Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

Cal gave me a look. ‘It’s gone now.’

‘What’s gone?’

‘The stored CCTV footage, the stuff we found on the council’s computer system. It’s been wiped.’

‘When?’

‘About ten days ago.’

‘Shit.’

‘It’s not really a problem … I’ve still got copies, and unless someone really knows what they’re doing, it’s almost impossible to completely delete anything.’

‘Who could have wiped the footage?’

Cal shrugged. ‘Anyone with access to the system.’

‘Bishop?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘All right,’ I sighed, lighting another cigarette. ‘What else have you got?’

He’d checked out Graham Gerrish pretty thoroughly, he told me, hacking into his laptop and confirming his fondness for very young girls, so it seemed very likely that he had abused Anna when she was living at home, but Cal hadn’t found anything to suggest that Gerrish had been the man in the Nissan.

‘I don’t think he killed his daughter,’ Cal said.

‘No, he just fucked her.’

Cal looked at me.

I said, ‘Did you manage to find Tasha?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s gone … I went down to London Road a couple of times last week, but there was no sign of her anywhere. One of the other girls told me that she’d just packed up all her stuff one day and left.’

‘Did she say where she’d gone?’

‘To her mother’s in Chelmsford. It’s where she goes when she’s trying to get clean, apparently. I called someone I know in Chelmsford and got them to check out her mother’s address.’ Cal looked at me. ‘Tasha’s definitely there.’

I nodded, wondering if Tasha had decided to leave town of her own accord or if someone had persuaded her to go. ‘What about Bishop?’ I asked Cal. ‘Have you done any checking on him?’

‘Not yet … I’ve set up an automated search, and it’s all ready to go, but I didn’t want to do anything until I’d heard from you.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘I’m pretty sure that my software’s safe, but Bishop’s not stupid, he’s probably got all kinds of alarm systems in place, and if he was to find out that someone was digging around in his life …’ Cal looked at me. ‘But, like I said, the search is all ready to go.’

‘So you just have to press a button or something?’

‘Yeah, basically …’ Cal smiled. ‘It’s my own software program — all you have to do is put in a name and as many details as you’ve got, and the software does the rest. If there’s something to find — no matter how insignificant — it’ll find it. And it’ll do it about a thousand times quicker than I ever could.’ He smiled again. ‘If it wasn’t quite so illegal, I could market it for a fortune.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘But I imagine that you still make a little bit of money out of it, don’t you?’

‘I can’t complain,’ he grinned.

‘How long will it take once it’s started?’

He shrugged. ‘It varies, depending on how much information is out there … could be a couple of hours, could be a couple of days.’

‘Best start it now then.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah … everything about all this comes back to Bishop. Anna Gerrish, Viner, me … everything. I want to know why. I want to know everything there is to know about him. I want to know what the fucker’s hiding.’

Cal got up, went over to his work desk and pressed a key on one of his laptops. He watched the screen for a few moments, then he took an iPhone from his pocket and rapidly thumbed its screen, and then, finally, he turned back to me. ‘OK, that’s it,’ he said, putting the iPhone back in his pocket. ‘If the program finds anything, it’ll send it to my iPhone. So … what do you want to do now?’

I looked at him. ‘Do you fancy a drive down to Eastway?’

I didn’t particularly want to go to the police station, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day trying to avoid getting arrested for assault and criminal damage either. And, besides, I knew that I’d have to deal with the charge sooner or later, and the later I left it, the worse it’d probably be.

Cal wasn’t all that keen on visiting the police station either, but once I’d assured him that he didn’t have to come in with me, that all he had to do was drop me off and pick me up again later, he was happy enough.

‘It’s not that I don’t want to be seen with you or anything, John,’ he told me as we drove away from his house in one of his several Mondeos. This one, like all the others, was totally anonymous from the outside — just another bog-standard black Mondeo — but on the inside, and under the bonnet, it was as well equipped, if not better, than a car worth twenty times as much. ‘I mean,’ Cal continued, ‘you know I’d do any thing to help you …’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘It’s just that … well, me and the police …’

‘It’s all right, Cal,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to keep explaining — ’

‘I think I’m allergic to them.’

‘You’re allergic to the police?’

‘Yeah … whenever I’m anywhere near them, my heart speeds up and I start sweating like a pig.’

‘That’s probably just the drugs.’

He looked at me. ‘You know that if I could wait for you in the car park, I would.’

‘Yes,’ I said patiently. ‘I know you would.’

‘But they’re always looking out of their fucking windows down there, aren’t they? Fucking cops … nothing better to do. And they’ve got all that ANPR shit now … automatic number-plate recognition. Not that they’d get anything from my plate — ’

‘Cal?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Just shut up and drive, will you?’

As he muttered a few more paranoid curses and carried on driving, and I wound down the window and lit a cigarette, my phone rang. I’d turned it back on that morning, hoping that any reporters would have given up trying it by now, and so far I hadn’t had any unwanted calls. But I was still double-checking the caller display before answering every call, and when I looked at the screen now I saw the name LEON.

I hit the answer key. ‘Hello, Leon.’

‘John,’ he said. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Yeah, I’m with Cal.’

‘All right, listen, I’ve been asking around about Mick Bishop and the Gerrish case, and there’s definitely some thing going on, but no one seems to know what it is. Whatever Bishop’s up to, he’s playing it very close to his chest. But as far as I can tell … and you have to understand that a lot of this is guesswork, John. I really don’t have enough information to confirm anything … but it would appear that the only evidence that links Viner to Anna Gerrish is one small sample of DNA, and I wouldn’t put too much faith in that.’

‘Why not?’

‘The pathologist, Gerald McKee … have you heard of him?’

‘No.’

‘He’s the pathologist that Bishop always uses when he wants things done his way.’

‘You mean he’s a bent pathologist?’

‘Not really,’ Leon sighed. ‘He’s just a sad old man with a few personal problems, the kind of problems that Bishop knows how to exploit. I doubt very much if McKee actually lies about anything for Bishop, but he’s perfectly willing to conveniently overlook things or stretch the truth a little if it’s in his best interests to do so.’

‘But McKee wouldn’t be involved in the DNA testing himself, would he?’

‘Not as such, no. The testing’s done at a contracted forensic laboratory, and I don’t think even Bishop has got his hooks in there. But even so … well, I wouldn’t trust any evidence that’s passed through the hands of Bishop and McKee.’