Authors: Kevin Brooks
‘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.’
‘How many?’
Delaney looks up at me. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘How many stab wounds?’
He looks down again. ‘Seventeen … all of them inflicted with the same weapon – a long, broad-bladed knife.’
‘Have you found it yet?’
‘Fingertip searches are still being –’
‘Have you found it yet?’
He looks at me. ‘No.’
‘Did he rape her before stabbing her?’
‘We believe the wounds were inflicted during the rape.’
‘And then he strangled her?’
‘Yes.’
‘John?’
I rubbed my eyes and turned to Bishop. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘What?’
He sighed. ‘London Road … last night. Were you down there for business or pleasure?’
‘Just asking a few questions,’ I said.
‘About Anna Gerrish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you get any answers?’
‘Not really.’
‘What does that mean –
not really
? Either you got some answers or you didn’t.’
I couldn’t be bothered to say anything, so I just shrugged.
Bishop didn’t like that. ‘Do you remember me telling you to keep me
informed
about what you’re doing?’ he said, a snide edge to his voice.
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘Well, which part of that don’t you understand? It’s not
that
fucking difficult –’
‘I’ve been locked in a cell all night. How was I supposed to –?’
‘That was
after
you talked to them,’ he spat. ‘I want to know what you’re doing
before
you fucking do it, not afterwards.’
‘I didn’t
know
I was going to talk to them,’ I protested. ‘I just happened to be down here last night …’ As I said it, I realised that we were on London Road now. ‘I mean, I didn’t come down here on purpose. I was just –’
‘Passing through?’ Bishop sneered.
I watched him as he slowed the car and pulled up at the side of the road, and I wondered what he’d say if I asked him why
he
hadn’t been down here talking to the girls about Anna.
What are you trying to hide, Mick?
I imagined myself saying.
What do you know about Anna? What do you know that you don’t want anyone else to know? What the fuck are you doing?
‘All right, listen,’ he said sternly to me. ‘From now on, you don’t do
any
thing without telling me first, OK? I want to know who you’re talking to, why you’re talking to them, and what they tell you. Do you hear what I’m saying?’
I shook my head. ‘You don’t have the right –’
‘Listen,
cunt
,’ he hissed, leaning towards me and staring into my eyes. ‘This is about me and you, that’s all. Understand? Just me and you. And what you’ve got to understand is that I can do whatever the fuck I want.’ He raised his hand and pointed his finger at me. ‘And
you
,’ he said, jabbing the rigid finger into my chest. ‘You can’t do fuck all about it.’ He smiled coldly at me. ‘You think last night was bad? Well, if you ever fuck me about again, I’ll
make sure you spend the rest of your fucking
life
locked up in a cell with the nastiest bunch of cunts you can imagine. They’ll rip open your face and piss in the hole. They’ll fuck you senseless, one after the other. And then they’ll do it again, and again, and again. And in the end you’ll be begging someone to cut your fucking throat.’ He smiled again. ‘Do you get the picture?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I get the picture.’
‘Good.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Now get the fuck out of my car.’
The girl who let me into Cal’s house this time was tall and willowy, with waist-length red hair and eyes like a Roswell alien. She was wearing black lipstick and a long black cardigan, and as she led me down to Cal’s basement flat, she didn’t say a single word. Didn’t even smile. She just waited for Cal to open the door, looked briefly at him, then floated off back up the stairs.
‘Is she from the circus too?’ I asked Cal as he showed me inside.
‘No, she’s from Birmingham.’
He was barefoot, dressed only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and I guessed he’d only just got out of bed.
‘Do you want me to come back later?’ I asked him.
‘What for?’ he said, lighting a cigarette.
I heard the cistern flushing then, and as I looked over towards the bathroom I saw the diminutive figure of Barbarella Barboni, the sacked acrobat, coming out. She was naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
‘Hey,’ she said, raising a hand and smiling at me. She looked at Cal. ‘Is there any coffee?’
Cal nodded. ‘This is John, my uncle … you met him before, remember?’
She smiled at me again. ‘Yeah.’
‘Listen, Barb, we’ve got some stuff to do …’
‘No problem,’ she said breezily. ‘Just let me get dressed and I’ll leave you to it.’
