Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

‘It’s just a little sideline for me, John,’ he said casually. ‘A bit of overtime, if you like. It’s all quite simple really.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘When someone needs to get rid of something on the quiet, they get in touch with me, and I tell them when to bring it round. They bring it round, it goes in the burner … and that’s it.’

‘When you say “get rid of something”,’ I said, looking over at the rolled-up carpet, ‘you mean … bodies?’

Dougie grinned. ‘Bodies, yeah. Dead people. I mean, I burn them all day anyway, the only difference with these extra ones is they don’t get a service, and I don’t have to bother sieving them into urns.’ His grin broadened. ‘Plus, I get paid a lot more for these.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘The going rate’s a grand a time.’

I looked at him, suddenly wondering if the only reason he was being so open about this was that he wasn’t planning on me being around much longer to tell anyone. I glanced over at the roaring furnace, then back at Dougie.

He laughed, realising what I was thinking. ‘It’s all right, John, there’s nothing to worry about. As long as you keep your mouth shut …’ His grin lost a little of its warmth. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

‘Good. Of course, if you did happen to let anything slip …’ He turned round, casually flicked his cigarette into the burner, watched as it was instantaneously vaporised, then turned back to me. ‘But that’s not going to happen, is it?’

I shook my head.

‘OK,’ he grinned. ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’d better get on. I don’t want to delay these two gentlemen any longer.’

‘Yeah …’ I muttered. ‘I’ll just get my jacket.’

‘Before you go,’ Dougie said, reaching into his pocket and passing me a business card. ‘If ever you need to get rid of anything …’

‘Thanks,’ I said, looking at the card.

All it had on it was his name, DOUGIE , and a phone number. I put the card in my pocket, retrieved my jacket, and left.

A few months later, I handed in my resignation at the crematorium and took up a better-paid job in a call centre. But I kept my promise to Dougie, I didn’t say a word to anyone about his unofficial cremation business — I didn’t even tell Stacy — and for some reason that I’ll never quite understand, I also kept his business card. I never imagined that a time would come when I’d actually have a need for Dougie’s services, and even now I still find it hard to believe that I really did call him before I executed Anton Viner.

But I did.

I called him before I left that night.

He didn’t want to know any details, just what time I wanted to bring the ‘package’ round. And when I told him that it had to be later on that night, probably in the early hours of the morning, he just said, ‘All right, but it’s going to cost you extra.’

And that was that.

I killed Viner in the pub car park. I wrapped his bloodied head in a bin-liner and dumped his body in the boot of my car. I drove to the crematorium, where Dougie was already waiting for me, and together we lugged Viner’s body out of the car, into the furnace room, and finally into the furnace.

And that really was that.

I’d killed Anton Viner.

I’d shot him in the head and incinerated his body.

I’d erased his life from this world.

But now, seventeen years later, I’d just been informed by DCI Bishop that Anton Viner’s DNA had been found on the body of Anna Gerrish.

Ghosts upon ghosts upon ghosts …

After Bishop left, I just sat in my chair beneath the window for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes and trying to work out what the hell was going on. It wasn’t easy, thinking about Anton Viner and what I’d done to him all those years ago … it was something that I usually kept buried deep in the dark places inside my head, the places where I didn’t want to go. It wasn’t that I had any conscious guilt about what I’d done, I didn’t regret it or feel any remorse. Nor did I have any good feelings about it either. There was no satisfaction, no sense of atonement or vengeance or closure … whatever that is. I didn’t consciously feel anything about Viner’s death at all.

But I had killed him.

I’d taken a human life.

And that leaves a hole in your soul. The hole fills, in time, but the new-grown flesh is never quite the same — it’s scarred, wrong, tainted … it has something missing.

It takes something away from you.

So I didn’t want to go back there, back to the dark place deep down inside me, but I knew that I had to think about Viner again now. I had to ask myself if there was any possibility, any chance at all, that the man I’d killed wasn’t Anton Viner.

And that meant taking myself back to that night, back to that shabby grey council house, back to the moment when I was standing over that lank-haired middle-aged man, looking down at the scabbed bite mark on his head … ragged and raw, the blood-brown crust edged with the pink of new flesh … seeing the toothmarks, the shape of a mouth … the shape of Stacy’s mouth. And I had to take myself back to her clothing too, all scrunched up in a carrier bag, browned with blood … her pale-pink vest, her white blouse, her jeans, her underwear … ripped, torn, bloodied … savaged …

And I had to ask myself how drunk I was that night, how drug-crazed and lost and out of my mind …

Could I have imagined these things?

The bite mark, the clothes, the proof that Viner had killed Stacy.

Was it possible that I’d not seen these things?

‘No,’ I muttered. ‘No.’

I’d seen them.

There were a lot more things I had to ask myself — could Viner have got Stacy’s clothes from someone else, or could they have been planted in his house? could the anonymous message I’d received have been a set-up, a string of lies to frame Anton Viner and goad me into killing him? and, if so, who could have sent it? and why? and was it possible that the man I’d killed had only admitted to Stacy’s murder because I hadn’t given him an alternative …?

And while I knew that none of these things were impossible, I also knew that the chance of all of them being true was virtually infinitesimal.

Anton Viner had killed Stacy.

The man I’d killed was Anton Viner.

I went into the kitchen, fetched a bottle of whisky and a glass, and took them back into the front room. I hadn’t had a drink in two weeks, and as I sat down in the armchair and opened the bottle, I hesitated for a moment … thinking about it, almost changing my mind … but I didn’t. I half-filled the glass, took a long shuddering drink, and lit a cigarette.

The only person who knew what I’d done to Anton Viner was Dougie the Burner, and even he didn’t know for sure. He knew that I’d killed someone, or at least that I’d been involved in the killing of someone, and he knew that we’d cremated the body, and I assumed he knew — from the TV and newspaper reports at the time — that a man called Anton Viner was the main suspect in the investigation into the rape and murder of Stacy Craine, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to work out whose body it was that we’d burned. But that was the point — we’d burned it. Dougie had burned it, just like he’d burned countless others. And he was never going to admit to that, was he?

Just as whoever had sent me the anonymous message about Viner wasn’t going to admit to anything either. Not that they actually knew anything — although, again, once they’d found out that Viner had disappeared, they must have guessed straight away what had happened to him — but whoever it was, and for whatever reason they’d sent me the message, I was pretty sure they’d want to keep quiet about it. And even if they didn’t, they didn’t have any proof that I’d done anything.