by Mike Carey
‘He’s gonna kill me!’ he kept moaning. ‘He’s gonna kill me!’ Then he turned and pointed at me, tears in his eyes. ‘I’m calling the police, you bastard. You won’t get away with this.’
I shrugged. ‘Sorry, friend. Threatening to murder people can give them the wrong impression. I don’t think the police are going to be too sympathetic under the circumstances.’
He sat down on the van’s step-up board, overcome with misery. ‘My brother needs the van for work,’ he said, his voice choked. ‘He only lets me borrow it when my car’s off the road. He’s not even in the AA.’
Any slight temptation I felt towards sympathy was quelled by the extravagance of his self-pity. Arseholes who play stalker when they should be writing term papers can’t really complain when their world turns upside down. All I wanted to do was to make absolutely sure these idiots weren’t the ones who’d just tried to kill me: then I’d be only too happy to leave them to mourn their various losses in privacy.
I tossed Bass’s wallet down on the road to get his attention. ‘Why were you staking me out in the first place?’ I demanded.
‘Oh yeah, like you don’t know,’ Bass sneered, raising his head to glare at me accusingly. ‘We know all about you, and what you’ve got planned.’
‘What I’ve got planned?’ I echoed, interested in spite of myself. ‘What’s that, exactly?’
‘Mass exorcisms across London,’ the other guy said from behind me in a strained, trembly voice. ‘Spiritual cleansing – getting rid of all the dead in one go. You’re the big wheel, aren’t you? Felix Castor.’
‘Is this a joke?’ I was starting to feel like I’d stepped into a parallel universe – one where Frank Spencer was God, and lifts only went down. ‘I’m Castor, yes, but I’m nobody’s wheel – big, small or indifferent. Who’s been feeding you this garbage?’
‘The lieutenant-’ the other guy said, but Bass cut him off with a brusque gesture.
‘We had a meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t know it, but the Breath of Life have been keeping tabs on you for ages. We had an operative at that funeral, watching you from undercover. She’s from our underground task force. And afterwards she made contact with us and told us to keep you under surveillance. And that’s what we’ve done. Wherever you go, we’ll be with you. Whoever you see, we’ll see them too, and we’ll take all their details down and circulate them to everyone in the movement. You’re ours, Castor, whenever we want to take you.’
A secret operative? A Breather working undercover among the London ghostbreakers? I tried that on for size: then I turned it upside down and discovered that if fitted a lot better that way. Dana McClennan. Dana McClennan stopping to talk to the pickets as she walked away from John Gittings’s funeral. ‘You see that man over there? Well, he’s not a man at all. He’s the big bad wolf.’
‘You fucking berk,’ I said sternly. ‘This secret operative – this sweet, blonde, sexy, plausible secret operative, who let you in on the big secret and made you feel so important – her name is Dana McClennan, and she’s not even in your sodding organisation. She was just using you to bust my balls.’
Bass gave me a pitying look. ‘You can’t trick me into giving away the names of our people. Your sort are finished, Castor. You just don’t know it yet.’
I walked towards him and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting any more. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle of the fire extinguisher and jerked it free from the remains of the windshield, which fell like rice at a wedding onto the van’s front seats. Bass gave an anguished wail. I hefted the extinguisher onto my shoulder and turned to face him and his blue-balled friend.
‘Stephen Bass,’ I said. ‘UCL, wasn’t it? I don’t know which faculty, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If I so much as see your sodding face again, I’ll come round to your hall of residence with some friends of mine, and we’ll whistle your soul right out of your body. You’ll be like a zombie, only with less personality.’
Bass almost swallowed his tongue.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he scoffed, with less conviction than Bart Simpson saying ‘It was like that when I got here.’
‘Try me,’ I suggested. ‘Listen, you’ve been sitting out here watching the building all this time. Did you see someone go in?’
Bass hesitated, torn between wanting to play it cool in the face of my threats and not wanting to piss off a man who now knew more or less where he lived.
