The Ghost (13 page)

March, 1975

Cook gouged a lump of unspreadable ‘best' butter over a round of bleached white bread, layered on a row of crinkle-cut chips and splattered them with a few forkfuls of baked beans. He squished another slice of buttery bread on top, lifted his creation – with both hands – to a fully gaped mouth, and bit into the centre, displacing beans and bean-juice onto a dinner-plate balanced on his knee. In the kitchen, Esther laboured and muttered, preparing steak and kidney pie, more chips, and a dessert of improvised apple turnover made with excess pastry. That was for tea, later. The baked-bean sandwich was a standard after-school snack which Cook consumed on Esther's TV chair, Rusty curled at his feet. He munched happily, eyes fixed on
The Wombles
, worrying the dog's nose with a big toe which poked out through a hole in his sock. Two-thirds of the way through, he'd had his fill and, in penance for the bothering, laid the plate on the floor next to Rusty, who immediately inhaled the bread and chips before lapping the plate clean.

“Lesley Whittle, the 17-year-old heiress kidnapped from her Shropshire home 52 days ago, has been found at the bottom of a drain shaft.”

The Wombles
gave way to
John Craven's Newsround –
usually a sign for Cook to dash up to his bedroom, to his comics and record-player and the impenetrable science-fiction novels handed down by Uncle Russell. But today, the normally jovial John, in tank-top and tie, spoke with a compelling note of alarm.

“Police made the discovery after a three-day search of Bathpool Park at Kidsgrove in Staffordshire, where Lesley's brother Ronald had tried to meet the kidnapper some seven weeks earlier. It is thought she had been strangled.”

“Nana?”

“What's the matter, Dor? I'm doing something!”

“Police are convinced she was taken by the killer known as the ‘Black Panther', because of his dark clothing.”

“The telly says that they found a girl!”

Esther emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea-towel. She gazed at the TV, tutting, gently shaking her head.

“Oh dear, dear, dear.”

“What's a drain shaft?”

“The car found later abandoned in the town contained Miss Whittle's slippers and some office tape.”

“It's a hole underground. They stop flooding when it rains. The water goes down there instead.”

Cook reached forward and switched off the TV. “But why did he hide a girl in one? I bet it was really wet and cold.”

“And dark!”

Esther had limited empathy for Cook's recent introspections. She saw little point in shielding him from abstract cruelties, preferring to focus on his immediate physical needs – keeping him alive and warm and well fed. He often overheard her, chattering to herself, discussing her own woes – arthritis, constipation, insomnia – in lurid detail, as if openly auditing pain could relieve it.

“He was trying to make some money, Dor. He took her away and said he wanted a lot of money before he would give her back.”

Cook thought of the drain shaft – smelly, deep and dark. “But why didn't he just make her stay at his house?”

Esther sighed. “I don't know, Dor. Because he's not a very nice person.”

“Have they put him in prison now?”

“They haven't caught him yet. But I'm sure they will really soon.”

Later, in his bed, throbbing stomach bloated with pie and beans and chips and apple turnover, Cook lay on his side, knees to his chest, and wondered if the girl had been given some food or if she had been forced to eat rats. (But how would she have caught them in the dark?) He thought she probably wouldn't have been able to scream and shout for help because her mouth would have been covered up by the man. But if that was true, how would she eat
anything?

And then.

*

Something was coming up the stairs, but the closet felt safer and darker than ever. Even if the door was opened, it would be too dark for him to be seen.

Thunk, thunk, thunk.

As the bedroom door opened, Cook realised that the inside and outside dark wouldn't help him, because the Sea Devils would be happy with both.

The closet door opened – to no fresh light. Cook kept his eyes screwed shut.

And then Something climbed into the closet with him and closed the door from the inside, shutting them in together.

*

Morning was usually announced through the bedroom wall, by Mr Smith, prematurely stirred by an extended spasm of dry coughing. (Uncle Russell called this phenomenon ‘Cough-a-doodle-do'.) But pangs from the overeating had needled Cook in his sleep all night, and he was awake and browsing the 1974
Buster
annual before he realised there was something missing – no coughing, no sobbing, no babbling.

At breakfast, Esther poured far too much heated milk over Cook's Shreddies and laid a foil-wrapped parcel on the table. “Before you go to school, can you take a turnover round to Mr Smith's?”

On top of being her neighbour's sole witness to his existence, Esther routinely kept Mr Smith in fruit and cake and pastry products, delivered by Cook. There was a suggestion of repaid debt, but Esther saw it as more philanthropy than duty – redistributing a chunk of state pension away from her Bingo budget and into the care of an old acquaintance who had long since drifted from any kind of consistent self-provision. Mr Smith had been a mine worker – riding the rickety lift, hacking at the fractured seam with pick and shovel, dislodging the strata, gulping down the gas and the steam and the dust. Even as he retired, and rose above ground, the Earth retained its claim on his derelict lungs. He was soiled and soil-bound from his final punch-out at the colliery.

