Walking with Ghosts (25 page)

‘Like me?’

‘Could’ve been, I suppose. But you’re taller.’

When Geordie glanced back to say goodbye, at the door of Male’s room, the old man was smiling. Didn’t improve him, though. Looked as ancient as God.

30

Joni Prine was the kind of girl who’d squeeze her friend’s blackheads in the street. The village pub in Wheldrake had, of course, seen her like before, but had not become enamoured through the exposure.

Marie tried repeatedly to get Joni to keep her voice down, but it seemed like a physical impossibility. Even when Joni whispered, the locals took in every word. Eddy had been nice to her in the beginning, when they had first met. But for the last year she’d felt trapped, ever since he’d got her pregnant with Jacqui. Now the physical violence was getting worse. Eddy also threw his weight around with the younger girls. One of the ones in the cottage tonight had a cut lip. Almost impossible for a girl to work with a cut lip.

Marie had a miniaturized recorder, which she kept running while Joni talked. But at eleven o’clock they drank up and walked to the outskirts of the village where Edward Blake’s cottages were situated behind a tall beech hedge. In the drive was a sleek Hertz rental with tinted windows, a sure sign that the gentlemen had arrived.

They were playing music inside the cottage, sounded like Cliff Richards’

‘Summer Holiday’, which put a certain vintage on the politicians, and pointed up the absence of taste which had led them, ultimately, into the hands of Edward Blake.

‘I want to get this right first time,’ said Marie, taking a small video camera from the bag on her shoulder. ‘We don’t go in unless we know we’ll get some good footage.’

Joni held up a bunch of keys. ‘We can go in the back Way,’ she said. ‘Through the kitchen. They’ll all be pissed anyway, and we’ll be able to watch without them knowing we’re there.’

Marie followed her round the house. They crept into the darkened kitchen, where Joni pushed open a serving-hatch A tangle of naked and semi-naked bodies was revealed in the room beyond. A portly man with silver hair on his head and chest was kneeling on a cushion on the floor. He was the owner of a short, fat penis, which was fully and comically erect. The girl on his left, who was dressed in a pyjama top, was holding his member between thumb and forefinger. The girl to his right, who was tall and thin and brown, seemed to be licking out his ear. When the serving-hatch opened he was caught squealing with laughter, his red face blotchy with alcohol, and his mouth open in a roar of abandonment.

‘Bobby!’ he shouted. ‘Tina wants us to make a daisy-chain.’

Bobby wasn’t fully visible. He was stretched out on his back on the floor. Like the first man, he was completely naked. Only the base of his penis and a few red hairs were visible, the rest of it being subsumed in the mouth of a girl with a badly cut lip who knelt between his thighs. At the other end there was nothing to recognize, as a dumpy blonde with long nipples and a bored expression was sitting on his face.

‘Let’s get to work,’ said Marie, flicking on the video camera. Joni kicked open the door, and the two of them tumbled into the room.

‘Wheeeee,’ screamed the silver-haired man. ‘More girlies. Hey, Bobby, we’ve got more girlies.’

Bobby moved the blonde off his face and peeked out between her buttocks. ‘More the merrier,’ he said. ‘Have a drink. Take your clothes off.’

Then he disappeared again under the blonde. Marie only caught a glimpse of him, but his face was almost a national icon. Robert ‘Bobby’ Neville was only a junior cabinet minister, but heavily tipped for one of the major jobs in the not-too-distant future. The Home Office and the Treasury had both been mentioned by political speculators.

His swift rise to prominence had been accomplished by a couple of veiled racist speeches, in which Bobby had partially concealed his misanthropy behind the cloak of patriotism.

But, like others who used flag-waving tactics, Bobby’s only real love was himself. Marie reflected that patriotism was nothing more or less than the conviction that a country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

She let the camera run. Who knows, she might be making history, recording the formative moments of a future prime minister. Not exactly an in-depth interview, but revealing nevertheless.

The girl with the cut lip drew back from Bobby’s sex and left it standing there, glistening with saliva. She looked at the camera. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ she said.

Bobby must have picked up on her tone, because he sat up quickly, and his engorged member went down like a pricked balloon, disappeared into that red bush real fast.

‘Minister,’ said Marie, zooming in on his face, ‘is it true that when your dick gets hard, your brain gets soft?’

The minister’s reply would have been censured in Hansard. His choice of words was not exactly considered, and there were far too many adjectives for the one sentence.

31

Before he went to the paper shop, Sam looked again at the photograph album Diana had found for him. They were all there, Arthur and Dora, Diana and Billy. There were a couple of photographs of Dora’s parents, portraits gone yellow with age, people with spines so straight and rigid that today they would be regarded as abnormal.

The wedding-day photographs. Arthur standing tall with his bride on his arm. Dora smiling at the camera, her young face bursting with anticipation, her eyes innocent of the complications and hardships that the years ahead might hold. She looked too young to be married. Like a schoolgirl in a pageant that had nothing to do with real life, a child dressing up, pretending to be adult for the cameraman. Looking hard at the wedding photograph Sam couldn’t detect much of the woman he now lived with. The girl in the photograph remained static, gazing into the dark aperture of the camera, fixed in the moment, unaware that another husband far in the future was looking back down the years at her through the same lens.

Sam sighed and flicked over a couple of pages. There was Arthur with Billy. Father and son in a studio portrait. Arthur would be around forty, the young Billy five or six years old. Billy had long curly hair and was dressed in a short linen coat, white ankle socks, and tiny sandals. Arthur was looking down at his son, who was standing on a chair. There was no physical contact between the two, but it was as if they were one being. The man’s gaze encompassed the totality of the child, so that Billy was unaware of the precarious nature of his perch. He was aware of the undivided attention of his father. He was too young to recognize that the camera was there to make a statement, but the core of him, reaching out a tiny hand towards his father, illuminated an action that perhaps still continued down to the present day.

