Dance of Ghosts

32

Mick Bishop came striding into the room like the police officer he was — cautious but confident, ready for anything — and it only took him a second or two to take everything in. He saw me sitting on his brother’s chest with the pistol held to his head; he saw Bridget lying unconscious on the floor; he saw Walter’s dead body, the broken chair, the cords, the blood … and then his eyes fixed on mine and he began moving towards me.

‘All right, John,’ he said calmly. ‘Just put the gun down — ’

‘Stay there,’ I told him, pressing the barrel of the gun into Ray’s head. ‘If you come any closer, I’ll kill him.’

He slowed to a stop and held up both hands, palms out. ‘All right, all right … take it easy — ’

‘Hello, Micky,’ I heard Ray say. ‘What took you so long?’

‘Ray,’ Bishop said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Do I look all right? I mean, shit, look what that fucking cunt’s done — ’

He shut up suddenly as I cracked the pistol into his broken nose and then jammed the barrel into his mouth.

‘John,’ I heard Mick say. ‘Please, don’t…’

I pushed down harder on the gun, shoving it into Ray’s throat … and I knew that I’d gone somewhere else now. I’d gone to a place where killing him was no longer enough; I wanted to hurt him too. Hurt him, then kill him … just like he’d done to Anna …

‘John!’

And all the other girls …

‘John!’

Make him suffer …

‘For Christ’s sake, you’re killing him!’

Just like Stacy had suffered …

‘He can’t breathe!’

And Bridget …

‘JOHN!’

Bridget.

I pulled the gun out of Ray’s mouth. He coughed and moaned, spitting up blood and bits of teeth.

‘Fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘You fucking — ’

I cracked the gun into his head. He grunted, then groaned, his eyes flickering and rolling. I hit him again and he went limp. I turned back to Mick and saw that he’d moved a lot closer to me. He was sweating now, pale and rigid. He didn’t look quite so calm and confident any more.

I pointed the gun at him. ‘Go over there and check on Bridget.’

He glanced down briefly at his brother, then moved over to where Bridget was lying on the floor.

‘Make sure she’s still breathing,’ I told him.

He crouched down beside her and began looking for a pulse. I watched him, surprised at how gently he moved — placing two fingers on her neck, concentrating quietly for a while, then carefully lifting her eyelids and looking into her eyes.

‘Did Ray do this to her?’ he asked, studying her battered face.

‘What do you think?’

He nodded, still looking at Bridget. ‘I don’t think there’s any serious damage … nothing broken.’ He eased her over onto her side and carefully tilted her head back. ‘It’s just a heavy concussion. She’ll live.’

‘Call an ambulance.’

He looked at me. ‘I can’t do that.’

‘She needs treatment. Call an ambulance.’

He got to his feet, shaking his head. ‘It’s not going to happen, John.’

I jammed the gun into Ray’s senseless head. ‘Your brother’s dead if it doesn’t.’

Mick stared at me in silence for a while, glanced down at Ray again, then went over and sat down on the settee. ‘If I call an ambulance,’ he said wearily, ‘the police will automatically be informed. And when they get here … well, that’ll be it. Everything’ll be fucked then … everything.’ He shook his head again. ‘I won’t be able to talk my way out of it. There’ll be too many people involved. They’ll find out about Ray and me, the Gerrish girl — ’

‘And all the others he’s killed.’

He looked at me. ‘You know?’

‘Yeah, I know. I know everything.’

He sighed. ‘Ray can’t help it — ’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ I spat. ‘Don’t give me that shit. He’s killed nearly thirty women, for God’s sake. Thirty. He’s tortured them, stabbed them, mutilated them … and you’re trying to tell me that he can’t help it?’

‘He can’t … it’s just …’

‘Just what?’

Bishop looked at Ray for a moment, studying his brother in much the same emotionless way that Ray had studied me. ‘It’s just what he is. He’s wrong. Wrong in the head, the heart … whatever. He’s got something missing. He was born like it … he was born broken.’

‘And that makes it all right, does it? That makes it all right for him to spend his life killing people?’

‘No…’

‘So why do you cover up for him?’

‘Because he’s my brother. He’s all I’ve got. He’s all I’ve ever had.’

I didn’t know what to say to that. As Bishop sat there, staring silently at the floor, I could see the years of pain and sadness in his eyes, and I knew that it was only his pain, his suffering, and I knew that what he’d done, what he’d allowed his brother to do, had caused so much more destruction and despair to so many innocent people …

‘It just happened,’ I heard him say. ‘I didn’t mean it to end up like this …’ His voice was detached and distant, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘Ray never meant to kill Mum and Dad, he just wanted to get back at them for being such bastards. But after he’d burned the house down, and then Pin Hall … well, I knew then that he’d got a taste for killing, and that he was going to carry on doing it, and that there was nothing I could do to stop him. So I just thought it’d be best if he moved away …’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’ I said. ‘What good did you think that would do?’

