I limped through into the bathroom, so overwhelmed with tiredness that I felt like my body was a puppet with some of the strings cut. I splashed cold water in my face, stripping one layer off the exhaustion and revealing a lot more layers underneath.
Try to forget about Juliet, at least for now. What she’d done, terrible though it was, was no surprise—and it was a big silver lining that she’d managed to do it without killing anyone. How long that would last was another question altogether. If she just let Myriam Kale walk away in Doug Hunter’s body after the jailbreak, then it was only a matter of time before Kale met some guy who pushed all the wrong buttons for her. Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere for the maid to find when she came to change the sheets.
I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try; it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames, instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.
Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus long enough to know what kind of moves demons favor and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done. But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist adapted to the terrain and the situation by whatever passed in hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.
That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside—someone who was writing him briefing notes and giving him tips on strategy. Take backup, take lots of backup, because youre certain to need it. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do—and exactly what John had been calling me to arrange. Me and maybe Stu Langley, too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion, and John had to go in alone.
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt. I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor facade, but I saw someone else’s face staring back at me: John’s face from my dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.
Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.
The whistle?
Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.
Maybe I had some backup already. Maybe John could pitch in for me in the way I’d refused to do for him.
Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions—my favored location for all flat valuables—until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria. I took it over to the table, laid it down, and smoothed out the worst of the creases.
The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant. Begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal people. The skeleton of a song—not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding, on which the rest of the song could be built.
That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.
The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I first saw them: vertical flecks of ink densely but, as far as I could see, randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally, a few marks interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a T or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk. Nothing to indicate how any of it fitted together or how it could be translated into sound.
Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument. I picked out tunes in a rough and ready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than anything else. So I didn’t have much to compare this gibberish to.
If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I’d need an expert.
I picked up the phone and dialed from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over and my thread-stripped brain had transposed two digits.
Tried again.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.
“Louise?” I said.
The same voice, a little sharper. “Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Felix Castor.”
“Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?”
“What’s the name of your band, Lou?”
“My band?” she echoed with pained incomprehension.
“You still play, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s the name of—”
“The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—”
“No,” I interrupted her, “I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.”
Twenty-one
HIS REAL NAME WAS JAMIE POMFRET, LOUISE HAD SAID, but he played under the assumed splendor of Speedo Plank. I’d arranged to meet him at noon, allowing a generous seven hours for restorative unconsciousness. When I woke up, my head banging and my throat feeling like someone had tamped a couple of bagfuls of silica down into it, it was one-thirty. I called Louise again, getting a livelier and more varied torrent of abuse this time because she was properly awake. I apologized profusely, swore to God and a bunch of other guys that I’d never pull this shit on her again, and got her to call up Mr. Plank and reschedule.
Then I called Juliet’s house, but it was Susan who picked up. She sounded cheerful enough until I told her where I was and asked if she’d heard from her other half. “But Jules is with you,” Susan protested, confused.
“Not anymore,” I admitted. I told her about my little difference of opinion with Juliet at the Golden Café in Brokenshire, omitting some of the more colorful details, like Juliet kicking my arse around the room. Susan got more and more unhappy as she listened.
“But how will she get home?” she protested. “Felix, you shouldn’t have left her there. She doesn’t know how to behave without scaring or upsetting people. She’s going to get into trouble.”
The anxiety in her voice made me ashamed, even though there hadn’t been any point in the proceedings where I’d felt like I had a choice. “She just walked out on me,” I said, hearing the words as I said them and realizing how lame and evasive they sounded. “She was really angry, and she warned me not to follow her. Which I wasn’t in any position to do, in any case. Long story, don’t ask.”
“But does she have her ticket? Her passport?”
“Susan,” I said, trying to head off her alarm and anger, “she’s back in the country already. She got back before I did. If she hasn’t come home, that’s because she’s been… well, busy with other things. I was just hoping she might have gotten in touch with—”
“What kind of other things, Felix? What do you mean?”
I hedged. I didn’t want to tell Susan Book that the woman [sic] she loved had been involved in a jailbreak—to free another woman (although one who was forty years dead and very convincingly disguised as a man) so that woman wouldn’t have to stand trial for murder. It was probably a conversation that Juliet and Susan needed to have between themselves at some point, maybe over a glass of wine and a candlelit supper for two.
“It’s something to do with the work she was doing for the Met,” I said. Truth as far as it went. “I’m sure she’s fine, but it was something she felt very strongly about, and she didn’t want to wait. That’s what I need to talk to her about, in fact. I’ve got some new i
nformation that I want to go over with her. If she comes home or gets in touch, could you tell her to call me?”
