Authors: Kevin Brooks
‘Now what?’ Cal asked me.
I lit a cigarette. ‘This is Long Road, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you see the house number?’
Cal adjusted the rear-view mirror and gazed over at the house. ‘One seven four, I think … yeah, one seven four.’
‘Is your iPhone connected to all those databases you use?’
He smiled, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his phone. ‘Just give me a few minutes.’
As he began doing whatever it was he was doing – thumbing and scrolling, jumping from screen to screen – I glanced admiringly at the battered old trilby hat on his head. He wore it well – tipped to one side, at just the right angle – and while it could easily have looked quite lame on somebody else, it looked just perfect on Cal.
‘Nice hat,’ I said.
‘It’s my detecting hat,’ he grinned, without looking up from his iPhone.
I smiled. ‘Thanks for all your help with this, Cal.’
He shrugged. ‘No problem.’
‘And I’m sorry if I was a bit pissy with you earlier on.’
‘Pissy?’ he said, smiling at me.
‘Yeah, you know, when I was telling you to sort yourself out –’
‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘You were right, anyway. I
was
a bit over-excited.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sorry –’
‘Shit,’ he sighed, shaking his head as he looked down at the iPhone screen.
‘What is it?’
‘Another dead end.’ He studied the screen for a moment. ‘174 Long Road is one of a number of properties owned by a man called Syed Naveed. He rents them out through a letting agency called HRL Ltd, and their records show that 174 Long Road is currently leased to a tenant by the name of Joel R Pickton. But the references they’ve got are fake. Fake driving licence, fake passport, fake letter from Mr Pickton’s fake previous landlord.’
‘Do the records say how long the lease is for?’
Cal looked at the iPhone screen. ‘Twelve months, paid in advance. He moved in at the end of July this year.’
I shook my head. ‘Where the fuck does he get all this fake ID from?’
‘I don’t know,’ Cal said. ‘But it won’t be cheap. Whoever he uses –’
‘Hold on,’ I said, my attention suddenly drawn to the house. ‘The lights have just gone off.’
While I carried on watching the house in the side mirror, Cal turned in his seat and looked out through the rear windscreen. After about half a minute, the front door opened and Ray Bishop came out. He paused on the doorstep, looking up and down the street, then he shut the door behind him, went down the path, out the gate, and headed across the road towards a white Toyota Yaris.
‘Do we follow him?’ Cal said.
I watched Ray Bishop get into the Yaris.
‘John?’ Cal said.
I looked at him. ‘Are you OK following him on your own?’
‘Why? Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to take a quick look round his house.’
Cal frowned. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea, John. What if he comes back? I mean, this guy might be a –’
‘Ring me,’ I said, opening the car door as the Yaris started up. ‘Just keep him in sight, wherever he goes, and as soon as you think he’s coming back, ring me and let me know. All right?’
Cal hesitated.
The Yaris was pulling away now.
I looked at Cal. He still wasn’t happy, but as the headlights of the Yaris approached us from behind, he reluctantly nodded his head and reached for the ignition. ‘All right,’ he said, starting the car. ‘But as soon as I ring you –’
‘I’ll be out like a shot,’ I assured him.
I waited for the Yaris to pass us, gave it a few seconds, then got out of the car and slapped the roof. As Cal pulled away and drove off after the Yaris, I checked that my mobile was switched on, waited another minute – just to be on the safe side – then headed for the house.
I learned how to pick locks from a semi-retired investigator who used to work part-time for Leon Mercer. It wasn’t actually a very useful skill to have in the world of corporate investigation and insurance fraud, which was lucky for me because I was never very good at it anyway. I wasn’t totally useless, but I knew that I probably wouldn’t be able to open the Yale lock on Ray Bishop’s front door, so I went through a rusty old gate at the side of the house and headed round the back instead. There was no back garden as such, just a high-walled concrete yard cluttered with bins and bin bags, carrier bags, bits of scrap metal, car doors, seats, hubcaps, broken deckchairs … all kinds of shit. The wall surrounding the yard was high enough to screen me from the neighbours’ downstairs windows, but I paused for a moment and looked around anyway, making sure that no one was watching me from any upstairs windows, then I went over to a glass-panelled door at the rear of the house and examined the lock. It was an old-fashioned mortice lock, loose and rattly, and I was fairly sure I could open it. I looked around all the crap on the ground, searching for something I could use to pick the lock, and almost immediately I spotted a carrier bag full of broken old tools. I went over and picked out a small handle-less screwdriver,
and within a couple of minutes I had the door open and was stepping through into a small kitchen at the back of the house.
