Free I Know Where the Bodies Are Buried by Oliver Clarke

"I know where the bodies are buried," is what he said to me as soon as he was sitting down. That was the line that hooked me. It would hook any journalist. A dozen questions instantly formed themselves in my head, all of them jostling with each other to be the first one out of my mouth. "Which bodies?", "Where?", "How did he know?" I didn't ask any of them though; I just sat there in silence and waited to see what he said next. You sometimes get a lot more that way, letting people fill the silence. Talking until they trip over themselves and tell you something they didn't mean to. It was a struggle, with all the questions I had queuing up, but I stuck with it. Looking back the one that didn't make it into that disorderly line in my head was the most critical one of all. Why was he telling me this? Or rather why was he telling ME this? There were plenty of other journos he could have gone to. Ones actually attached to papers rather than failing freelancers like me. Ones who would definitely be able to get his story into print, which was presumably what he wanted.
I know where all the bodies are buried. It's a phrase that gets used a lot in my line of work. It means, well you know what it means, it's not literal. At least it shouldn't be. This guy though, something about him made me sure he was talking about corpses in the ground rather than dubious tax records or compromising photographs. He was a bit older than me. Somewhere in his 40s, although his ruddy, weather beaten face made it hard to pinpoint exactly where. His hair and fingers and teeth were stained yellow from years of smoking and his nose and cheeks had the red pinpricks and threads of an alcoholic. Not that I was in a position to judge, in the last year or so I'd taken to not looking at myself for too long in the mirror in case I saw the same evidence on my own face.
The weird thing was examining his face then I couldn't help feeling I'd met him before. I couldn't place him, had no clear memory of him, but there was something there. That feeling, a little like deja vu, nagged away at me as I watched him speak. It was another question to add to the list I already had.
He'd called me out of the blue. When I picked up the phone he'd launched straight into a spiel that sounded like he'd been reading it from a card. Meeting him now I wondered if that hadn't actually been the case. He was so jittery that it seemed he'd be incapable of stringing a coherent sentence together. I had no idea how he'd got my number. Enough people knew it though and this was exactly the kind of the thing that was supposed to happen. The anonymous tip off. Only in this case the tipster had insisted on meeting face to face.
What he'd said on the phone was that he needed to meet me, that he had something to tell me that I needed to know. There had been an urgency in his voice that made me ask him if he wanted to meet right away. Not now, not after dark, was what he'd said back to me. We'd made arrangements to meet in a local cafe the next day. I'd suggested the location, wanting to make sure it was somewhere I wouldn't bump into any other journos. Something told me this might be big.
"Can you give me any idea of what the story is?" I had said.
"Story?" He'd laughed at that and then hung up.
So here I was the following morning, late morning because I'd wanted to be alert for this and I rarely get to sleep much before 2am. His hands were shaking as he lifted up the cup of coffee I'd bought him. Not enough that you'd notice it normally but enough that you could see the coffee sloshing dangerously close to the lip of the cup.
I sat there quietly sipping my own coffee and waiting to see if he'd carry on. He stared back at me over his shaking cup. His eyes red from lack of sleep or crying, I wasn't sure which.
"Tell me what you know," I said. "What bodies?"
"All the bodies. All the people who he took to be close to him."
"Who?" I said.
He laughed again and shook his head. "I can't tell you