Dead Men's Boots (13 page)

“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—”

“You mean Juliet Salazar,” I said bleakly, cutting him off before he could go on to tell me what a waste it is that Juliet
is a lesbian—or worse, start speculating on what it might take to turn her around.

“Salazar,” he repeated distantly, looking past me in a way that made it quite clear he was still seeing her in the private
theater of the visual cortex. “Yeah. Got it in one.”

I waited patiently until he pulled himself out of the happy reverie. It cost him an effort. “So anyway,” he said, “you said
there were two things you wanted to see me about. What’s the other one?”

“Someone’s trying to kill me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah.” I told him about the falling lift and the man-size footprint in the oil and the shit on the roof of the car. He
was interested, but he didn’t want to show it.

“I hate it when you play junior detective, Castor,” he said ruefully. “Some other poor bastard always ends up getting the
sticky end of the lollipop.”

“Yeah, well, everyone’s entitled to a second opinion, Gary. Metal fatigue? Give me a fucking break!”

“If the cable’s been tampered with, it’ll be easy to tell,” Coldwood allowed. “I’ll send a team down to get an impression
of that footprint, anyway. Probably get some virtuals off the cable, too, if the gent wasn’t wearing gloves. You got any idea
who he might have been? Whose cage have you been rattling?”

I didn’t want to mention John’s letter. It sounded too much like one of Nicky Heath’s paranoid fantasies. I just shrugged.

“Your Breathers mentioned a huge fat man. Have you pissed off any huge fat men lately?” he asked.

“Not that I can think of.”

“Have you even met any?”

“Well, yeah, there was one,” I said reluctantly.

“Go on.”

“Guy named Leonard. I don’t know his last name. He works at a law office over in Stoke Newington. Ruthven, Todd and Clay.
I saw him for, like, five minutes as I was waiting to see one of the partners. But he did seem to be staring at me a lot.”

“He’s a lawyer?”

“No, I don’t think so. Some kind of clerk, maybe. He was fixing the photocopier.”

“Okay.” Coldwood looked thoughtful. “Ruthven, Todd and Clay. I’ll look into it. Tell you if I find anything.”

“Officially or unofficially?”

“The latter. I do homicide, Fix, remember? Not metal fatigue.”

    
Seven

T
HERE’S SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT JULIET, just so—unlike, say, Detective Sergeant Coldwood—you get the right picture
in your head to start with. Oh, don’t misunderstand me; she’s every bit as drop-dead gorgeous as he said. It’s just that in
Juliet’s case, the “drop-dead” part of that phrase is more than a simple intensifier.

Juliet is a succubus—a sex demon. Her real name is Ajulutsikael, so you can see why she doesn’t use it much anymore. She feeds
by stoking up your lust to the point where you’re about to drown in your own drool and then consuming you, body and soul.
She’s tried to explain to me why the lust is a necessary component in all of this: It provides a conduit, a psychic drinking
straw that she can use to suck up your spirit like a blood-warm milk shake.

There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could
say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know; but if I’m honest, what I
was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process
with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.

Going back before that, Juliet tried to make a meal of me once but stopped halfway. In some ways, halfway is where I’ve been
ever since—unable even to decide whether I’m relieved or frustrated that she didn’t go through with it. Either way, I find
it curiously hard to bear that she’s shacking up with someone else—someone who (because she’s female and Juliet’s triggers
are all male hormones) can get physical with her without arousing her other appetites.

All of which is by way of an explanation for why I didn’t take up Gary Coldwood’s suggestion and go and talk to Juliet as
soon as I left his flat. There’s only so much suffering a body can stand, and in any case, there was somewhere else I needed
to be. I took the coward’s way out and told myself that my duty to John Gittings’s restless spirit came first: that and my
curiosity as to what the letter hidden in the pocket watch was all about. If it had anything to do with me almost taking the
express elevator all the way to Ropey Doyle’s basement, I felt like I probably ought to know about it.

I was walking up the steps toward Carla’s flat just as Todd was coming down. Four men in identical suits of funereal black,
with identically impassive faces, walked behind him. Todd himself was jauntily dressed in a pale gray pinstripe.

“I take it you’ve just made a delivery,” I said.

Todd glanced in mild surprise from my face to the rolled-up sleeping bag I was carrying over my shoulder. “Yes,” he said.
“The coffin is in the living room. Are you staying the night, Mr. Castor?”

“That I am, Mr. Todd.”

The lawyer nodded. “That’s good. Mrs. Gittings probably shouldn’t be alone tonight.” He made to walk on past me.

“One quick question,” I said. “When John came in to see you about changing his will, how did he look?”

Todd turned to look back at me with a stare that was suddenly all cold professionalism. “In what sense?”

I’d hoped to avoid specifics while I fished for random gobbets of information, but evidently, lawyers have built-in radar
for that kind of thing.

I gestured vaguely. “In the sense of—did he appear lucid to you? Rational? Or was he looking a little frayed at the edges?”

Todd answered without even a microsecond’s pause. “He was in his right mind. Entirely lucid, to use your expression. If he
hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to take legal instructions from him. He looked tired. Stressed, perhaps. A man with
a lot weighing on his mind. But if his suicide was the result of any kind of—mental decay, then it hadn’t started when I spoke
with him. Or at least it hadn’t begun to show in the way he talked and acted. I’d have said he was as sane as you or me.”