Cal watched her as she went into his bedroom, then he turned to me. ‘You want some coffee?’
‘Please.’
He peered at me for a moment. ‘You look like shit, John.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You want something to eat?’
I don’t really like eating. To me, it’s nothing more than a refuelling process, something you have to do to stay alive. And I particularly don’t like eating when it has any kind of social connection. So my natural response when I’m asked if I want anything to eat is to say no. And I almost said no to Cal. But the mention of food made me realise that I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time, and that I was, in fact, desperately hungry.
So I said, ‘Yeah, something to eat would be good, thanks.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Got any eggs?’
‘What kind of eggs?’
‘Chicken?’
He smiled. ‘How about eggs Benedict? I make a
very
mean eggs Benedict.’
I didn’t even know what eggs Benedict was. And twenty minutes later, after Barbarella had left us alone, and I’d shared a big plateful of food with Cal, I still didn’t know what it was. But it did the job. It filled a hole. And, with the help of three cups of coffee, it gave my energy levels a much-needed boost.
But it still wasn’t enough.
‘Listen, Cal,’ I said. ‘I really need your help with something –’
‘You’ve got it.’
‘No, just listen to me, OK? I’ll explain everything in a minute, and I’ll tell you what I want you to do, but first of all … well, the thing is, I’m totally fucked at the moment. I’ve been working this case non-stop, and I haven’t slept for God knows how long, and I’ve got a feeling that today’s going to be another long slog.’ I looked at him. ‘So, I was wondering … you know … well, I was just wondering if you’ve got anything that’ll keep me going for a while.’
‘Well, yeah …’ Cal said hesitantly. ‘But I thought … I mean, I thought you’d given up all that?’
‘I just need something for today, that’s all.’
‘Well, OK … if you’re sure …’
I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him.
He gazed back at me for a while – and I could see the concern in his eyes – but then he just nodded his head, got up, and went into his bedroom. When he came back out, fully dressed now, he was carrying a brown plastic prescription bottle.
‘They’re black bombers,’ he said, passing me the bottle. ‘You don’t often come across them these days, but there’s this Portuguese guy I know … anyway, they’re slow-release amphetamines. You only need to take one at a time.’
I looked at the bottle. It contained about half a dozen plain black capsules.
‘Thanks, Cal,’ I said, taking one out and swallowing it with a mouthful of coffee.
‘Yeah, well …’ he said guardedly. ‘Just don’t go crazy with them, all right? I mean, shit, if Stacy was here …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’d kill me.’
Cal smiled. ‘And me.’
We looked at each other in silence for a while, and I knew that we were both feeling the same unfillable emptiness – the despair of knowing that Stacy wasn’t here, and that she’d never be here again …
‘All right,’ I said to Cal, lighting a cigarette. ‘Let’s get on with it.’
After I’d told him everything I knew about the case, and everything that had happened to me in the last few days, Cal just sat there for a while, not saying anything, just quietly thinking things through. As for me, the amphetamine had kicked in now – with an uncharacteristically
un
edgy kind of rush – and my mind was beginning to buzz with all kinds of new ideas and fresh possibilities about everything: Anna Gerrish, Mick Bishop, the guy in the Nissan …
‘So,’ Cal said eventually, ‘you
think
that Bishop went through your stuff when you were locked up, but you don’t know for sure?’
‘Well, no … not for sure. But –’
‘Give me your phone.’
‘What?’
‘Your mobile, let me see it.’
I took out my phone and passed it over. He glanced at the connection sockets, then got up from the settee – we were sitting in the small recreation area in the corner of his
flat – and he went over to one of his work desks and started searching through a tangle of cables.
‘What time did you get to the police station?’ he asked me.
‘I’m not sure … about eleven, I think.’
He’d found the cable he was looking for, and I watched as he plugged one end into my phone and the other end into a hand-held device that looked a little bit like a credit-card reader. He connected the device to a laptop, hit some buttons on my phone, waited a while, then pressed some keys on the device and watched as a stream of data appeared on the laptop screen. He lit a cigarette and studied the screen for a while, scrolling up and down through the information, then he nodded to himself and turned back to me.