Cook unlatched Mr Smith's gate and tiptoed down the yard to the pale-green back door. He would have been happy to leave the parcel on the ledge, knock, and dash away, but Esther had asked Cook to ‘check on him'.

“Mr Smith?”

Cook's voice sounded detached and remote. He knocked – too loudly – to cover the apprehension.

“Mr Smith?”

The silence wasn't unusual. Mr Smith was almost completely deaf and only came to his door when he happened to be in the rear sitting-room and could see Cook waiting – after peering creepily through the filthy net curtains.

Cook approached the sitting-room window. He balanced the pastry on top of the coal-scuttle, formed a light-blocking tunnel with both hands, and looked inside. The room appeared to be empty – although, oddly for early morning, Mr Smith's black-and-white portable – perched on a tall table at the bottom of the stairs – was switched on, broadcasting the test-card. All three bars of the electric fire shone light-orange.

“Hello?”

He would take the parcel into the house, put it on the table, call out, say that he was sorry but he had to leave to get to school on time.

Inside, the kitchen smelt starchy, as if it had long since been abandoned as an area for food preparation and was now just dead space – a memorial of pans and Pyrex. From the sitting-room TV, the test-card session musicians cranked out a circular dirge of droopy funk. Cook set the pastry down on the kitchen table and walked through the connecting door. On the TV screen, a hair-banded young girl was posed and frozen, playing noughts and crosses with a green-bodied clown puppet. On the floor, behind the sofa, Mr Smith was flat out and face-down. Cook tried to do several things at once – speak to Mr Smith, not look at the body, shout for Esther, turn and run. But he just stood there – by the hinged dining table, by the doilies, by the dark wooden chairs and the clunking grandfather clock.

Mr Smith's left arm was folded underneath his upper body, his right skewed up and out at an unnatural angle, hand resting flat against the peeling skirting-board. There was a terrible sense of tableau, as if the body had been propped in place. Cook crouched, and reeled at a faecal reek that only seemed present in the lower half of the room. He jerked back upright and, carefully, allowed his eyes to slide past the shoes (no socks), the formal but ill-fitting trousers, the dark green cardigan – up to the wrinkled, reptilian nape with its edging of cheaply trimmed white hair. The face was under there somewhere, and Cook imagined it eyeless and skeletal – brow bloodied, nose inverted. Fearful of glimpsing a contorted grimace, he shifted his eyeline sharply to the other side of the sofa, where a pair of NHS glasses – arms yanked from hinges, frame buckled, lenses cracked – lay upended against a leg of the TV table. Another shift of gaze and he alighted on the hallway beyond, with its transparent plastic faux-lino flattened loosely to the floor, home now to a set of ejected false teeth which had skated almost all the way to the front door, trailing a forked smear of saliva, upper and lower gums resting side by side.

“Dorian?”

Uncle Russell's shout came from outside, from the far end of Mr Smith's yard. Cook wanted to reply, but found that he couldn't open his mouth to try. His breathing had slowed, but now each inhale was sharp and stammering.

“Oh no!”

Now, Uncle Russell was in the room behind him, but Cook didn't turn. He stayed fixed on the false teeth, now appalled and terrorised at the thought of how the dead body's presence could be re-confirmed with just a minor eye movement.

Hands on Cook's shoulders – and he startled and turned and scurried out through the kitchen and the open gate, down the back-entry, to the front wall of the boarded-up butcher's shop. He squeezed through the gap and into the yard where he had retrieved John Ray's bag and handkerchief, squashing himself into the corner by the still untouched wheelbarrow, hiding from he didn't know what. He looked up at the boarded windows, then down at the door with its partially demolished brickwork – and now, no wooden panel attempting to repair (or disguise?) the damage on the inside. From here, he could simply stand up and, with a crouch, walk right inside. Instead, he took up a fist-sized chunk of chalky rock and ground it across the grey stone wall by his head, at first scraping out a few random straight lines, then scoring in a couple of circles which transformed into squiggles, then melded into a continuous, random, savage scribbling.

