Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

While Cal set about entering the vehicle details I’d given him, I gave Ada a quick call at the office.

‘I’m at Cal’s,’ I told her. ‘He’s helping me out with the Anna Gerrish case.’

‘How’s it going? Are you getting anywhere with it?’

‘Well, kind of …’

‘Kind of?’

‘It’s complicated. There’s a chance that Bishop might have something to do with it. Personally, I mean.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I haven’t got any proof yet, but I’m pretty sure that he’s got some thing to do with it. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me looking into it, and I’m fairly sure that he’s having me followed.’

‘Did he have anything to do with you getting beaten up the other night?’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘George Salvini. He said it looked like you’d been through a meat grinder — ’

‘It wasn’t that bad, Ada.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I was going to — ’

‘Was it Bishop?’

‘I don’t know … I’m fairly sure that he wasn’t one of the men who attacked me, but it’s possible he was behind it.’

Ada sighed. ‘Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’

I thought about lying to her for a moment, but I knew she’d find out about the drink-driving charge eventually, so I decided I might as well tell her. ‘I was arrested last night — ’

‘Oh, John …’

‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘It was a set-up. I didn’t actually do anything — ’

‘What was the charge?’

‘Kerb crawling and drink-driving. But, like I said — ’

‘Kerb crawling?’

‘It was a set-up, Ada — ’

‘And what about the drink-driving? Were you over the limit?’

‘Well, yeah, but — ’

‘Shit, John. You could lose your fucking licence.’

‘I know,’ I said, looking over at Cal. He was clicking his fingers at me, drawing my attention to the laptop screen. ‘I have to go, Ada,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this later. But listen, if Bishop or anyone else from the police calls — ’

‘I don’t know where you are.’

‘Thanks. I might be in later, but if I’m not — ’

‘Just let me know what’s happening, John. All right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart …’

‘And be careful, OK?’

‘OK.’

I ended the call, lit a cigarette, and went over to Cal.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said, pointing at the laptop screen. ‘The Nissan’s registered to a Charles Raymond Kemper. Fifty-three years old, no points on his licence, a home address in Leicester.’

‘Leicester?’

‘Yeah. I’ve done a quick search through all the usual databases — phone listings, utilities, council tax, electoral roll — but I haven’t found anything else so far.’ He looked at me. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Charles Raymond Kemper …?’ I shook my head. ‘Not as far as I know.’

‘I’ll do some more checking,’ Cal said. ‘See what I can find out.’

‘All right, but leave it for now. There’s something else I want you to do. And we need to let Bishop know about the registration number too.’

‘Have you got his mobile number?’

‘I think so,’ I said, taking Bishop’s business card from my pocket and studying it. ‘Yeah, here it is. What do you think we should do? Just text him the number?’

Cal nodded. ‘There’s no point in letting him know we’ve got the name too. Do you want to send it anonymously?’

I thought about it, then shook my head. ‘If he doesn’t know who it came from, he might think Tasha sent it. You know, he might think she’s trying to blackmail him. And then he’ll definitely go after her.’

‘Yeah, but if he knows that you sent it — ’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? He already knows that Tasha gave me the number, and he must have known there was a chance I’d remember it.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ Cal said. ‘But instead of using your mobile, why don’t we use one of my untraceable phones instead? Just text him the registration number, nothing else, and sign it with your initials.’

‘What’s the point? If he knows it’s from me anyway — ’

‘He’ll think it’s from you,’ Cal said, smiling. ‘He’ll be 99 % certain that the text came from you, but he’ll still try to trace it, just to make sure. And the trace will take him halfway round the world and back. And eventually, after three or four hours, his IT people will realise that the trace is going round and round in circles, and they’re never going to get anywhere with it.’

‘And what’s that going to achieve?’

Cal smiled again. ‘It’ll keep him busy for a while, waste his time … give him something to think about.’

‘And piss him off.’

‘Yeah, that too.’

I smiled. ‘OK, let’s do it.’

After he’d sent the text, Cal said to me, ‘All right, what next?’

‘CCTV cameras,’ I said. ‘Can you hack into them?’

‘What kind of CCTV?’

‘Just the usual stuff, you know …’

‘Town-centre cameras, that kind of thing?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded. ‘No problem.’

‘What about old footage?’

‘How old?’

‘A month or so.’

He looked at me. ‘The night Anna disappeared?’

‘Yeah. I know it’s a long shot, but if we can find any footage of the Nissan around the time that Anna was picked up that night, it might give us an idea of where she was being taken. Do you think you can do that?’

Cal had to think about it for a while, but eventually he said, ‘Well … I’ve never actually tried hacking into archived recordings, but it should be easy enough. All the public surveillance cameras in Hey are operated by the council, and they probably store the archived footage on hard disks in their system …’ He grinned at me. ‘The security on the council’s computer system is notoriously pathetic. In fact, it’s so ri dic ulously easy to get into that some hackers think it’s an insult to their intelligence and they refuse to go anywhere near it on principle — ’

‘Right,’ I said impatiently. ‘So you can get into it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And if I tell you as much as I know about Anna’s whereabouts that night, do you think it’s possible to track her?’

‘It all depends on the location of the cameras,’ he said, turning to his laptop. ‘All right, let’s see … the first thing we need is a site map of all the cameras …’

I must have sat beside Cal, watching him do his thing, for at least a couple of hours, maybe longer. It was an incredible experience. Most of what he was doing was way beyond my comprehension, but although I didn’t really know what he was doing, it was impossible not to admire the skill and tenacity with which he was doing it — his fingers skipping gracefully over the keyboard while his eyes focused almost fanatically on the screen … it was entrancing, like watching a genius at work. Of course, the amphetamine was really buzzing through me now, and I’m sure that played some part in the sheer intensity of my enchantment, but still … it was a hell of a thing to witness.

We didn’t speak very much for the first hour or so when Cal was actually getting into the system, and that was fine with me. I’d done enough talking over the last few days to last me a lifetime, and I was perfectly happy just sitting there quietly, smoking cigarettes and staring dumbly at the inner workings of cyberspace as they streamed up and down the screen.

Once Cal had accessed the system though, we needed to work together, and that’s what we did for the next hour and a half. Cal asked me questions — what time did Anna leave The Wyvern? what route would she have taken to get to London Road? what time did she get there? what time did she get picked up by the Nissan? — and I did my best to answer them as accurately as possible. We didn’t get all that far at first because London Road was right at the edge of the area covered by the council’s CCTV cameras, but Cal quickly realised that both the railway bridge itself and the neighbouring mainline and branchline tracks were covered by a number of Network Rail CCTV cameras, and once he’d hacked into their archived footage — which didn’t take him long — we finally had the coverage that might just be enough to show us something.