Susan said she’d pass the message along, but her tone was cold. She was blaming me for all this, in spite of my weasel words. As far as she was concerned, she’d invited me over for dinner, and I’d dragged a big bag of crap and chaos in with me and dumped it all over her floor. Even without knowing the whole story, she knew that much, and she was right.
I fixed myself a quick breakfast of toast and dry cereal, the milk in the fridge having transubstantiated into something green and malevolent. My neck and back ached so badly, I was moving like an arthritic granddad. The day was off to a great start.
Nicky had said they had Gary Coldwood in traction over at the Royal Free. A hop, a skip, and a jump, and I was treading the streets of Hampstead, a place where I’ve always felt as welcome as a slug in a salad. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten to shave. Or maybe it did. At least people didn’t seem inclined to intrude on my privacy.
There were two uniformed cops on duty outside the private ward where Coldwood was holed up, but they didn’t stop me from going in or ask to take my name or anything. I wasn’t sure whether they were there to stop Gary from leaving—in which case they probably should have had more faith in his broken legs—or if they’d been assigned to protect him from his screaming fans. Either way, they were earning their overtime fairly painlessly.
Coldwood wasn’t feeling any pain, either, but that was because he was doped up to the eyeballs and only about one tenth conscious. I sat there for ten minutes or so, wondering if he was going to surface far enough to realize that he wasn’t alone. I wasn’t even sure why I was here, or at least where the balance lay between apologizing and debriefing.
Eventually, I admitted defeat and got up to leave. Coldwood mumbled something, but it wasn’t to me, and it wasn’t intelligible. As I headed for the door, though, a nurse walked briskly in and cut off my escape. She was about forty and built like a Victorian wardrobe: a solid trapezoid with a single undifferentiated mound of breast like a continental shelf.
“Who are you?” she demanded brusquely.
“Friend of the family,” I hedged.
“Well, you’ll have to come back after I’ve given the sergeant his bed bath.”
“I was hoping I could have a word with him about—”
“After his bed bath. Move along, please, or I’ll do the both of you together.”
I was about to protest at this ugly threat, but the noise of our voices made Coldwood stir and open his eyes, so we both shut up hurriedly.
“Fix,” he mumbled. “Is that— Fuck, it is.”
I hurried back to his bedside, ignoring the toxic glare of the nurse. “It’s me, Gary,” I said, kneeling down beside him in a posture familiar from a million tear-jerking scenes.
“Yeah.” His voice was slurred and slow. “Thought I was just having a bad dream.”
“You dream about me? Then what they’re saying down at Uxbridge Road nick is true.”
“Shut the—” He tailed off in the middle of the abuse, his eyes defocusing. When his gaze found me again, he winced with the effort of concentration, obviously not sure what the hell I was doing there.
“Ruthven, Todd and Clay,” I reminded him. “You had something juicy.”
He nodded slowly. “Client base.”
“Big-time gangsters?”
A shake of the head. “Judges. Politicos. Big businessmen. Ten pages of—fucking Who’s Who.”
“So?”
“So they meet once a month for a shindig at a fucking crematorium. Why’d you suppose that is?”
“They all went to the same school. Gary, once a calendar month, or—”
The nurse interrupted me, looming at my shoulder. “I think you’re getting Sergeant Coldwood agitated,” she chided me coldly.
“Lunar month,” Coldwood mumbled. “Twenty-eight days. Every twenty-eight days. When it’s—”
Dark of the moon.
Inscription night.
Its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together.
I clapped Coldwood on the shoulder, even though he probably didn’t feel it, and stood up. “Thanks, Gary,” I said. “Feel better.” When I left, the nurse was putting on rubber gloves. I wondered why people fetishized those things. They always scared the shit out of me.
I met Jamie/Speedo at the National Gallery, where, in his day job, he worked as a tour guide. That didn’t seem to fit the profile, somehow, but maybe I stereotype drummers unfairly.
He was a bit of a letdown to look at as well. Very young, for one thing, and very shortsighted for another, wearing thick lenses of the kind that make you look not so much like an intellectual as some human-alien hybrid. His hair was short and neatly combed, with a faint sheen to it, as of gel or pomade. When he spoke in a quiet and diffident voice, I was inclined to think that I’d been put on a bum steer.
“You’re a friend of Lou’s,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“So what can I do for you? I can give you twenty minutes, then I’ve got to meet my next group.”
