Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  I sat down next to him on the edge of the bench, because he didn’t bother to move up and make room for me. His gaze flicked sideways to acknowledge me, then he went back to staring up through the leafless branches at the swag-bellied gray clouds. He was wearing black jeans and a bright red T-shirt. It made his unnatural pallor look all the more unsettling by contrast, which I guess was the point. Given the time of the year and the unkindness of the weather, it also flaunted the fact that he didn’t have a circulatory system.

  I tilted my head up, following his gaze. There was nothing to see up there except the black lattice of the branches against the sky—the rib cage of a monster waiting to be reborn. “Isn’t Mother Nature wonderful?” I remarked.

  Nicky snorted dryly. He does everything dryly, of course: no body fluids. “Castor,” he murmured, “the only mother around here is you. Don’t try to small talk me, and don’t piss me off, because I’m not in the mood.”

  “Fine. I won’t. I’d hate to spoil your mood, Nicky.”

  “So you want something or not? I didn’t come all this way to hear your usual bullshit.”

  “I offered to come to you,” I reminded him. “You saw me, raised, and I folded. And I’ve got to say, this is a whole new you.”

  He looked at me again, for a second or two longer this time, and shrugged as he looked away again. “I’m having some work done on my place,” he said simply.

  That was intended to shut me up, and it worked. Ever since he died, Nicky has been keeping house in a derelict cinema in Walthamstow, and it had been trashed not so long ago by a pack of crazed American satanists who knew about Nicky in the first place only because of his association with me. He’d been able to claim a heap of money back on the insurance, and he’d told me he had some big ideas about what to do with it, but he’d refused to be pinned down on the specifics.

  The whole experience seemed to have changed him subtly—or maybe not so subtly. He’d been turning in to one of those life-forms whose house is part of their bodies, like a snail or a tortoise. Now, apparently, he’d entered a different phase of his afterlife cycle.

  By way of changing the subject—and coming to the point—I handed him the key and the A to Z, which I’d been carrying around with me all day. He pocketed the key without a word, knowing that I wanted it matched to a batch number and a location. Then he switched his attention to the book. He turned it over in his hand as though checking it for bugs, then flipped it open at the first page and started to scan the list on the inside front cover.

  “It belonged to John Gittings,” I said. “And you’re in the middle column. Any idea why?”

  Nicky looked bored as he scanned the names. “John the Git was one of my regulars,” he said.

  “You did data raids for him?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Recently?”

  “No.”

  “But you did see him recently?”

  “What are you, Castor, my father confessor? Yeah, I saw him.”

  “In the line of work?”

  “Yes. And before you ask, no, I won’t tell you what the work was. It was his business, now it’s mine. You’d be choked if you heard I was advertising your wheelings and dealings to everyone else who waved a fifty under my nose.”

  I nodded. He had me there. “Okay,” I said. “I respect your professional integrity. But could you look through the rest of the shit in there and see if it makes any sense to you? John spent the last few weeks before he died writing out those names again and again, so they must have meant something to him. Or maybe there’s a code that I’m not picking up. Either way, I’d be grateful for a second opinion.”

  Nicky flicked to the back of the book and looked over the list there. The final word, SMASHNA, glared up at us from the nest of ink swirls.

  “Smashna,” I mused aloud. It didn’t sound like a real word. Maybe it was an acronym of some kind.

  “It’s Russian,” said Nicky. “Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.” He closed the book and leaned slightly toward me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. “What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?”

  “Let’s leave that open for now,” I parried. “There’s something else I need, and it’s big.”

  “Yeah?” Nicky’s offhand tone suggested there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him. “So what’s that?”

  “I was wondering if you could pick up something for me,” I said. “The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.”

  “Go on.”

  “Memorabilia.”

  “Relating to?”

  “A dead gangster. A killer from way back.”

  Nicky’s head swiveled around fast, and he stared at me for a few moments in perplexed silence. It seemed like something of an extreme reaction. Okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections. Still, something was bothering him enough that he hadn’t been able to hide it.

  “I thought we had a no-bullshit rule in place, Castor,” he said, his tone unreadable.

  “You think this is bullshit, Nicky?”

