by Kevin Brooks
Dance of Ghosts
( PI John Craine - 1 )
Kevin Brooks
Kevin Brooks
Dance of Ghosts
I will dance
The dance of dying days
And sleeping life.
I will dance
In cold, dead leaves
A bending, whirling human flame.
I will dance
As the Horned God rides
Across the skies.
I will dance
To the music of His hounds
Running, baying in chorus.
I will dance
With the ghosts of those
Gone before.
I will dance
Between the sleep of life
And the dream of death.
I will dance
On Samhain’s dusky eye,
I will dance.
Karen Bergquist Dezoma, ‘An Autumn Chant’
13 August 1993. Friday afternoon, 5.15. It’s another sweltering hot day, and I’m driving home from work. The car radio is playing — ‘Young At Heart’. I can feel the thin cloth of my cheap white shirt sticking to the stale sweat of my skin. My hands are moist on the steering wheel. The car windows are open and I can smell the stink of traffic and the heat of the baking streets. People are drinking outside pubs, getting ready for a hot night out. The sound of laughter and chinking glasses passes by in the stifling air.
I’m tired.
My head is aching.
But I’m going home now.
I’m happy.
I’m looking forward to the weekend. Two whole days with Stacy. No going to work, no getting up in the morning and putting on a cheap white shirt … just me and Stacy and a weekend of blue summer skies.
We can talk about the baby.
We can think some more about names.
We can slide away into our own perfect world and dream about what’s to come.
At 5.30 I pull up outside our house, park the car, and turn off the engine. I pick up my jacket from the back seat, shut the windows, get out of the car, and lock it. I walk along the pavement and turn right, through the gate, and head up the garden path. Jingling my keys and humming quietly to myself, I skip up the front step and unlock the door.
I’m as happy as I’m ever going to be.
Inside the house, I drop my keys on the hall table and call out, ‘Stacy! It’s me … Stacy?’
There’s no reply.
PART ONE
WEDNESDAY 6 OCTOBER — FRIDAY 8 OCTOBER 2010
1
I was watching a man called Preston Elliot when I got the phone call that brought the ghosts back into my life. Elliot was nothing, just a cheapskate Essex Boy trying to make some easy money on the sly. He’d been involved in a minor accident at work which he claimed had resulted in a severe and ongoing back injury that supposedly prevented him from doing just about anything — walking, driving, working, sleeping. He was currently on long-term sick leave and had recently put in a compensation claim against his employers, an industrial cleaning business called StayBright. StayBright’s insurance manager had hired an investigation company called Mercer Associates to look into the claim, and Mercer had subcontracted the case to me.
So there I was, sitting in my car on a cold and rainy October morning, trying to stay awake while I gathered evidence against a man called Preston Elliot. Like most of the work I do, it wasn’t particularly demanding. I’d taken the case on Monday, started my initial surveillance on Tuesday, and this morning I’d got up early and followed Elliot from his low-rise council flat to a run-down terraced house in a scratty little side street on the south side of town. Two other men had been waiting for him in a white Transit van outside the house — a shortish ginger guy in a tartan jacket, and a lank-haired teenager with a pock-marked face — and for the last hour or so I’d been watching all three of them as they trudged in and out of the house, loading up a skip with pieces of old furniture and rusty radiators. I guessed they were gutting the place in preparation for some kind of renovation work — not that it made any difference to me what they were doing.
All I needed to know was that Preston Elliot was fit enough to drive, fit enough to walk, fit enough to spend all morning hefting tables and wardrobes and rolls of old carpet out of a house and into a skip.
I had plenty of video footage. I’d filmed him leaving his house that morning, walking without any obvious pain or discomfort. I’d filmed him getting into his car and driving across town. And right now I was filming him as he struggled through the rain carrying a stained old mattress on his back.
I checked my watch and clicked on my digital voice recorder. ‘10.47 a.m.,’ I said into the the recorder. ‘Subject continues to work at the house. Surveillance ends.’ I turned off the voice recorder, clicked off the camcorder …
And that was when my mobile rang.
There was no sense of foreboding to the sound of the ringtone, nothing to suggest that this was a moment that might return to haunt me, or that in days to come I’d wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t answered my phone that morning …
No … there was nothing like that at all.
My mobile just rang. And I just took it out of my pocket, checked the caller ID, saw that it was Ada, my secretary, and answered it.
‘Hey, Ada.’
‘Where are you?’ she said.
‘Croke Street, down by the football ground. I’m just finishing up on the StayBright thing — ’
‘Are you coming back to the office?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How long will you be?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘You’ve got a client.’
‘A client?’
‘Yeah, you know … someone who pays you to work for them.’
‘You’re a funny woman, Ada.’
‘I know. Anyway, she’s here, in the office.’
‘What does she want?’
‘I don’t know, she won’t tell me anything. She wants to talk to you. Do you want her to come back later, or should I tell her to wait?’
‘Yeah, ask her to wait. I won’t be … hold on a minute.’
