The Ghost (16 page)

May, 1976

It was a Raleigh – three-speed,
derailleur
gears, drop handlebars, dark orange frame, and the word ‘Chopper' in lemon-yellow, pasted along the lower tube. Cook's annual pester for the bike kicked in sometime around late autumn, as regular as the clocks going back. The hints to Esther and Lily had grown heavier by the year – pointing out other children who had recently evolved from scooters, pushing the kitchen-table chairs into a line to form a ‘play-bike' and, most recently, leaving torn-out pages from the Kays catalogue slotted inside Esther's
TV Times
. On Christmas Day 1975, the “We'll see…” refrain had finally delivered his own private fiery chariot.

Cook rode it in the morning before school – a menace to milk-floats. He rode it to school, at speed, whooshing by the pushchairs, grazing the shuffling cliques. He came ‘home for dinner', so he could ride it more casually, trundling around the play-park path, gliding down empty streets. He rode it home after school and, on this day, he kept riding – to Dennis Mountford's house, where the two boys drank grapefruit squash, listened to ‘heavy rock' records and plotted a robbery.

“You could stick it under your coat,” said Mountford. “Easy. My mate gets loads like that.”

“I'm not putting your stuff under my coat!”

“Okay, then. You get the lamp and I'll get a pump.”

“Lamp will be harder to hide.”

Mountford laughed. “We won't get caught, Dor. It's a massive place and we'll be too quick.”

They cycled, side by side, parallel, fanning out then drifting back in close. They cycled up steep Lowther Street, to test their gears. They cycled to the gravel wasteground at the edge of the play-park path and – heads down, highest gear – raced each other, completing three full circuits before laying the bikes flat and collapsing by the main gate. Mountford's bike was a metallic blue Grifter – better suited to his older, rangier frame. The fit of Cook's Chopper was a little generous, but he was still too smitten to covet – he wanted to grow into his own bike, not be big and old enough for someone else's.

“Hi, Dorian!”

Lisa Goldstraw skipped off the roundabout and swayed over to the gate, gripping the bars, poking her face through. Cook, mortified at being caught in a moment of recuperation, leapt to his feet.

“Guess what? No more school for me now!”

“How come?”

“We're going to Canada in a few days. Emigrating.”

Cook had known and prepared for this, but had kept it safely shut away and suspended – an abstract unpleasantness, far away in the foggy future.

“Wow. Brilliant! When are you coming back? Are you going on a plane?”

Lisa laughed. “Of course we're going on a plane! It would take ages by boat. And we're not coming back. We're going to live there. My mum's family are there.”

Cook crouched and sifted through a stack of pebbles by the gate foundations. “So, you're not coming back – ever?”

“Don't think so.”

“Are you still at your house?”

“No. We're living with my auntie.”

This was a major setback for Cook's long-term plan – to marry Lisa and live in her enormous house when her mum died.

“Is it because of me?”

“What?”

“Rebecca. The magazine.”

“Of course it isn't!”

Cook rolled the pebbles, one by one, into the hole that held one of the gate's support posts.

“It's not that far. I could come and visit you.”

“Yeah.”

“Kissy-kissy!”

A group of boys who Cook recognised from Lisa's class ambled from the roundabout to a perilous-looking rocking-horse in the park's far corner. As they passed by the gate, they giggled and aimed lip-smacking noises at Cook and Lisa.

Cook jumped up. “Got to go for my tea.”

Lisa nodded. “Is that your new bike? It's really nice.”

“Yeah,” said Cook. “The orange one.”

A gaping pause. The scene was suddenly drained of flavour. Cook wandered back to his bike and mounted it, hoping he looked vaguely cowboyish – aloof and unhurtable. He pushed away without looking back, reclaiming the betrayal. Mountford had to hurry to catch him and keep pace.

“Dor! You're not going home yet, are you?”

“No! But I couldn't say we're going nicking, could I?”

