Dance of Ghosts

by Kevin Brooks

  ‘How old was she when she left?’ I asked.

  ‘Seventeen. She’s a very independent-minded girl.’

  ‘Did she visit very often?’

  ‘This is it,’ Mrs Gerrish said, ignoring my question as she opened a door, turned on the light, and ushered me inside.

  When I stepped into that room, I really thought that she’d made a mistake and shown me into the wrong daughter’s room, a daughter that she hadn’t told me about … a daughter who was twelve years old. Because that’s what it looked like – the bedroom of a twelve-year-old girl. Pink wallpaper, Mickey Mouse curtains, furniture that belonged in a doll’s house. There was a little wooden chair with flowers painted on it, a minuscule dressing table, a single bed made up with crisp white sheets and embroidered blankets. There were frilly things all over the place, velvety cushions, brightly coloured ribbons. And there were teddy bears and stuffed animals everywhere – lined up on the bed, sitting on chairs, perched on top of a wardrobe. The only non-sugary-sweet thing in the room was a sleek black laptop on a table beside the bed.

  ‘This is Anna’s old room?’ I said, trying to keep the disbelief from my voice.

  ‘Yes … she liked to keep it neat.’

  ‘And she slept in here until she was seventeen?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Helen said, crossing the room towards a rack of plastic shelves standing against the wall. ‘Yes, here they are … Anna’s photographs.’ She started looking through a collection of framed photographs positioned neatly on the shelves. All of the pictures were of Anna: Anna when she was a child, Anna when she was six or seven, Anna when she was twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I could hear Helen muttering to herself as she searched through the photos. ‘I think we’ve got some recent ones here … I’m sure Graham framed some and brought them up …’

  I wandered slowly towards her, looking around as I went, still unable to believe my eyes. ‘Did she decorate the room herself?’ I asked.

  ‘Who, Anna? Goodness me, no. Graham would never have allowed that. He does all the DIY in this house. He’s very good with his hands, is Graham.’

  I bet he fucking is, I thought.

  ‘I thought you said he was working this evening?’ I said casually.

  ‘Oh, yes … well, he thought he was, but there was some kind of mix up with the shifts or something.’

  ‘Right … so what does he actually do, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘He used to work for the Inland Revenue, but he was made redundant a few years ago. He has a security position now.’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Yes, he works mostly in the big shopping precinct in town.’

  I nodded. It wasn’t hard to imagine Graham Gerrish patrolling the shopping mall, proudly wearing his security guard uniform … bullying children, ordering kids to get off their skateboards, telling people to put out their cigarettes …

  ‘Is that Anna’s laptop over there?’ I asked Mrs Gerrish.

  ‘No … that’s Graham’s. He keeps it in here because apparently it’s the only place in the house where he can get a decent Internet connection.’

  ‘Really?’ I gazed round the room, looking for a router, but I couldn’t see one anywhere. ‘I would have thought with a wi-fi connection he’d have access all over the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry … I don’t know anything about computers … ah, here we are.’ She turned from the shelves with a framed picture in her hand. ‘I think this should do the job.’ She passed me the picture with a satisfied smile. ‘It was taken the year before last when Anna was on holiday.’

  The photograph was mounted in a cheap white plastic frame. It showed Anna sitting on a wooden bench against an old stone wall, dressed in cut-off jeans and a bikini top. She was smiling dopily, and her eyes looked like tiny black marbles. There were grubby thumb marks around the edge of the frame.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Was this a holiday with friends? Work colleagues?’

  Helen shook her head. ‘Anna didn’t say.’

  ‘Do you know where she went?’

  ‘I think it was Ibiza … or maybe Greece. Somewhere like that. Is it important? I could probably find out –’

  ‘No, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter. Is it OK if I keep the picture for a while?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Thanks. Well, I’d better get going now, if that’s all right.’

  As Helen led me out and shut the door, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d left part of myself behind in that strangely chilling room. I could sense the darkness, the silence. The dull black shine of the toy animals’ eyes. I could feel the air, empty and still. And although it was too dark to see anything, I could still see those pictures of Anna. Her face, her eyes, her years, her life …

  And, just for a moment, I thought I could hear her crying.

  In the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, I surprised myself by turning to Helen and saying, ‘You’re more than welcome to come with me to Anna’s flat … if you’d like to, that is.’

  She hesitated for a moment, glancing instinctively at the door to the front room, as if she couldn’t make any decision without asking her husband first. ‘Well, yes …’ she said, ‘I think I would like to … I haven’t been there since Anna disappeared. I’ll just have to check with Graham –’

  ‘Why don’t you just go and get ready, get your coat and whatever else you need? I’ll let Graham know that you’re coming with me.’

  ‘Well … he’d probably prefer it –’

  ‘Go on,’ I said, giving her a friendly nudge. ‘Live dangerously for once.’

  She smiled anxiously at me, still not sure about it, but I was blocking her way to the front room now, and she didn’t want to offend me by pushing past, so in the end she didn’t have a choice.

  ‘I’ll just be a moment, then,’ she said, shuffling back up the stairs, where I assumed she kept her coat.

