Dance of Ghosts

14

The girl who let me into Cal’s house this time was tall and willowy, with waist-length red hair and eyes like a Roswell alien. She was wearing black lipstick and a long black cardigan, and as she led me down to Cal’s basement flat, she didn’t say a single word. Didn’t even smile. She just waited for Cal to open the door, looked briefly at him, then floated off back up the stairs.

‘Is she from the circus too?’ I asked Cal as he showed me inside.

‘No, she’s from Birmingham.’

He was barefoot, dressed only in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and I guessed he’d only just got out of bed.

‘Do you want me to come back later?’ I asked him.

‘What for?’ he said, lighting a cigarette.

I heard the cistern flushing then, and as I looked over towards the bathroom I saw the diminutive figure of Barbarella Barboni, the sacked acrobat, coming out. She was naked, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

‘Hey,’ she said, raising a hand and smiling at me. She looked at Cal. ‘Is there any coffee?’

Cal nodded. ‘This is John, my uncle … you met him before, remember?’

She smiled at me again. ‘Yeah.’

‘Listen, Barb, we’ve got some stuff to do …’

‘No problem,’ she said breezily. ‘Just let me get dressed and I’ll leave you to it.’

Cal watched her as she went into his bedroom, then he turned to me. ‘You want some coffee?’

‘Please.’

He peered at me for a moment. ‘You look like shit, John.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You want something to eat?’

I don’t really like eating. To me, it’s nothing more than a refuelling process, something you have to do to stay alive. And I particularly don’t like eating when it has any kind of social connection. So my natural response when I’m asked if I want anything to eat is to say no. And I almost said no to Cal. But the mention of food made me realise that I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time, and that I was, in fact, desperately hungry.

So I said, ‘Yeah, something to eat would be good, thanks.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Got any eggs?’

‘What kind of eggs?’

‘Chicken?’

He smiled. ‘How about eggs Benedict? I make a very mean eggs Benedict.’

I didn’t even know what eggs Benedict was. And twenty minutes later, after Barbarella had left us alone, and I’d shared a big plateful of food with Cal, I still didn’t know what it was. But it did the job. It filled a hole. And, with the help of three cups of coffee, it gave my energy levels a much-needed boost.

But it still wasn’t enough.

‘Listen, Cal,’ I said. ‘I really need your help with something — ’

‘You’ve got it.’

‘No, just listen to me, OK? I’ll explain everything in a minute, and I’ll tell you what I want you to do, but first of all … well, the thing is, I’m totally fucked at the moment. I’ve been working this case non-stop, and I haven’t slept for God knows how long, and I’ve got a feeling that today’s going to be another long slog.’ I looked at him. ‘So, I was wondering … you know … well, I was just wondering if you’ve got anything that’ll keep me going for a while.’

‘Well, yeah …’ Cal said hesitantly. ‘But I thought … I mean, I thought you’d given up all that?’

‘I just need something for today, that’s all.’

‘Well, OK … if you’re sure …’

I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him.

He gazed back at me for a while — and I could see the concern in his eyes — but then he just nodded his head, got up, and went into his bedroom. When he came back out, fully dressed now, he was carrying a brown plastic prescription bottle.

‘They’re black bombers,’ he said, passing me the bottle. ‘You don’t often come across them these days, but there’s this Portuguese guy I know … anyway, they’re slow-release amphetamines. You only need to take one at a time.’

I looked at the bottle. It contained about half a dozen plain black capsules.

‘Thanks, Cal,’ I said, taking one out and swallowing it with a mouthful of coffee.

‘Yeah, well …’ he said guardedly. ‘Just don’t go crazy with them, all right? I mean, shit, if Stacy was here …’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘She’d kill me.’

Cal smiled. ‘And me.’

We looked at each other in silence for a while, and I knew that we were both feeling the same unfillable emptiness — the despair of knowing that Stacy wasn’t here, and that she’d never be here again …

‘All right,’ I said to Cal, lighting a cigarette. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

After I’d told him everything I knew about the case, and everything that had happened to me in the last few days, Cal just sat there for a while, not saying anything, just quietly thinking things through. As for me, the amphetamine had kicked in now — with an uncharacteristically unedgy kind of rush — and my mind was beginning to buzz with all kinds of new ideas and fresh possibilities about everything: Anna Gerrish, Mick Bishop, the guy in the Nissan …

‘So,’ Cal said eventually, ‘you think that Bishop went through your stuff when you were locked up, but you don’t know for sure?’

