Ghosts Know (30 page)

As if the shout has set it off, the phone vibrates in my hand like an alarm. I’m fast enough to silence all of its new ringtone—Frank Sinatra singing “I Only Have Eyes For You”—except for the first word of the line. Pressing the mobile against the side of my face I can see with, I murmur “Hello?”

“Is this Graham?”

For a moment I’m sure I’ve been recognised. “That’s my name.”

“Leave your radio off, but you’re going to hear it on your phone. Derek will be with you when he’s finished talking to the lady who’s on now.”

I swing around to look at the traffic. Suppose the response to my other call arrives too soon? I can see only trucks and ordinary cars, oncoming layers of them, and I keep an eye on the garage as Dennison speaks in my ear. “I hope every one of your neighbours who care will stand by you, Swati, and the police will as well. I know they’re listening to us today.”

I should have realised they might, but Dennison distracts me by saying “Next in for a chat is Graham from the city centre. How are you today, Graham?”

“Better than some.”

“Then we’re two of a kind and I’ll bet you good money there’s more. We should give thanks for our blessings and pray other people have the same.”

I need to answer, however disconcerting it is to hear my voice in the garage. It sounds more unnatural than I expected—louder than I am and so disconnected from me that I could easily imagine it’s beyond my control. I’m also afraid Dennison may hear it and tell me to turn off the radio, and I plant my other hand over the phone as well before saying “I’d like to give someone some of mine.”

“That’s big of you, Graham. Well, there’s a subject for another day. We should have Count Your, I mean Share Your Blessings Day.”

“I’m sure that would be your kind of show.”

“So long as the listener’s the winner.” After a pause that’s filled by the clang of a hub-cap on the floor of the garage, Dennison says “Tell me something, Graham. Where do I know you from?”

I clasp my hands harder over the mobile on the wholly irrational notion that it will make me inaudible in the garage. “I’ve been on the show.”

“I’m sure I’ve never spoken to you, but you sound familiar.”

“Does it matter? Anyway, let me—”

“Good Lordy. Well, let’s hear it for my ears. My senses haven’t let me down yet.” All this allows me to hope that he may keep his realisation to himself until he says “You’re Graham Wilde.”

How may this affect my plan? I can’t hear any reaction in the garage, and denying who I am won’t help; it might even get me taken off the air. “You’ve spotted me, Derek.”

“Call me Deny and I’ll call you Gray. What’s brought you back to us? I should tell listeners in case they don’t know that you used to be in my slot.”

If he doesn’t mean to be disdainful this must be an unintended innuendo, but I haven’t time to deal with either. “I’m calling on today’s subject.”

“I should use my peepers, shouldn’t I? It says here what you’re doing.” Having paused as though to give the drill in the garage a moment to clatter, he says “Are you a regular listener?”

“I won’t pretend I have been.”

“Only then you mightn’t know— ” This pause is so prolonged it isn’t far from unprofessional. “Forget it for now,” Dennison tells me or himself. “Let’s hear your call.”

I’m even more aware of my giant voice in the garage. I take a breath that I could imagine is audible above the rapid gunning of a power tool in the workshop and say “You’ll have heard what happened to me.”

“We all have to move on, Gray, don’t we? I did from the Beeb.”

“I don’t mean losing my job.” He sounds a shade defensive, but I mustn’t let that divert me. “I mean losing my eye. Go on, tell me that’s careless.”

“I hope you don’t think I ever would.”

Now I’ve antagonised him. My huge voice in the unnaturally flattened shed is making me say things I never planned to say. I’m about to reclaim control when the presenter says “Have they found whoever was responsible?”

“Not yet and maybe never. That’s not the crime I want to help with.”

“Then give it to us, Gray, but just be sure to remember how we have to work.’”

He’s advising me to stay professional. I haven’t time to resent that; I need to keep my rage in focus. “I’m guessing you listened to some of my shows or you wouldn’t have recognised me.”

“I was listening because—I did hear some.”

“Maybe you heard some people thought I gave a psychic reading on the air.”

“Didn’t you?”

He sounds eager to believe, which is an advantage I didn’t predict. “They thought I did it without knowing,” I tell him. “I expect they’d say I could have developed it since, maybe to compensate for my eye.’”

“Is that what you’re saying?”