  I waited until she’d gone, then I opened the door and went into the front room. The TV was still on, and Graham Gerrish was still slumped in his armchair in front of it, with the remote control still glued to his hand and his eyes still glued to the screen.

  ‘Do you want to turn that off for a minute?’ I said to him.

  He looked at me with studied contempt. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The TV … turn it off.’

  ‘I don’t see why –’

  ‘I know what you do in your daughter’s bedroom,’ I said bluntly. ‘I know that you sit up there watching porn on your laptop.’

  I was half-expecting him to start ranting and raving at me then – how dare you, that’s disgusting … that kind of thing. But he didn’t say anything at all, he just sat there, perfectly still, staring dumbly at me. And I knew then that I’d guessed right about the laptop.

  ‘Look,’ I sighed, ‘I really don’t care what you do, but I imagine your wife wouldn’t be too pleased if she knew what you get up to. So unless you want me to tell her, I suggest you turn off the TV and just listen to me for a minute, OK?’

  He nodded, and turned off the TV.

  ‘Right,’ I said, sitting down. ‘So tell me … what’s the matter with you?’

  He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your daughter’s missing, Mr Gerrish. Now I don’t know if you love her or not, but your wife obviously does, and although this whole thing is totally fucking her up, she’s still doing everything she possibly can to find Anna. But you …? All you seem to be doing is acting like a fucking arsehole and treating your wife like she’s a piece of shit. That’s what I mean.’

  ‘I love Anna very much, Mr Craine,’ he said matter of factly. ‘I always have, and I always will. She means everything to me. She’s my little girl.’

  ‘So what’s your problem? What have you got against me trying to find her? Is it the money?’

  ‘Of course it’s not the money,’ he said, disgusted that I’d even consider such an idea.

  ‘So what is it then?’

 
He closed his mouth tightly for a moment and made a strange little grinding motion with his teeth. Then, as if he’d finally made a decision to tell me the truth, he raised his eyes and looked at me. ‘It’s just … well, it’s just …’ He sighed. ‘I don’t want Helen getting her hopes up, that’s all. I don’t think it’s good for her, you know … the way she is. It’ll just make things all that much harder for her in the end.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Well, you see it all the time on the television, don’t you? On the news. These girls … the ones who go missing … it always ends up badly, doesn’t it?’

  ‘On the news it does, yes,’ I said. ‘But that’s only because if it ends up badly it is news. There are thousands who go missing who don’t end up on the news, simply because nothing happens to them.’

  He looked at me. ‘So you think Anna might be all right?’

  ‘I’ve really got no idea, Mr Gerrish. But what harm can it do for me to try and find out? Even if it does end up badly – and I’m not saying that it won’t – Helen’s not going to feel any worse just because her hopes have been raised, is she? And, in the meantime, she might just feel a little bit better.’

  ‘Well,’ Graham said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose if you look at it like that –’

  He broke off suddenly as Helen came into the room.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, instinctively aware of the change in her husband’s demeanour.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ I said, standing up. ‘We were just having a little chat.’ I looked at her. ‘Are you ready to go?’

  She glanced at her husband. He tried smiling at her, but he obviously wasn’t used to it, and all he really achieved was a strained look of constipated embarrassment.

  ‘All right?’ I said to Helen.

  She nodded, frowning briefly to herself, and then we left.

  5

  Once we were out of the house and driving back towards town, Helen Gerrish gradually began to relax a little. And I soon realised that she was the kind of person who talks a lot when they’re relaxed. In fact, as we approached the outskirts of Hey, passing through the superstore world of Sainsbury’s, B & Q, Homebase, and Comet, I realised that she hadn’t stopped talking for the last five minutes. And, of course, the only thing she wanted to talk about was Anna: Anna was this, Anna was that, Anna did this, Anna did that … it was as if she’d been waiting a long time to let it all out, and now that she’d started she just couldn’t stop.

  I was quite content to let her do all the talking. For one thing, it saved me the bother of having to say anything. And for another … well, I wasn’t really listening to her anyway. I was too busy thinking about her husband instead. Graham Gerrish: a man whose seventeen-year-old daughter had slept in a room that belonged in the mind of a child abuser; a man who’d designed and decorated this room himself and used it now for viewing pornography; a man who professed to love his daughter, yet scorned his wife’s efforts and desire to find her.

  Yes, he was definitely a man worth thinking about.

  It took another twenty minutes or so to get to Anna’s flat. It was in an area of town called Quayside, just south of the river. Quayside is the kind of place that’s quiet during the day but comes to life at night, especially at the weekends. It used to be a working dock, but most of the old warehouses and boatyard buildings are now nightclubs – the Hippodrome, Tiffany’s, the Quay Club. The surrounding streets are dotted with pubs, restaurants, and fast-food places, a lot of which have opened quite recently, and most of these newer establishments have a relatively safe reputation. But there are still one or two places around where the entertainment on offer is just as seedy as it was before all the bright young things arrived, and The Wyvern, the pub where Anna worked, was one of those places.

