no need for the bump-keys. Cook listened – to nothing – for a few seconds, and entered the dark side-return, guided by the glow from his phone screen. He advanced a few feet into th
e room, casting the light over oblivious furniture. All was clean and correct and undisturbed. He moved on steadily, step by silent step, towards the hall and kitchen. The adjoining door was closed and, as he reached for it, there was no longer nothing. Something stirred – a shuffling sound, beyond the door – not directly in the hallway but close by. Then, more than a shuffle – a thud. Something small but heavy dropping to the floor. Cook touched his ear to the door. Something was alive, in a room across the hall. He reached for the door-handle and, remembering the squeak, turned it carefully and gradually, just enough to release the latch. He opened up an inch-wide gap and squinted through. The weak light from upstairs revealed a scattering of glass fragments from a mirror which lay face-down across the lower legs of a body – also face-down, its upper half slumped across the doormat. Cook pointed his phone-light through the gap in the door. A small table lay on its side, sprinkled with mirror-shards, beside a lamp with a flattened shade and smashed bulb. He opened the door a little wider and stepped through.

  The glass crackled beneath his feet. He scanned the body with his light, tracing up from leg to torso to where the head used to be – now a detonation of meat and bone. The arms were posed mid-swim, squelched into a glinting puddle of gore. A metallic smell wrinkled Cook’s nose and he quickly shifted his light back down to the body’s feet, noting the leather slippers and pyjama trousers. This, it seemed, was the owner of the house – Eleanor’s captor and keeper no more. It was his second dead body and despite the violent contrast with Mr Smith’s melancholy exit, Cook was troubled by the absence of shock or empathy. He stepped over the legs, crossed the bottom of the stairs and made for the open door to the sitting-room.