The Ghost (20 page)

COOK WASTED TWO DAYS
trying to contact Brereton. No answer from his flat, no joy from a trawl of likely hotel kitchens. (He had doubted his claim, anyway – sous-chef seemed too close to the frontline for someone so slippery.) This urge to connect was driven by impulse over reason. Brereton may have been the only other person alive who knew the back-story, but Cook had no need of advice or solidarity. He already had clear sight of his final act – the spy-camera footage was writing the script. He sat here now, on someone else's sofa, watching their television, drinking wine from their glass. Maybe soon, he would pine for the stolid certainties of the world he had been forced to abandon. But he had been still for too long. After years of deferral, he was a man with momentum.

“Welcome to Crimewatch. On tonight's programme…”

The Mountford murder was trailed as part of an opening preview, by the show's male anchor, striding through the live incident room, booming significantly into a roving camera.

“A man and his young son brutally murdered in their own home. Can you help lead police to the killer?”

After the opening item – a typically am-dram reconstruction of a robbery on an industrial estate – the focus switched to a more sympathetic female presenter, standing in front of a transparent bulletin board decorated with hand-written case comments and photographs of Dennis and Jake Mountford. As she spoke, the camera drifted back to reveal incident-room workers hunched over computer monitors, shouldering telephones. A startled-looking man in a short-sleeved shirt stood beside her.

“Now, a case which contains detail which some viewers might find upsetting. At the end of September, a 47-year-old man, Dennis Mountford, and his seven-year-old son Jake were murdered at their home in Edgware, north-west London. With me is Inspector Adam Claymont, one of the officers leading the enquiry. Inspector Claymont – this is a particularly appalling crime and one which you're obviously keen to get to the bottom of.”

Inspector Claymont shuffled in position. Cook thought he seemed a little junior for a national spotlight.

“Indeed. It's a savage and heartless crime and the attacker is obviously still a huge danger to the public.”

The director – clearly sensitive to the gulf of composure – was quick to cut back to the presenter. Cook, ever the critic, was so distracted by the random pace and artless shot-framing, he found it difficult to absorb what was being said.

“The thing that's so unusual about this case is that there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for the crime.”

“Yes. There's no evidence of robbery or sexual motive. There's also no sign of a break-in – which raises the possibility that the killer was known to Mr Mountford. But he may also have tricked his way onto the property under false pretense. As far as we can tell, the deceased lived a relatively simple life. He owned a small signwriting business and lived in a usually safe suburban area. So we're keen to understand whether anyone might have cause to hold a grievance against him – perhaps as a result of business dealings. If there was friction in this area, someone knows about it – and I would ask them to please come forward, in absolute confidence.”

Cook sipped his wine. Could these two people really be there together, in that studio, at this time, because of his actions, another life ago?

“I believe that Mr Mountford's family have given you some interesting information…”

“Yes. We understand that Dennis had been concerned about a man who was seen talking to Jake outside his school on the 18th September. We don't have an accurate description of this man, but we're obviously keen to trace him. I would urge anyone who was witness to the conversation or who might have an idea as to the identity of this man to please call the Crimestoppers line immediately.”

“He might, of course, be unconnected to the case.”

“Indeed. But we do need to speak to him urgently.”

“As I said, the details of this crime are extremely upsetting. Both Mr Mountford and his son suffered a great deal of violence.”

“That's correct, yes. Although it may seem like an isolated, spontaneous incident, this has the hallmarks of a carefully planned attack and we have to assume that the killer is capable of doing it again. We need to find the individual who did this very urgently indeed.”

“What sort of help are you looking for? Do you have anything that might lead you to understand more about the killer's motivations?”

“We do have an item found at the scene which isn't familiar to Mr Mountford's family. I would urge anyone who recognises this to please get in touch.”

The camera cut to a close-up shot of Inspector Claymont's hands. He was holding a plastic evidence bag containing a blue-and-white handkerchief.

