Dance of Ghosts

5

Once we were out of the house and driving back towards town, Helen Gerrish gradually began to relax a little. And I soon realised that she was the kind of person who talks a lot when they’re relaxed. In fact, as we approached the outskirts of Hey, passing through the superstore world of Sainsbury’s, B amp; Q, Homebase, and Comet, I realised that she hadn’t stopped talking for the last five minutes. And, of course, the only thing she wanted to talk about was Anna: Anna was this, Anna was that, Anna did this, Anna did that … it was as if she’d been waiting a long time to let it all out, and now that she’d started she just couldn’t stop.

I was quite content to let her do all the talking. For one thing, it saved me the bother of having to say anything. And for another … well, I wasn’t really listening to her anyway. I was too busy thinking about her husband instead. Graham Gerrish: a man whose seventeen-year-old daughter had slept in a room that belonged in the mind of a child abuser; a man who’d designed and decorated this room himself and used it now for viewing pornography; a man who professed to love his daughter, yet scorned his wife’s efforts and desire to find her.

Yes, he was definitely a man worth thinking about.

It took another twenty minutes or so to get to Anna’s flat. It was in an area of town called Quayside, just south of the river. Quayside is the kind of place that’s quiet during the day but comes to life at night, especially at the weekends. It used to be a working dock, but most of the old warehouses and boatyard buildings are now nightclubs — the Hippodrome, Tiffany’s, the Quay Club. The surrounding streets are dotted with pubs, restaurants, and fast-food places, a lot of which have opened quite recently, and most of these newer establishments have a relatively safe reputation. But there are still one or two places around where the entertainment on offer is just as seedy as it was before all the bright young things arrived, and The Wyvern, the pub where Anna worked, was one of those places.

It was still raining as I pulled into the car park of a block of flats at the far end of Quayside, and as we got out of the car and crossed over to the flats, I could see the lights of the neighbouring nightclubs flickering brightly in the rain. It was still too early for the clubs to be open, but even now I could feel the promise of the night to come in the air: the noise, the heat, the dancing, the drinking … the fighting, the fucking … the promise of love and despair …

It was all there.

‘… but, of course,’ Helen Gerrish was saying, ‘even though we were against her moving out in the first place, we still helped her out with the deposit.’

We’d reached the entrance to the flats now, and Helen, I guessed, was telling me about Anna’s rent, or how she managed to afford it … or something like that.

I looked at her and smiled.

She opened the front door and I followed her up two flights of steps to the second floor, then along a corridor to Anna’s flat. As Helen put the key in the lock, I could tell that she was beginning to get anxious again. She’d stopped talking, and her face had become pinched and tense.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I asked her. ‘You can wait outside if you like. I won’t be long.’

‘No …’ she said, pausing for just a moment. ‘No, I’m all right, thank you.’

She opened the door and we went through into a darkened room. Helen turned on the lights, and I stood there and looked around. It was a fairly small place — sitting room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom — but it wasn’t excessively cramped. And while it wasn’t spotlessly neat, it wasn’t overly messy either. I could smell stale cigarette smoke, and there were several overflowing ashtrays dotted around the room. The second-hand furnishings had clearly come with the flat, and although the overall state of the place left a lot to be desired, I’d seen a lot worse in my time. All in all, it was just a typical low-rent living space, ideally suited for a young woman desperate to leave home.

As I started wandering around the sitting room, looking at this and that, Helen went over and sat down on a cheap settee.

‘What are you looking for?’ she asked me.

‘Anything, really,’ I said, scanning a row of shelves. ‘Something that shouldn’t be here, something that should be here but isn’t …’

‘The police have already searched here, you know.’

I nodded. ‘When was that?’

‘The day after I reported her missing. DCI Bishop told me that they didn’t find anything suspicious.’

‘Do you know if he thinks she came back here that night?’

‘He said it was impossible to tell. No one saw her coming back, but it would have been late … and, besides, the kind of people who live around here …’

I looked at her.