*

At the far end of Lowther Street, Cook and Mountford slowed at the sight of a small figure, cautiously wheeling his bike along by the kerb, in the gutter, despite the absence of cars. The weather was mild, but John Ray's top half was smothered in heavy winter clothes – duffel-coat, padded jumper, scarf – while his lower body had to make do with an ill-fitting pair of flimsy polyester flares. He looked like he'd been dressed remotely, by two separate people in different climates. Mountford called to him.

“John! Come with us to the new Tesco!”

Ray glanced over as he dragged his junior racer onto the pavement. He pivoted the handlebars a couple of times, flinching at the squeak. Cook pulled up alongside him.

“Y'need some oil, John.”

John Ray stayed silent, keeping his gaze fixed on the far side of the street. He squeezed and unsqueezed his brake handles.

“Do you want us to get you some?” said Mountford, hanging back, circling.

“No, thank you.”

Ray looked up and, at last, submitted to eye contact. His pupils had lost a little of their redness, but Cook was startled by how bright and white his forehead dazzled beneath that waxy hair. The heat around his nose and cheeks caused a subtle blood-flush below eye-level, but the upper half of his head was so parched and colourless it seemed to have been dusted in flour. He glanced from Cook to Mountford and back again, accusing eyes staring from the centre of tear-streaked sockets.

“You alright?” Cook posed the question carefully, but it made Ray startle and he pulled out his handkerchief, blowing his nose to displace the agitation.

“Yes. I'm fine. I can't come with you.”

The voice – immaculate enunciation but so slender and frail and fleeting.

“It'll be a laugh. Go on!”

“I can't.”

He was steadying his bike, turning his back, planning his escape.

“Don't be a chicken, John!” offered Mountford. “We'll look after you!”

But John Ray was done. He climbed aboard and squeaked away, even less convincing than Cook as aloof and unhurtable.

At the new Tesco, Cook and Mountford were detained by a tall and terrifying store detective as they stupidly tried to leave by the fire exit. Mountford had slotted a long, thin tyre-pump under his jumper, palpably impeding his movement. Cook had poorly concealed a bulky detachable head-lamp under his jacket. In a windowless side-office, the store detective smoked gravely and made several phone calls. Cook cried, Mountford held off until his mother arrived. Between sobs, Cook kept asking the same question, over and over.

“Can we go yet?”

The store detective smoked and dialed and typed and shook his head.

Two uniformed policemen eventually appeared and took some details. When Cook finally found the strength to wrench his gaze from the carpet, he saw that one of the policemen was Frank Ray.

(“I can't.”)

With Mountford's mother and Esther present, Frank Ray explained that the boys were expected to attend the station for an interview within a week, and that their case may be referred to a ‘juvenile liaison committee'. Outside, Esther kept her furious distance – five body-lengths ahead of Cook, who wheeled his bike slowly and sniffed and snivelled all the way home.

“Am I going to prison, nana?”

“No. Shame! It might teach you a bloody lesson!”

In the house, Cook hurried through the front-room and tried to dash up the stairs, but Uncle Russell was ready for him and barred the way.

“Dorian. You crackpot! What was that for? What a silly, stupid thing to do!”

“The other boy made me do it!” lied Cook, through a fresh downpour of snot and tears.

“Dorian, it's
stealing!
When you go out now, you're not to go past the end of the street. And you're not going out on that bike.”

“What?
How long for?”

“Until I say so, Dorian! If you go past the end of the street or take the bike out, then I'll make sure it gets sold – to someone who can appreciate it!”

“I do appreciate it!”

Esther came in from the kitchen. “Well, you've got a funny way of showing it!”

“It's not fair!”

Cook pushed past Uncle Russell, thudded up the stairs and dived into the corner closet, shutting the door on it all. The darkness absorbed him – cool and calm and dispassionate. It was above ranting and crying and knew nothing of emigration or juvenile liaison committees. It was the only judge he respected.