He shrugged. ‘If he’d stayed here … if he stayed anywhere for too long, he’d get caught. But if he kept moving around …’

‘It’d be easier for him to get away with it.’

Bishop nodded.

I shook my head. ‘And moving around costs money, which you supplied. Money, false ID, cars, homes … you funded him. All the drugs you stole, all the bribes you took, all the lives you fucked up — including my father’s — you did all that just to make sure that your fucking brother could go round the country brutalising and killing people without getting caught — ’

‘They were whores.’

‘What?’

‘He only killed whores. Most of them would probably have been dead within a year or so anyway.’

I shook my head, more in annoyance with myself than anything else. I couldn’t believe that I was actually conversing with this man, treating him like a human being, or that just a few minutes ago I’d almost been tempted into feeling sorry for him.

‘You’re no better than your brother, are you?’ I said to him. ‘The only difference is that he’s a bit more honest than you.’

Bishop shrugged. ‘Well, that’s as maybe … but none of us gets to choose who we are, do we? Or what we do. You, of all people, should know that, John.’

‘What do you mean?’

He smiled. ‘Anton Viner …?’

I shook my head. ‘Viner’s — ’

‘Dead … yes, I know. It took me a while to figure it out, but once I started thinking about it … well, it was the only thing that made sense.’

‘I don’t understand — ’

He laughed. ‘It’s all right, John. You don’t have to keep pretending any more. I know you killed him. I don’t know how you did it, but I know you did.’

‘That’s ridiculous — ’

‘John … John,’ he said gently, almost intimately. ‘It’s all right … I don’t have a problem with it. He killed your wife, you killed him. If I’d been in your shoes, I would have done exactly the same. My only concern is that I didn’t know you’d killed him until after I’d planted Viner’s DNA on Anna Gerrish’s body.’

‘So you knew your brother had killed her?’

He sighed, looking at Ray. ‘I told him not to come back. I fucking told him … but he just …’

‘What?’

Mick looked at me. ‘He just wanted to see me, that’s all. We hadn’t seen each other for years … he said he was lonely. I didn’t think he’d do anything while he was here.’

‘But he did.’

Mick nodded. ‘I guessed he’d killed Anna as soon as I found out that she worked the streets. He always went after whores.’ He shook his head. ‘They make it so fucking easy. I mean, all you’ve got to do is …’ He sighed, shaking his head again. ‘Anyway, I went to see Ray, and he denied it at first, but I knew he was lying. And he couldn’t keep it up for long, not with me. He never could. So I got it all out of him — where he’d picked her up, what he’d done with the body — and I thought it’d be all right. I thought I’d have enough time to get him out of Hey and sort everything out before the body was found …’ He looked at me. ‘But then you got involved. Not that I was worried at first, because I didn’t think you’d stick with it, but once I realised you weren’t going to give up, I knew I had to do something. It was too risky to move the body, so all I could do was try to make sure that if it was found, there was no way it could be connected to Ray.’

‘But why did you use Viner’s DNA?’ I said. ‘What was the point?’

‘That first day you came to see me, when I told you I’d been going through your wife’s case file? I wasn’t lying. I had been going through it.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘I always like to know as much as possible about the people I’m meeting before I actually meet them, so I had somebody bring me all the paperwork on your wife’s murder. Paperwork, photographs, evidence … I had it all in my office. And later on, when I decided I had to plant some evidence on Anna’s body, it was all still there. Nice and convenient. And then, of course, I realised that if the body was discovered, and we released the fact that Viner’s DNA had been found under Anna’s fingernails, everyone’s attention would be drawn to you and Viner and the whole serial-killer thing, and while all that was going on, Ray could just quietly disappear. But now …’ He glanced down at Ray again, then back at me. ‘Well, that’s out of the question now, isn’t it?’

I nodded. ‘It’s over … for both of you.’

Bishop smiled. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Give me your phone,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so.’

Without taking my eyes off him, or the gun from Ray’s head, I reached back and felt through Ray’s trouser pockets, looking for a mobile. The front pockets were empty, so I leaned over and dug into his back pocket, but that was empty too.

‘You’re wasting your time, John,’ Mick said to me. ‘He doesn’t carry a mobile when he’s …’

‘When he’s what? Killing people?’