“Let me tell you what I see and you can tell me what you think.”

I’ve come to it at last. He shouldn’t interrupt me much if he wants to give his other callers their time on the air. “I believe I can see what happened to the girl who was killed by the canal.”

I’ve barely said this when I hear a shout and a door slamming in the garage, though the man’s words are indistinguishable. “You mean Kylie Goodchild,” Dennison says in my ear.

His voice in the garage has lost volume. Through a grimy window that’s open a few inches in the side of the building I see a bulky figure lurch into an office decorated with a nude girl on a calendar. As I turn away to hide my face I glimpse him at the window. I feel as though he’s watching me, even if just sunlight is glaring at my back. I have to keep talking, and I say “That’s who I mean. I told the police I thought her boyfriend was responsible, but now I know it wasn’t him.”

“Don’t name any names.”

Dennison’s other voice and my equally distant one are muffled now, because the man at the window has dragged the sash down. When I risk a sidelong glance I find he’s out of sight, presumably at his desk. “I won’t be doing that,” I assure Dennison. “You won’t have to cut me off.”

“Go on then, but be careful.”

“I thought the man responsible objected to her trying to see me, but it wasn’t only that. I don’t think it was even mainly me.”

I’m frustrated by the suffocated mumble of my dislodged voice. I can’t make out a word it says, despite hearing them all in my mobile. More important, if there’s any reaction in the office of the garage I won’t be able to hear. “I’ll tell you this much, Derek,” I say and pace towards the building, which appears to squeeze it even flatter. “The man used to call up my show.”

“No names, remember.”

“No need. He knows who he is.” I have to free one hand to dab my wet prickling forehead. “That’s why Kylie took to me,” I say, “and why she wanted to talk to me the night she died. Because I argued with him on the air about issues they disagreed over.”

“Make sure you don’t name anyone, but are you saying he still rings in?”

“I’m certain he still listens.” I found that out yesterday as I loitered near the garage. “He only called me once after that night,” I tell Dennison. “He must have been afraid of being recognised.”

“Why would he be? I don’t understand.”

I’m on the edge of saying, but Dennison would take me off the air, and I have more to broadcast. “Let me tell you what I see and maybe you will.”

“We’re all waiting, so can I ask you to come to the point?”

“I think they had an argument that night about his problem and she ran off to see me. Or maybe she wasn’t coming to see me at first, she couldn’t have been sure I’d be there, but then she thought of me once she was downtown.” Suppose Dennison cuts me off because he finds this too indefinite? How much more will I have to say to provoke the reaction I’m after? “We know he followed her,” I say and take another step towards the side of the garage—in a minute I’ll be able to dodge out of sight and stay close to the wall of the building. “I don’t know how he explained where he went unless there was nobody else around to see him go.’”

“Excuse me, Gray, but you sound as if you’re guessing.”

“It isn’t just a guess.” I’m beside the house next to the garage, and within yards of darting into the gap between them, though that’s wider than it looked. “I see him chasing her away from Waves,” I say and hear my own words beyond the office window. “Maybe she was trying to hide by the canal until he went away, but he found her. And then she stood her ground. That’s how she was.”

“Hold on a moment. Is there a radio on near you?”

I don’t know what to do or say except “I haven’t got one.”

“We’re getting an echo but all right, don’t stop now. Just keep it as brief as you can.”

“I don’t know what was said between them. Something was too much.” I’m hurrying to the corner of the empty house as I say “I see him lashing out. It only took a moment and one blow. It broke her jaw and knocked her out, and before he knew it she was in the canal. Why didn’t he try and rescue her? Maybe—”

A face looms at the window of the office. There’s a shout of “It’s you, you cunt” and the sash rattles up. In my ear Dennison protests “What was that?”

“I didn’t hear. I’m saying maybe he couldn’t bear anyone to know he’d—”

“You cunt,” Kylie’s father yells again, “you fucking cunt,” and lurches away from the window.

I’m not about to flee—very much the reverse. I switch my phone to loudspeaker mode and hurry to meet him in front of the open workshop. “That’s the man,” I say and hear my enlarged voice burst out of the office. “I won’t name him, but—”

“I’m sorry, Gray. I won’t have that kind of language on my show even if you would on yours.”