‘Well, no … not for sure. But — ’

‘Give me your phone.’

‘What?’

‘Your mobile, let me see it.’

I took out my phone and passed it over. He glanced at the connection sockets, then got up from the settee — we were sitting in the small recreation area in the corner of his flat — and he went over to one of his work desks and started searching through a tangle of cables.

‘What time did you get to the police station?’ he asked me.

‘I’m not sure … about eleven, I think.’

He’d found the cable he was looking for, and I watched as he plugged one end into my phone and the other end into a hand-held device that looked a little bit like a credit-card reader. He connected the device to a laptop, hit some buttons on my phone, waited a while, then pressed some keys on the device and watched as a stream of data appeared on the laptop screen. He lit a cigarette and studied the screen for a while, scrolling up and down through the information, then he nodded to himself and turned back to me.

‘Your phone was accessed at 02.17 this morning,’ he said. ‘I take it that couldn’t have been you?’

‘No, I was definitely locked up by then.’

‘OK, well, whoever it was, they had a good look through your address book, your texts, your call logs … pretty much everything, really.’ He came back over to the settee and gave me back the phone. ‘It’s clean, by the way. No bugs or tracking devices.’

‘Thanks.’

He sat down. ‘So, basically, if it was Bishop who went through your stuff, he’s now got all the information on your phone — who you’ve been calling, who’s called you, who’s in your address book — ’

‘You’re in my address book,’ I said, suddenly realising. ‘All your numbers … and I called you recently — ’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Cal said. ‘He won’t get anywhere if he tries to trace my numbers. But if there’s anything else … you know, anyone in your address book, or anyone you’ve been in touch with … anything that Bishop could use …?’

‘I don’t think so … I mean, I’ll have to check, but I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.’

‘All right,’ Cal said, lighting a cigarette. ‘So let’s assume that it was Bishop, and that he took the cigarette packet because it had the registration number of the Nissan that this girl told you about — ’

‘Tasha.’

‘Right, Tasha.’ He looked at me. ‘Do you think Bishop knows it was her? He obviously knows that you were down there talking to the girls, but would he know which one gave you the number?’

‘I don’t know … probably. I didn’t see anyone watching me when I was talking to her, but the cops who arrested me must have been hanging around somewhere nearby, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw us together, and they would have told Bishop.’ I looked at Cal. ‘Do you think I should warn her? If Bishop’s linked with this Nissan somehow, and he knows that Tasha’s a possible witness …’

‘You really think Bishop might do something to her?’

I thought about it, wondering if I was just being paranoid about Bishop, but then I remembered the story about him torturing the drug dealer in Chelmsford, and I recalled the look of venom in his eyes when he’d jabbed me in the chest a few hours earlier, and I knew that I wasn’t being paranoid. Bishop was a violent man. If he wanted something badly enough, he wouldn’t care what he had to do to get it.

‘I’ll go down there tonight and tell Tasha to be careful,’ I said to Cal.

‘Maybe I should do it,’ he said. ‘Bishop might have someone watching the girls, and if he finds out that you’ve been down there again …’

‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right.’

After I’d told him what Tasha looked like, and where he could find her, we got back to talking about the Nissan.

‘She could be lying about it, you know,’ Cal said. ‘Just making it all up … you know what junkies are like.’

‘Yeah, but why would Bishop keep the cigarette packet with the registration number on it if it didn’t mean anything?’

Cal shook his head. ‘I don’t really understand why he kept it anyway.’

‘Because he knew that I’d had a few drinks last night, and he was guessing that without the packet I wouldn’t remember the number. And if I didn’t remember the number, then I couldn’t try to track it … shit.’

‘What?’

‘Well, if I didn’t have the number, what would I do?’

‘You’d go back to Tasha … fuck, yeah, I see what you mean. If Bishop thinks you don’t have the number, he’s going to try to get to Tasha before you do.’

‘And she’s probably got a record, so he’ll know where she lives.’