‘There was a big fat man,’ he said.
‘And did you see him come out again?’
‘What?’ Evidently Bass had worn himself out on the starter for ten.
‘Did he come out again?’ I repeated more slowly. ‘Did you see him come back out onto the street?’
‘No.’
Interesting. Very.
‘Okay, thanks for your time,’ I said, dropping the fire extinguisher at Bass’s feet and making him jump. ‘If you do feel a burning desire to talk to the police, I’m about to call them. All you have to do is wait right there. They’ll be along presently.’
I heard the doors of the van slam behind me as I went back into the block, and the engine start before I reached the stairs.
I went back up to the flat and dialled 999. The police rolled around an hour or so later: a rapid-response unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbours, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. They ended up, as I’d more or less expected, by putting the whole thing down to accident. The cables had snapped off clean, the nice constable said, which ruled out any foul play with bolt-cutters or hacksaws. Probably down to metal fatigue.
Two things made me less than a hundred per cent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts turned out, despite the OUT OF SERVICE notices pasted across them, to be working as well as they ever did. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm – Inter-Urban – while I was waiting for the boys in blue to show, and it didn’t exist. I hadn’t really expected anything different: to quote Iago the parrot, I almost had a heart attack from not-surprise. The whole set-up had been too pat, the timing too convenient.
After the police had left, I waited a half-hour or so for the last of the onlookers to go back to their interrupted evenings, and then I went down to the basement to look at the remains of the lift car. It had hit the bottom of the shaft with enough force to demolish the motor housing, and the splayed remains of it kept the lift doors open. Ignoring the incident tape and the warning sign, I climbed inside and inspected what I could see of the roof of the car, which was easy enough since the inspection hatch had popped right out of its frame when the metal buckled under the force of impact.
Snapped off clean, just like the man said. But the few feet of cable that were still attached to the roof of the lift were shiny and uncorroded. Metal fatigue doesn’t show to the untrained eye, of course. But footprints do. In the sooty grease at one corner of the car roof there was a nice one, size eleven or so, perfectly captured. If the Met boys had seen it at all, they’d probably put it down to the maintenance engineer: but this was a council block, and the lifts only got inspected on alternate blue moons.
The coincidence of this happening immediately after I’d read that letter hidden in the pocket watch had shaken me more than slightly. Warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. And then my name, scribbled in the margin. So had someone else read those words besides me? Was that why I’d just nearly been bludgeoned to death by the force of gravity?
Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind had been starting to go long before he’d died, and that one sign of it had been this business of hiding notes to himself all over the place. It was more than possible that he’d written the letter to himself: I didn’t know his handwriting well enough to tell.
Either way, though, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to just stick a knife in my back, like regular folks: presumably because they wanted my tra
gic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.
And, either way, I was feeling more curious now about the job that John had been working on when he died. Maybe I would turn up for the wake after all. I’d probably kill the mood, but what can you do?
6
Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood had blood on his hands, and it wasn’t his. Not just blood, in fact: gobbets of red-black tissue hung from his fingers and from the business end of the wickedly thin filleting knife he held in his right hand. In his left-hand there was a heart that would never beat again.
‘Meter’s running,’ he said. Coldwood likes to say things like that because it fits in with his image of himself as a tough, ruthless cop doing his balls-out thing in the canyons and arroyos of the urban wasteland. He’s got the face for it, too – all squared-off chin and over-luxuriant eyebrows – and he used it to scowl at me now. ‘I don’t owe you any favours, Castor, and I’m not telling you anything that wasn’t already reported in the papers, so don’t ask.’
‘Because a punch in the face often offends,’ I finished for him.
‘Exactly.’
‘Then why are we meeting here, instead of down at the cop shop?’
‘Here’ was the kitchen of his maisonette in East Sheen. It was the afternoon of the next day, and given the Victor Frankenstein vibe that Coldwood was currently putting out, I was grateful for the touches of normality provided by the sinkful of dirty dishes, the Dress-Up Homer Simpson fridge magnets and the FHM calendar on the wall.