Sam picked up the
Yorkshire Post
and read the Stop Press headline on the back page. He paid for the paper and took it outside to a bench on the main road. He knew what it was going to say before he began reading it. It was like an epiphany, something he’d known was going to happen all along, something that he might have averted if he’d known it consciously. But he’d known it instinctively, with a kind of tribal knowledge. Until he’d seen the headline he hadn’t even known that he knew.

The Surgeon Strikes Again?

Police were called to a house in York last night, after an attack on a young woman, believed to be the fourth intended victim of the serial killer known as the Surgeon.

A spokesperson said that the attacker was interrupted by the victim’s boyfriend as he was attempting to strangle the woman. The attack took place at a flat in the Fishergate area of the town.

The woman is recovering in hospital.

The Surgeon, who has struck three times before in the York area, is known to use a distinctive modus operandi, and the attacker last night seemed to be following the same pattern.

The police spokesperson confirmed that no one had been detained. Various leads were being followed and investigated. An incident room was being established.

There will be a further statement later today.

It was the woman Billy had followed. Sam played it back ' his head, the night he had followed Billy following ^ woman to the flat in Fishergate. Fie could see Billy watchin from the shelter of the bus stop as she pressed the bell and was let into the flat. After she’d disappeared inside, Billy stjjj waited, watching the building, looking up at the windows He’d locked on to her and followed her halfway across the town, and now she had been attacked, nearly killed.

Dora had asked Sam to find Billy, her son, because she missed him, and because she was dying and wanted to see him one last time. What was he supposed to do? Go back and tell her Billy was a serial killer? Brighten up her last days with that?

Or should he do nothing, let Dora die in peace? Leave Billy free to kill again?

It was the kind of problem that made Sam Turner want to find a friendly pub. Get a high stool next to the bar and order a little glass of Scotch. Watch the world and all its problems recede into the distance.

It was always there, that thought. Have a drink and forget. Sam nodded at it inwardly. It was a demon he didn’t need, but a demon he had to deal with.

Was Billy the Surgeon? Circumstantial evidence seemed to point that way. But circumstantial evidence wasn’t admitted by the courts. The state wouldn’t convict Billy on that evidence, but Sam Turner the great liberal had already judged him guilty without hearing what the guy had to say for himself.

And although in theory the state didn’t convict anyone on circumstantial evidence, Sam knew from first-hand experience that in reality that was often the only kind of evidence available. And the fact that it was circumstantial had never stopped a good copper from going for the conviction. When he was a young man in Liverpool, the local filth had fitted Sam Turner up with a quantity of dope, searched him, found it, charged him, and sent him down.

He shrugged. So, slow down, Sam, he said to himself, you weren’t a dealer when all the evidence said you were. It’s at least possible that Billy isn’t the Surgeon, even though it looks as though he is. Be suspicious. Don’t close your eyes. But don’t hang the guy until you’re sure.

I’ve got a suspect, he told himself. That’s all. A prime suspect.

Billy came out of the house in St Mary’s and walked up to Bootham carrying a black holdall. Sam followed. Over to the east the sky was darkening, and violent squalls blew paper bags and bus tickets along the street. Billy crossed over the road and walked the length of Gillygate, eventually disappearing into a launderette on Clarence Street. Nothing sinister in that, Sam thought, the guy doing his weekly wash. Unless, of course, the black holdall contained clothing stained with the blood of the girl who had been attacked in Fishergate.

Sam watched through the window while Billy unloaded underwear and socks, a shirt, a single sheet, a pillow case, and a pair of jeans. None of them seemed unduly stained. Billy put money into the machine and sat down on a bench to wait. He was small and dark. He wasn’t paler, or markedly more drawn. He hadn’t turned into a slobbering Mr Hyde overnight. Didn’t have a twitch. Sam tried to imagine what someone would look like who had recently attempted to murder a young girl and gouge out her eyes with a knife. It was an impossible exercise. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine that someone who’d done that would casually turn up at the launderette.

Sam didn’t plan what happened next. He’d vaguely thought of tailing Billy for a couple of days, get to feel how the man lived, observe his habits before approaching him. But without thinking about it, he found himself pushing open the door of the launderette. He walked across the floor and sat down next to the young man. Billy tried to ignore him at first, affecting the studied indifference of a frog on lily leaf.

‘Hello, Billy,’ Sam said.

Billy slowly turned his head. He looked at Sam long and hard before saying: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know you.’

‘That’s right. My name’s Sam Turner. I’m married to yoUr mother.’

A brief smile crossed Billy’s face, but he didn’t attempt to sustain it. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘One of Dora’s fancy men.’

Sam suppressed the urge to break his neck. ‘Dora’s ill,’ he said. ‘She’s going to die soon. She’d like to see you.’

The smile flitted across Billy’s face again. ‘Die?’ he said. And he looked through Sam as he said: ‘My father would have liked to see me before he died.’

Sam shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I know you were close to your father. But Dora, your mother... You’d make her happy if you came to see her.’

Billy turned his head away and watched his clothes going round in the washing machine. Sam looked at his profile. He’d changed from the night Sam had followed him across York. Then his hair had been slicked back and black, reminiscent of Elvis Presley. Sam remembered thick lips and a swarthy appearance. But today Billy’s hair was short and auburn, and his lips were thin. He was paler, too. A different person. The Billy he’d followed across York had been wearing a wig and make-up.

‘How did you find me?’