‘Fuck,’ Cal said. ‘We need to find her as soon as possible. Tonight might be too late.’

‘I don’t see how we can. She won’t be on the streets now, and even if we could find some of the other girls, they’re not going to tell us where she lives.’

‘Do you know her surname?’

I shook my head. ‘And Tasha’s probably her street name anyway.’

‘So we don’t know her surname, or her real first name, and we don’t know where she lives — ’

‘We need to look at this differently,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘We can’t get to Tasha before Bishop, can we?’

‘No.’

‘So we have to stop Bishop getting to Tasha.’

‘Right. And how the fuck do we do that?’

‘By letting Bishop know that I have got the registration number she gave me.’

‘Have you?’

I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the number I’d written on my arm when I was in the back of the patrol car last night. ‘It’s something I learned from my drunk days,’ I told Cal. ‘You can’t trust yourself not to forget anything, or not to lose anything, when you’re drinking. So if you really need to remember something, write it down where it can’t get lost.’

It was Cal’s idea to check out the registration number first.

‘It won’t take long,’ he told me. ‘Once we’ve found out whatever we find out, we can decide how to let Bishop know.’ He went over to his work desk and started tapping away on a laptop. ‘I’m still working on that other registration number you gave me, by the way,’ he said. ‘The Renault.’

‘Any luck?’

‘Not yet. I’ve still got a few more things to try, but it’s not looking too hopeful at the moment.’

‘OK. Well, let me know if you find anything.’

While Cal set about entering the vehicle details I’d given him, I gave Ada a quick call at the office.

‘I’m at Cal’s,’ I told her. ‘He’s helping me out with the Anna Gerrish case.’

‘How’s it going? Are you getting anywhere with it?’

‘Well, kind of …’

‘Kind of?’

‘It’s complicated. There’s a chance that Bishop might have something to do with it. Personally, I mean.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, I haven’t got any proof yet, but I’m pretty sure that he’s got something to do with it. He’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me looking into it, and I’m fairly sure that he’s having me followed.’

‘Did he have anything to do with you getting beaten up the other night?’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘George Salvini. He said it looked like you’d been through a meat grinder — ’

‘It wasn’t that bad, Ada.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’m sorry. I was going to — ’

‘Was it Bishop?’

‘I don’t know … I’m fairly sure that he wasn’t one of the men who attacked me, but it’s possible he was behind it.’

Ada sighed. ‘Is there anything else you haven’t told me?’

I thought about lying to her for a moment, but I knew she’d find out about the drink-driving charge eventually, so I decided I might as well tell her. ‘I was arrested last night — ’

‘Oh, John …’

‘It’s all right,’ I told her. ‘It was a set-up. I didn’t actually do anything — ’

‘What was the charge?’

‘Kerb crawling and drink-driving. But, like I said — ’

‘Kerb crawling?’

‘It was a set-up, Ada — ’

‘And what about the drink-driving? Were you over the limit?’

‘Well, yeah, but — ’

‘Shit, John. You could lose your fucking licence.’

‘I know,’ I said, looking over at Cal. He was clicking his fingers at me, drawing my attention to the laptop screen. ‘I have to go, Ada,’ I said. ‘We’ll talk about this later. But listen, if Bishop or anyone else from the police calls — ’

‘I don’t know where you are.’

‘Thanks. I might be in later, but if I’m not — ’

‘Just let me know what’s happening, John. All right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart …’

‘And be careful, OK?’

‘OK.’

I ended the call, lit a cigarette, and went over to Cal.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said, pointing at the laptop screen. ‘The Nissan’s registered to a Charles Raymond Kemper. Fifty-three years old, no points on his licence, a home address in Leicester.’

‘Leicester?’

‘Yeah. I’ve done a quick search through all the usual databases — phone listings, utilities, council tax, electoral roll — but I haven’t found anything else so far.’ He looked at me. ‘Does the name mean anything to you?’

‘Charles Raymond Kemper …?’ I shook my head. ‘Not as far as I know.’

‘I’ll do some more checking,’ Cal said. ‘See what I can find out.’

‘All right, but leave it for now. There’s something else I want you to do. And we need to let Bishop know about the registration number too.’

‘Have you got his mobile number?’

