Ghosts Know (11 page)

“Well, it doesn’t really matter who it was. She was never here.” Having leaned forward to take a gulp of water, I stay crouched over the table. I hope this looks like evidence of honesty, though in fact I’m trying to keep clear of the sunlight, which has crept up behind me to settle on my scalp like an extension of my headache. In case my words weren’t unambiguous enough I add “Kylie Goodchild, I mean.”

“We have a witness to the contrary,” says Rudd.

I feel as if the heat has seized me by the neck. “What contrary?” I say before realising how meaningless it sounds.

“He saw a girl of that description here about ten o’clock that night. He’s certain it was her.”

“Anybody I should know?” My words are falling shorter still of what I want to ask, perhaps because my voice seems more detached from me than ever. “Him, I mean,” I say in something close to rage.

“He’s an independent witness,” Linley says.

Presumably that’s a denial and perhaps a warning not to try and find out who. “All right then, just tell me where he was, because I was alone up here.”

“He saw her attempting to enter the premises.”

“Downstairs, you mean. She wasn’t trying to shin up the wall.”

They don’t appreciate the joke, not that it was much of one. As the heat crawls higher on my neck Linley says “She was waiting to be let in. According to the witness, she appeared to be distressed.”

“Why didn’t he do something about it, then?”

“He was late for a meeting. He wishes he’d intervened now.”

Intervened to prevent what? Rather than demand this I say “You said he saw her waiting. You mean he saw her not being able to get in.”

“He didn’t see her leaving either, Mr Wilde.”

“I don’t see quite a lot of things. It doesn’t mean they’re real.” This isn’t far from the opposite of the point I want to make, and the heat on my back feels as if it’s reaching for my headache. Barely in time I catch hold of a thought. “Hold on,” I blurt. “Maybe I remember.”

“Take your time,” Rudd says as his partner makes to speak.

“Somebody did ring the bell. I suppose it would have been somewhere round about ten.”

They plainly think I should offer them more. After quite a pause Linley says “Is there no security at night?”

“He must have been on his rounds.” I resist the urge to crouch lower to take the heat off myself—I don’t want them to think I’m trying to evade their attention. “If he’d let anybody in for Waves,” I say, “he’d have called up.”

“According to our witness,” Rudd says, “she rang more than once.”

“Whoever it was did. A few times, now I remember.”

“And how did you respond?”

“I didn’t till the last time, and when I looked whoever it was had gone.”

“You’re saying you went down to look.”

“From up here. Wait, I’m remembering.” Somewhere between the heat and my headache I’m able to see a figure foreshortened by four storeys, its shadow from the streetlamp lengthening like an arm in search of a prize as it dodges around the corner towards the Palaces. “I saw someone running away,” I tell the police. “A man.”

“Can you describe him?” Linley says and reaches for his notebook.

“To be honest, I didn’t bother seeing how he looked. Too many people think it’s fun to ring the bell at night.” The heat feels capable of shrivelling my thoughts, but I succeed in retrieving some. “If he wasn’t running away he was running,” I decide. “You can’t see much from up here, but maybe it’s worth finding out if anyone else saw him.”

Linley has left the notebook in his pocket. “Why are you suggesting that?”

“If the giri was really there, maybe he was why she ran away. He could have been chasing her.”

The policemen are silent, and then they stand up so nearly simultaneously that they might have been given a cue. “If you think of anything else,” Linley says, “please let us know.”

“If I call I’ll say I’m helping you with Kylie Goodchild, shall I?”

“If you are,” Rudd says and holds the door open like a jailer releasing a prisoner.

I drain my paper cup while watching the policemen cross the newsroom, where most of the heads that are raised to observe them sink very quickly. My mind feels as parched as my mouth, and I refill the cup at the water cooler. It won’t do any harm to remind them to question whoever was manning the desk downstairs that night, and I hurry out to Reception, but they’re gone. I’m wondering if I should go after them and listen to their conversation with the guard when Paula follows me into the lobby. “Don’t say you’re making your escape, Graham,” she calls, and I do my best to take it as a joke.

