Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  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 doesn’t even have any insurance.”

  Any slight temptation I felt toward 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 started, 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. Afterward 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 down all their details 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 it 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 here? 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, blond, 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 organization. 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 toward him, and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle of the fire extinguisher, and jerked it free from the remains of the windscreen, which fell like rice paper 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 started before I reached the stairs.

  I went back up to the flat and dialed 999. The police rolled around about an hour or so later—a rapid-response unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbors, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. As I’d more or less expected they ended up 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 100 percent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts had turned out, despite the OUT OF SERVICE notices pasted across them, to be working as well as ever. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm—Interurban—while 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’d almost had a heart attack from not surprise. The whole setup 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 housing as the metal buckled under the force of impact.

  Snapped off clean, 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 probably would’ve put it down to the maintenance engineer, but this was a council block, and the lifts got inspected only 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 nearly been bludgeoned to death by the force of gravity?

  Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind was starting to go long before he died, and one sign of it was 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, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to stick a knife in my back, like regular folks—presumably because they wanted my tragic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.

  And either way, I was feeling more curious 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?

  Six

  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 was a heart that would never beat again.

  “Meter’s running,” he said. He liked to say things like that because they fit 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 had the face for it, too—all squared-off chin and overluxuriant eyebrows—and he used it to scowl at me now. “I don’t owe you any favors, 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.

  Instead of answering, Coldwood dropped the heart—a sheep’s, judging by the size of it—back into the dish 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 in 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. “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, Detective Sergeant Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioral modeling 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 likes to go to—are purely notional.

  To show my good faith, I left that thought unspoken. “I’m not asking for any trade secrets anyway,” I told Coldwood, comfortable with the outrageous lie because the next sentence exposed it straightaway. “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 a 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 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.”

  He 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 is 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 with a BTEC Higher that he’ll happily wave in the face of the aforementioned Detective Sergeant Basquiat—a willowy blond with a pixieish 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 understood 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,” Cold-wood suggested. “Barnard had been beaten, burned, buggered, and bent backward. Then he’d been tenderized 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 Saint Pancras, and they say Hunter’s been a regular down there for the past three months. They hate his kind—skindivers, they call them. Gay men who come down to head off a punter but don’t charge for it. Hunter 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.”

  He’d finished wiping his hands and gone on to wash them under the tap and dry them on a tea towel. 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.

  “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 him, 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 quid worth of damage to the Whittington and left two injured officers behind 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 toward the ethnic recruitment quotas. Anyway, this is someone you know, an old friend. So you can ask her yourself, and she can tell you a fuck of a lot more than I can.”

  She? Someone I knew? Suspicion formed inside me, filling a small void left when my stomach dropped into my shoes. “Is this—?”

  “I met her last year when I was interviewing Sue Book, the verger at Saint Michael’s Church—you know, after it got set alight by those American satanists. Beautiful woman. I mean, you know—incredible. I was choked when I found out that she and Book were—”