Ghosts Know (31 page)

The fist looks weighty and yet less substantial than I know it is. I only just back out of range—I feel in danger of fancying it isn’t as lethal as he means it to be. He’s still coming at me. Perhaps he thinks nobody else can see him now. The passing drivers can, but nobody is even slowing down, and it would be gullible to expect them to intervene—I’d be as deluded as any of Jasper’s victims. I take another hasty step backwards, and the uneven pavement catches my heel.

The cracked flagstone has been raised at least an inch. No doubt it’s where a truck was parked. I haven’t regained my balance when Kylie’s father lurches at me, swinging his fist. My other foot catches the edge of the flagstone, and I sprawl on my back.

The impact jolts a fiery pain the length of my spine and thumps all the breath out of me. The mobile, which I’d forgotten I was clutching, flies out of my hand. Goodchild grins at the phone and takes a heavy step towards it before swerving back to me. “Say ta-ra to the one you’ve got left,” he says and stamps on my face.

I almost can’t believe I’m seeing the heel of his boot swell into my eye. With so little perspective all the substance seems to have been squeezed out of it, and I barely have time to roll out of its way. Pain flares along my spine while grit and flagstones scrape my cheek, almost dislodging the eye-patch. I shove myself onto my agonised back to find Goodchild waiting for me to show my face. As he tramps at me again I hear a distant siren.

It’s a police car, and in a moment I see its glaring lights. Goodchild glances furiously over his shoulder and then comes faster at me. The police are hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of time to injure me or worse. I plant my hands on the hot prickly stone and lever myself upright—into a sitting position, at any rate. It’s as much as I can do before he kicks me in the eye.

I jerk my head away, not fast enough or sufficiently far. The steel toecap misses my eye but slices open my cheek, grinding against the bone. The sight of blood doesn’t satisfy Goodchild. It seems to encourage if not to excite him, and he kicks out with more force. I’m just in time to grab the boot with both hands to prevent it from bursting my eye.

He leans all his weight on it, forcing me backwards. My whole body shudders with the effort of fending him off, and then my spine lets me down. My shoulders thump the pavement, and the boot descends towards my face to grind my eye under its heel. I can’t tell how few inches it is from me—perhaps I’m no longer misjudging the distance, which is no distance at all. My fingers are trembling with the strain, and the flagstones have scraped my elbows skinless, when the howl of the siren swells in my ears. It sinks to a growl as car doors slam, and Goodchild is hauled away from me. “Get your hands off,” he protests and attempts to stop shouting. “I’m not the villain. He was robbing from my business.”

When I manage to support myself with my twitching hands and shaky arms I see him in the grip of two burly policemen. He’s doing his best to appear reasonable, even cooperative. “Ask his workers if I was,” I say in a voice that feels as if it doesn’t belong to me. “I don’t think they’ll all lie for him.”

I could be wrong, but what else can I do? I’m groping for a handkerchief to press against my cheek when the driver of the police car steps onto the pavement. “We heard what happened. I’ve called an ambulance.”

What did they hear? As I struggle to my feet and then hold the handkerchief against my streaming cheek I grow aware of a small voice repeating a word. I can’t locate it or identify it until the police driver stoops to retrieve my phone. “I think someone’s calling you,” he says.

“Hello? Hello? Can somebody answer?” It’s the girl on the Dennison Deal switchboard. She’s been speaking for just a few seconds, but I have to learn “Did you get all that?”

“The police did. They told us to keep the line open for them after you went off the air.”

“The police did.” So they’ve been listening as I asked them to once I’d called the show the first time. I see Goodchild understand, and not just his expression but the whole of him seems to collapse, growing smaller and less substantial. Despite the throbbing of my face I feel almost sorry for him. He looks like a man who can no longer avoid knowing what he’s done and what he is, and perhaps that’s the worst punishment of all.

As I step out of my apartment building a train sends a prolonged whine through the overhead track. It sounds like a tool in a workshop, and my fingers stray towards the stitches in my cheek, although the memory hasn’t revived any anger. I don’t think even meeting Walter Belvedere would now, and I glance up at his window, but if he’s home he’s staying out of sight. The sun is packing the shadows away under the sides of the street, but it feels less pitiless this morning, more like an omen of renewal. While the office workers are at their desks there are still people at large in the streets. Most of them look at me, and I tell several “The other fellow came off worse.”