  “Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now—” He hesitated, shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.

  “It’s not about John. It’s a different case.” I put out a hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually touch him. He hates to be touched by the living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running. And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons, it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal space. “Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though I didn’t know you had one until now.”

  He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. “It may not be something you can help me with, in any case. There was a gangster back in the sixties named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get ahold of her and sent her to the chair.”

  “An American gangster,” Nicky said with careful emphasis.

  “Yeah. Sorry, I thought I said that already. Anyway, you know the way these things work, probably better than I do. There’s always a market for celebrity souvenirs. And it’s kind of like an iceberg—some of it’s above the water, most of it isn’t.”

  “Sure,” Nicky said. He seemed mollified. Whatever I’d said to upset him, he’d either bounced back from it or filed it away for later. I still couldn’t figure out what had gotten under his skin, but right then didn’t seem like the best time to ask.

  “So,” I summed up, shielding my eyes as the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds, “you think you could lay your hands on something?”

  He nodded a few times, not in answer to the question but acknowledging that it was an interesting commission. “Funnily enough,” he said, shooting me another narrow-eyed stare as if warning me off making any smart one-liners, “I’ve got some contacts in that line of business.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding.” He slid along the bench, out of the patch of sunlight. He might have reclaimed the day, but he was clearly going to be selective about which parts of it he kept. “I’m not making any promises. Stuff like that doesn’t come up for sale too often, and when it does, it tends to go for crazy prices. Supply and demand. There’s a whole lot of sickos out there, and only so many dead serial killers. You might not want to pay the asking price.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.”<
br />
  “Buy it, sell it on again,” Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession, with a commission to be made twice over. “Yeah, maybe. Who’s this ‘we,’ by the way, and what do you want the little keepsake for?”

  I got up. “Call me if you get a bite,” I said. “Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s life,” Nicky observed.

  When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.

  Eleven

  SOMETIMES SYNCHRONICITY IS YOUR FRIEND. EVERYTHING flows together, and the thing you’re looking for turns out to be in the first place where your groping fingers come down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t feeling like one.

  I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café Bar, which, going by the postcode, was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t know whom I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t want to miss it. In the meantime, I called Jan Hunter from the middle of Trafalgar Square to tell her how my meeting with Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet; I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for a second opinion. I didn’t mention Kale, either, not at first. I was afraid of offering Jan any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder. So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying a passenger, I asked why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s theory that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line went very quiet for a moment.

  “Incipient psychosis,” she corrected me at last. “Not full-blown.” She sounded defensive but not apologetic. “I just thought that if I told you Doug was losing his mind, you might not agree to help me. And really, it’s not relevant—not to the case. It’s only come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.”

  “I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,” I reminded her. “And then he went AWOL for a week and didn’t even call you.”

  “But he was still himself.” Her voice was thick with tears. “Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself, it wasn’t like he was mad. Just… like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer. I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!”

  “Maybe not,” I allowed. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think Dr. Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.”

  “You don’t?” Through the tears, hope and relief showed like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. “Then what is it? What’s happening to him?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I hedged. “And Jan, I hate to say this, but it may not make any difference. Not in terms of the verdict. But there’s a lot more to it than the police have their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to get you some answers. We’ve got a window—probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary—Detective Sergeant Coldwood—had to say, the trial date hasn’t come down yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck, so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid—” That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous and formless all of my speculations were. “Well, whatever I turn up,” I finished lamely, “I’ll hand it over to you, and you can decide for yourself what to do with it.”

  “So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mr. Castor?”

  I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I didn’t have a bastard clue. “I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,” I said. “But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the why of it, or at least get some idea of—”

  “‘Why’ isn’t an issue,’” Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. “She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.”

  “And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.”

  Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the obvious answer: Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman… Meanwhile, my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I were subconsciously looking for a way out of the conversation. A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big it spilled all the way down to the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons fly from one equestrian statue to the next; the cat’s tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it. An art student, or maybe a hobbyist, was sketching Charles I in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she sat cross-legged on the stones.

