Authors: Kevin Brooks
‘Sorry about that,’ I said to Bridget, making sure that Walter was safely in the back and locking the car doors. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt the guy –’
‘Fuck him,’ she said, fastening her seat belt. ‘He deserved it.’
‘You ready?’ I asked her, starting the car.
She smiled. ‘Let’s go.’
About five minutes later, as we approached the north end of the High Street, Bridget glanced over her shoulder and said, ‘I think we’re being followed.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘Are they reporters?’
‘In the BMW, yeah. There’s a TV crew in the Range Rover behind them.’
Bridget looked at me. ‘Aren’t you going to try losing them?’
I shook my head. ‘There’s no point.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m a shitty driver,’ I said. ‘And this is a shitty car. And, besides, they know where I’m going anyway.’
‘Yeah, but they don’t know where
I’m
going, do they? I don’t want them following me to the shop, John.’
‘I’ll drop you off at the NatWest in the High Street,’ I said, pulling up at the lights. ‘You can cut through the bank and go out the back way into Wyre Street. It’s only about five minutes from there to your shop.’ I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that the BMW and the Range Rover were about three or four cars behind us. The lights were still red.
‘But what if they follow me into the bank?’ Bridget said.
‘They won’t.’
Before she could say anything else, I slammed the Fiesta
into gear, put my foot down and shot through the red lights. Horns blared as I swung the Fiesta to the right, narrowly missing an oncoming bus, and sped down the High Street for about fifty yards before screeching to a halt outside the bank.
‘Go on,’ I told Bridget, glancing quickly in the rear-view mirror. ‘You’re all right, they’re still stuck at the lights.’
‘Will you call me later?’ she said, undoing her seat belt and opening the door.
‘Yeah, if I can. Now get going.’
She jumped out, got Walter out of the back, and as they hurried off together into the bank, I drove off steadily down the High Street. Within twenty seconds or so, the BMW and the Range Rover were behind me again, only this time they were keeping a lot closer.
They were still right behind me when I drove round the market square and turned left at a
No Entry
sign into Wyre Street. It was strictly pedestrianised here – no cars, no parking – and I got a lot of nasty looks and angry shouts as I drove slowly up the street, crawling through the crowds of Saturday shoppers, which wasn’t all that pleasant … but it was a lot better than having to park somewhere and walk to the office with a pack of reporters dogging my every step.
I parked the Fiesta on the pavement outside the office. I knew that it’d be gone within the hour, clamped and towed away, and I’d have to pay God-knows-how-much to get it back, probably more than it was worth … but I didn’t really care. It was only a car. And it was about time I got a new one anyway.
A reporter and a cameraman were waiting at the door to the office, and when they saw me coming they immediately started hustling towards me – the reporter fiddling with his earpiece, the cameraman adjusting something on his camera …
‘Sky News, Mr Craine,’ the reporter called out as he approached me, somehow making the statement sound like a question.
Sky News, Mr Craine?
I didn’t look at him, didn’t say anything, just kept on going towards the office door.
‘We’re live on Sky News, Mr Craine,’ I heard him saying. ‘Could you tell us how you feel about your wife being the victim of a serial killer?’
I stopped and looked at him. His face was vaguely familiar from countless TV news reports, but I couldn’t put a name to it. He was holding a microphone towards me, his head tilted slightly to one side and his mouth turned down, showing me how serious and sympathetic he was.
‘This is live?’ I said quietly.
‘Yes, Mr Craine. You’re live on Sky News.’
I smiled at him. ‘Why don’t you fuck off, you annoying cunt?’
And as he stepped back, momentarily stunned, I walked past him, unlocked the office door, and went inside.
I don’t often go into the office at the weekend, but on the odd occasion that I do, George Salvini is always there, quietly getting on with some work in his office. He’s usually on his own, but when I knocked on his door that morning and he let me in, he was with a neatly groomed
young man called Fabian who worked part-time for him. Fabian was perched on the edge of a desk, staring at a small TV on a table in the corner.
‘Sorry about all this, George,’ I said, glancing at the TV. It was tuned to Sky News, and the studio presenter was in the middle of apologising for the inappropriate language that had just been heard during an interview with John Craine.
‘Not at all, John,’ George beamed at me. ‘It’s all rather exciting, really. We were just watching your interview outside.’
‘Yeah, good one,’ Fabian added, grinning at me.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ George asked.
