Walking with Ghosts

you’ll be as a witness,” she says to me. “Laid up on your back, half dead.” Because that was just after I had the attack. I was in no state to argue with her. Even when I was fit I couldn’t argue with her. Couldn’t be bothered, to tell the truth. Arguing with a woman who can’t ever be wrong. I’d rather eat bird shit.
    ‘Then the next thing we hear they’ve let the husband go. And when I see his picture in the paper, he’s nothing like the young chap was hanging round the allotments. Then I thought she should ring the police, tell them to come round here. But she’s: “It’s too late now, after all this time. They won’t want to be bothered with something you might’ve seen and not seen. Police tramping through the house, I can’t be doing with it.” So I just think to me self, Oh, to hell with it, I’ll watch the telly instead. It’s nothing to do with us. But I thought somebody would come round enquiring sooner or later, and here you are. What’s your name?’
    ‘Geordie Black.’
    Old Malc took Geordie’s card and squinted at it. ‘Geordie Black, private investigator.’
    ‘This man you saw,’ Geordie asked. ‘You didn’t see him with a woman?’
    ‘No, he was always by himself. He came at night. He’d walk up and down the street a couple of times if anyone was around. Then, when he thought the coast was clear, he’d be over to that shed sharpish, like. Inside, and he’d be in there twenty minutes, half an hour, then he’d be away again.’
    ‘How many times did you see him?’
    ‘Three nights on the trot he was there, before I was taken bad the first time. I couldn’t work out what he was up to. I was going to have a peek inside the shed after he’d gone, but then I had the heart attack, and that was that.’
    ‘Can you give me a description? What did he look like?’
    ‘It was always at night when I saw him, but I watched him good, because I couldn’t work out what he was up to. He had a broad forehead. He was young, like I said, and he was thin. When he moved it was more like a woman than a man. I don’t mean he was a woman. He was a boy. Not sure of himself. He was small and dark, not a working man, more like somebody what works in an office.’
    ‘Like me?’
    ‘Could’ve been, I suppose. But you’re taller.’
    When Geordie glanced back to say goodbye, at the door of Male’s room, the old man was smiling. Didn’t improve him, though. Looked as ancient as God.
     

30
     
    Joni Prine was the kind of girl who’d squeeze her friend’s blackheads in the street. The village pub in Wheldrake had, of course, seen her like before, but had not become enamoured through the exposure.
    Marie tried repeatedly to get Joni to keep her voice down, but it seemed like a physical impossibility. Even when Joni whispered, the locals took in every word. Eddy had been nice to her in the beginning, when they had first met. But for the last year she’d felt trapped, ever since he’d got her pregnant with Jacqui. Now the physical violence was getting worse. Eddy also threw his weight around with the younger girls. One of the ones in the cottage tonight had a cut lip. Almost impossible for a girl to work with a cut lip.
    Marie had a miniaturized recorder, which she kept running while Joni talked. But at eleven o’clock they drank up and walked to the outskirts of the village where Edward Blake’s cottages were situated behind a tall beech hedge. In the drive was a sleek Hertz rental with tinted windows, a sure sign that the gentlemen had arrived.
    They were playing music inside the cottage, sounded like Cliff Richards’
    ‘Summer Holiday’, which put a certain vintage on the politicians, and pointed up the absence of taste which had led them, ultimately, into the hands of Edward Blake.
    ‘I want to get this right first time,’ said Marie, taking a small video camera from the bag on her shoulder. ‘We don’t go in unless we know we’ll get some good footage.’
    Joni held up a bunch of keys. ‘We can go in the back Way,’ she said. ‘Through the kitchen. They’ll all be pissed anyway, and we’ll be able to watch without them knowing we’re there.’
    Marie followed her round the house. They crept into the darkened kitchen, where Joni pushed open a serving-hatch A tangle of naked and semi-naked bodies was revealed in the room beyond. A portly man with silver hair on his head and chest was kneeling on a cushion on the floor. He was the owner of a short, fat penis,