Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

‘Puffy?’

‘You said thuppothe . It sounds like you’ve got a mouth full of cotton wool.’

I ran my tongue over my split lip. ‘Uh, yeah … it’s just a … it’s nothing. Just a cut lip. I’ll tell you about it later on.’

‘Ooh,’ she mocked. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Yeah … well, I’ll probably get back to the office some time this afternoon, OK?’

‘All right.’

At about half past eight, just as I was about to leave, I heard the sound of raised voices upstairs. Bridget and Dave, arguing. I couldn’t make out most of the words, but I could hear the tone of the emotions: anger, frustration, placation, pleas — You don’t understand … I do … No, you don’t …

After a while, the argument subsided and a low sobbing began. Bridget, crying. A few minutes later, angry footsteps came thudding down the stairs, the front door opened, then slammed shut. Dave Dave, storming out.

I waited until I’d heard his car start up and pull away, with the inevitable screech of tyres, then I opened my door and went out into the hallway. I could still hear Bridget crying quietly, and just for a moment — a very brief moment — I found myself gazing up the stairs, wondering if maybe I should go up there and …

And what? I asked myself.

Comfort her?

Hold her?

Tell her she’s better off without him?

I shook my head, locked my door, and left.

Cal Franks had at least four mobile phones, maybe more. There were his two ‘regular’ phones, which he used for straightforward, everyday calls. There was another which he’d fitted with some kind of signal booster, in case of poor reception. And then there was his ‘special’ phone, which — according to Cal — was totally anonymous, impossible to listen in to, and completely untraceable.

I didn’t know what he used this special phone for, and I didn’t want to know.

I’d already called him on one of his regular numbers before I left that morning to see if he was awake and available, and surprisingly — since he usually stayed up most of the night and only went to sleep when everyone else was getting up — he not only answered his phone and told me to come on over, he actually sounded relatively sane. Which, for Cal, was also quite surprising.

It was around nine o’clock when I pulled up outside his house. The rain was still holding off, and there was even a hint of autumn sunlight glowing palely behind the clouds. It was still pretty cold though, and the wind seemed to be picking up.

A wheelie bin had been blown over at the side of the road, and the bin bags inside had fallen out and split open on the pavement. Bits of rubbish had been picked up by the wind and were flapping around in the air — empty crisp packets, polythene bags, plastic food containers — like confetti at a wino’s wedding.

As I got out of the car and locked it, I wondered why I was bothering. Not only did the car not have a side window, but it was a cheap old pile of shit anyway. I mean, who the hell was going to steal a twelve-year-old Ford Fiesta that was held together with body filler and carrier bags?

I pulled up my coat collar and headed along the street towards Cal’s house. It was a tall old place with black railings and steep concrete steps leading up to the door. The walls of the steps were cracked and topped with birdshit-encrusted slabs, and the front door was daubed with years of graffiti. The shiny black CCTV camera mounted on the wall over the door didn’t seem to fit with the overall shabbiness of the place, but it was an incongruity that fitted Cal to a T.

Cal had lived here since he was seventeen, by which time he’d already been thrown out by his parents and excluded from every school he’d ever been to. It wasn’t so much that he was a bad kid — although he could be kind of wild at times — nor did his alienation have anything to do with a lack of intelligence or understanding. If anything, Cal was just too smart for school. He got bored very easily, and when he got bored, he started looking for something exciting to do. And, for Cal, something exciting usually meant something illegal. Like credit-card fraud, or hacking, or phishing, or mobile phone scams …

He was very good at what he did.

He’d never been caught, never been arrested.

And he made a lot of money.

There were rumours that a few years after he’d moved into this house, which at the time had been a squat, he’d very quietly become the owner. I didn’t know if that was true or not. And, if it was true, I didn’t know if he’d bought it legally or not. But, again, I didn’t care. I liked Cal. And Stacy had liked him too — she was the only member of her family who did — and that meant a lot to me. And it meant a lot to Cal too.

He was twenty-eight now, and he’d been helping me out with things since he was fourteen, and in all that time he’d never, ever, let me down. So, as far as I was concerned, Cal was all right.

I rang the doorbell and waited, pulling up my collar against the wind. The feeling of the house hadn’t changed from its days as a squat — although I imagined that Cal now charged some kind of rent — and as I stood there on the doorstep, I could hear various kinds of music playing in different parts of the house: some rap stuff on the ground floor, a guitar band on the second floor, an operatic voice sailing out from an open window on the third floor. It sounded good.

The girl who opened the door was no more than four-and-a-half feet tall. She was dressed in a pale-blue vest with a tiger’s head on the front, a very short threadbare skirt, black tights, and monkey boots. Plastic bangles rattled on her wrists, silver studs glimmered in her ear, and strings of coloured beads were wound around her neck, together with a knotted thong of black leather and a small plastic doll on a chain. The king-size cigarette hanging from her lip-glossed mouth was far too big for her.

‘Yeah?’ she said, looking at me with glassy eyes.

‘I’m here to see Cal.’

She took the cigarette from her mouth and looked over my shoulder. ‘Who are you?’

‘John Craine. Cal’s expecting me.’

She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and opened the door. I stepped through into a corridor cluttered with bicycles, bin bags, and damp clothes drying on racks. A high staircase led upwards on the right, and at the far end of the corridor was a large communal kitchen. The house smelled of wet clothes, soup, and marijuana.

The girl took the cigarette from her mouth and scratched her arm. ‘Cal’s down the hall,’ she said. ‘The basement flat.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

She wandered off up the stairs, and I headed down the hallway. At the end, a narrow stairwell with steep spiral steps led down into the basement. More CCTV cameras were mounted on the wall, and I knew that Cal was probably watching me as I moved stiffly down the steps. My legs were really aching now, and my knees didn’t seem to want to bend — a condition not especially conducive to walking down stairs — so it took me a while to reach the bottom. When I finally got there, the door to Cal’s flat — a solid chunk of reinforced steel — was already open, and Cal was waiting for me in the doorway. He looked as good as he always looked: a handsomely wasted face, an uncombed mess of jet-black hair, rings in his ears, eyebrow studs, a touch of eyeliner. He was wearing a plain black T-shirt, skinny black jeans, and black leather boots with red laces.

‘Shit, Uncle Johnny,’ he said, grinning wildly at the state of my face. ‘What the fuck have you been up to?’

By the time Cal had shown me inside and made me some coffee, and I’d sat down at one of his work desks and briefly told him what had happened to me outside The Wyvern, I’d already realised that he was wired out of his head on something. His eyes were huge, he was twitching like a lunatic and licking his lips all the time, and he couldn’t keep still for more than a second.