*

In the morning, the smell of poached egg on toast lured Cook downstairs. There had been no familiar call from Esther – she had simply laid the food out on the table before leaving for her Saturday job with a sulky door-slam. He ate and watched cartoons, closely observed by Rusty who was eventually rewarded with a few crusts and a dollop of unwanted egg. He slouched out into the back yard and felt a flex of anger at the sight of his hard-won bicycle, propped against the toilet wall, temporarily decommissioned. On top of this private pain, there was also the public shame, the exposure. PC Frank Ray would surely tell his sons and the thwarted shoplifting story would spread and breed around the school, growing more lurid and shameful in the telling.

Cook climbed up onto the metal dustbin and hopped over the wall, down into the cobbled back entry. Since Uncle Russell's inclusion zone extended only to the end of the street, the old butcher's shop was now an outer marker. As ever, Cook approached it with a mix of fear and fascination, but since it was now the edge of his world, the urge to explore had grown more seductive. If he could conquer the fear, it would surely make an incredible den, and, because other people would have been too scared to go in, there might even be abandoned treasures. He crouched down by the ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted' sign and wriggled through the gap by the gate's broken hinge.

The builder's equipment was unchanged – wheelless wheelbarrow, scaffold tubes, metal sheeting. It felt almost theatrical – an ossified exhibit, more arranged than abandoned. Emboldened by outrage at his confinement, Cook aimed a kick at the wooden panel blocking the hole in the brickwork and it flapped over, invitingly, to one side. The opening was roomier than the gate-hinge gap and he barely had to stoop to pass through into a small back-room overrun by chalky chunks of masonry. The walls had shed enormous dunes of plaster and formed a central pyramid of powdery grime. Slender shafts of daylight poked in through gaps in the window-boards, casting a sepulchral shimmer over the clusters of bottle-shards and faded beer-cans. He digested the silence and stepped through a battered door-frame into a larger, less cluttered main hall which served as a central chamber to several box-rooms, all now doorless. The fittings had been mostly hacked away and the floor's uneven concrete crunched and crumbled underfoot. It was brighter in here, with light leaking in from an exposed staircase which led to the first-floor window – the one from which Cook had been dared to wave on the day they had retrieved John Ray's school-bag. Stumbling through a patch of greasy polythene, Cook approached the staircase. He would rehearse the dare – climb to the window, admire the view, hopefully call to someone he knew. But at the bottom step, he peeked through a split in a splintered door and spotted another staircase winding down into darkness, out of sight. To a cellar? If there was treasure here, surely it would be down there. He pushed at the door, surprised at its weight. It swung open, lower hinge screeching in protest.

Cook could only see the first five or six steps. The others melted into the gloom, if they were even there at all. He edged forward, hovering a foot just beyond the threshold of the door-frame. From somewhere down below, something groaned – a swelling, extended rumble, somewhere between pain and fury. Cook turned and tripped and leapt away, skidding on the polythene, crashing through the panel, then outside and running, running, running.

“MR COOK?”

“Yes.”

“I'm Inspector Ramshaw, this is Constable Whitcombe. Would you mind if we came inside and asked you a few questions?”

Cook was underdressed for the occasion – grimy REM T-shirt, elasticated tracksuit trousers, no socks. It was 8.30pm on Saturday night and he was about to settle in for a punishing double-bill of Bergman and Preminger. The doorbell had interrupted a ranting hunt for the TV instruction manual. He had been freeloading here for a week, but he had not yet adjusted to his absent friend's taste for minimalist electronics.

The policemen were positioned a respectful couple of steps beyond the doorstep, offering weak smiles and photo ID.

“What's this about? I'm just…”

Ramshaw's smile broadened into something approaching sympathy. “It's just a few quick questions. We won't keep you for too long. It'd be helpful if we could discuss it indoors.”

The rhetoric in the request was now clear. Cook stepped aside and the officers entered, taking turns to shuffle their feet on the doormat. Cook's phone vibrated – silently – in his saggy pocket.