Mick shrugged.

‘Give me your phone,’ I said to him again. ‘Or I’ll kill your brother.’

He sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what, John. You give me the gun, and then we can talk things over. How about that?’

I shook my head. ‘I’d rather just kill him.’

‘Like you killed Viner?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But this is different, John.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because if you kill Ray, you’ll have to kill me too.’

‘And why wouldn’t I want to do that?’

He smiled. ‘Because I’m a DCI, I’m a serving police officer. And no matter how dirty I am, no matter how much I’m loathed and despised … I’m still a serving police officer. And that means that if you kill me, you will go down. Guaranteed. You’ll be locked up for the rest of your life.’

‘You know what?’ I said, suddenly feeling incredibly tired. ‘I really don’t care any more. I don’t care what happens to me, and I don’t care whether you believe me or not.’ I looked down at Ray. He was starting to come round now — moaning softly, his semi-conscious eyes gazing up at me. I stared back at him, seeing nothing but a half-dead sack of bones and blood, a heartless thing with a broken head. And in the dulled grey mirror of his eyes, I saw myself holding the gun to my own head … and I heard a voice that might have been mine, or it might have been my father’s:

It won’t feel like anything, John.

It won’t feel like anything at all.

And I knew then that all I had to do was pull the trigger.

‘What about Bridget?’

I looked up slowly at Bishop. ‘What?’

‘You might not care about yourself,’ he said. ‘But what about Bridget?’

I sighed. ‘What about her?’

‘Well, knowing Ray, I’m guessing that she’s been through a hell of a lot in the last hour or so. And I’d imagine that when all of this is over, however things turn out, she’s going to need somebody to look after her, somebody who understands what she’s been through. And I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how it feels when you lose someone you really care for, John, someone who really understands you. Of course, I don’t know how close the two of you are — ’

‘You’re sick,’ I said wearily. ‘You know that, don’t you? You’re genuinely fucking sick.’

He smiled. ‘I’m only trying to help you see the bigger picture, John. That’s all I’m doing. I’m just trying to remind you — ’

‘I know what you’re doing.’

He looked at me for a few moments, thoughtfully nodding his head, then — very slowly — he got to his feet and began walking towards me. ‘So how about it, John?’ he said calmly. ‘You give me the gun, we sit down and work things out, and that’ll be it — end of story.’

‘End of story?’ I said incredulously.

He nodded. ‘Trust me — I can fix this. By tomorrow morning, Ray will be gone, Bridget will be in hospital, and you’ll be wherever you want to be.’ He stopped in front of me and held out his hand. ‘All you have to do is give me the gun.’

I looked up at him, and if it hadn’t been for the overbearing weight of tiredness inside me, I might have actually laughed out loud at the idea of trusting him … but I was so exhausted now, so lost and black and full of nothing, that I could barely even think. I was deep down in the black place, draped in the darkness, and I’d been there for ever and I’d be there for ever …

I couldn’t do anything.

Didn’t want anything.

What was the point?

The temptation to just end it all was almost irresistible. All I had to do was move my finger … I could do that. Move my finger, pull the trigger …

Once … and Ray Bishop would be gone.

Twice … his brother.

And a third time …

Nothing.

John?

Fuck everything, just do it.

Listen to me, John.

‘Stacy?’

Bishop’s right … Bridget needs you.

‘He’s just saying that, Stace … he’s just using her — ’

I know he is. But she still needs you. And you need her.

‘I don’t — ’

Yes, you do.

‘I want to be with you, Stace.’

I’m in your heart, John … always. No matter what.

‘I love you.’

I know.

‘John …?’

I looked at Bishop. He’d crouched down beside me and was staring into my eyes.

‘It’s OK, John,’ he said quietly. ‘Everything’s all right … just give me the gun …’

I looked down at his outstretched hand — seeing the shape of it, the colour, the texture of the skin … the lines and the whorls and the pores — and all of a sudden I knew that I didn’t have to think any more. All I had to do was place the pistol in Bishop’s hand, and that would be it. No more decisions, nothing to think about. Whatever happened would happen. If I lived, I lived. If I died, I died.

The future doesn’t exist.

I moved my finger off the trigger, slowly lifted the gun, and placed it carefully in Bishop’s hand.

‘Thank you,’ he said. He studied the pistol for a moment, frowning slightly, then he looked down at his brother.

‘Micky?’ Ray muttered quietly. ‘Are we — ?’

‘Goodbye, Ray,’ Mick said.

He put the gun to his brother’s head and calmly pulled the trigger.