  It was almost as though Jan could see the chasm yawning up ahead of her and knew instinctively to veer away from it. “I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “Whatever you can find, Mr. Castor—whatever you can tell me—”

  I could have taken the invitation right there, but like a coward, I veered, too. I grabbed a question from my mind’s cluttered desktop and waved it like Chamberlain waving his famous autograph from Adolf Hitler.

  “Doug mentioned spraining his ankle,” I said. “Was that something that really happened?”

  “Yes.” Jan sounded surprised. “A few months ago. He was coming down a ladder, and his foot slipped. He was in agony. The stupid bastards running that site didn’t even have a first-aid kit. And that meant they wouldn’t even let anyone call an ambulance, because they didn’t want anyone to twig that they weren’t up to code. Doug had to limp around the corner—two of his mates carried him part of the way—so he could make the call from somewhere else and not get them into trouble. Sodding cowboys. He’s always worked for sodding cowboys!”

  I looked at my watch. It was half past eleven, and I really needed to be hitting the tube. I told Jan very quickly what Juliet and I were going to try to do, and I told her I’d let her know how it came out. Then I hung up and went underground.

  The Reflections Café Bar turned out to be on Wilton Road, directly opposite the front entrance to Victoria Station and offering a top-notch view of the bus shelter.

  The name promised something eclectic and cosmopolitan. The reality was a narrow glass booth jutting out onto the pavement, containing a coffee machine, a fridge full of Carling Black Label, a countertop, and six chairs. A teenage girl in a maid’s uniform that looked as though it had been ordered from a fetish shop took my order for a double espresso with a nod and a smile, and I sat down. She was the only person in the place apart from a stocky, balding man in a drab-looking mid-brown suit. He had a film of sweat on his face as he worked through the Times sudoku, as though sudoku were an illicit thrill of some kind.

  I sat down well within his field of vision, but he didn’t react and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was five past twelve by this time, so there was a chance that my man had already been and gone. That seemed more likely when my coffee came and he still hadn’t shown. Taking a sip of the tepid liquid, I stared out the window at the bus shelter across the street and idly scanned the faces of the people waiting for the number 73. None of them so much as glanced at the window of the café; none of them looked as though they were trying to pluck up the courage to step inside.

  The waitress was lost in the intricacies of cleaning out the coffee machine’s drip tray. The
bald guy was working on his puzzle. Nobody seemed to want to make contact with me. Probably time to chalk this one up to experience and walk away. Might as well finish my coffee first, though.

  And while I did that, I scanned the faces at the bus stop again. Most of them were new, but one of them had been there while half a dozen buses came and went. He was a skinny guy in his late twenties or thereabouts, in an LL Cool J T-shirt, black jacket, and jeans. His nose was the size and shape of a rudder and made the rest of his face look like it had been arranged around it in a space that wasn’t quite wide enough. He had a sallow, unhealthy complexion and the trailing wires of a pair of headphones dangling from his ears. His crisply ringleted head nodded gently, double-four time, as he soaked up the vibrations of whatever was playing on his iPod. He still hadn’t looked at me, or if he had, I hadn’t caught him at it.

  The usual place. Maybe I’d jumped to conclusions. Maybe the late Mr. Gittings had outparanoided me yet again. Leave the matchbook, yeah, and the phone number, but don’t quite join the dots, because then everyone else will see the shape of what you’re making. Maybe the usual place was somewhere you could watch from the Reflections Café Bar.

  I finished my coffee, paid up at the counter, and walked out onto the street. The guy at the bus stop moved off at the same time, still—as far as I could tell—without glancing in my direction. I followed him at a medium-fast stroll, crossing the street as he tacked away to the south toward Bridge Place.

  We were in the maze of bus lanes and bollards in front of Victoria, and I thought he might veer off to the right and go into the station. He didn’t, though, and he didn’t look behind him. He kept ambling along, his head still bobbing slightly in time to his personal sound track. I kept pace with him, ten feet behind. I slid my hand inside my coat, found my mobile, and took it out. Almost out of charge, I noticed—already showing empty, in fact—but there ought to be enough juice for this, I thought. Pressing the recent calls button, I found the number I’d dialed the night before—the one John had written down on the matchbook cover—selected it, and called it up.