“Have a seat in the…”

“Sitting-room?” smiled Ramshaw, with a calculated brevity that only made Cook more nervous.

“Yes. Can I get you anything? I was just making tea.”

“No, thank you. As I say, we won't be too long.”

Cook skulked into the kitchen and checked his phone. There was a missed call from Gina, followed up with a text message.

Cook pocketed the phone and carried his mug of tea into the sitting-room, where Ramshaw – lanky, smooth-bald – and Whitcombe – shorter, squinty – sat side by side, on the sofa. As he sunk carefully into a facing armchair and clanked the drink down a little too hard on the glass coffee table, Cook rewound his memory through vaguely illicit recent events – cut corners, wily misdemeanours, downloaded BitTorrent files. Perhaps it was something to do with the playground fight? Maybe the Mountford/Brereton thing? Since Mountford's panicked call on his leaving day, Cook had deleted the contact, erased past messages, avoided
PastLives.com
and generally gone entirely dark on his… friend? Old schoolmate? Shoplifter comrade? Surely this couldn't be the re-opening of a cold-case – a crackdown on unresolved petty youth crime from the '70s.

Whitcombe flipped open a notebook. Ramshaw did the talking.

“Mr Cook, are you familiar with a young woman by the name of Eleanor Finch?”

“I've seen the news, yes. Has she been found yet?”

Cook thought he saw a sidelong glance pass between the two officers. Whitcombe, finally, found his voice. “No. Are you acquainted? Do you know each other?”

“I recognise the name.”

“Dorian…”

Ramshaw resumed control. The switch to first-name terms was clearly intended to unsettle.

“Have you ever
met
Ms Finch?”

“No. Of course not. Why would you think that?”

The tea was too hot to drink but Cook took a nervous slurp, anyway.

“Our enquiry indicates that the two of you may have known each other.”

Ramshaw let this hang. Cook stared into his tea for a few silent seconds, and when he looked up he saw that both Ramshaw and Whitcombe had their heads tilted to the left, like curious dogs.

“She used to write to me,” said Cook. “But that was a very long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Back when I was on my first full-time job. I'm a journalist. She… had some kind of crush on me.”

Whitcombe nodded. This wasn't news to him, but he noted something in his book. Ramshaw stayed silent, giving his partner the opportunity to follow up.

“How old were you at the time?”

“Early twenties.”

“That would make her fourteen or fifteen.”

“She wrote to me, but I never wrote back. I never encouraged anything.”

Ramshaw stepped in. “What was in the letters?”

(A slight smirk from Whitcombe on this.)

Cook's mouth was uncomfortably dry. He took another sip of tea. “Just teenage stuff. It was a bit embarrassing, really. The envelopes were always covered in hearts and things – and the other staff always managed to get to them first.”

“How often did you receive them?”

“About once a week. They stopped when I left the magazine and started on a weekly paper.”

“And you've had nothing since?”

“No.”

“Did you know her by any other name?”

“No. She always signed them as ‘Eleanor'. Why?”

“We don't believe that was her real name at the time – although she did change it officially later.”

Cook sensed the officers were trying to establish whether or not this was a surprise to him. It was.

“I'm not sure how I can help. Have you had any luck in trying to find her?”

Ramshaw smiled. “We try not to work with luck. It's a complex enquiry.”

Whitcombe now, shifting up a gear. “Mr Cook, we have discovered a number of letters at Ms Finch's flat – intended for you, but apparently unsent.”

“As I said, I haven't heard from her since I changed my job. It must be twenty years ago.”

“The letters we found are fairly recent.”

“Obviously,” said Ramshaw, leaning forward, “we're keen to understand if there's any connection to her disappearance. I have to question why a woman in her late thirties felt the urge to revisit what was – as you say – a teenage crush.”

“Wasn't she separated?” Cook on the attack a little, now.