I shut the door behind me, took out a penlight, and looked around. The kitchen was very small and very cramped, neither overly clean nor excessively dirty. There was a stained porcelain sink with a warped wooden draining board, old cupboards, a rust-flecked boiler, a formica-topped table scattered with empty KFC boxes. I paused for a moment, listening to the silence, then I moved down a narrow hallway and went into the front room. The curtains were drawn, the lights off. As I swept the penlight around, I saw a room that didn’t belong to anyone. It was a room that had been furnished from Argos: bland pictures on the walls, a thin carpet, a cheap two-seater settee and matching cheap armchair. The dining table and shelves were flat-packed white plastic wood, and the ornaments were straight from the ornaments page of the catalogue: lamp, vase, clock, a porcelain figurine of a doe-eyed child. A cut-price music system was stacked against the wall and a widescreen television loomed large on the floor.
There was nothing of Ray Bishop in here.
It was no more than the simulation of a room.
I left the room and headed upstairs.
Halfway up, a samurai sword was hanging from a cord on the stairway wall. At first, I thought it was just another ornament from the Argos catalogue, but when I paused on the stairs and looked closer, I realised that it was all too real. The blade – 24 inches of slightly curved, razor-sharp steel – even showed some signs of use. It was nicked here and there,
the cracked edges beginning to rust, and several parts of the blade were discoloured with dark-brown stains. I stood there for a few seconds, gazing at the sword, trying to ignore the simmering fear in my guts … then I went on up the stairs.
There was a small landing, a bathroom, an empty box room, and a surprisingly large main bedroom. And when I opened the bedroom door and stepped inside, I knew straight away that this was where Ray Bishop
lived
. Up here … this was his home. I didn’t even need to see it, I could sense it, feel it – a brutal vitality that sapped the air from my lungs.
I closed the door behind me and shone the penlight around. The walls were black, the paint seemingly applied with no care at all. It looked as if someone had simply rushed round the room, slapping on paint until the walls were more black than white. The only window, facing the street, was covered with a single heavy black curtain. There was no bed, just a blanket on the floor. The blanket was surrounded by a mess of scattered objects: syringes, phials, tissues, a spoon, a carton of milk, crackers, soda bread, yoghurt, cheese, nuts …
‘Christ,’ I whispered, stepping cautiously around the mess and sweeping the penlight around the room again.
The entire place was lined with wall-to-wall shelves stacked with all manner of extraordinary things: ropes and wires and chains, small wooden boxes, metal boxes, plastic boxes, cardboard boxes, baskets, tins, box files, piles of papers, pornographic magazines, newspapers, books, photographs, DVDs, knives, belts, axes, straps, tubes, packets of pills, small glass bottles …
It was like a nightmare haberdashery.
As I moved round the room looking at these things, my heart was beating hard, sucking the air from my throat, and I could feel the race of adrenalin imploring me to get out –
go, right now, get out of here, get OUT!
But I couldn’t leave yet.
I had to keep looking.
I didn’t know what I was looking for … I was just looking.
It wasn’t pleasant. The pornographic DVDs and magazines were sick with dull-eyed people doing fucking awful things … unnatural things, things that had nothing to do with sex, just violence. In the corner of the room, there was a small desk tented with a khaki blanket, and beneath the blanket was a computer screen, scanner, and printer. The monitor surround was painted black. I couldn’t bear to go anywhere near it. I scanned the shelves again, looking at tongs, clips, dolls, masks, protein powder, clubs, execution stills, a leather-bound black bible … and right in the middle of all this madness, I came across a black-and-white photograph in a cheap cardboard frame. As far as I could tell, it was the only framed photograph in the whole room. It showed two teenage boys standing in front of a large grey house. They were both dark-haired, both pale-skinned, both unsmiling, both dressed in V-neck jumpers. I picked up the photograph and looked closer. In a granite block over the door of the house, I could just make out the words
PIN HALL
. I looked at the two boys again, quite certain now that I was looking at Mick and Ray Bishop. Mick was slightly taller than Ray, and although he was only
a year older than his brother – about fifteen at the time of the picture, I guessed – it was clear that he was the dominant one. Standing just in front of his brother, his body tensed, staring hard at the camera … it was almost as if he was guarding him from the unseen eyes of the future, the eyes on the other side of the camera, the eyes of people like me.