‘I think so,’ I said, taking Bishop’s business card from my pocket and studying it. ‘Yeah, here it is. What do you think we should do? Just text him the number?’

Cal nodded. ‘There’s no point in letting him know we’ve got the name too. Do you want to send it anonymously?’

I thought about it, then shook my head. ‘If he doesn’t know who it came from, he might think Tasha sent it. You know, he might think she’s trying to blackmail him. And then he’ll definitely go after her.’

‘Yeah, but if he knows that you sent it — ’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? He already knows that Tasha gave me the number, and he must have known there was a chance I’d remember it.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ Cal said. ‘But instead of using your mobile, why don’t we use one of my untraceable phones instead? Just text him the registration number, nothing else, and sign it with your initials.’

‘What’s the point? If he knows it’s from me anyway — ’

‘He’ll think it’s from you,’ Cal said, smiling. ‘He’ll be 99 % certain that the text came from you, but he’ll still try to trace it, just to make sure. And the trace will take him halfway round the world and back. And eventually, after three or four hours, his IT people will realise that the trace is going round and round in circles, and they’re never going to get anywhere with it.’

‘And what’s that going to achieve?’

Cal smiled again. ‘It’ll keep him busy for a while, waste his time … give him something to think about.’

‘And piss him off.’

‘Yeah, that too.’

I smiled. ‘OK, let’s do it.’

After he’d sent the text, Cal said to me, ‘All right, what next?’

‘CCTV cameras,’ I said. ‘Can you hack into them?’

‘What kind of CCTV?’

‘Just the usual stuff, you know …’

‘Town-centre cameras, that kind of thing?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded. ‘No problem.’

‘What about old footage?’

‘How old?’

‘A month or so.’

He looked at me. ‘The night Anna disappeared?’

‘Yeah. I know it’s a long shot, but if we can find any footage of the Nissan around the time that Anna was picked up that night, it might give us an idea of where she was being taken. Do you think you can do that?’

Cal had to think about it for a while, but eventually he said, ‘Well … I’ve never actually tried hacking into archived recordings, but it should be easy enough. All the public surveillance cameras in Hey are operated by the council, and they probably store the archived footage on hard disks in their system …’ He grinned at me. ‘The security on the council’s computer system is notoriously pathetic. In fact, it’s so ridiculously easy to get into that some hackers think it’s an insult to their intelligence and they refuse to go anywhere near it on principle — ’

‘Right,’ I said impatiently. ‘So you can get into it?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And if I tell you as much as I know about Anna’s whereabouts that night, do you think it’s possible to track her?’

‘It all depends on the location of the cameras,’ he said, turning to his laptop. ‘All right, let’s see … the first thing we need is a site map of all the cameras …’

I must have sat beside Cal, watching him do his thing, for at least a couple of hours, maybe longer. It was an incredible experience. Most of what he was doing was way beyond my comprehension, but although I didn’t really know what he was doing, it was impossible not to admire the skill and tenacity with which he was doing it — his fingers skipping gracefully over the keyboard while his eyes focused almost fanatically on the screen … it was entrancing, like watching a genius at work. Of course, the amphetamine was really buzzing through me now, and I’m sure that played some part in the sheer intensity of my enchantment, but still … it was a hell of a thing to witness.

We didn’t speak very much for the first hour or so when Cal was actually getting into the system, and that was fine with me. I’d done enough talking over the last few days to last me a lifetime, and I was perfectly happy just sitting there quietly, smoking cigarettes and staring dumbly at the inner workings of cyberspace as they streamed up and down the screen.

Once Cal had accessed the system though, we needed to work together, and that’s what we did for the next hour and a half. Cal asked me questions — what time did Anna leave The Wyvern? what route would she have taken to get to London Road? what time did she get there? what time did she get picked up by the Nissan? — and I did my best to answer them as accurately as possible. We didn’t get all that far at first because London Road was right at the edge of the area covered by the council’s CCTV cameras, but Cal quickly realised that both the railway bridge itself and the neighbouring mainline and branchline tracks were covered by a number of Network Rail CCTV cameras, and once he’d hacked into their archived footage — which didn’t take him long — we finally had the coverage that might just be enough to show us something.

‘Now all we’ve got to do is find her,’ Cal said.