While I’d been talking to Ada, the ginger man in the tartan jacket had come out of the house, got into the Transit, and reversed it across the road. At first, I’d just assumed that he was driving off somewhere — maybe to get some cigarettes or something — but when he stopped in the middle of the street and turned off the engine, and when I saw Preston Elliot coming out of the house and start walking towards me with a ball-peen hammer in his hand, it was pretty obvious that I’d been spotted. And that Elliot was about to do something about it.
‘John …?’ I heard Ada saying. ‘Are you still there?’
Elliot wasn’t much to look at. A squitty little man, he had a small head, cropped hair and a pair of glasses that didn’t seem to go with his face, and up until then I hadn’t really considered him to be any kind of a threat. But now … well, now he had a ball-peen hammer in his hand, and he was heading straight for me, and the look in his eyes made me realise — far too late — that he was one of those runty little men who’ll pick a fight at the drop of a hat just to prove that size doesn’t matter.
‘Shit,’ I muttered, glancing quickly over my shoulder.
‘John?’ Ada said. ‘John? What’s going on?’
‘I’ll call you back in a minute,’ I told her, ending the call.
My options, I realised, were fairly limited. I could stay where I was and try to bluff it out — pretending to be an estate agent was my usual cover in this kind of situation — or I could start the car and get the hell out of there as fast as I could.
I looked at Elliot again. He was about ten metres
away from me now, and from the look on his face — a mixture of pent-up aggression and mindless resolve — I didn’t think he’d go for the estate-agent bluff. But the road up ahead was blocked by the Transit van, and there were cars parked on either side of the street, making it far too narrow for a quick U-turn, so the only way out was by reversing all the way back along the street. And I was shit at reversing at the best of times.
‘Ah, fuck it,’ I said, sitting back in the seat and lighting a cigarette.
As Elliot drew level with the car, I was mentally setting the odds as to what he was going to do. Evens, he’d just stand there waving the hammer around, shouting and cursing at me from the pavement; 2–1, he’d try to yank the door open; and 3–1, he’d give the car a whack or two with the hammer, probably going for the bonnet or the door.
As it turned out, I was wrong on all counts.
He just walked up to the side of the car, stopped by the door and stared at me for a moment or two, and then — with an air of almost admirable nonchalance — he swung the hammer and smashed it into the side window. There was a loud CRACK! as the window shattered, showering my face with chunks of safety glass, and then all at once the car seemed to explode in a fury of noise and chaos. The wind came gusting in, blowing loose papers all over the place; the cold rain hissed in through the broken window, stinging the side of my face; and Preston Elliot’s raging voice bellowed in my ear.
‘I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE FUCKING DOING, YOU NOSY FUCKING CUNT! WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM? YOU THINK I’M FUCKING STUPID? HERE, GIVE US THAT FUCKING THING …!’
‘That fucking thing’ was my camcorder, and as he reached in and grabbed it off the ledge above the dashboard, I tried to snatch it back off him. But he was too quick and too strong for me, and before I could do anything else to stop him, he’d yanked the camera out of the car and thrown it down on the rain-sodden pavement. As I heard the expensive crack of shattering metal and plastic, my immediate thought was, ‘Shit, there goes the best part of a grand.’ But Elliot hadn’t finished yet. And as he started pounding away at the camcorder with his hammer — smack, smack, smack — smashing it into a thousand little pieces, I felt something flash through me, some kind of unfamiliar passion …
I still don’t know what it was.
I definitely wasn’t angry. Or aggrieved. And I wasn’t even that bothered about the camcorder. It was just a thing … a piece of equipment. It didn’t mean anything to me. And besides, I knew I’d probably claim the cost of it back from StayBright’s insurers anyway. But there was just something about the way Elliot was smashing it up that galled me … it offended me. The sheer stupidity of it, the pointlessness, the unnecessary level of violence …
Whatever it was, I found myself getting out of the car and approaching Elliot as he leaned down again and gave what was left of the camcorder another hefty thump with his hammer, and before I really knew what I was doing, I heard myself saying to him, ‘Hey, come on, Preston … there’s no need for that …’
He froze in mid-hammer swing, stayed perfectly still for a moment, then slowly turned to face me. His staring eyes reminded me, oddly, of the eyes of a porcelain donkey that my mother used to keep on the mantelpiece.
I gave Elliot my best placatory smile, holding up my hands to let him know that I wasn’t a threat, and I was just about to say something else to try to calm him down, when all of a sudden he stepped towards me and said, ‘I’ll give you “there’s no fucking need for that.”’ And then he swung the hammer at me.
I moved quickly enough to avoid the worst of the impact, and thankfully Elliot had gone for me with the handle of the hammer instead of the business end, but it still caught me a glancing blow on the side of my face, and although it didn’t really hurt that much, it was enough to send me staggering back against the car.
And that was enough for me. Holding the side of my face, I just stood there in the rain, leaning against the car, and watched in resigned silence as Elliot went back to the remains of the smashed-up camcorder and began stomping the broken pieces into the ground.
