Kevin Brooks - Dance of Ghosts

13 August 1993. Friday afternoon, 5.15. It’s another sweltering hot day, and I’m driving home from work. The car radio is playing — ‘Young At Heart’. I can feel the thin cloth of my cheap white shirt sticking to the stale sweat of my skin. My hands are moist on the steering wheel. The car windows are open and I can smell the stink of traffic and the heat of the baking streets. People are drinking outside pubs, getting ready for a hot night out. The sound of laughter and chinking glasses passes by in the stifling air .

I’m tired .

My head is aching .

But I’m going home now .

I’m happy .

I’m looking forward to the weekend. Two whole days with Stacy. No going to work, no getting up in the morning and putting on a cheap white shirt … just me and Stacy and a weekend of blue summer skies .

We can talk about the baby .

We can think some more about names .

We can slide away into our own perfect world and dream about what’s to come .

At 5.30 I pull up outside our house, park the car, and turn off the engine. I pick up my jacket from the back seat, shut the windows, get out of the car, and lock it. I walk along the pavement and turn right, through the gate, and head up the garden path. Jingling my keys and humming quietly to myself, I skip up the front step and unlock the door .

I’m as happy as I’m ever going to be .

Inside the house, I drop my keys on the hall table and call out, ‘Stacy! It’s me … Stacy?’

There’s no reply .

I was watching a man called Preston Elliot when I got the phone call that brought the ghosts back into my life. Elliot was nothing, just a cheapskate Essex Boy trying to make some easy money on the sly. He’d been involved in a minor accident at work which he claimed had resulted in a severe and ongoing back injury that supposedly prevented him from doing just about anything — walking, driving, working, sleeping. He was currently on long-term sick leave and had recently put in a compensation claim against his employers, an industrial cleaning business called StayBright. StayBright’s insurance manager had hired an investigation company called Mercer Associates to look into the claim, and Mercer had subcontracted the case to me.

So there I was, sitting in my car on a cold and rainy October morning, trying to stay awake while I gathered evidence against a man called Preston Elliot. Like most of the work I do, it wasn’t particularly demanding. I’d taken the case on Monday, started my initial surveillance on Tuesday, and this morning I’d got up early and followed Elliot from his low-rise council flat to a run-down terraced house in a scratty little side street on the south side of town. Two other men had been waiting for him in a white Transit van outside the house — a shortish ginger guy in a tartan jacket, and a lank-haired teenager with a pock-marked face — and for the last hour or so I’d been watching all three of them as they trudged in and out of the house, loading up a skip with pieces of old furniture and rusty radiators. I guessed they were gutting the place in preparation for some kind of renovation work — not that it made any difference to me what they were doing.

All I needed to know was that Preston Elliot was fit enough to drive, fit enough to walk, fit enough to spend all morning hefting tables and wardrobes and rolls of old carpet out of a house and into a skip.

I had plenty of video footage. I’d filmed him leaving his house that morning, walking without any obvious pain or discomfort. I’d filmed him getting into his car and driving across town. And right now I was filming him as he struggled through the rain carrying a stained old mattress on his back.

I checked my watch and clicked on my digital voice recorder. ‘10.47 a.m.,’ I said into the the recorder. ‘Subject continues to work at the house. Surveillance ends.’ I turned off the voice recorder, clicked off the camcorder …

And that was when my mobile rang.

There was no sense of foreboding to the sound of the ringtone, nothing to suggest that this was a moment that might return to haunt me, or that in days to come I’d wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t answered my phone that morning …

No … there was nothing like that at all.

My mobile just rang. And I just took it out of my pocket, checked the caller ID, saw that it was Ada, my secretary, and answered it.

‘Hey, Ada.’

‘Where are you?’ she said.

‘Croke Street, down by the football ground. I’m just finishing up on the StayBright thing — ’

‘Are you coming back to the office?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘I don’t know. Why?’

‘You’ve got a client.’

‘A client?’

‘Yeah, you know … someone who pays you to work for them.’

‘You’re a funny woman, Ada.’

‘I know. Anyway, she’s here, in the office.’

‘What does she want?’

‘I don’t know, she won’t tell me anything. She wants to talk to you. Do you want her to come back later, or should I tell her to wait?’

‘Yeah, ask her to wait. I won’t be … hold on a minute.’

While I’d been talking to Ada, the ginger man in the tartan jacket had come out of the house, got into the Transit, and reversed it across the road. At first, I’d just assumed that he was driving off somewhere — maybe to get some cigarettes or something — but when he stopped in the middle of the street and turned off the engine, and when I saw Preston Elliot coming out of the house and start walking towards me with a ball-peen hammer in his hand, it was pretty obvious that I’d been spotted. And that Elliot was about to do something about it.

‘John …?’ I heard Ada saying. ‘Are you still there?’

Elliot wasn’t much to look at. A squitty little man, he had a small head, cropped hair and a pair of glasses that didn’t seem to go with his face, and up until then I hadn’t really considered him to be any kind of a threat. But now … well, now he had a ball-peen hammer in his hand, and he was heading straight for me, and the look in his eyes made me realise — far too late — that he was one of those runty little men who’ll pick a fight at the drop of a hat just to prove that size doesn’t matter.

‘Shit,’ I muttered, glancing quickly over my shoulder.

‘John?’ Ada said. ‘John? What’s going on?’

‘I’ll call you back in a minute,’ I told her, ending the call.

My options, I realised, were fairly limited. I could stay where I was and try to bluff it out — pretending to be an estate agent was my usual cover in this kind of situation — or I could start the car and get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

I looked at Elliot again. He was about ten metres away from me now, and from the look on his face — a mixture of pent-up aggression and mindless resolve — I didn’t think he’d go for the estate-agent bluff. But the road up ahead was blocked by the Transit van, and there were cars parked on either side of the street, making it far too narrow for a quick U-turn, so the only way out was by reversing all the way back along the street. And I was shit at reversing at the best of times.