The Ghost (19 page)

“The den is down here,” said Mountford, motioning for Cook and Brereton to help. Ray aimed Mountford's torch at the iron handle as the other three grunted and prised and gouged the trapdoor from its frame. Cook was first to the ladder, descending with stuttering stealth as the frail beam flitted from rung to trapdoor to darkness below, steered by Ray's curiosity. Brereton and Mountford followed and, after some cajoling, Ray probed and groped his way down to the cool stone floor. He trained the faltering torch up at the curved ceiling, guiding its glow slowly down and around – a soft-focus searchlight inspecting the featureless walls.

Behind him, Mountford was climbing back up the ladder. “I'll get the matches, just in case.”

Cook followed him up, unnoticed by Ray.

Brereton took the torch from Ray, slipped his arm around his shoulders. “Now, you have to close your eyes.”

“Okay. But don't scare me too much!”

Brereton turned and quietly climbed the first few rungs. He passed the torch up to Cook, who shone it down into the cellar, lighting the way as Brereton crawled out through the open trapdoor.

“Now you have to count to three,” said Brereton.

“Okay! One…”

John Ray's voice – wavering and diluted – wafted up from the cellar. To Brereton, he seemed absent, a thousand miles away. Mountford heard something exquisite – anticipation, not fear. For Cook, it was a sign-off – a last transmission, soon to be tuned out and wiped over with silence.

“Two…”

Cook screwed the lit torch into a gap in the wall, spotlighting the scene. Brereton and Mountford lifted the trapdoor away from the floor. Cook grasped the iron handle as they heaved it upright.

“Throw down the torch,” whispered Mountford. “Dave's got matches.”

Brereton, straining against the trapdoor's bulk, nodded impatiently. Cook poked his arm down through the frame, shoulder-deep, reducing the falling distance.

“Three!”

He let the torch drop. It clinked against the stone floor, flickered, stayed alight. John Ray opened his eyes at the noise.

Cook, Brereton and Mountford pushed the trapdoor.

Thunk.

It slotted into place with a gust of dust – sealing the hole, stealing the light.

Silence.

Brereton lit a match.

Screaming.

Watch! He hates this!

Cook had first heard this screaming in the passage by Lisa's house, when the boys had tied Ray's hair up with his handkerchief. It was more like a howl of outrage – primal and jarring, but tainted by impotence. Back then, it shuddered out in bursts, between breaths. Now, it emerged as a single, sustained note of immaculate terror.

And so they left him there – to scream in peace. They bolted – scampering back through the passage, up the stairs, through the central chamber, out into the yard. They huddled by the back door, panting.

Brereton – delirious, cackling.

Mountford – startled, cry-laughing.

Cook – listening, listening for Something.

Instead, there was Nothing.

No screaming.

“I can't hear ‘im,” said Brereton.

“It's too deep,” said Mountford. “I thought we'd be able to hear everything outside.”

They cycled back to the marl-hole. Mountford stayed with the bikes while Brereton squeezed onto Cook's long saddle and hitched a ride back to the butcher's shop. Brereton dismounted and hopped onto Ray's junior racer. They paused, listened. Still nothing.

“We should leave him his bike,” said Cook.

“Someone might nick it!”

“Just stick it round the corner, by the gate.”

They wedged the bike in next to the Cash & Carry side-entrance, not obvious to anyone passing at either end of the entry, but hardly well hidden.

They went back to the marl-hole.

They talked for a while, worried about whether they would ‘get done' or not.

They didn't go back. They didn't go back to John Ray and they didn't open the trapdoor.

*

Later, in the airless night, Cook was inside the old butcher's shop, looking out of the first-floor window. The scene shifted to the view from his own bedroom window – the Sea Devils rising from a lake of hot tar, swarming across the road, dripping black, herding towards his front-door.

He heard them bustle together at the foot of the stairs and begin their ascent.

He waited for the bedroom door to open.

He cowered in the closet, straining hard to wake up.

He heard them crowd into his room.

John Ray screaming.

But it was Cook screaming and he woke, with Esther there, asking what was wrong, saying the heat must be giving him bad dreams.

Saying, “Don't worry, Dor. It's not real. If it's not real, it can't hurt you.”