“She was, indeed.”

“That must have been stressful – I saw the press conference with her ex-husband. Maybe she was taking comfort in something from simpler times.”

Ramshaw raised his eyebrows, nodded. “It's an interesting theory.”

Whitcombe, scribbling.

“And the letters are clearly marked for me?”

“Yes. Your name is on all the envelopes. No address.”

“What did they say?”

Whitcombe looked up. “I'm afraid we can't disclose any detail.”

Ramshaw sensed progress and took a softer line. “There's actually very little. Drawings, abstract things. The writing seems to be mainly concerned with why you haven't replied to earlier letters. Are you sure you've received nothing since the time you changed your job?”

“Absolutely. Nothing.”

“Dorian…” Ramshaw leaned back, scrutinising. The gaze was keen and challenging and Cook had to fight the urge to break eye contact. “I'm sure you can appreciate the seriousness of this case. If you have any information at all, if you feel you know anything about what might have happened to Eleanor, then you must come forward. I want to make it clear that we're not accusing you of anything, but if you do fail to disclose information that could serve the enquiry, then that may well be held against you later.”

Cook bristled. This sounded suspiciously like a prelude to arrest. “As I said, I recognised the name from the news and, obviously, I was shocked. But it was all such a long time ago. I've never written back, never been in two-way contact, never encouraged anything. I hope that nothing has happened to her, but I honestly can't see how I can help you.”

Later, when the police had left him to tea and toast and 1950s courtroom drama, Cook called Gina and calmed her with a soft-focus explanation of why they had connected him to the missing woman. He heard her sigh down the phone-line – a breeze of enervation.

“All this drama, Dorian.”

He spoke to Alfie, mostly about football stickers and zombies. (“They can make you one of them but what happens when all the humans run out and there are only zombies. Will they have to eat each other?”)

(Cook had to confess his ignorance on this.)

He wished his son goodnight, told him that he loved him (receiving a mumbled ‘uhuh' in return), hung up the phone and pulled a small, lockable leather briefcase from one of the still-unpacked removal boxes. Inside, was a stack of letters from Eleanor Finch, retrieved from a safe in his home office. They were packed into clear plastic wallets bearing month/year stickers. The letters had started to arrive at the
Widescreen
office around two years ago. Their frequency was inconsistent, but rarely dropped below two or three a month. Cook had been tempted to reply a few times, but had managed to keep to his (wise? cowardly?) policy of non-engagement. He sifted through the oldest, sliding the pastel-coloured sheets out through cleanly slitted openings. Eleanor's initial awkwardness at rekindling the contact steadily progressed to tender advances and heartbreaking one-way reminiscence. After a few months, she seemed to accept the silence, and the tone became more diary-like – pining for the happier days of her marriage, deep thoughts on elapsing time, occasional flares of unrequited sexuality. And then, after a year of silence, the letters came again, telling of her ‘new man', thoughts on restart and redemption, renewed affection for her children and soon-to-be ex-husband.

The most recent letters were more confused. She seemed cowed and uncertain.

Eleanor's final letter was sent a few days before she was reported missing. Cook unfolded the single sheet of lilac paper and re-read it, for the third time that week.

Cook folded the letter and slotted it back into its envelope. He shuddered – and remembered Esther's saying in response, back at their old, cold house.

“Someone just walked over my grave.”

When he was seven years old, he had asked her what she meant by this. (“It's just what they say, Dor – when someone steps on the bit of ground where you're going to be buried.”)

Mountford was right. It was far from nothing.

Cook had identified two primary schools called Vaughan Green. He had compared their positions with online street-map software, and only one – around thirty miles away – appeared to be on high ground near the end of a street, facing a large detached house.

Here sat Dorian Cook – jobless, loveless, a force without form, always passing through, never quite arriving. He was a lonely soul who had hovered too long in limbo. But now, gripped with a fresh panic for life, he knew that his time had come around at last.