Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

‘How about just Nuncle?’ he grinned.

‘How about I kick your arse?’

He laughed.

I looked at my watch. ‘I’d better go,’ I said. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot …’ I took the damaged memory card out of my pocket and passed it to him. ‘Can you see if you can do anything with this?’

‘What happened to it?’ he said, examining the card.

‘It got hit with a hammer.’

He looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

I shook my head. ‘You don’t want to know.’

He glanced back at the card again. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Don’t spend too much time on it, it’s not that important.’

‘Whatever you say.’

I stood up and took out my wallet. ‘What do I owe you?’

‘For what?’

‘The registration number, the card …’

He waved me away. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, just … well, just remember what I said, all right? I like working with you. I miss it when you don’t come round.’

I looked at him, trying to think of something to say, something that would tell him how much he meant to me … but in the end I just kind of nodded, and he nodded back, and that was about it. I think we both would have liked to have held each other then … but, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen.

We didn’t speak for a while as Cal showed me out of the flat, and I could tell that he was beginning to come down from whatever it was he’d been taking. But after he’d waited patiently for me to hobble up the stairs, and we were heading along the hallway towards the front door, he suddenly seemed to perk up again.

‘What did you think of Barbarella?’ he asked me, grinning once again.

‘Barbarella?’

‘Yeah, the girl who answered the door … her name’s Barbarella Barboni.’ He looked at me. ‘She used to be an acrobat … well, she still is I suppose. The circus sacked her.’

‘ What? ’

‘She was with that circus that came to Hey in the summer. You know the one I mean? She did all the acrobat stuff, you know … tumbling, juggling, that human pyramid thing. She was really good, apparently.’

‘So why did she get sacked?’ I asked, slightly bemused.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know … she’s never really talked about it.’

I looked at Cal. ‘Has this actually got anything to do with anything?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I was just telling you, that’s all.’ He grinned again. ‘She’s very bendy.’

‘I bet she is.’

‘She’s also a very fine pickpocket. So, you know, if you ever need a pocket picking …’

‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

We were at the front door now.

Cal said, ‘I’ll let you know if I find out any more about the Renault, and I’ll get back to you about the memory card as soon as I can.’

‘Thanks.’

He opened the door.

I said, ‘Get some sleep, Cal. All right? I’ll see you later.’

He nodded, and I left him standing there in the doorway.

As I headed back to my car, I heard him call out, ‘See you later, Nunc.’

I was still smiling as I got into the car.

My father didn’t have a particularly happy life. He joined the police force when he was sixteen, and despite a lifelong struggle with often debilitating depression, he rose steadily through the ranks until he finally made Detective Inspector in 1989. It was during his time as a Detective Constable with Hey CID that my father first met and befriended Leon Mercer, who was then a DC too. Another officer based at Hey at this time, and already gaining something of a reputation, was PC Mick Bishop. Leon and my father continued working together throughout the late seventies and early eighties, and even when they were both promoted to Detective Sergeant and transferred to different divisions, they still remained close friends. Bishop, meanwhile, was also beginning to rise through the ranks. Although some years younger than Leon and my father, he was the first of the three to reach Detective Inspector. Leon made the grade about twelve months later, and my father was finally promoted two years after that, at the age of forty-four.

Three years later, he took his own life.

It’s a complicated story, and even now I don’t know all the details, but there’s no question that it all began with allegations and counter-allegations of police corruption.

My father was a good policeman. He didn’t possess any outstanding attributes — no stunning intellect or insight, no instinctive flashes of detective genius … in fact, if truth be told, in terms of the skills he had, he was no more than average at best. But he was methodical, committed, determined … and, above all, he believed in what he did. He truly believed that, as a police officer, it was his duty to keep and preserve the peace and to uphold fundamental human rights with fairness, integrity, impartiality, and diligence.

And that, to me, made him a good policeman.

But it also meant that he was unable to keep his mouth shut when his colleagues didn’t act with fairness and integrity, and that, in effect, was the root of his undoing. It wasn’t that he was a high-minded idealist, or in any way naive about the realities of police work. Far from it. He knew, and to a certain extent accepted, that police officers are no different to anyone else. They’re just people, human beings, with the same flaws, the same desires, the same weaknesses as the rest of us. So, inevitably, there will always be police officers who abuse their power and use it to their own advantage. My father knew that. He also knew, as most of his colleagues did, that throughout his career, Mick Bishop was one such officer. Bishop bent the rules, he broke the rules. He broke the law. He hurt people, humiliated people, corrupted people. He acted with neither fairness nor integrity.

But he got results.

And although my father was aware of Bishop’s criminality, he was never actually in a position to prove it until January 1992, when he received a video in the post. The video, captured by a hidden CCTV camera and sent anonymously, showed Bishop and two other men torturing a drug dealer in the bedroom of a house in Chelmsford. The dealer was tied to a chair, and Bishop and the other two took turns beating him with baseball bats and burning him with cigarettes until eventually he told them what they wanted to know. The final shot showed Bishop leaving the house carrying five kilos of cocaine in a black leather holdall.

My father personally passed this video and the accompanying letter — which gave further details of the incident — to his immediate superior, DCI Frank Curtis.

Some days later, having heard nothing back from Curtis, he went to see him. To my father’s utter disbelief, Curtis told him that there was no proof whatsoever that such an incident had ever occurred, that the video was a fake, that Bishop had been nowhere near Chelmsford at the alleged time and date, and that he had a cast-iron alibi to prove it. There was no trace of the supposed drug dealer, and the address given in the letter didn’t exist. Curtis then went on to accuse my father of making false statements about a fellow officer in a deliberate attempt to ruin his career.

My father, understandably, was dumbfounded.

Even more so when he was suspended from duties pending a full investigation.

Three weeks later, while still on suspension, he was summoned to a meeting with the Detective Chief Superintendent and asked to explain the presence in his station locker of two kilos of cocaine and?25,000 in cash. He was also asked if he had any comment to make about an alleged relationship he was having with an eighteen-year-old girl called Serina Mayo, who’d recently been a key witness for the prosecution in the high-profile trial of a serial paedophile.