It took us a long time, at least another three hours, and it was a painstakingly tedious task which gave both of us throbbing headaches and aching eyes, but eventually we reached the stage where we’d managed to track Anna — through a series of blurred and stuttered images — from the bottom of Miller’s Row all the way down to London Road. And now Cal had loaded the footage from a camera that was located about fifty metres south of the railway bridge, looking back at the lay-by, and we were both peering intently at the screen, our eyes fixed on the smallish grey blob of a figure that we knew to be Anna Gerrish. We’d seen her arrive at the lay-by at 01.31, and now — according to the read-out at the bottom of the screen — it was 01.47. So far, nothing had happened. Although the picture quality was poor, the view from the camera couldn’t have been better. It showed the whole of the lay-by, the tunnel entrance/exit, and the road leading towards it from the bridge. There was very little traffic around at that time of night, and none of the cars we’d seen so far had stopped at the lay-by.

We just had to wait.

‘What time did Tasha say she saw the Nissan?’ Cal asked me, without taking his eyes off the screen.

‘She thought it was around two-ish.’

Cal nodded.

I leaned closer to the screen as headlights appeared in the tunnel … but the car didn’t stop. I watched it drive past the lay-by, approach the camera, and then disappear.

I said to Cal, ‘Where does this road go anyway?’

‘South from here?’

‘Yeah.’

‘London Road ends at the entrance to the tunnel. After that it becomes Great Hey Road. It follows the railway tracks for a while, maybe half a mile, then there’s a right turn that takes you back into town, but if you stay on Great Hey Road and keep going … hold on, what’s that?’

Another pair of headlights had appeared in the tunnel, this time moving quite slowly. We both leaned in closer to the screen again. The headlights were on full, the glare making it impossible to see what kind of car it was. But as it approached the end of the tunnel, it definitely seemed to be slowing down.

‘This could be it,’ Cal said quietly.

The car was coming out of the tunnel now, its left-side indicator flashing. It pulled in at the lay-by, and as I watched the grey blob that was Anna walking towards it, I felt an irrational urge to shout out to her — Don’t do it, Anna! Don’t get in the car! But of course, after leaning in through the passenger window and talking to the driver for ten seconds or so, she got in.

‘Shit,’ Cal whispered.

The headlights were still on full beam as the car pulled away, and at that distance there was no chance of identifying the driver. But now the car was coming towards us, getting closer all the time … and we both had our faces almost pressed to the screen … and just as the car was about to pass the camera and disappear from view, another car appeared, travelling in the opposite direction, and our driver had to dip his lights. And just for a second, we had a relatively clear picture of our car. But it was, literally, only for a second, and then the car was gone.

‘Did you see him?’ I asked Cal.

‘No, it was too quick.’

‘Shit.’

He grinned at me. ‘It’s not live …’

‘What?’

‘It’s a recording, we can watch it as many times as we want.’ He started tapping the keyboard. ‘You didn’t really think it was live, did you?’

I leaned back in the chair, rubbing my eyes, trying to bring myself back to reality. I knew exactly where I was and what I’d been doing for the last few hours, but I was feeling that slightly odd sensation — a kind of gradually dawning awareness — that can come to you at the end of a really engrossing film. And that, in turn, was making me feel really uncomfortable. Because what I’d just witnessed wasn’t a film … it wasn’t a drama, played out by actors. It was real. A real girl, getting into a real car with a real man … a man who was quite possibly about to kill her.

There was nothing engrossing about that.

‘There,’ said Cal. ‘That’s as clear as I can get it.’

I looked at the screen. He’d re-run the CCTV footage and frozen it just before the car disappeared from view. The static image was still fairly blurred and grainy, but it clearly showed a man in the driving seat, and a girl in the passenger seat, and when I half closed my eyes and squinted at the faces, it was just possible to see — or, at least, to imagine — that the man matched Tasha’s description, and that the girl was Anna. But, of course, my imagination was probably swayed by the fact that I already knew it was Anna.

‘What do you think?’ Cal said.

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘I could enlarge it, but all that’d do is make it even blurrier.’

‘You can’t get it any clearer?’

‘No … I know someone in the States who could maybe clean it up a bit. But he’s really expensive, and he’s got a really long waiting list. He probably couldn’t do it for at least a couple of weeks, probably a month.’