THE IMAGE WAS SURPRISINGLY
clear, with a wide field of view which monitored the front and side of the house. The camera was intentionally unremarkable – off-white and about the size of a cigarette packet. It ran for forty-eight hours off specialist batteries which could be replaced in seconds, with one hand. (Thumb-flick and slide open the panel, release the old, slot in the new.) It had an automatic, light-sensitive infra-red mode and could be switched on and off remotely, via a unique website. Live footage was viewable by web or dedicated app. Cook had used adhesive strips to fix it – high enough to deter accidental curiosity – on a street-corner lamp-post. To the unsuspicious eye, it looked like some sort of micro alarm system. Suspicious eyes were an unavoidable risk, but he'd been viewing the pictures and changing the batteries for two weeks now with no threat of interference – apart from one tense afternoon when the lens had been partially blocked by a maintenance worker on a hydraulic platform.

Cook had sourced the camera by reviewing the notes for the section in his social media article on live-blogging and lifestyle-tracking. His world was now so condensed and constricted, the observations sounded like mutterings from a mind adrift in some parallel reality.

The ‘new solipsism'… Free and open platform for opinion regardless of insight makes more noise… Difference between panel debate and room full of shouting people (number of followers equates to loudest shouters)… Blogs more like scrapbooks than diaries… Experience-driven analysis given way to indiscriminate leakage… Quantified self and Orwellian impulse to monitor others…

The piece was spiked due to ‘space issues', but even as he filed, Cook knew the copy was too hostile and soap-boxy for the flippant brief (‘Diary Of A Social Media Naysayer'). There was comfort in the irony of his kill-fee covering the camera purchase.

He reviewed the images twice-daily – cutting and pasting significant sections, noting timings and repetitions, cross-referencing irregularities. He drew up a colour-coded chart of occupancy and activity. A pattern was forming, but not as quickly as he'd hoped, and he would not act until he was confident that the risk of discovery was virtually zero.

Cook drove to the house on two consecutive Saturday afternoons, parking round the corner, but still in sight of the gate. He rehearsed his approach vicariously, through several cold-callers and once, a parcel courier who rang the doorbell after receiving no answer from a neighbour. Each time, Cook was satisfied to see that the outcome tallied with his chart.

Today – a Sunday – he arrived home, feeling almost optimistic after a day at the cinema with Alfie, and made the mistake of turning on the radio in time for the half-hourly news bulletin.

“Police are still hunting the killer of a 47-year-old man and his seven-year-old son. Dennis and Jake Mountford were brutally murdered at their home in Edgware last month.”

Mountford's death had slipped down the news agenda, behind a crisis in Estonia and a scandal involving a married politician housing his lover at public expense. Cook had tried to keep the implications corralled in a corner of his aching mind, but this was denial most foul. After the initial panic, he had cooled on trying to contact Brereton and was starting to convince himself that the crime was just an appalling fluke.

“After conducting house-to-house enquiries and several forensic investigations, we are appealing to the public to come forward if they saw anyone acting suspiciously in the area from late afternoon on Saturday 28th September to around 10am on Monday 30th September. Please contact us, in absolute confidence, if you know anything at all, as it could be important to the investigation.”

Cook had taken a call from the police, who explained that they were conducting a ‘routine elimination' of every number in Mountford's mobile address book. He confirmed that they were old school friends who had recently caught up after a chance meeting. He heard the junior-sounding officer sigh and type something. There was a possibility of a follow-up interview, she said – probably within a day or two. He had heard nothing more.

“The case is to be featured on BBC's Crimewatch this Thursday at 9pm.”

*

Cook brewed some strong coffee and opened his laptop. He logged in to the camera website, accessed the clipping section, activated the live feed and resumed work on his private directorial debut. (He was, of course, also producer, editor and cameraman.) The evening ahead was clear – a couple of hours' work on the latest footage, reheated lasagne, half-bottle of Rioja, a new Herzog documentary. Then, he would open the small package he had received yesterday from William Stone.

September, 1976

The heatwave faded, doused by ferocious thunderstorms which rolled in with supreme comic timing – soon after the government had appointed a ‘Minister for Drought'. Back at school, Cook, Mountford and Brereton gathered in the upper playground, by the utility shed.

“What did Mrs Mellor say?” asked Cook.

“She said she didn't know,” said Brereton, already a little bored by the fuss.

“It's been in the paper,” said Mountford. “My dad was reading it. He told me to make sure I always come straight home from school.”

Brereton unwrapped a blob of bubble-gum, rolled the wrapper into a stiff tube and scratched out a lump of crumbled mortar from the shelter wall. He mumbled into the stone. “It was an accident.”