‘No, thanks. I’m not stopping … I just wanted to use your back door, if that’s OK?’
‘Of course, of course …’
‘There’s no one out there, is there? No reporters?’
George looked at Fabian. ‘Would you mind?’
Fabian nodded, smiling intimately at George, then he padded across the office towards a door in the far wall.
‘He’s a good boy,’ George said, watching him go through the door.
I smiled.
George turned back to me. ‘You look tired.’
‘I am.’
He patted my shoulder. ‘If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know. OK?’
‘Thanks, I will.’
We both looked over as Fabian came back in.
‘It’s clear,’ he said. ‘No one’s out there.’
‘Thanks,’ I told him, heading for the door.
‘Mind how you go, John,’ George called out.
‘Yeah, you too,’ I called back.
The door led me out into a carpeted corridor, at the far end of which was a cluttered storage area with a barred window and a fire door. I went over to the door, pushed down on the bar, gave it a shove, and stepped out into a narrow alley at the back of the building. The alley was enclosed behind a high brick wall crowned with shards of broken glass. Piles of retail debris were stacked against the wall: flattened cardboard boxes, bin bags, pallets, rolls of plastic sheeting. A sparse rain was falling, and I could hear the drops
tocking
loudly on clamp-shaped blocks of polystyrene. Someone had taken the trouble to paint
ALWAYS ON MY MIND
on the wall, and beneath that,
FUCK YOUR NOB
.
I pulled up my collar and headed off into the rain.
When I got to Cal’s place, the first thing I learned was that the photographer whose nose I’d broken had reported me to the police and that I was now wanted for questioning on suspicion of assault and criminal damage.
‘It was on Sky News just a minute ago,’ Cal told me. ‘And I heard it on the police scanner too.’ He smiled at me. ‘I think they might want to talk to you about calling someone a cunt on live TV as well.’
‘Is there a law against that?’
‘Fuck knows. Do you want some coffee?’
While Cal made coffee, I went over and sat down on the settee, lit a cigarette, and stared at the mute TV. A picture of me was being shown, with a
BREAKING NEWS
banner scrolling underneath that said
HUSBAND OF SERIAL KILLER VICTIM IN INTERVIEW OUTRAGE ACCUSED OF “ASSAULT” BY DAILY EXPRESS PHOTOGRAPHER
. After a few moments, my picture was replaced by a photo of Stacy, and then a blurred mugshot of Anton Viner appeared on the screen …
I picked up the remote and turned off the TV.
‘So what’s going on, John?’ said Cal, sitting down next to me and passing me a cup of coffee. ‘All this stuff about Anton Viner … is it true?’
I looked at him. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
‘So if I were to tell you that I knew, without doubt, that Anton Viner
didn’t
kill Anna Gerrish, but that I couldn’t tell you how or why I knew … could you accept that?’
He hesitated for a moment, thinking about it, then simply nodded. ‘Viner didn’t kill Anna?’
‘No.’
‘And you know that for a fact?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s good enough for me.’ He smiled. ‘So does that mean we’re back on the case?’
I looked at him. ‘I’ve got a funny feeling that you’ve never been off it.’
Although I’d told Cal two weeks ago to leave the case alone, I’d known all along that he wouldn’t – he simply wasn’t capable of it. I knew he’d just have to keep digging, keep poking around, keep lifting up stones to see what was under them … and I was right, that
was
what he’d been doing.
‘The Charles Raymond Kemper that we’re looking for doesn’t exist,’ he told me. ‘I’ve run him through my automated search program and I’ve manually been through every possible database, using every possible combination of names and initials, and I haven’t come up with anything that makes sense. The address in Leicester doesn’t exist. There’s no birth certificate for anyone called Kemper that matches the date of birth in the DVLA’s records.’ Cal looked at me. ‘There’s simply no trace of our Charlie Kemper anywhere.’
‘So it’s a fake driving licence?’
‘Yeah, but there’s more to it than that. Fake ID’s not difficult, and driving licences are a piece of piss, but even with the really good fakes I can usually get behind the false information and find little traces of the real stuff, but with this one …’ He shrugged. ‘There’s just nothing there. Nothing at all.’
‘OK, so it’s a false name and a false address … but the guy in the Nissan was real, wasn’t he?’
‘Well, yeah …’
‘We saw him on CCTV.’
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 …’