Coldwood dropped the heart – a sheep’s, judging by the size of it – back into the dish instead of answering, and wiped his free hand on an apron that was already foul. Then he picked up a pencil and stared at the sad, half-dismantled piece of offal with a hard frown of concentration.
‘We’re meeting here because I can’t trust you to shut up when shutting up is the only sane option,’ he growled. He touched the business end of the pencil to a page of an open A4 pad and began to draw the heart, with great care but no particular skill. A couple of pink smears extended across the paper like a wake behind his wrist as it moved. ‘You’ll ask questions you shouldn’t ask, make stupid guesses to see if you can gauge anything from my reactions, and generally show me up in front of people whose opinions matter to me.’
There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t bother. Might as well try the sympathy card, though, because you never knew. ‘Basquiat still got your balls?’
Coldwood laughed mirthlessly. ‘When the Paragon Hotel case broke, DS Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioural modelling in detective work. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone is holding anyone’s balls here . . .’ He tailed off, aware that the metaphor had unexpectedly run aground. Ruth Basquiat is as hard as tungsten-tipped nails, but her balls – unless she throws the kind that Cinderella liked to go to – are purely notional.
To show my good faith, I left the punchline unspoken. ‘I’m not asking for any trade secrets anyway,’ I told Coldwood, comfortable with the outrageous lie because the next sentence exposed it straight away. ‘All I need is an idea of how strong the case against Doug Hunter is.’
‘All you need for what, Castor?’
‘Sorry, Gary. Client privilege.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re full of shit in an amazing variety of different shades and textures.’
‘Seriously,’ I persisted. ‘All I need are the basics, nothing that would compromise your professional integrity by even half an inch.’ I pointed at one of the tubercles sticking out of the heart. ‘You missed that one,’ I added helpfully.
‘I didn’t miss it,’ Coldwood muttered. ‘I just didn’t get to it yet. You want me to give you a walk-through of the whole case? Seriously? And you don’t think that would compromise me?’ The emphasis he put on the word was unnecessarily sarcastic. I could see that I was rubbing him up the wrong way.
‘Okay, Gary,’ I said. ‘Just meet me halfway, then. You know you want to. Deep down you’re still feeling guilty because you let me get arrested for murder that time, and then stood there and watched while Basquiat beat the crap out of me.’
‘No,’ he said, drawing in the little additional piece of cardiac plumbing. ‘I’m not feeling guilty, because that whole Abbie Torrington business was your own damn fault. And if I remember rightly you got yourself out of arrest again in very short order. By driving an ambulance through the front wall of the Whittington Hospital, wasn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t driving.’
‘Point stands.’
Coldwood straightened up and looked at his drawing with a critical eye: apparently it passed muster, because he put the pencil down. I thought I could see a couple of other oozy bits of anatomy that he hadn’t captured in his lightning sketch, but maybe they didn’t matter from a policing point of view.
Coldwood’s evening class in forensic science is his latest attempt to get ahead of the baying pack down at Albany Street and make Inspector while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. He goes up to Keighley College two nights a week, gets day release once a fortnight and in theory comes out in a couple of years’ time with a BTEC Higher, which he’ll happily wave in the face of the aforementioned Detective Sergeant Basquiat – a willowy blonde with a pixie-ish disregard for interrogation protocol. In the meantime he spends his free time slicing up internal organs that don’t – anatomically speaking – belong to him.
‘You don’t have a murder weapon,’ I said, deciding to go for a direct approach. Sometimes there’s such a thing as being too subtle.
‘We’ll find it. We still think Hunter ditched it in between leaving the Paragon and being picked up.’
‘Ditched it where? Out on the street?’
‘Maybe, yeah. Or maybe in the boot of a car. Or in a skip behind a shop. It’s a bloody claw hammer, Fix – with a two-and-a-half-inch cross-section on the blunt end. We’ll know it when we see it.’