COOK HAD ALWAYS NEGOTIATED
his attendance at the Cannes Film Festival with a voracity that denied both the event's declining reputation for hedonism and his own diminishing media profile. However brightly it had blazed in the days of MTV-bankrolled degeneracy at the Palais Bulles, Cannes was now a pale ember, out-twinkled in the festival firmament by mid-September Venice (leaner awards, keener movies, younger talent, older churches). Where once the tone was sybaritic abandon – overnight cocaine airlifts from LA to Nice, porn-industry yachts moored offshore, unquenchable beach parties – now there was only distaste for sleaze and disdain for excess. But still they came – for the withering shrugs and the refurbished tourist menus, for the Rosé refills and the hateful caste system of pastel screening passes (white down to blue – from the high-priesthood of major media critics to the untouchable local-paper hacks and freesheet liggers). The uninitiated would detect self-esteem issues behind this docile clique insulated by elitism – conspirators without crime. But for Cook, it was tribal – a scramble for sterile turf in a demilitarised zone of round-table interviews and parochial embargos. For film critics, Cannes had become Coppola's Saigon – when they were away they wanted to be there; but when they were there, all they could think of was getting away.

With his yellow pass (fast-track admittance to all screenings) and self-proclaimed ‘superior knowledge of world cinema', Cook was usually the King – or, at least, mid-ranking prince – of Cannes. But this year, he couldn't seem to find a foothold. The interviews were slippier and chippier, the PRs less fawning, the talent access joylessly micromanaged. Having talked Henry into assigning him for the full ten days, he was restless by day three, and now, on the Saturday of the first weekend, had partially hatched a domestic crisis as an excuse to return home – although the invention hardly demanded much effort.

Gina had dropped him at the airport, following an inch-by-inch burrow through motorway congestion. A jovial Radio Four panel game jarred with their brimming squabble over the playground incident. (
Grown men behaving like children… Appalling example for Alfie… Teaching him that violence is an option…
)

Alfie was blissed and oblivious in the back seat, shielded by headphones, tablet computer and
The Incredibles,
his barks of laughter out of sync with the gloom up-front.

“We should take a break, Dorian.”

But then, a news report. And, for the first time in fifteen years, he had
shushed
her – a loud and insistent hissing which made her double-take in outrage.

“The ex-husband of a missing mother-of-two has issued an appeal for her safe return. Gareth Finch revealed that he was aware his wife Eleanor had been suffering from depression for some time, but insisted her lack of contact was ‘entirely out of character'.”

“Why the sudden interest in the news?”

“Ellie. If you're watching… We all love you. Amy and Joe just want their mum back and whatever differences we've had, we can work something out. Please get in touch. Everyone is so worried.”

“How awful.”

“Detective Chief Inspector John Barrett, who is leading the enquiry, has admitted that his force are struggling for leads.”

“Let's put some music on.”

“We are extremely concerned for Eleanor's safety, given she was last seen on CCTV over a week ago. We are conducting enquiries near the family home and around Eleanor's place of work, but I can't comment on any information received. We know that some money was withdrawn from Eleanor's bank-card last weekend, and her passport is still at home, along with her car.”

“Did you hear me?”

Cook felt car-sick. He closed his eyes and reclined. Oh, to transform! To become membranous – porous – and sink into the structure of the seat, to settle there, coiled around the moulding, grinding through the gridlock with supreme indifference. Eleanor Finch was another old acquaintance – unforgotten. Back at the beginning of Cook's career, when he was a staffer on a free reviews and listings magazine, he had written a feature on a film about an obsessive chat-show host attempting to track down his first love. Each of the magazine's writers was asked to contribute eighty words to a side-bar on their own ‘lost loves'. Cook's submission managed to be both economical and indulgent.

At first, Eleanor had written to say how lovely she thought this was. Soon after, she wrote again, saying how lovely she thought
Cook
was (based on his monochrome byline picture – side-on, conspirational smile). Then the letters arrived at least once a week – coloured envelopes smothered in concentric heart-shapes and lurid declarations. Inside, the prose was purple, occasionally blue, always loaded with self-loathing and pleading for validation. Cook had wisely left the letters unanswered, but the silence only made Eleanor bolder. She started to etch potential meeting dates into the petals of the pre-printed flowers which lined the margins. Cook was twenty-four years of age, brooding behind owlish spectacles, hair side-swept and – he regularly winced at the memory – sprayed rigid. Eleanor was barely fifteen. Within a year, Cook had left the magazine, to his first newspaper job, and his admirer had fallen silent. Until recently.

*

Here now, dashing down the croisette, hurdling the dog-leads, heading for an early-morning screening of a Ukrainian film about a taxidermist torturer, Cook was shaken by the need to stir. He felt simultaneously besieged and marooned, a man without mooring – alive and alert to his assailants but absurdly unarmed and without base. This was not a good time – for the unsmiling doorman outside the Debussy theatre to refuse to even touch his pass, for a wordless redirection to a low-status queue of murmur and morning-breath, for the sight of
Movie
magazine's Neil Hooper swaggering past security with a flash of orange pass.

“Fucking fascists!”

This was a surprise – to both his fellow professionals and to Cook himself. Usually, he managed to drive a filter between thought and mouth, but, in a disturbing new development, process time had apparently now dropped to zero.