She shrugged. ‘Well, they don’t like to get involved, do they?’

I stood in the middle of the room and took a final look round, but I got the feeling that there was nothing here to tell me anything. It was a room that could have belonged to anyone, as bland and anonymous as a hotel room. No personal touches, no ornaments, no pictures, no books. It was just a place to watch TV.

I went into the kitchen, but there was nothing useful in there either. The fridge had been cleared out, the sink was empty. A small cupboard held a few cans of vegetables and a packet of crackers, and there was a drawer full of the usual kitchen stuff — cutlery, clingfilm, aluminium foil — but that was about it.

‘Did the police clear out the fridge?’ I asked Helen as I went back into the sitting room.

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

‘Are you all right there?’ I said.

She was perched on the edge of the settee, all hunched up, her hands held tightly together in her lap.

‘Yes … yes, I’m all right, thank you. Just … well, you know … you can’t help thinking about things, can you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, you can’t …’

She looked at me for a moment, her eyes glazed and haunted.

I said, ‘I’ll just go and have a quick look in the bedroom and bathroom, and then we’ll get going, OK?’

She nodded.

I went into Anna’s bedroom and turned on the light. The smell of cigarette smoke was stronger in here, and the room was a lot messier than the sitting room — piles of clothes all over the place, the bed unmade, dirty cups and plates on the floor. I went over and took a closer look at the bed. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it didn’t take me long to realise that — whatever it was — I wasn’t going to find it in an unmade bed. It was impossible to tell when it had last been slept in, and even if there were any tell-tale signs that Anna had been sleeping with someone — which, as far I could tell, there weren’t — that still wouldn’t tell me anything.

I moved away from the bed and started searching through a chest of drawers that was set against the wall. It had six drawers; two smaller ones at the top, the rest full-size. The two at the top were underwear drawers, the next one down was T-shirts and tops, the one under that was jeans and trousers, and the next-to-last drawer contained skirts. It all seemed quite ordinary, the sort of clothing you’d expect a young woman without much money to own. Nothing too stylish or expensive, most of it quite practical and plain … the kind of clothes you’d buy at Primark or Tesco or TK Maxx.

In the bottom drawer though … well, the clothing in the bottom drawer wasn’t quite so ordinary. It wasn’t that it was any more fashionable or expensive than the rest of Anna’s clothes, it was just that it was totally different in style. These clothes could never be described as practical and plain; in fact, if anything, they were the opposite. Incredibly short skirts, fishnet stockings, studded leather belts. Tiny strips of material with zips on the front, which I guessed were some kind of top. Leather trousers, ripped denim jeans that were more rip than jean, a little white shirt and school tie …

It was possible, of course, that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for all this — maybe Anna had been doing some glamour modelling, or maybe this was the kind of stuff she wore on hen nights, or maybe she just liked dressing up a bit outrageously when she went out …

Or maybe it was just me? Maybe these clothes weren’t outrageous at all, and I was just jumping to the conclusions of an out-of-touch, out-of-style, out-of-date forty-year-old man.

I was crouched down on the floor, staring into this drawer full of confusion, trying to work out what, if anything, it meant, when I heard a quiet shuffle in the doorway behind me, followed almost immediately by Helen Gerrish’s frail little voice.

‘Have you found anything yet?’

I quickly closed the drawer and stood up. ‘No … no, nothing yet, I’m afraid …’

‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’

Yeah, I thought, don’t ever creep up on me again.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, glancing around the room. ‘I’m just about done in here, anyway.’ Which I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to keep poking around in Anna’s things with her mother looking over my shoulder, and it didn’t seem quite right to ask Helen to leave me alone either. So, noticing a few items of jewellery beside a little box on the bedside table, I said to Helen, ‘Actually, you could have a quick look through Anna’s jewellery for me while I check the bathroom … if you don’t mind.’

‘Her jewellery?’