As I turned my attention to the image of Ray in the photograph, I realised that the look on his fourteen-year-old face was almost identical to the expression I’d seen earlier that evening, when Mick had been scolding him about something outside the pub. The disdain, the emptiness, the lack of emotion …
It was unnerving.
I put the photograph back on the shelf and carried on looking. There were lots of books: Spinoza, Voltaire, Unamuno,
Genius, Skinned, Leviathan, How We Die, The Fabric of Reality, Killing for Company, Varieties of Religious Experience, The Character of Physical Law, Infinity and the Mind, Three Steps to Hell
. There were strange little ornaments: painted skulls, tiny skeletons, disturbing sculptures. There were things in jars: dead insects, pickled mice, embryos, divining bones … all kinds of untouchable and unknowable things. They held a silence and a sense of aged stillness that reminded me of exhibits in a small-town museum … but this was a museum that no one was meant to visit, a museum of a twisted mind. These exhibits were not meant to be seen.
After what seemed like an hour or so, but was probably closer to twenty minutes, I came across a small wooden
chest hidden away at the back of a wardrobe. At first, I didn’t understand why I felt drawn to it, why it felt different to all the other objects in the room … but after crouching down in front of the wardrobe and thinking about it for a while, I slowly realised that – unlike everything else – the wooden chest wasn’t on display.
It was hidden away.
Out of sight.
I paused for a moment, wondering what that could mean … then I reached in, lifted out the chest, and opened it up.
It was filled with what, at first sight, seemed like nothing much at all, just a haphazard collection of random objects … bits of nothing: a shoe, a hair band, a broken watch, a pink cardigan, some rings, bracelets, a purse …
And a necklace …
A silver half-moon on a silver chain.
Anna Gerrish’s necklace.
I don’t know how long I sat there, crouched on the floor of that sickening room, staring into that box of gruesome souvenirs … and that’s what they were, I realised. Souvenirs. This man – Ray Bishop, Charles Raymond Kemper, Joel R Pickton … whatever he wanted to call himself – this man had killed Anna Gerrish. He’d picked her up in his car, overpowered her, stabbed her, killed her, he’d discarded her body at the side of the road … and he’d taken her necklace. As a souvenir. To remind him of what he’d done.
As I looked down into the box, I
wanted
to be wrong. I
didn’t
want
to believe that all those bits of nothing weren’t bits of nothing at all, that they were bits of people, girls, women … all of whom were probably dead.
Killed.
Murdered.
‘Fuck,’ I heard myself say.
There were so
many
of them …
Did Mick Bishop know? I wondered. Did he
know
that his brother was a serial killer? Or was he only aware that Ray had killed Anna Gerrish? I took a pen from my pocket and cautiously lifted the silver necklace from the box. It was proof, I knew that. Proof that Ray Bishop had killed Anna Gerrish. But what could I do with it? Who could I trust with it?
I was still asking myself these questions when I heard a car pulling up outside.
I froze for a moment and listened hard. I heard the engine stop … then nothing for a few seconds … and then the sound of a car door opening and someone getting out. I knew it couldn’t be Ray Bishop, because Cal would have called to warn me if he was coming back, but still …
I had to make sure.
Dropping the necklace into my pocket, I quickly got to my feet, went over to the window and pulled back the edge of the heavy black curtain. For a second or two, I tried to convince myself that the car parked outside the house wasn’t a white Toyota Yaris, and that the man heading up the path below
wasn’t
Ray Bishop … but I knew I was only wasting my time.
‘Shit,’ I said, as I heard him putting his key in the door.