“No, it wasn't,” said Cook.

That afternoon – the third day of the new term – Cook waited for the rest of his class to leave for lessons before summoning the nerve to approach his fearsome new form teacher as he cleaned the blackboard.

“Sir?”

“Dorian Cook…” said Mr Corlett in sinister reply, not bothering to turn.

“Was John Ray meant to be in our class?”

Corlett faced him. He was improbably tall, with a lumpy, reddened nose, hair waxed flat.

“I think he's off sick at the moment, lad.”

*

The storms were triggered by a dense humidity which seemed to intensify Cook's nightmares. Sleep became an oppression, ripening his guilt with a clarity which could not be dampened by rationalisation or denial. His resting mind had settled deep inside a narrative furrow through which the creatures travelled – across the road, through the door, up the stairs and into his hiding-place, desecrating the darkness. Before, although they carried panic and pain, he knew he would eventually open his eyes and escape. Now, they threatened irreversible shutdown – the totality of death.

And in the waking light – at the park, by the ice-cream factory, on the school-walk, along the over-groomed avenue where his imagined girlfriend once lived – John Ray remained, banished from sight but not from mind. The three boys did not dare return to the scene of the crime, but they did sometimes pull themselves up to peek over the wall, where the building materials sat undisturbed, in shrine-like repose.

That year, Cook's birthday – his eleventh – fell on a Saturday and he was allowed a small party in the parlour. Michael Howell came, as did Brereton, Mountford and a few others. For the first time, in the presence of Tom, Lily, Esther, and Uncle Russell and girlfriend, Cook toiled beneath the weight of his secret. It was there in the glances between the three who shared it, and he realised that the story they had used to lure Ray – the imaginary ‘gang' – was now a reality. They were a complicit collective, bound by mutual self-preservation.

There was lemon squash and jelly and ice-cream. They played a rigged version of Musical Chairs, with Tom strategically lifting the stylus from one of Cook's records whenever he approached an empty chair. After all non-family had been ushered away with birthday cake wrapped in tissue paper, Cook squeezed onto the sofa with Tom and Russell. His uncle had threaded a copy of the
Daily Mirror
through the elastic slats under the seat-cushion. He slid it free and flattened the front-page across his knee. A bruised, black-eyed face stared out, contrasting with an older, more composed police mug-shot. Beneath the battered version, the caption ran:

And then, the bellowing headine and main story.

CAGED FOREVER – PANTHER JAILED FOR LIFE

Under this, a portentous sub-splash.

Cook turned the pages, eager to study the contents of the ‘dossier', but a few flicks in, his eye was drawn to a text-only story compressed into a side-column.

Tom laughing with Esther.

Russell shovelling up a bowl of trifle.

Lily suddenly there, stroking his hair. (“Have you had a nice birthday, darling?”)

The missing boy was thirteen-year-old Robert Gillham, not ten-year-old John Ray.

The Black Panther had been caged.

Yes, he told his mother. It had been a nice birthday.

*

Something was coming up the stairs. But Cook was already half-awake. Was this residue from his dream or a new twist of reality? He could smell smoke, wisping in through his bedroom window. Outside in the street, someone was shouting, banging on front-doors.

Esther barged in. “C'mon, Dor. Get yerself out of bed! There's a fire!”

Cook jumped upright. “Here?”

“No! In that old house down the end of the street. Fire brigade are there. We've got to get out.”

Cook dived into shorts and T-shirt.

“I've got your shoes. Come on!”

Esther grabbed and squeezed his hand, too hard. She yanked him down the stairs, out of the house and over the road, falling in with a group of bleary neighbours – fluffy slippers, ‘house-coats', pre-breakfast cigarettes. The old butcher's shop was almost completely obscured behind rippling swirls of dark black smoke. Flames surged through the half-boarded windows, tamed – but not extinguished – by columns of water from two hoses directed by yelling firefighters. Their actions were futile – the sun-baked timber was easy prey for the inferno and, as the building was apparently uninhabited, the fire had already savaged most of it before anyone had raised an alarm. Cook watched through droopy eyes as the structure buckled and shrivelled. He gazed, bewitched by the orange-and-black fury. He watched the embers take flight and twist skyward, tracking their escape up into the morning haze.

Further down the street, he saw David Brereton, skulking under the iron bridge.

And down came another shower of summer rain – too late to snuff out the fire or wash away any sins.