Two doormen approached, leaving a third to consult with a two-way radio.

“Sir…”

“Oh! Now it's English! But when you're on your petty fucking power-trip, you hide behind French!”

“Sir, the two lines are based on level of accreditation. It is the only way to manage capacity.”

“Fuck off! Half of the people in this queue don't even know what they're seeing, anyway! I'm here to
work!
I have to see this film for my
work!
You are trying to stop me from doing my
work!”

A fourth official had materialised to the side, on the edge of Cook's vision. He slithered forward with a sinister confidence – older and tauter, dark blue suit in autonomous contrast to the uniforms of his colleagues.

“Could I see your accreditation, sir?”

“I have already shown you my ‘accreditation', and apparently it isn't fucking creditable enough!”

Cook produced the lowly yellow laminate with smouldering self-portrait and wafted it sarcastically, a few inches in front of the official's nose. The card was taken, vaguely studied – and retained.

“Please attend the festival office within the hour, sir.”

“Attend?”

Cook's voice could now be heard by anyone in the surrounding area – queue members, festival staff, kiosk attendants, passers-by with their umbilical bichons frise. All heads lifted, eager for drama.

“What is it, a fucking court hearing?”

The official had already walked away and was re-entering the theatre, Cook's pass in pocket. After a few seconds of outraged realisation, Cook burst back into life – teeth flashing, spittle splashing – with a barrage of French and English insults. He was now that most redundant of species – a civilian in Cannes. He had been cast out – to out-of-competition theatres showing out-of-date films. He would be turned away from scheduled interviews with stars who would insist (reasonably) that their interrogator should at least have seen the film under discussion. Parties and PR drinks were still within reach, but he would feel sidelined in any discussion of the festival programme and, in a day or two, his absence at the after-screening street huddles would be conspicuous. With a week to go, he'd only fulfilled a third of his
Widescreen
brief, and was commissioned for two major freelance projects. He could stir up an outrage, claim a grotesque overreaction to a genuine admission grievance. But the episode had been seen by too many – possibly even photographed or filmed. As research for his recent feature on social media, Cook had been forced to engage with the babble and squeak of Twitter. He had fumbled together a sparse profile page, attempted a few stilted acknowledgements of fellow critics and industry pals, and quickly settled into the dreary habit of intoning mini-reviews. (“A film of quiet power and grace with extraordinary central performances. Breathtaking and heartbreaking. Four stars.”) But, as his piece demonstrated, he knew enough of the culture (‘petty prurience', ‘maximalised playground lore') to imagine a response to the confrontation.

Cook slouched back to his hotel, downed a room-service espresso and composed a resignation letter (five redrafts). Later that morning, in attendance at the festival office, he was assigned a mid-ranking but well-briefed press officer who explained that the ‘altercation' was ‘unacceptable' and that the festival security adopted a ‘zero-tolerance approach to employee abuse'. Cook's accreditation would remain revoked and the case would be reviewed in late summer, with the possibility of a ban for future events.

In a dark corner of the festival coffee bar, Cook spent a miserable half-hour gnawing on a baguette and emailing the news of his pariah status to various editors and colleagues. It was a skilfully woven but overcooked tale of mistreatment, sprinkled with a few limp asides about legal advice and human-rights violation. He booked an evening flight home and logged in to his personal email.

There were five messages – a mail from Dennis Mountford, a profile alert from
PastLives.com
, and three spams with headers that made him splutter with laughter.

Three taps of the ‘delete' button scrolled the list down to Mountford's subject-line and message.

Cook logged in to
PastLives.com
via a link in the final email. The previously read notifications were greyed out, but a message at the top – from ‘@beth_s' –was marked in bold. He tapped the subject line (‘No Subject') and the message expanded to reveal a blank content area. Cook gazed into the screen, baffled. A few seconds later, a narrow, dark-edged rectangle appeared at the top of the space and began to slowly extend, revealing an image that Cook recognised before it had even half-downloaded. It was a recent-looking street-level photograph of a sparsely populated car-park, next to the now undeveloped site where Bethesda First & Middle School used to be. At first, Cook thought it had been simply pasted from the Street View feature of Google Maps. But he lifted the phone up close, to eye level, and saw that the sunlight, shining from behind the point of capture, had cast a tall, slender shadow across the pavement where the school gate would have been. The shadow's arms were raised to its face, elbows jutting, frozen as it framed and shot the picture.

Cook jumped to his feet and scurried over to the festival pigeon-holes, where official documents and promotional flyers were posted daily. Henry Gray was due to arrive that evening for his customary weekend of client-schmooze and party-crashing. Cook slid his resignation letter into Gray's section and began typing a text message to William Stone.