We were in the gallery’s main atrium, in between the cloakroom counter and the shop. Pomfret had been waiting at the desk when I arrived, visibly keen to get this over with, and he didn’t seem any happier with me at first glance than I was with him. Then again, given the state of my face, I probably looked like a bare-knuckle fighter fallen on hard times.
I took the sheet music out of my pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to him. He scanned it with a critical eye. “What’s the tune?” he asked at last.
“That’s what I’m asking you,” I answered. “Is there a tune in there? You’re a drummer, so you’d know, right?”
He looked up from the music, shaking his head very emphatically. “No. I wouldn’t. This is only a rhythm map. It’s in hybrid notation, so it’s not the easiest thing in the world to follow, but I’ve used both systems before, so I can roll with it. The thing is, it doesn’t give you a tune. It only gives you the rhythms. And this one’s really complicated. If I knew what the tune was, I’d be able to see how it all fits together.”
“If I knew what the tune was, Speedo,” I growled irritably, “I wouldn’t be here. The tune’s what I’m looking for.”
Pomfret fired up all of a sudden, as though he had a reheat button and someone had just hit it. “Now, why are you pulling that crap on me?” he asked on a rising tone.
“What crap?” I asked, looking over my shoulder and then back at him, as if maybe he’d been hit by some crap flung by a chance passerby.
“Calling me Speedo. I’m Jamie here. Jamie Pomfret. My stage name’s not a stick for you to poke me with, man. I don’t want to hear it again in this conversation. Not if you expect me to do you a favor. I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, and I don’t have to put up with it. Okay?”
“Okay,” I acknowledged, giving him a gesture that was halfway between a shrug and a hands-in-the-air surrender. “I’m sorry. I’m working in the dark on this, and it’s putting me on edge. I didn’t mean to sound like I’m taking the piss out of you.”
Only partially mollified, Pomfret nodded. “Well, don’t,” he said. “Just don’t, and we’ll get along fine. I’ll show you how the system works—what you can get out of this sheet and what you can’t. And that’s all I’ll have time for, so you’ll have to do the rest yourself. Let’s go to the café.”
The café was more or less deserted, which suited me fine. I bought a cappuccino for Pomfret and a double espresso for me, adding a packet of crisps as a token gesture toward lunch—or whatever meal my jetlagged intestines were expecting to receive.
Pomfret took a sip of his coffee, wiped the foam from his upper lip with the back of his thumb, and spread the sheet music out on the table. “Okay,” he said. “Can you read ordinary sheet music?”
“Barely,” I said. “I don’t come across it that much, but I know what all the bits and pieces mean.”
“Okay. So you’re used to the idea of the stave as a way of indicating a sequence of notes, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“In drum music, they don’t. Obviously. How could they? So when drum music is done like this, on standard-form music paper, it uses the stave to do something else. Each line stands for a voice—one of the drums in the rig. Top line is high hat. Middle line, or anywhere around it, is the snare drum. Bottom line is the bass. So each of these vertical strokes is a hit on one of the drums. Unless they’re crossed, like this.” He pointed to one crossed line, then another, then a third. “Those are probably cymbals.”
I blinked. It wasn’t that this was so hard to absorb; it was that I was already being taken in a direction I hadn’t expected to go in. When John Gittings did an exorcism he used a little handheld tambour. Anything more than that tended to be a bit unwieldy in the field. “So this is scored for a whole drum kit?” I said.
Pomfret nodded. “Yeah, most likely. I mean, you can make the lines stand for any assortment of drums; doesn’t have to be high-snare-bass-cymbal. But it usually is.”
“Okay,” I said, letting the point ride for now. “What about all these other marks? Are they letters? That one looks like a T, and that one could be a K. And we’ve got asterisks, Morse code dots and dashes…”
“That’s frame notation,” Pomfret said. “Different system altogether. Different letters stand for different sounds. D is for ‘doum’: That’s the bass sound. T and K—‘tek’ and ‘ka’—both stand for the treble sound, depending on whether you’re using the strong hand or the weak hand to make it. Asterisks or dashes stand for rests. The thing is, you’d normally use this system for a hand drum, not a full rig. It’s a bit weird to see the two being thrown in together like this. It’s like—” He hesitated, frowning, as though he weren’t entirely happy with whatever he was about to say.
“Like what?” I demanded.
“It’s like the drummer was scoring for different players—at least two, maybe three—but he wanted to plan it all out on the one sheet because that’s how he was seeing it in his head. As one massively complicated rhythm made out of all these separate bits and pieces.”
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