Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked me, looking over as Big Bastard started coughing his guts up again. He’d been doing it most of the night — coughing, choking, spitting up gobs of God knows what. But apart from that — and the two occasions when I’d had to put up with him crawling out of bed for a long, loud, and foul-smelling piss — he hadn’t been any trouble at all.

‘I don’t know what’s the matter with him,’ I said, glancing over at the still-coughing Big Bastard. I think he’s got asthma or something.’

I was let off with a caution for the kerb-crawling offence and bailed to attend court for the drink-driving charge.

‘Where’s my car?’ I asked the custody officer as he passed me a large manila envelope containing my belongings.

He shrugged. ‘Where you left it, I suppose.’

‘Any chance of a lift?’

He laughed.

As I emptied out the envelope and started putting all my stuff back in my pockets, the custody officer passed me a form.

‘Make sure everything’s there,’ he said, ‘then sign at the bottom.’

It was all there — phone, keys, photograph, lighter … everything except the packet of cigarettes that Tasha had given me.

I looked at the custody officer. ‘There should be a packet of Marlboro.’

He checked the form. ‘There’s no cigarettes listed here.’

‘Are you sure?’

He looked at the form again. ‘Sorry, mate … there’s a cigarette lighter down here, but no cigarettes.’ He looked at me. ‘Are you sure you didn’t finish them?’

I shook my head. ‘I had them when I got here last night, and I clearly remember the custody officer taking them off me.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, smiling, ‘but you were pissed last night, weren’t you? We all forget things that happened and remember things that didn’t happen when we’re pissed, don’t we?’

I looked at him — a harmless, passionless man — and I knew that he didn’t have anything to do with whatever was going on here. As far as he was concerned, it was simply a matter of a missing packet of cigarettes. To Mick Bishop though … well, I had to assume that at some point last night, after I’d been locked up, he’d gone through my belongings, looking for anything that might interest him, and he must have spotted the registration number of the Nissan Almera that Tasha had jotted down on the back of the cigarette packet … and the number must have meant something to him. And that had to mean that there was a link between Bishop and the Nissan, which in turn had to mean there was a link between him and Anna Gerrish. It had to. Why else would Bishop take the gamble of keeping the cigarette packet, in the hope that I wouldn’t remember the registration number without it, when he must have known that once I’d realised what he’d done, I’d realise why he’d done it.

‘Are you all right, son?’ the custody officer asked me.

‘Uh, yeah …’ I told him. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

‘If you want me to check about the cigarettes, I could probably get in touch with one of the officers who dealt with you — ’

‘No, that’s all right, thanks. Don’t worry about it.’

When I left the police station, the rain had stopped and a pale-purple October sky hung low over the morning streets. There was a strange light to the air, an unreal haze that seemed to both clarify and deaden everything at the same time. It reminded me of the feeling you get when you come out of the cinema into the late afternoon daylight and you’re suddenly faced with the humdrum brilliance of the real world again. The sights, the smells, the sounds …

It was all too real.

It was Friday morning. I was dirty and tired, my breath stank, my skin itched, my head was aching. And I didn’t even have any cigarettes.

I headed off towards town.

I was coming out of a newsagent’s on Eastgate Hill, tearing the cellophane off a packet of Marlboro, when I heard someone calling out to me. ‘John! Over here!’ And when I looked up, I saw Mick Bishop leaning across the passenger seat of a blue Vectra stopped at the side of the road. He pushed open the door and waved at me to get in. I thought about it for a second, realised that I didn’t have much choice, and went over and got in the car.

‘All right?’ Bishop said as I closed the door.

‘Yeah …’

He smiled at me. ‘I thought you might need a lift back to your car.’

‘Thanks.’

‘London Road?’

I nodded.

He looked at me for a moment, slyly amused, then he pulled out into the traffic and drove away.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ I asked him.

‘Do you have to?’

‘Yeah.’

‘All right, but open the window.’

I cracked the window and lit a cigarette, sighing audibly as I breathed out the smoke.

‘Rough night?’ Bishop said.

I looked at him.

‘I just heard about it,’ he said, smiling again. ‘You really should know better, John. I mean, how are you going to carry on working if you’re disqualified for a year? It’s not as if you can chase after the bad guys on a bus, is it?’

‘You just heard?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Twenty minutes ago … I always check through the custody log at the start of the day shift, just to see what’s been happening, you know? So, there I am, looking through it this morning, and what do I see?’ He glanced at me. ‘John Craine, detained overnight on kerb-crawling and drink-driving charges.’

I’d already noticed that he was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing yesterday — the dark-blue blazer, the pale-blue shirt, the burgundy tie pinned with a thin gold chain — and he didn’t strike me as the kind of man who’d wear the same clothes two days running. And when I added that to the fact that he hadn’t shaved since I last saw him either, I knew that he was lying. He hadn’t just come into work. He’d been at the station all night.

‘You look tired,’ I said to him.

He sniffed. ‘It’s a tiring job.’

He didn’t say anything else for a while, he just kept quiet and concentrated on manoeuvring his way through the town-centre traffic. It was a good opportunity for me to mull things over — what was Bishop up to? what did he want with me? what was I going to do next? — but I was simply too drained to find any answers. So, instead, I just smoked my cigarette and gazed out of the window, watching the world pass by — the boiling chatter of the High Street, early-morning shoppers scuttling around in insect lines … taxi drivers, office workers, old husbands and wives … people, humans … all going somewhere, following their desires … a faithful motion of blood, flesh, and bones …

The business of life.

The business of death. 23 August 1993. Monday morning, nine o’clock. Ten days after Stacy was killed. It’s another sweltering hot day, and I’m sitting in an office at Eastway police station with Detective Inspector Mark Delaney. I’m hungover, sick, my sweated skin soured with the stink of stale alcohol. DI Delaney is updating me on the investigation into Stacy’s murder .

‘I’m afraid there’s no easy way of doing this, John,’ he says, leafing through some papers in a file. ‘I can skip over the specifics if you’d prefer — ’

‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I need to know what happened.’

He looks up from the file. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

He holds my gaze for a moment, genuine concern showing in his warm brown eyes, then he nods his head and looks down at the file again. ‘All right. Well, as you know, the post-mortem was carried out last week, and we now have some further preliminary forensic results.’ He pauses for a moment, taking a quiet steadying breath, then continues. ‘The pathologist’s report concludes that while the primary cause of death was manual strangulation, Stacy also suffered numerous stab wounds, several of which would have been fatal.’