Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

‘Ada’s just left,’ George said to me, smiling.

‘Sorry?’

‘Your secretary, Ada, she left some minutes ago. She asked me, if I see you, to tell you that everything is up to date, there’s a note for you on her desk.’

‘Right …’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

He smiled again. ‘You’re very welcome.’

I left him to his cigarette and went up to my office.

Ada’s hours of work are pretty much up to her. She basically works for as long as she needs to, and then she goes home. Some days that might mean being in the office from nine till five, or later, other days she doesn’t even bother coming in at all. It suits her, and it’s fine with me. And it’s what we agreed on when I poached her from Mercer Associates shortly after setting up my own business.

Today, clearly, there hadn’t been all that much to do.

There were some cheques for me to sign on my desk, a list reminding me of the phone calls I had to make, and — in the note that George had mentioned — a summary of the calls that Ada had taken that morning.

All of it could wait.

I went into my office, closed the blinds, and poured myself a drink. I looked at the clock on the wall. Tick, tock …

It was 15.45.

I sat down on the settee and closed my eyes.

Ripped open on the bed .

Naked .

Butchered .

Bled white .

Dead .

I cradle Stacy’s ruined body in my arms, howling and sobbing … holding her for ever, for ever, it’s all I can do. I can’t let go. I can’t ever hold her enough …

I can’t .

There’s nothing left .

After a timeless time — a thousand years, a minute, a day — I wipe a smear of blood from her mouth, kiss her cold lips, and whisper goodbye. I have to let go now, Stacy. Just for a while. I have to call the police. I don’t want to. I want to stay here with you, holding you in my arms … I don’t want to let you go. But I know if I stay here, I’ll stay here for ever, and if I stay here for ever I might as well be dead. And dead’s no good to me now. Not yet. I have to attend to the business of death .

I opened my eyes, wiped the tears from my face, and took a long shuddering drink from the whisky bottle. A flood of wretchedness welled up inside me, a feeling so awesome and desperate that it defied all logic and reasoning. Stacy was dead … for ever. The child she was carrying, our child, was dead …

For ever.

The tears filled my eyes again as I went over to the wall safe, opened it up, and took out my father’s pistol. I went back to the settee, and sat there for a while with the gun in my hand, wondering — as I’d wondered so many times before — where my father had got it from. Did he buy it? Was it police issue? Had he owned it for years, or had he got hold of it specifically to end his own life?

I slipped off the safety catch and wondered how it would feel to rest the barrel against my head and gently pull the trigger.

It wouldn’t feel like anything , I told myself.

It wouldn’t feel like anything at all .

Twenty minutes later, I reset the safety catch, put the pistol back in the wall safe, and lit a cigarette instead.

The office was dark and quiet when I woke up, the whole building hushed with the edgy silence of a time and place that isn’t meant to be heard. I could hear the light spit of rain on the window, the unconcerned hum of a water pipe, a low groaning creak from somewhere downstairs …

There is no silence, not anywhere. If you listen hard enough, you can hear the sound of the machine beneath your skin.

I reached for my whisky glass and took a long, slow drink, savouring the sedate heat of the alcohol.

My head hurt.

My legs ached.

It was 8.55 p.m.

Time to get going.

I lit a cigarette and set about trying to remember where I’d left my car.

An hour or so later, after I’d walked back to the Blue Boar to pick up my car — stopping only at a cashpoint in town and for a couple of quick drinks in the pub — I was driving slowly along a street of terraced houses at the back of Hey Town’s football ground. London Road looked much the same as any other residential street on the south side of town — parked cars, satellite dishes, pavements glistening dully in the street-lit rain — and during the day there was no way of telling that this street, together with a handful of others, was at the heart of Hey’s red-light district. At night though, especially late at night, when the skinny young girls appear on the streets, and the men in cars come creeping around … well, it’s not hard to guess what’s going on then.

I hadn’t seen any working girls yet, but I guessed that as the rain was still coming down quite heavily, I’d probably find most of them up by the railway bridge at the far end of London Road.

I drove on, constantly checking in the rear-view mirror for any sign of the Renault. I was keeping my eyes open for it all the time now, and although I hadn’t seen it since getting beaten up, I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Halfway along London Road, I caught sight of several girls hanging around in the arches next to the railway bridge up ahead, and a few more taking shelter in the tunnel itself. I checked in the mirror again, seeing nothing but rain and an empty street, and I slowed down and pulled in at the side of the road. I turned off the engine, lit a cigarette, and waited.

A number of cars went by me during the next few minutes. Most of them just drove past the girls and carried on under the bridge, but some of them momentarily slowed down — window-shopping, I guessed — and a few of them actually stopped. The one girl I saw getting into a car couldn’t have been more than sixteen.

With a final look over my shoulder, and satisfied that there wasn’t a silver-grey Renault in sight, I got out of the car and headed for the bridge.

I’m not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting from the girls, but once they realised that I wasn’t a punter or a cop, and that all I wanted was information about Anna — and that I was prepared to pay pretty well for it — most of them were friendly enough. The only trouble was, most of them, if not all of them, were addicts of some kind or other — heroin, crack, meth — and they were usually pretty out of it when they were working, which didn’t make for the best witnesses in the world. Most of the girls knew who Anna was, even before I’d shown them the photograph. And they knew about her reported disappearance too. But that was about it. As one girl put it, ‘She wasn’t a regular. She’d come down every other night for a while, then we wouldn’t see her at all for a couple weeks, then she’d start showing up again.’

When I asked this girl, whose name was Lizzie, what kind of person Anna was, she just shrugged and said, ‘Fuck knows … I don’t think she ever said a single word to me. She kept herself to herself, if you know what I mean.’

‘Do you remember anything about the night she disappeared? It was 6 September, a Monday.’

Lizzie laughed. ‘You must be fucking joking … I can’t even remember what happened this morning.’

It was much the same story when I asked the other girls about Anna — she wasn’t here all the time, she didn’t mix with us when she was here … and, no, I don’t remember the night she disappeared — and I’d almost given up hope of finding out anything useful when Lizzie came up to me and suggested I talk to a girl called Tasha.

‘I don’t know if she’ll know any more than the rest of us,’ Lizzie said. ‘But I remember her talking to Anna a couple of times … so, you know …’ She smiled at me. ‘You got a cigarette?’