THE MAN WAS ALWAYS
alone. He left the house alone and he entered it alone. Every Friday evening between 7 and 8pm, he arrived with two grocery bags, one in each hand, switching them both to one hand as he unlocked the door and shouldered his way in. From Friday to Monday, he only ever left the house once – for two hours on Saturday afternoon. From Tuesday to Thursday, he emerged at 8.30am and returned at 4pm, always double-locking the front door and always checking the back door and side window, tugging and testing. He was tall and large, but moved at quickstep pace. His hand-speed – reaching, lifting, key-twisting – was brisk and dextrous. Dorian Cook had monitored the man for six weeks now and he had seen no sign of anyone else entering or leaving the house, and no evidence of internal activity when the man was out.

Early on Saturday morning, Cook drove to Vaughan Green Primary School and parked on a corner of Peakvale Avenue, a few streets away from the man's house. He walked the short distance to a local cafe, and slid into a booth seat, trembling with dread. Worries over arousing curiosity were unfounded – his absence of charisma was natural camouflage, and it took the over-tattooed waiter ten minutes to approach and take his order, despite the cafe being half-empty. He nursed a butterless scone and large mug of tea through the rest of the morning, grazing on a newspaper and keeping the camera app in view on his phone – a full-screen window featuring a live feed of the house. At 12.30pm, the man appeared, as usual. He ran through his door and window checks, and, after pausing slightly to look back over his shoulder at the front door (listening for something?), he crossed the street and walked, hands in pockets, up the inclining main road before taking a left turn, as usual, down a side-street. After a judicious fifteen-minute delay, Cook requested his bill from the passing waiter, who jumped slightly at the noise, as if he had not only forgotten about Cook being there, but had detected an adversarial edge to his voice. (He was evidently doing a poor job of remaining – and appearing – calm.)

At his car, Cook opened the boot and took out the small package from William Stone. It contained two items, one of which he slipped into his jacket's inside pocket, not expecting to need it but feeling better with it to hand. The other was a small set of standard cylinder-lock keys with the cuts planed down to maximum depth. There were versions for tumbler locks and dimple locks, and all of them had small strips of shock-absorbing material glued to their top edges, to prevent detectable damage. Stone had shown Cook how to partially insert one of the keys and, while twisting it in the desired direction, whack it with a screwdriver handle. As long as the key's teeth aligned with the top pins of the lock cylinder, the impact would ‘bump' the pins upward, enabling the key to turn and open the lock. Cook had practiced the technique on his kitchen door and had been surprised at how quickly he developed a process – insert key, wriggle it forward and back into position, bash it with screwdriver head while applying turning force. He pocketed the keys, took a small screwdriver from the glove-box and approached the house.

Cook did not indulge in a portentous pause at the back-garden gate. He strolled straight in and walked, with authority, up the short path to the back door, which the man always checked last. The lock was a simple tumbler and he found the right key after only two attempts. Cook felt that gaining short, sharp entry would be less risky than taking a shifty look around, and so he jiggled the key, rapped the head with his screwdriver, unlocked the door, and immediately stepped inside.

He was standing in a long, slim side-return, extended onto the main building. It was a neat and clean-smelling space, with glossy, chestnut-brown floorboards. The walls were lined with precisely stacked storage boxes – all white. A wheeled office-chair and expensive-looking glass-topped desk gleamed beneath a deep-set skylight. There were few open surfaces and no loose or discarded items. He removed a pair of light leather gloves from his pocket and pulled them over twitchy fingers. He stood motionless, breathing slowly and deeply. This was either the man's home office, kept minimalist and uncluttered to ease concentration and emphasise separateness from his living space, or the sterile decompression zone of an unstable and divided mind – an airlock between the outside world and the horrors within.

Cook twisted the handle of a locked wall-cupboard. The violation was now complete. He had identified and seized an opportunity, gained illicit access, crossed the threshold and connected with the environment. There was relief in the commitment. His threadbare heart, thunking with the terror and the thrill of it all, was most definitely
in it
. At last, he could – in the words of his old Film Studies teacher – ‘interrogate the plot'. In movies, Cook knew that it was all about the edit – the director's meticulously gathered ingredients were sliced and spliced and rechannelled for pace, logic and dramatic intensity. Here, though, was the unrewinding world – one take, no reshoots, no post-production failsafe. The final act was live and loud and upon him – a man who had spent most of the second half of his life in self-imposed captivity, under cover of darkness.