Running Wilde won’t do for Hannah Leatherhead, and Going Wilde is just as bad. Wilde at Heart sounds too much like a film. Wilde Man is no better than Wilde Boy, which is no good at all. I’ll Make You Wilde and This’ll Make You Wilde would be in the bin beside my desk if I’d bothered to write them down, but I haven’t even put them on the laptop. Thinking up titles has taken so long that I feel as if my mind is being hindered by a thought I’m not quite managing to have. Of the ideas I’ve produced Wilde Fire seems to mean most, but will it be enough for Hannah?

I’m in the largest room of my apartment, where the television screen that dominates one wall is even thinner than the disc player, although just as black. They’re vying with today’s newspaper for attention, and the low table across which it’s scattered is competing too. Also in the contest are the laptop and the corner desk on which it sits. I chose the location so that nothing in the room would distract me from any work I might be doing at the desk, but just now I feel shut in. I could almost imagine that someone has sent me into the corner—Christine, perhaps.

I didn’t tell Paula that another radio station was interested in me. By the time I’d satisfied her curiosity about the police I was due on the air. Christine seemed to think I used this as an excuse to carry on keeping the secret, and even hearing about the police didn’t entirely win her over. I tried to placate her by telling her about my novel but stopped short of admitting I’ve been at work on it all year. Now that she’s finished
producing this week’s
Up the Arts
I hope she’s burning off any resentment in the gym.

The novel’s on the screen. The last unfinished sentence has been there longer than I care to think. All I like about the writing just now is the title,
You’re Another.
I’ve thought of a new character who inspires me, but how do I deal with her? I’m tempted to start a new novel about Gladys Savage, except that I’d resent having to abandon months of work. How do I fit her in? Should I make the other characters talk about her? When I scroll through the chapters yet again the sentences seem no livelier than epitaphs. Would she bring them to life, or would they steal hers? Staring at the screen drains me of thoughts, and the sight of the room doesn’t help; it seems as scrawny as the thinnest of its contents, too flimsy for my mind to grasp. Perhaps I need to go out for a walk.

In the hall a youthful Judy Garland sends a winsome look to Robert Mitchum’s preacher. The corridor outside Walter Belvedere’s agency is deserted, but I wouldn’t think of mentioning my novel to him yet in any case. Above the glare of the streetlamps the night sky reminds me of a sheet of carbon paper. A train passes over the bridge like a series of illuminated slides through a viewer—should I put that in my novel? If ideas are going to ambush me in the street I ought to carry a notebook.

As I reach the Canal Street bridge I meet a couple climbing the steps from the towpath hand in hand. The younger man gives me a look as if he fears they’ll have to ignore an insult if not worse, though I’m simply frowning about my novel. I try on an apologetic smile, but perhaps it looks flirtatious. They plainly don’t think much of it, and I hurry down to the canal.

Surreptitious ripples are attempting to wipe out dim reflections of the office blocks that loom above the water. Some floors are lit and some entire buildings, where the rooms remind me of display cases awaiting exhibits. Under Princess Street the bridge is so low that it forces my head towards the restless water. A bat flaps in the dimness and then quacks to reveal it’s a duck.

All of this seems to be adding to the mental weight that’s suffocating my efforts to think about the novel, and I can’t shake off a suspicion that there’s something I ought to have told the police. Walking faster doesn’t help me leave the impression behind, and strolling fails to let any other thoughts catch up. The backs of office buildings tower above the Oxford Street bridge, beyond which a woman with a vacuum cleaner pauses at each window of a long room as if she’s selecting the background against which she’d prefer to be framed. On the far side of the canal discarded plastic bottles are tapping at the bars of a drain to be let in, and a frayed lump of garbage sways with the current as if it’s gesturing to me. Ahead I see Waves with all its windows lit against the sky, and I’m making for the next bridge when somebody comes to a window on the floor below the radio station. He’s silhouetted against the glare of a fluorescent tube, and although I’m unable to make out his face I can’t help feeling watched. On the night the police asked me about I was up there looking down, and now I’m being seen. I feel as if this has something to tell me, and all at once it does. “Yes,” I shout and punch the air, neither of which I can recall ever having done before. I’ve solved the problem with my novel.