Over at the house, his two colleagues were watching him as well, both of them standing in the doorway, smoking cigarettes, neither of them showing much interest. I could see other spectators as well — residents watching from their windows, little kids on bikes pointing and laughing … an old man with an old dog, the old man disdainfully shaking his head — this kind of thing never happened on the street in his day — while the old dog impassively lifted its leg against the back wheel of a parked car. They were all just watching. No one wanted to get involved. It was just something to look at, that was all: a small-headed man angrily smashing a camcorder to pieces in the rain.
It was something to talk about later on.
Eventually, after about a minute or so, Elliot either ran out of energy or decided that he’d done enough damage, and after a final cursory kick at the shattered mess on the ground, he straightened up, took a couple of deep breaths, and turned to me.
‘All right …’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Now you can fuck off. And if I ever catch you following me again, if I ever see your fucking face anywhere, it won’t be bits of your camcorder in the gutter, it’ll be bits of your fucking brain. D’you understand me?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
‘You’d fucking better.’
I smiled at him.
I thought for a moment he was going to hit me again, but all he did was stare at me for a couple of seconds, the hammer swinging gently in his hands, then he spat on the ground, wiped his mouth, and began walking back to the house.
I watched him all the way.
I watched his colleagues grinning at him and patting him on the shoulder, I watched him light a cigarette, and then I watched them all get into the Transit van and drive off slowly down the street. I waited until they’d turned the corner at the end of the road, waited a little more, and only then did I fetch an empty carrier bag from the back of my car, get down on my knees, and start gathering up all the bits of smashed-up camcorder from the ground.
I found the memory card in a shallow brown puddle. It was soaking wet, of course, and there was a bit of hammer damage to the top left corner, but apart from that it didn’t look too bad. There was a chance it might still work. And if it did, Preston Elliot was fucked.
And if it didn’t …?
Well, I could always get more evidence against him. Or someone else could. Or maybe no one would, and he’d get away with conning some money out of his employers. But in the end … well, it didn’t really matter, did it? It didn’t mean anything.
Not to me, anyway.
Nothing means anything to me.
Not any more.
Back in the car, I put the carrier bag full of camcorder bits on the back seat, lit a cigarette, and checked myself out in the rear-view mirror. There was a small cut above my right eye where a bit of broken safety glass had nicked me, and the side of my face was marked with a raised red welt from the hammer handle. Blood was running from the cut, mingling with the sheen of rain on my face, and there were pale pink spots on my shirt collar. As I took a tissue from the glove compartment and started cleaning myself up, my mobile rang again. I gave my face another wipe, rested the cigarette in the ashtray, and put the call on speaker.
‘Hi, Ada.’
‘John?’
‘Yeah, sorry about that, I got a bit — ’
‘What the hell’s going on?’ she interrupted. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. It was nothing — ’
‘It didn’t sound like nothing.’
I picked up my cigarette and took a long drag. ‘Really,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.’
‘Are you coming back now?’
‘Yeah … is the client still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK. Tell her I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes. And Ada?’
‘What?’
‘Be nice to her,
all right? Talk to her. Make her a cup of tea or something … are you listening?’
‘Yeah,’ she drawled. ‘I’m listening. Be nice, talk to her, cup of tea … anything else?’
‘Try not to fart too much.’
She laughed.
I ended the call, dropped my cigarette out of the window, and drove off into the rain.
2
The town of Hey is pretty much the same as any other medium-sized town in the south-east of England. It’s got a town centre, housing estates, supermarkets, a bypass, outlying villages, a river, a park, pubs, clubs, fights, drugs … it’s got 200,000 people living 200,000 lives, and it’s got no more goodness and no less shit than any other place I’ve ever been to.
It’s Any Town, Anywhere.
It’s Hey, Essex, England.
It’s where I live.
It’s where I come from.
My office is situated on the second floor of a three-storey building at the lower end of Wyre Street in the middle of the town centre. Wyre Street is a narrow pedestrianised lane that runs parallel to the High Street. It’s mainly populated with small businesses, like mine, and independent shops that can’t afford to be located in the High Street: hippy shops, comic-books shops, skateboard shops, candle shops … the kind of shops that don’t make much money and never last more than a year or two.
It’s OK.
It’s a street.
It’s where I work from.
*
It was getting on for midday by the time I got back to town. I left my car in the usual place — a council car park in the old market square — and walked up the steep stone steps that link the car park to Wyre Street. The streets were as quiet as you’d expect on a rainy Wednesday lunchtime, and most of the people I passed were too busy keeping themselves out of the rain to pay any attention to me, but I still got a few wary looks as I made my way back to the office. It was only to be expected. I’d been driving in the rain with no side window, so I was soaking wet and dishevelled. My face was still bleeding, the welt from the hammer blow had swollen up and was starting to turn blue, and I was carrying a manky old carrier bag filled with smashed-up bits of camcorder.