All this drama.

Cook turned the squeaky handle on a heavy adjoining door and crept across the hall into a gigantic fitted kitchen so obsessively antiseptic it could have passed as a laboratory. He moved slowly and silently across the stone-tiled floor, casting a fractured reflection in the polished chrome of the integrated oven. Who was that, he wondered, and what was he doing here?

He reached a gloved hand out to a bright yellow waste-bin, slotted out of sight around the back of a curving breakfast bar. The motorised lid flipped open unexpectedly, startling Cook into a whispered, ‘Fuck!' He studied the bin's contents – mostly cellophane, cereal wrappers and fruit-peel. There was a second sensor-bin, in complimentary turquoise, next to the first. He opened the lid and rummaged around inside – cardboard, plastic milk cartons, tin cans. He sifted a little deeper and spotted the colour and typography of a familiar brand – a crushed blue-and-white box – Tampax.

Footsteps outside, approaching the front door.

He inhaled.

Then the letterbox.

Then something flopping onto the doormat.

Then the footsteps again, receding.

He exhaled, closed the lids of both bins, and opened the door to a shallow utility room, which housed little more than a few propped long-handle brushes, an ironing-board and an upright Dyson. The smell – sweet polish clashing with sour paint – reminded him of Esther's ‘scullery' – a poky box-room opposite the outside toilet, home to an old vertical-drum washing-machine and mangle. It was one of the first places Cook had adopted as a hideaway, tucking himself into a shady corner by the broken rubber wash-basket and Rusty's dog-bath. Drawn to the sense-memory, he edged into the room, groping for a ceiling-cord.

Inside, under an energy-saving half-light, Cook could see that the room was longer and slimmer than it appeared from the kitchen, with a ceiling that sloped down towards the far end. The walls were bright and scrubbed – recently whitewashed – with shelves holding regimented racks of uncrusted paint-pots and fluffy rollers. A small door, secured by a heavy latch and padlock, was set into the wall at the mid-point of the ceiling slope. Cook drooped his head and shuffled forward. He used the in-built light on his phone to examine the lock closely, being careful not to touch it. None of the bump keys would work on the mechanism.

“Hello?” Cook was startled by the authority in his voice.

He waited, listening.

Again.

“Hello?”

There was a shuffling from behind the locked door. Then a voice – female, adult.
“Hello?”

“It's okay,” said Cook. “Please don't shout.”

“Who is that?
Help me!”

The door clattered from the inside, rattling the lock. The woman's voice – ragged and hoarse – was now just inches away. “Who is it? Get me out!
Open the door!”

Cook pressed his cheek up against the door and kept his voice at a low level, hoping the woman would do likewise.

“Please. Listen. I can't open the door. But – I will help you. Really.”

“Who are you? Where is he?”

“You'll be okay – I promise. But I can't help now. You have to wait a bit longer – and you
can't say anything
. He can't know that someone has been here.”

“Please…”
The woman was sobbing – her flash of hope short-lived. “Please help me! How did you know I was here?”

In his internal rehearsal, she had been more yielding and compliant. But there was impurity in Cook's urge for dramatic redemption. Eleanor's survival was a by-product, and he had to stay true to her bit-part role.

“I will help you. But not now. I know you're here, and that's enough. You can't tell him. I can never help you if you say anything.”

“Don't fucking leave me here!”

“I won't.”

And he left her there.

He back-stepped out of the utility room, closed the door, and hurried out through the kitchen, checking he'd left no footprint smudges on the stone floor.

Across the hall. Fresh junk-mail on the doormat.

Into the side-return and back outside, re-closing the door, which clicked back into its locked position.

Giddy with adrenaline, he walked back to Peakvale Avenue, got into his car and drove away.