Kylie’s father is in custody, though the media have yet to say so. Presumably they’re waiting until he has been charged. I wonder how the
Clarion
will report the story and whether Alice Francis or the editor will take back their comments about me. Just now I’m concerned only that Christine should hear I’ve been exonerated. Even if it’s too late to make a difference between us, I want her to know she mustn’t blame herself. I can’t help suspecting she does, even though she never had a reason.

She isn’t to be seen as I cross the road to the apartments. She wasn’t cycling in the window of Corporate Sana, and I hope she wasn’t elsewhere in the gym; it ought to be too early for her to have left for work. Even if I still had a set of her keys I’d ring the bell; in any case, my mother exchanged them for Christine’s set of mine at the hospital. When Christine visited the ward I said I couldn’t see her, but now I feel as though it was a hole in my head that spoke. Perhaps I’ll tell her so if I have the chance. The intercom grille comes to life with a click, and I’m opening my mouth when a metallic voice says “Ambler.”

“If I were you I’d amble off.” I don’t have the right to tell the man that, even if his presence has taken me off guard. Why should I have expected Christine to stay on her own? I do my best to feel reasonable for only saying “Graham.”

“Yes.”

This doesn’t sound much like an acknowledgment, still less an invitation. “It’s Graham,” I attempt to establish.

“You said so. What can I do for you, Mr Graham?”

I gather that he hopes the answer is very little if not nothing at all. “Graham Wilde. Is—”

“That still doesn’t signify anything to me.”

I can’t believe Christine hasn’t mentioned me, if only in the context of her work. Or has she a reason to pretend there was nobody before he came along? Has she ended up in another abusive relationship? I seem to feel my temperature flaring, not just with the sunlight. “Graham Wilde of Wilde Card,” I say louder. “Graham Wilde of Waves.”

“Is that the radio station? I don’t patronise it, I’m afraid. If you’re conducting some kind of audience survey you’re wasting your time with me.”

“I’m no more interested in you than you are in me as long as you’re taking care of Christine. Can I have a word with her? She doesn’t have to see me unless she wants to.”

Ambler is silent, and I’m growing furious with the suspicion that he’s cut me off when he says “Who?”

“Christine. Christine Ellis. The girl whose flat you’re in.”

“I know nothing about any such person, I’m afraid.”

“What are you trying—” As I grow nearly incoherent with the kind of rage I thought I’d left behind, my gaze drifts to the cardboard strip in the metal frame above the bellpush. I hardly bothered glancing at the printed name, but now I see it says CHARLES AMBLER. “I’m sorry,” I babble. “I’ve been, I’ve been away. Doesn’t Christine live here any more?”

“That’s my perception of it, yes.”

I can’t afford to let him enrage me further. “Can I ask when you moved in?”

“Not long ago.”

“Would you happen to know where she went? She must have left a forwarding address.”

“I know nothing about it, and now you must excuse me. I’ve business to attend to,” Ambler says and shuts off the intercom.

I stare at the grille, which puts me in mind of a fixed mocking grin with bared teeth. I’m tempted to lean on the bellpush, but suppose Christine forgot to leave her address or disliked him as much as I do—too much to entrust it to him? They’ll have it at Waves, and surely Shilpa will take pity on my state. If she won’t give me the address I can wait for Christine by the counter where my photos used to be.

There are no posters for Jasper outside the Palace. He’s moved on and good riddance, despite the help he inadvertently gave me. As I make for Waves I wonder if the last call Bob from Blackley made to Wilde Card was an attempt to pretend everything was normal, since he’d already killed his daughter. The automatic doors slide apart for me, and the left one appears to vanish. Vince is at the security desk, and his expression has to catch up with his stare. “God almighty,” he says. “Did you get your fight at last?”

“I was never looking for one and I’m not now, Vince. Can I go up?”

“Nobody’s told me different.”

