Dead Men's Boots (48 page)

H
IS 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 information 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.”

I stared at the sheet, trying to translate the dense, scribbled marks into sounds inside my mind. They still defeated me.
“Show me,” I said.

Pomfret sucked his teeth. “Easy to say. I need something to be the drums.” He looked around the table. “Okay,” he said, “let’s
give it a go.” He took his empty coffee cup and turned it upside down in its saucer. “High hat,” he said. Then he did the
same with mine. “Snare.” The sugar basin, a steel cylinder full of sealed packets, he dumped out on the table. The basin itself,
upturned, was placed next to the coffee cups. “Bass.” That left two spoons, which he put one inside the other, bowl end toward
him. “Cymbals.”

He demonstrated each item. Flicking the saucers made the coffee cups rattle briefly and hollowly. Thumping the sugar basin
made a slightly deeper note. Tapping the spoons made them scrape against each other with a metallic ring. “This is how it
starts,” he muttered. Rattle rattle thump rattle rattle ring thump ring. “Then you get a backbeat coming in here like this—just
the bass.” Thump rest thump thump rest thump rest thump thump rest. “Okay, and now this. The hand drums. Beat then break.
Beat then two breaks. You do that—on the edge of the table.”