Dance of Ghosts

19

In the summer of 1991, I worked for a few months as a handyman at the crematorium in Hey’s Weir. Most of my time was spent cutting grass, burning old wreaths, digging flower beds … I basically did whatever I was told to do. I didn’t mind. It was pleasantly thoughtless work, physically but not mentally tiring, and I was on my own most of the time. And, besides — as I’d explained to Bridget — as long as I knew that I’d be with Stacy at the end of the day, I didn’t care what I was doing.

Occasionally, when the crematorium was busier than usual, I’d be asked to help out in the furnace room. I didn’t get involved with the actual cremation procedures — I was mostly just moving coffins around or sieving the ashes — but it was while I was working in the furnace room that I met a man known as Dougie the Burner. Dougie was an intriguing man. In his late twenties or early thirties, he had an unruly mop of tousled black hair, twinkling dark eyes, permanently grubby skin, and an equally permanent lopsided grin. He was slightly hunchbacked and he walked with a limp. And he always wore the same shabby old blue overalls. He smoked pipe tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes, and for his lunch he’d eat a whole raw onion.

Although there was plenty about him that always unnerved me a little — not least his resemblance to a hunchbacked Fred West — there was a lot about Dougie that I liked. I liked the way he never got angry about anything, never worried about anything, never took anything seriously. He just seemed to hobble his way through life, carelessly enjoying whatever came his way — burning bodies, sieving ashes, eating onions … he was perfectly content with his lot.

On a warm Friday night in July that year, just as the sun was starting to go down, I suddenly realised that I’d left my jacket at the crematorium earlier in the day. My wallet was in my jacket pocket, and Stacy and me were setting off early the next morning for a weekend away in Wales, and for some reason that I can’t remember I decided that, rather than picking up my jacket in the morning, I’d go back and get it that night.

So I grabbed my work keys, got in the car, and drove out to the crematorium. It must have been around ten o’clock when I got there, and at first the whole place seemed as quiet and deserted as I’d expected. But as I got out of the car and headed across the car park towards the door at the side of the main building that led into the staff room where I’d left my jacket, I gradually became aware of a familiar low rumbling sound — the muffled roar of the furnace. I’d always assumed that the furnace was shut down at night, so I was a little surprised to hear it working, but I didn’t really give it much thought. I just assumed that my assumptions were wrong. And as I approached the side door, and noticed that Dougie’s car was parked at the back of the building, and that next to it was a dark-blue van I’d never seen before, I still didn’t think anything of it. I just supposed Dougie must be working late, maybe checking the furnace or something, and that the van probably belonged to a friend of his who was helping him out …

I unlocked the side door and went inside. The staff room was dark, the lights turned off, but the adjoining door to the furnace room was open, and through the doorway I could see a flickering glow of bright orange flamelight. I could see Dougie too — standing beside the furnace, wiping his hands on a rag, looking over at me. He wasn’t grinning. And then two men stepped into view from across the room. One of them was middle-aged, stout, with cropped white hair; the other one was a younger man with a dark complexion, possibly Turkish or Greek.

As the younger man reached into his pocket, Dougie stepped forward and took hold of his arm.

‘It’s all right,’ I heard him say. ‘I know him.’ Dougie turned to me. ‘Hey, John,’ he said, grinning now. ‘What are you doing here?’

What are you doing here? I thought.

‘I left my jacket behind,’ I said, staring at something I’d just noticed on the floor behind Dougie. ‘I was just …’

Still grinning, Dougie glanced over his shoulder at the object that had caught my attention, then turned back to me. ‘I hope you can keep a secret, John.’

The object on the floor was a roll of carpet. At least, that was my first impression. I was shortly to find out that it was actually just a piece of carpet, and that rolled up inside that piece of carpet was a corpse. The body, according to Dougie, belonged to a young gypsy man who’d been beaten up and shot to death by the father and uncles of an eight-year-old girl who’d been assaulted and raped by the dead man. The two men with Dougie weren’t gypsies themselves, they were just fixers, hired intermediaries, people who ‘got things done’.

Dougie seemed remarkably unconcerned as he explained all this to me. Grinning his care-free grin, he just rolled a big fat cigarette and told me all about it.

‘It’s just a little sideline for me, John,’ he said casually. ‘A bit of overtime, if you like. It’s all quite simple really.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘When someone needs to get rid of something on the quiet, they get in touch with me, and I tell them when to bring it round. They bring it round, it goes in the burner … and that’s it.’

‘When you say “get rid of something”,’ I said, looking over at the rolled-up carpet, ‘you mean … bodies?’

Dougie grinned. ‘Bodies, yeah. Dead people. I mean, I burn them all day anyway, the only difference with these extra ones is they don’t get a service, and I don’t have to bother sieving them into urns.’ His grin broadened. ‘Plus, I get paid a lot more for these.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. ‘The going rate’s a grand a time.’

I looked at him, suddenly wondering if the only reason he was being so open about this was that he wasn’t planning on me being around much longer to tell anyone. I glanced over at the roaring furnace, then back at Dougie.

He laughed, realising what I was thinking. ‘It’s all right, John, there’s nothing to worry about. As long as you keep your mouth shut …’ His grin lost a little of its warmth. ‘Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

‘Good. Of course, if you did happen to let anything slip …’ He turned round, casually flicked his cigarette into the burner, watched as it was instantaneously vaporised, then turned back to me. ‘But that’s not going to happen, is it?’

I shook my head.

‘OK,’ he grinned. ‘Well, if you don’t mind, I’d better get on. I don’t want to delay these two gentlemen any longer.’

‘Yeah …’ I muttered. ‘I’ll just get my jacket.’

‘Before you go,’ Dougie said, reaching into his pocket and passing me a business card. ‘If ever you need to get rid of anything …’

‘Thanks,’ I said, looking at the card.

All it had on it was his name, DOUGIE, and a phone number. I put the card in my pocket, retrieved my jacket, and left.

A few months later, I handed in my resignation at the crematorium and took up a better-paid job in a call centre. But I kept my promise to Dougie, I didn’t say a word to anyone about his unofficial cremation business — I didn’t even tell Stacy — and for some reason that I’ll never quite understand, I also kept his business card. I never imagined that a time would come when I’d actually have a need for Dougie’s services, and even now I still find it hard to believe that I really did call him before I executed Anton Viner.

But I did.

I called him before I left that night.

He didn’t want to know any details, just what time I wanted to bring the ‘package’ round. And when I told him that it had to be later on that night, probably in the early hours of the morning, he just said, ‘All right, but it’s going to cost you extra.’

And that was that.

I killed Viner in the pub car park. I wrapped his bloodied head in a bin-liner and dumped his body in the boot of my car. I drove to the crematorium, where Dougie was already waiting for me, and together we lugged Viner’s body out of the car, into the furnace room, and finally into the furnace.

And that really was that.

I’d killed Anton Viner.

I’d shot him in the head and incinerated his body.

I’d erased his life from this world.

But now, seventeen years later, I’d just been informed by DCI Bishop that Anton Viner’s DNA had been found on the body of Anna Gerrish.

Ghosts upon ghosts upon ghosts …