Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

And I didn’t.

What I did see, though, as the lift door opened and I stepped aside to let some people out, was a face I hadn’t seen for a long time. His name was Cliff Duffy. He’d been a DC when my father had died, and he was still a DC now. Our eyes met as he passed me by, but we didn’t openly acknowledge one another.

I kept my eye on him as I followed DC Wade into the lift, watching which way he went, and just as the lift doors were closing, I reached out and held them open, said ‘Hold on a minute’ to Wade, and before he could stop me I walked quickly along the corridor and caught up with Cliff Duffy just as he was entering a room. He stopped and turned round as I touched his arm, and as I made a show of shaking his hand and smiling broadly at him, I whispered under my breath,’ Blue Boar, half an hour … it’s important, OK?’

He didn’t answer me, just carried on shaking my hand, but the almost imperceptible nod of his head told me that he’d heard me. I gave him a parting pat on the arm and went back to the lift, where DC Wade was waiting impatiently for me.

‘Sorry,’ I told him. ‘Cliff’s an old friend of my father’s …’

Wade said nothing, just pressed the button for the ground floor.

About ten years ago, Cliff Duffy had got in touch with me about a problem he was having with his eighteen-year-old son. The problem, Cliff had explained to me, was that he’d been working on a small-time fraud case that had unexpectedly developed into a much bigger operation which involved several high-profile politicians, including the MP for Hey West, Meredith Chase, who at the time was a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Cliff’s role in the operation was relatively minor, but he’d been part of a surveillance team that had managed to obtain a number of photographs showing Meredith Chase in a series of intimate situations with a seventeen-year-old boy. Unfortunately for Cliff, he’d made the mistake of taking some of these photographs home with him one night, and even more unfortunately, it just happened to be the night when his estranged son, Richey, had let himself into his parents’ home in the early hours of the morning, looking for anything he could steal and sell in order to fund his drug habit. This wasn’t the first time Richey had made such a visit, and although Cliff and his wife were devastated every time it happened, they’d learned to simply swallow their despair, keep quiet about it, and accept it. And they would have been quite happy to do the same this time if it wasn’t for the fact that Richey, it seemed, had stolen the surveillance photographs of Meredith Chase.

‘So,’ Cliff had said to me, ‘you can see the situation I’m in. Once Richey realises who the man in the photographs is, the first thing he’s going to think of is blackmail. Or he might just sell the pictures to the tabloids if the price is right. Either way, my career would be over.’

He didn’t say it, but I think Cliff knew that if the worst came to the worst, it wouldn’t only be his career that was over, but his marriage too. The shame and embarrassment of their son’s criminal lifestyle coming to light would have been too much for Mrs Duffy to bear, and although I’d never met her, I got the impression that she blamed Cliff for all their son’s problems.

The reason Cliff had brought his problem to me was that, firstly, he knew me fairly well having worked with, and respected, my father over the years, and he believed that he could rely on me to be discreet. And secondly, his son Richey was always on the move — living in squats here and there, staying with friends, sometimes sleeping rough — and Cliff simply didn’t have time to go looking for him because he was still involved in the Meredith Chase investigation. Also, while Cliff didn’t actually admit it, he’d never been particularly good at detective work, which was why he’d remained a DC for most of his career.

So, anyway, I told Cliff that I’d see what I could do, and within a couple of days I’d traced Richey to a squat in North London, and after making sure that he hadn’t made any copies of the photographs, I simply stole them back and returned them to Cliff.

He was so incredibly relieved and grateful that not only did he give me a very generous cash bonus, he also promised me, hand on heart, that if he could ever do anything for me, anything at all, all I had to do was ask. And although I think he probably regretted this offer when I asked him, there and then, if he could find out what had happened to the gun that my father had used to shoot himself, and if possible return it to me, he didn’t renege on his promise. It took him a while, and I’m still not exactly sure where he got it from, or how, but he did.

To this day, Cliff has never asked me why I wanted the gun. And I wouldn’t have known how to answer him if he had.

It was close to two o’clock when Cliff finally showed up at the Blue Boar, and by then most of the lunchtime trade had finished and the pub was beginning to empty out. It was a smallish place in a quiet side street in the Dutch Quarter, an old part of town that’s known for its steep cobbled lanes and narrow houses.

I was sitting at a table near the far end of the bar when Cliff came in. I raised my hand to let him know where I was, and watched him as he made his way over. He was a beaten-down man, a man who’d long since given up caring about anything. He had a mournful face, with a down-turned mouth and sagging cheeks, and he walked with a slouching air of resignation. He looked pretty much like what he was: a just-about-functional drunk.

I had a large Scotch waiting for him on the table, and as soon as he’d shaken my hand and sat down, he picked up the glass, took a drink, put the glass back down, then immediately picked it up again and took another drink, this time finishing it off.

‘You want another?’ I asked him.

He nodded. ‘Might as well.’

I went up to the bar and ordered another large Teacher’s for Cliff and half a Stella for myself, then I took the drinks back to the table.

‘Thanks,’ Cliff said, taking the glass from me. ‘Cheers …’

I touched glasses with his and took a drink of lager. ‘So,’ I said. ‘How’s it going, Cliff?’

He shrugged. ‘Same as … you know.’

‘How’s your wife?’

‘She left me last year.’

‘Oh, right … sorry. I didn’t know.’

He shrugged again and took another drink.

I said, ‘And what about Richey? How’s he doing now?’

‘Fuck knows … I haven’t seen him for two years. He could be dead for all I know.’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just sipped my lager and said nothing.

Cliff looked at me, a sad smile bringing a touch of light to his face. ‘It’s all right, John,’ he said kindly. ‘You don’t have to go through all this small-talk shit with me … neither of us really need it, do we?’

‘I suppose not.’

He nodded. ‘OK, so let me get some more drinks in and then you can tell me what you want.’

‘No, you’re all right,’ I said, taking his empty glass from him. ‘I’ll get them.’

He started to protest, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I could tell that he didn’t have enough pride left to care about pride any more.

It didn’t take long to tell Cliff what I was working on. He was a good listener, and he didn’t need everything explaining to him. And, of course, he already knew who Anna Gerrish was. But in terms of any inside knowledge, that was about as far as it went.

‘Sorry, John,’ he told me. ‘But I didn’t have anything to do with the case. In fact, I didn’t even hear about it until the Gazette ran the story.’

‘Did Mick Bishop take charge of the investigation straight away?’