Nevertheless he seems doubtful, and I hurry to the lift before he can change his mind about me. The metal cage looks smaller than it used to and approaching two-dimensional. The possibility that I might be faced with Megan makes it feel even more cramped. I’m reminded how determined Goodchild was to be polite to another receptionist, and how I didn’t realise that his wife thought he was making too much of Shilpa because it was so untypical of him. The lift doors open once the floor number has fitted together, and I’m relieved to see Shilpa, whose expression turns sympathetic faster than Vince’s did. “Oh,” she says, “Graham.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not quite as bad as I look.”

As I wonder if she’s taken aback just by my condition or because I’ve shown up at Waves, she says “What happened to you this time?”

“Nothing worth a news report. It’s all right, I’m not blaming anyone.”

Perhaps the police are withholding the information until they charge Kylie’s father, if they bother releasing it at all. “Were you here to see someone?” Shilpa says more in the tone of her job.

“Now who do you think she might be?”

“I didn’t realise. She didn’t mention you’d be coming in.” Shilpa seems pleased for me, if a little puzzled. “Is it to do with yesterday?” she says.

“How do you mean yesterday?”

“The call you made to Derek’s show.”

“You’re right, it’s because of that. I can’t really tell you how much of a difference it’s made.”

Presumably that information hasn’t reached her either; perhaps the police have told anyone who knows how the call continued off the air to keep it to themselves. “I’m glad for you, Graham,” Shilpa says. “Let me tell her you’re here.”

She puts on half her headphones and flicks a switch on the board before laying the headset down. “Can you wait? She’s engaged.”

“On the phone, you mean.”

It isn’t much of a joke, and Shilpa seems to think it’s even less. “Would you like me to get you a drink?”

“It’s a bit early for the kind I like.”

“I expect so.” Apparently to take us past any unwelcome implication she adds “You can have a sweet instead.”

When it becomes clear she isn’t offering me one I say “Which sweet is that?”

“One of the ones on her desk.”

“When did she start going in for those?” I can’t help feeling guilty; it must have been since she couldn’t see me at the hospital. “So long as she still goes to the gym,” I say, trying to make it sound like a joke.

“Graham, you can’t have forgotten. She’s always kept some in her office.”

So I’ve been making jokes without knowing, and perhaps I’m something of one. “Sorry, have we been talking about Paula? I’m here to see Christine.”

Shilpa blinks as her lips part. They remain open while she manages to stop blinking and gazes at me. “Graham, she isn’t with us any longer.”

“I always knew there was more to her. Where’s she working now?”

“No.” I can’t judge if the word is meant to silence me or to serve as some kind of answer until Shilpa says “She’s gone.”

I won’t believe what someone unlike me—one of Jasper’s flock, for instance—might assume Shilpa is trying to convey. “Gone where?”

Her eyes grow full of sympathy, close to overflowing with it With a visible effort she contains it and says “She was coming to see you, Graham. She had something she wanted you to hear.”

It seems safest just to ask “What?”

“She didn’t tell anyone, but Trevor thought she’d copied part of one of your shows. Some argument you had with a caller she’d recognised from somewhere else.”

It must have been Goodchild. She realised who he was before I did; perhaps all the playbacks I searched through caught up with her. I hear my voice complaining or confessing “She never came to me.”

“She only got as far as the Palace. She was crossing the road.”

I’m hoping at least not to have to ask, but Shilpa falls silent. “What happened?” I blurt.

“You know you have to watch out when you’re crossing there. People said she was in a lot of hurry and didn’t look. They said she couldn’t have known—” Shilpa’s determination falters, and she glances past me at the lifts as if hoping to be rescued. With a further effort she says “It was very quick.”

I’m not far from demanding why I wasn’t told, but I’m too aware of not having listened to Waves for weeks or read a newspaper. Before I can find words Shilpa says “The bus ran over whatever she was bringing.”

I don’t care about that, but perhaps Shilpa is using it to bring her emotions under control. I don’t suppose I help by asking “When?”

‘Just a few days after you were attacked by the canal.”

At first I’m too confused to speak. “That can’t be right. I’ve seen her since then. She was in her flat and the gym.”

Shilpa blinks and runs a swift finger under her eyes. “It must have been someone else, Graham.”

I won’t argue. I’ve left that behind, but I know if I took a polygraph test it would find in my favour. Shilpa lets me stay silent for a few seconds and then says “Would you like me to tell anyone you’re here?”