I’ll tell it from the viewpoint of Glad Savage. She reads people’s secrets from their behaviour, and I just need to let her do so from the start, showing how she thinks of herself while inadvertently betraying her real nature. I turn my back on Waves and hurry home. Now that my novel has come alive it seems to bring the world into focus—the jittery ripples that a duck sets off by swimming away from me, a couple in a fifth-floor office switching off the light as if they don’t want their assignation to be seen, the terse cry of a siren as a police car halts someone on the street. The plastic bottles are still knocking on the drain, and the tendrils of the lump of pallid garbage give me another wave. In fact they aren’t tendrils; they’re the fingers of a glove. It doesn’t look quite empty; limp though they are, the fingers don’t seem as flat as they should. I go to the edge of the towpath and peer across the sluggish murky water. I have to remind myself to breathe, because I’m not sure it’s a glove at all.

The idea flares up inside my skull, blotting out my vision. It’s so fierce that the glare turns my right eye blind. In a moment I realise that a beam is shining at my face. A lanky man with a flashlight is being tugged along the towpath by a large young hound. Except for his sandals he’s dressed like a runner in a marathon. The floppy puppy’s lead is wound several times about his right wrist, and he’s poking the flashlight ahead of him with his left hand. “Excuse me,” I call, “can you bring that here?”

Perhaps my effort to keep my voice steady makes me sound aggressive, because he retorts “What do you want?”

“Can you shine that over here?”

His pet is more eager to reach me than he is, and he follows at an alarming backwards slant. “Heel,” he says to minimal effect as the puppy sets about leaping at me. “What are you asking for?”

“Just over there.” Since this fails to shift the flashlight beam, which is drowning beside the towpath now that he’s finished scrutinising my face, I say “What’s that against the drain?”

He winds more of the lead around his wrist before raising the beam. “Bottles,” he says with some contempt for them if not for me.

“Not those. What’s the other thing?”

“Keep still,” he says fiercely enough to have some venom left over for me, and jabs the flashlight towards the drain. “Just somebody’s glove.”

“I’m not so sure. I think—”

“Shut it, Sherlock.”

Even though the hound has begun yapping I don’t immediately realise he’s addressing it. As the flashlight beam returns to the towpath I say “Can you keep that over there?”

“I’ve said what I think,” the lanky man objects, and has started to let the puppy drag him onwards when he jerks to a halt. “What are you
doing?”

My movement may have been dauntingly abrupt, but I’m not reaching for a weapon. The pale fingers sway back and forth in the water, and I’m almost certain they belong to a large blurred shape that’s just distinguishable under the murky surface. I could imagine they’re groping in search of some kind of help, far too late, if not trying to give me a sign. I look hastily away from them and show the man my phone. “I’m calling the police.”

Long before the police arrive I wonder why the man is waiting—after all, he thinks it’s just a glove. He has turned the flashlight off and stuffed it in his waistband so that he can use both hands to control the dog. When Sherlock isn’t straining to reach me he’s lunging at the canal, either in a bid to investigate its contents or just for a swim. The fingers by the drain are as helplessly restless as ever; they might almost be desperate to wave the dog away. “Pipe down,” his owner keeps repeating, which only encourages the hound to bark louder still, especially when a whirring object swoops across the roofs and a light appears overhead.

It’s a police helicopter. The spotlight beam glides along the canal to fasten on me. When I point almost blindly across the water, the fierce beam veers to the far bank and finds the drain. The fingers seem to waver up to clutch at the light, but they’re borrowing life from a series of ripples. The reality is dismaying enough—the sight of the limp fingers at the mercy of the water—although the bright circle in the midst of so much darkness puts me in mind of a lighting effect on a stage. The disc is folded almost exactly in half with the upper semicircle propped against the drain and the surrounding wall. The arc of mossy brick resembles an illuminated headstone awaiting a name, and the rusted bars aren’t unlike railings around a grave, but I don’t want to pursue the comparison while the light displays the agitated fingers in the water. I could fancv that the dog is yapping at them as the helicopter attempts to drown the sound. The row accumulates inside my head, so that I’m close to turning on Sherlock’s owner by the time a cluster of pulsating lights races onto the Oxford Street bridge. They’re on the roof of a police car.