‘What if you don’t find it? Are you prepared to admit the possibility that there was someone else in that hotel room?’
Coldwood rolled his eyes and shook his head in something like disgust. He picked up the dish and overturned it, letting the heart slide out and fall into his pedal bin. ‘About a thousand someone elses,’ he scoffed. ‘You know the kind of place we’re talking about. Revolving doors, hot and cold running whores. They’re in and out of there like Tom and effing Jerry. We picked up three dozen sets of prints on the bedposts alone.’
‘I’m talking about someone who might not have left any prints,’ I said quietly.
That got his full attention. He wagged a finger at me, nodding to indicate that he got it now. ‘Oh, right. This is Janine Hunter’s vengeful-ghost theory, is it?’ he said derisively. ‘Myriam Kale, back from the dead. How did she get to England? Through the phone lines?’
‘You will admit, though,’ I pressed on regardless, ‘that without a weapon most of your evidence is circumstantial . . .’
‘Circumstantial?’ Coldwood was incredulous. ‘DNA evidence from an anal rape?’
‘Rape’s a question of interpretation – especially if you walk into a bedroom in a knocking shop and lock the door behind you. But in any case we’re talking about the murder, not the sex.’
‘Look at the autopsy report and tell me it’s all interpretation,’ Coldwood suggested. ‘Barnard had been beaten, burned, buggered and bent backwards. Then he’d been tenderised with a fucking hammer. Whether he went into that room for sex or not, I think it’s pretty fair to assume that very little of what was done to him was as per tariff.’
I was fighting a rearguard action here, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. ‘Burned?’ I repeated. ‘You mean on his face? According to Jan Hunter, that happened after he was killed, not—’
Coldwood waved the objection away. ‘Don’t trip me up with semantics, Fix. This isn’t a courtroom. Look, we can place Hunter in the area. We can place him in the room. We can place him �
�� excuse my language – up Barnard’s arse. What more do you want?’
He turned his back on me, pulling a generous length of kitchen towel from a rack on the wall and wiping his gory hands on it. ‘We’ve done our homework,’ he went on. ‘Among other things, we talked to the rent boys around the back of St Pancras, and they say Hunter’s been a regular down there for the past three months. They hate his kind – skin divers, they call them. Gay men who come down to head off a punter, but don’t charge for it. He got into a fight with one of the street boys, and he threw some kind of a wobbly – very nasty. Went for the guy’s face and marked him so he couldn’t work. They left him alone after that. Just swore at him and gave him the finger from a distance.’
Coldwood had finished wiping his hands by now, and had gone on to wash them under the tap and dry them on a tea towel. Now he opened the fridge and took out two cans of Asda lager, one of which he offered to me. I took it for the sake of solidarity.
‘And besides,’ he added, sounding very slightly, almost imperceptibly defensive, ‘we got someone to read the scene for us.’
‘Someone?’ Taken slightly off guard, I snapped off the end of the ring-pull without actually opening the can. ‘What sort of someone? You mean an exorcist?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Exactly. Your sort of someone.’
‘Son of a bitch!’ I tossed the can back to Coldwood, suddenly not so keen on enjoying his hospitality. ‘You said you’d get me back on the roster as soon as the heat died down.’
‘It’s not that easy, Castor. You resisted arrest.’
‘Wrongful arrest,’ I countered. ‘You dropped the charges.’
‘Yeah, we did. You still did eighty thousand quids’ worth of damage to the Whittington and left two injured officers behind you when you walked out.’
‘When I was carried—’
‘Fix, what can I tell you? The heat didn’t die down yet. Your name is still John Q. Shit as far as the department is concerned. Frankly, they’d rather have Osama Bin Laden on the payroll than you. At least he helps towards the ethnic-recruitment quotas. Anyway, this is someone you know. An old friend of yours. So you can ask her yourself, and she can tell you a fuck of a lot more than I can.’