  It was still raining as I pulled into the car park of a block of flats at the far end of Quayside, and as we got out of the car and crossed over to the flats, I could see the lights of the neighbouring nightclubs flickering brightly in the rain. It was still too early for the clubs to be open, but even now I could feel the promise of the night to come in the air: the noise, the heat, the dancing, the drinking … the fighting, the fucking … the promise of love and despair …

  It was all there.

  ‘… but, of course,’ Helen Gerrish was saying, ‘even though we were against her moving out in the first place, we still helped her out with the deposit.’

  We’d reached the entrance to the flats now, and Helen, I guessed, was telling me about Anna’s rent, or how she managed to afford it … or something like that.

  I looked at her and smiled.

  She opened the front door and I followed her up two flights of steps to the second floor, then along a corridor to Anna’s flat. As Helen put the key in the lock, I could tell that she was beginning to get anxious again. She’d stopped talking, and her face had become pinched and tense.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I asked her. ‘You can wait outside if you like. I won’t be long.’

  ‘No …’ she said, pausing for just a moment. ‘No, I’m all right, thank you.’

  She opened the door and we went through into a darkened room. Helen turned on the lights, and I stood there and looked around. It was a fairly small place – sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom – but it wasn’t excessively cramped. And while it wasn’t spotlessly neat, it wasn’t overly messy either. I could smell stale cigarette smoke, and there were several overflowing ashtrays dotted around the room. The second-hand furnishings had clearly come with the flat, and although the overall state of the place left a lot to be desired, I’d seen a lot worse in my time. All in all, it was just a typical low-rent living space, ideally suited for a young woman desperate to leave home.

  As I started wandering around the sitting room, looking at this and that, Helen went over and sat down on a cheap settee.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ she asked me.

  ‘Anything, really,’ I said, scanning a row of shelves. ‘Something that shouldn’t be here, something that should be here but isn’t …’

  ‘The police have already searched here, you know.’

  I nodded. ‘When was that?’

  ‘The day after I reported her missing. DCI Bishop told me that they didn’t find anything suspicious.’

  ‘Do you know if he thinks she came back here that night?’

  ‘He said it was impossible to tell. No one saw her coming back, but it would have been late … and, besides, the kind of people who live around here …’

  I looked at her.

  She shrugged. ‘Well, they don’t like to get involved, do they?’

  I stood in the middle of the room and took a final look round, but I got the feeling that there was nothing here to tell me anything. It was a room that could have belonged to anyone, as bland and anonymous as a hotel room. No personal touches, no ornaments, no pictures, no books. It was just a place to watch TV.

  I went into the kitchen, but there was nothing useful in there either. The fridge had been cleared out, the sink was empty. A small cupboard held a few cans of vegetables and a packet of crackers, and there was a drawer full of the usual kitchen stuff – cutlery, clingfilm, aluminium foil – but that was about it.

  ‘Did the police clear out the fridge?’ I asked Helen as I went back into the sitting room.

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you all right there?’ I said.

  She was perched on the edge of the settee, all hunched up, her hands held tightly together in her lap.

  ‘Yes … yes, I’m all right, thank you. Just … well, you know … you can’t help thinking about things, can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you can’t …’

  She looked at me for a moment, her eyes glazed and haunted.

  I said, ‘I’ll just go and have a quick look in the bedroom and bathroom, and then we’ll get going, OK?’

  She nodded.

  I we
nt into Anna’s bedroom and turned on the light. The smell of cigarette smoke was stronger in here, and the room was a lot messier than the sitting room – piles of clothes all over the place, the bed unmade, dirty cups and plates on the floor. I went over and took a closer look at the bed. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it didn’t take me long to realise that – whatever it was – I wasn’t going to find it in an unmade bed. It was impossible to tell when it had last been slept in, and even if there were any tell-tale signs that Anna had been sleeping with someone – which, as far I could tell, there weren’t – that still wouldn’t tell me anything.

  I moved away from the bed and started searching through a chest of drawers that was set against the wall. It had six drawers; two smaller ones at the top, the rest full-size. The two at the top were underwear drawers, the next one down was T-shirts and tops, the one under that was jeans and trousers, and the next-to-last drawer contained skirts. It all seemed quite ordinary, the sort of clothing you’d expect a young woman without much money to own. Nothing too stylish or expensive, most of it quite practical and plain … the kind of clothes you’d buy at Primark or Tesco or TK Maxx.

  In the bottom drawer though … well, the clothing in the bottom drawer wasn’t quite so ordinary. It wasn’t that it was any more fashionable or expensive than the rest of Anna’s clothes, it was just that it was totally different in style. These clothes could never be described as practical and plain; in fact, if anything, they were the opposite. Incredibly short skirts, fishnet stockings, studded leather belts. Tiny strips of material with zips on the front, which I guessed were some kind of top. Leather trousers, ripped denim jeans that were more rip than jean, a little white shirt and school tie …

  It was possible, of course, that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for all this – maybe Anna had been doing some glamour modelling, or maybe this was the kind of stuff she wore on hen nights, or maybe she just liked dressing up a bit outrageously when she went out …