‘Over there,’ I said, indicating the bedside table. ‘Just see if there’s anything missing …’

‘But I don’t know — ’

‘It’s all right, just have a look. You might remember something.’ I smiled at her. ‘OK?’

‘Well, if you think it might help.’

I watched her as she moved hesitantly over to the bedside table, sat down on the edge of the bed, and started picking reluctantly at the pieces of jewellery. She handled the necklaces and bracelets as if she could hardly bear to touch them, and the look on her face — a pained and sickened expression — was a look that verged on disgust. It was like watching someone retrieving their lost contact lenses from a steaming pile of dog shit.

I stood there watching her for a moment or two, briefly transfixed by her oddness, then — with a baffled shake of my head — I left the room and went into the bathroom.

There wasn’t a lot to look at in there — toilet, bath, sink, cupboard. There was a toothbrush and toothpaste in a glass on the sink, and in a cupboard over the sink there were several more items which I would have expected Anna to take with her if she’d been planning to go away — Tampax, talcum powder, make-up remover, nail files … stuff like that. There was a fair amount of over-the-counter medication in there too — paracetamol, Gaviscon, Benylin, Night Nurse. In fact, the cupboard was so packed full that I doubted if anything had been removed from it. Which, again, suggested that maybe Anna hadn’t just packed a suitcase and left.

The cupboard wasn’t all that sturdy, and as I closed the door and pushed it shut I heard a load of stuff inside falling over. I thought about just leaving it, but that didn’t seem right, so I carefully inched open the door again … and half a dozen bottles and tubs fell out, scattering pills and God-knows-what all over the floor.

‘Shit,’ I muttered.

Helen called out from the bedroom. ‘Is everything all right in there?’

‘Yeah,’ I called back. ‘I just dropped something, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

It was quite a poky little bathroom, with not much room for manoeuvring, and as I kneeled down on the floor to start clearing up the mess, my foot bashed into the bath panel and knocked it loose.

‘Fucking hell,’ I whispered, turning round to inspect the damage.

Nothing was broken. The plastic panel had just come away, as if it hadn’t been fixed on properly in the first place. And when I looked closer, pushing the loose panel back and peering into the space under the bath, I realised that the panel was supposed to be loose, because Anna had been using the space behind it as a hiding place. And what she’d been hiding in there, and what was still in there now, was heroin. Four wraps of heroin, a syringe, a box of needles, a packet of alcohol swabs, and a spoon.

And that changed things. It changed Anna’s life and the world she inhabited. It made her more vulnerable, more desperate, more liable to risk. It made her more likely to associate with the kind of people who might want to hurt her. And if she was an addict, which was by no means definite, as it wasn’t impossible that she just used the stuff now and then … but if she was an addict, she’d never have willingly gone away and left all her gear behind.

And that changed the way I was thinking.

The way I was thinking now was that although Helen Gerrish’s reasons for worrying about her daughter were wrong, it was beginning to look like she was probably right to be worried.

When I went back into the bedroom, Helen was still perched on the edge of the bed, but she’d given up on the jewellery now and was just sitting there staring at nothing.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked quietly.

She turned slowly and looked at me. ‘Yes … yes, I’m fine, thank you.’

‘Any luck with the jewellery?’

She shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry … the only thing of Anna’s that I’m familiar with is a necklace she wore all the time, and that’s not here.’

‘What kind of necklace? Can you describe it?’

‘It’s a silver half-moon on a silver chain … she’s had it for years.’ Helen looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘You know, I don’t even know where she got it from …’

‘A silver half-moon?’ I said.

Helen nodded. ‘She should be wearing it in the photograph I gave you.’

I took the photo out of my pocket and saw that she was right. Sunlight was glinting from a small silver crescent on a necklace around Anna’s neck.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘well, that’s something.’

‘Are we finished here now?’

I nodded. ‘If that’s OK with you.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘Yes, I’d like to go home now.’