Dennison says this in my aching ear and much louder in the garage; he might almost be alerting Robbie Goodchild. “Wait, Derek, Derry,” I hear myself plead in at least two places at once. “Don’t you realise—”

I’m already talking to myself. My voice is no longer at Robbie Good-child’s back. As my fist clenches on the useless phone and sinks away from my face, Dennison booms in the garage “Any children who heard that, just you go and wash your ears out and never talk that kind of privy talk. It’s never clever and it isn’t funny either.”

I’m in front of the garage now, and pathetically relieved to see several men at work in the depthless shed. One is underneath a car on a hydraulic platform, while a second is removing the door of a van, and their colleague has just fitted a wheel on a jeep. None of them is looking directly at Goodchild as he stalks fast across the concrete floor littered with tools and vehicle parts, and surely that means they don’t approve of his behaviour. They don’t look even when he yells “You’ll be sorry, you cunt” and strides at me.

“Think what you’re doing. There are witnesses this time.” When he
doesn’t falter I shout “You can’t ignore this, any of you. He needs to stop before he goes too far again.”

The younger men seem to be busier still. Only the eldest—the man under the platform—stares at me. “Deserve everything you fucking get, pal,” he says, and at least one of the others nods.

Perhaps the loss of an eye has blacked out part of my brain, because I’ve made just about every mistake I could. I’m staying in sight of the mechanics for want of any better scheme when Goodchild swings a hulking fist at the blind side of my face. Up to this moment I managed to delude myself that he wouldn’t give way to actual violence. I must be as naive as any of Frank Jasper’s faithful. I step back so fast that it feels like flinching, which inflames my anger. “That’s like the one you gave Kylie, is it. Bob? When did you find out Wayne’s stepfather was black?”

Something makes him hesitate. Perhaps I’ve roused a memory he’s done his best to stifle, unless I’ve said more than his employees knew. I’m not sure they can hear me above the ad for Frugrab bargain offers that Dennison is playing, and I raise my voice. “Don’t you realise you’re showing I told the truth? Was that your drawing of Mohammed in her book? You used to phone in attacking anyone who wasn’t white. You even said Blackley shouldn’t be pronounced how it is.”

“Fucking shouldn’t either,” the man under the platform shouts, and both his colleagues nod.

I still have to try to appeal to their better selves. There’s nobody on foot along the Blackley road, and no sign of the kind of vehicle I’m just about praying to see. At least Goodchild has halted while he scoffs “Took you all this time to work that out, did it? You’re no more fucking psychic than I am or any other cunt.”

I’m overtaken by an insight, and I blurt it out. “You never believed in Frank Jasper any more than I did. You hired him because you thought he’d be no use. It made you look as if you’d nothing to hide and like you cared as well.”

“Don’t you fucking say I never cared,” Goodchild snarls and lurches forward.

“How did it feel, pretending to respect her boyfriend? How does it feel to have to hide what you did from her mother?”

I need him to betray himself in front of the only witnesses that are left—to say something even they can’t ignore. I have to stay out of his reach as he takes another vicious swing at me, but I can’t back into the
traffic. I retreat along the pavement just far enough to avoid the blow. I’m still in front of Goodchild Motors when I say “How did it feel to have to pretend at Kylie’s funeral?”

“Hello to Eunice from Sale,” Dennison says several times louder, as though he has to shout over the rattle of a power tool on a hub-cap in the garage. Too late I realise the mechanics may not be hearing me or Goodchild any longer above all the noise. They’re certainly determined not to watch him throw another hefty punch at my face. “Fucking leave her out of it,” he says through his bared teeth.

I can scarcely believe he said that, but it’s no more incredible than the situation I’ve put myself in. My plan has failed, and I’ve nothing left except rage. When I back out of reach of yet another swing that looks capable of splintering my jaw, I can’t be seen by anybody in the workshop even if they would have come to my aid. I won’t let Goodchild glimpse my apprehension or make Kylie’s error of allowing him too close. “You know I’ve seen the truth,” I tell him. “I’d have seen it sooner if you hadn’t called yourself Bob on the air. Who didn’t you want to recognise you?”

“Just you and me, cunt.” Goodchild shows me his teeth again, practically grinning. “I’m the last fucking thing you’ll see,” he says and lashes out at my remaining eye.