I leaned forward and squinted at the images again. ‘It could be Bishop …’

‘It could be anyone.’

‘What about the car?’

‘Well, it’s definitely a Nissan Almera — ’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah, but I can’t make out the number plate.’

I leaned back, lit a cigarette, and looked at my watch. It was just gone four o’clock. Deep down inside me I could feel the faint stirrings of the black place again, and I knew that it wouldn’t be too long before it dragged me down into its void. But it wasn’t quite ready for me yet. And the black pills in my pocket would help to keep it at bay for a while.

‘What time does it get dark?’ I said to Cal.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Six, half-past …? Why?’

‘Great Hey Road …’ I said, gazing at the frozen image on the laptop screen. ‘It carries on down to the coast, doesn’t it?’

‘Yeah,’ Cal said, frowning at me, not sure why I was asking. ‘It takes you out past the Ranges, through all those little villages … and it ends up at Hale Island.’

I nodded, remembering now. I hadn’t been to Hale Island for years, but when I was a kid we used to drive down there on Sunday afternoons for family strolls on the beach … my mother and father walking together, talking quietly to each other, while I went off on my own … scuffing along the strandline, kicking up junk, looking for jewels — tropical beans, cuttlefish bones, mermaid’s purses …

I was happy then.

‘John?’

I looked at Cal.

He said, ‘Are you all right? You look a bit — ’

‘Can you see if you can find some more footage of the Nissan?’ I said to him, getting to my feet. ‘Try and see where this guy went with Anna?’

Cal nodded. ‘I can try … there’s a few more Network Rail cameras that might have picked him up, but that’s before the turn-off back to town. After that … well, I’ll have to check, but I don’t think there’s too many cameras along Great Hey Road.’ He looked at me, frowning again. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m just going to take a drive out there, before it gets too dark.’

‘Out where?’

I looked at the image on the screen again. ‘I’ll start at the lay-by, and then … I don’t know. Just keep going, I suppose.’ I looked back at Cal. ‘I know it sounds stupid — ’

‘Yeah, it does. I mean, you’re not going to find anything, are you?’

‘I know. But I just need to do something, Cal. Even if it’s pointless … I need to feel like I’m doing something.’

He looked at me for a while, chewing his lip … and just for a moment he reminded me so much of Stacy. It wasn’t just the family resemblance — although Cal did have the same natural beauty as Stacy — but the way he was chewing his lip and looking at me … Stacy used to do exactly the same thing when she was worried about me, especially when she was worried about my state of mind.

‘It’s all right,’ I said quietly to Cal. ‘I’m all right.’

‘Honestly?’

I smiled. ‘Yeah.’

He nodded. ‘OK.’

‘So you’ll keep working on the CCTV stuff?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And you’ll let me know — ’

‘I’ll call you whether I find anything or not.’

‘And if you’ve got the time — ’

‘I’ll see what I can find out about Charles Raymond Kemper.’

‘Thanks, Cal.’

‘Oh, and before you go …’ he said, fumbling around through the clutter on his desk. ‘Hold on … where the fuck is it? I know I put it somewhere … ah, there it is.’ He got up, came over to me, and handed me a flash drive.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘The video footage that was on that damaged memory card you gave me … I’ve transferred it all to the flash drive.’

It took me a moment to realise what he was talking about, but then I remembered — the StayBright case, Preston Elliot and his ball-peen hammer …

It seemed like a long time ago.

‘Was it all still there?’ I asked Cal.

‘Yep.’

‘You’re a genius,’ I said, pocketing the flash drive.

He smiled. ‘I know.’

Before I left, I went to the bathroom and swallowed another pill. I knew that I’d pay for it later — because the longer the black place is kept at bay, the blacker it is when it finally comes — but later was later. Right now, my only real concern was how Stacy would have felt about me taking the pills … and as I went over and looked in the bathroom mirror, and my fucked-up eyes stared back at me, I could hear the anger and exasperation in Stacy’s voice as she told me not to be so stupid …

You don’t need pills, John. You don’t need to keep doing this to yourself.

‘I’m sorry, Stace,’ I muttered, pocketing the bottle of pills. ‘I’m just …’

Just what?

‘Nothing … I’m just sorry.’