Dead Men's Boots (9 page)

“Yeah?”

“Could you—could you come over and be here with me? When they bring John’s body back?”

I thought about that one for all of two seconds. “I’d love to, Carla,” I lied, “but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll
have my mobile with me, though. If the geist— I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to
sleep again.”

I hung up before she could find another angle to come at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone, and
I left a message there. That ought to have left me feeling off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.

It didn’t, though. I prowled around the flat, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able
to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block
was like a howl of pain sampled and played back through some aeolian synthesizer. It made me think about the late John Gittings,
prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes
of noisy passion, which meant they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other sometime within the next hour.

I felt the call of the wild, so I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if
they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.

Okay, “the call of the wild” is relative, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about; but you’ve got to love a pub that’s
painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit. And the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in
Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.

It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students
were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited
at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then, when he came over, I nodded toward the IPA pump. “Usual,” I said.

“Someone wants to meet you, Fix,” he said as he pulled the pint.

“What sort of someone?”

“Woman.”

“Young? Old? Nun? Policewoman?”

“See for yourself.”

As he handed me the pint, he nodded, barely perceptibly, off to my right. I handed him a fiver, took a sip on the beer, and
casually took a glance in that direction.

There was a woman sitting by herself at a table off to one side of the door, dressed in a smart cutaway jacket over shirt
and slacks, the whole outfit built around a motif of rust red and black. Something about her look reminded me of Carla: the
intangible suggestion of widows’ weeds, which was odd and unsettling because this woman couldn’t have been over thirty. Dark
brown hair in a tightly curled perm, bronzed eyelids, and metallic highlights on her lips. She was staring at the wall, but
I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing it. The gin and tonic in front of her hadn’t been touched.

I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted; and maybe I jumped at
the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table and gave
her a nod as she turned to stare at me. “Paul said you were asking after me,” I said.

She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. “Felix Castor?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.” She put out a hand and I shook it. “I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re
good. I’d like to hire you.”

“Okay if I sit down?” I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully
neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at. Given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it
might be kind of a loaded question.

I took a seat opposite Jan, and she swiveled to face me. “So what’s the problem?” I asked. The standard opening phrase for
doctors, mechanics, and ghostbreakers.

“My husband,” she said, then seemed to hesitate. “He’s—” The pause went on. Whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over
it. I tried to help.

“Passed on?” I suggested.

She looked surprised. “No! He’s on remand at Holloway.” Another leaden pause. “For rape and murder.”

“Okay,” I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“And he didn’t do it, Mr. Castor. Doug looks really tough, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s— I’ve got to find the real
killer. I want her to tell everybody what she did. So they’ll let Doug go.”

I noted the female pronoun in passing. This was getting stranger by the second. It was also veering gracefully away from what
I think of as my core competencies.

“I’m an exorcist, Mrs. Hunter,” I reminded her as gently as I could manage. “I could only find this killer for you if she
happened to be—”

Before I could get the word out, Jan cut across me with the inevitable rejoinder. “She is, Mr. Castor. She’s dead. She’s been
dead for forty years.”

    
Four

I
STARED AT HER FOR A MOMENT, LETTING THE IDEA GROW on me.

“Okay,” I said at last. “Provisionally, I mean. Okay with provisos. You’d better tell me the whole story. Then I’ll tell you
if there’s anything I can do for you.”

By way of answer, Jan Hunter rummaged in her handbag and came up with a photo that she handed to me. It showed a man the same
age as Jan or maybe a couple of years older, with a suedehead haircut and slightly overlarge ears, looking to the camera with
a goofy grin while holding up two fish on a hook. The background was a riverbank; the props, a canvas chair and a keep-net.
He was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a wedding ring, and that was all I could tell you about him from memory. It wasn’t a face
that left a deep impression.

“Doug,” I said.

“Look at that face,” Jan said with a slight tremor in her voice. “Can you imagine him hurting anyone? Let alone killing—”

“He did those two fish,” I said, trying to inject a little reality back into the proceedings. She gave me a wounded look,
and I shrugged an apology. “Why don’t you just tell me what happened?”

She looked down at the photo, drawing in a long, ragged breath. It was mind over matter. I saw her shoveling the emotions
back inside and locking them down. When she looked at me again, she was almost clinically calm.

“Just the facts, ma’am,” she said, presumably being Dan Aykroyd rather than Jack Webb.

“To start with.”

So she told them to me. And they were as nasty a set as I’d ever come across.

The twenty-sixth of January. Sometime after four p.m. A man named Alastair Barnard, age forty-nine, checked in to a hotel
room in King’s Cross along with another, younger man—this other man described as having close-cropped mid-brown hair and brown
eyes and wearing a black donkey jacket with a green paint stain on the left sleeve. The hotel in question was the Paragon;
it rents by the hour because the clientele it caters to are the prostitutes who work the backstreets off Goodsway and Battle
Bridge Road.

The desk clerk, one Christopher Merrill, gave them a key—room 17, which offered a fine view of the freight yard. He assumed
that the younger man was a rent boy bringing his work in off the streets, but he didn’t ask any questions or make any small
talk, because you don’t mess with your core business.

Normally, the clerk would have expected to see the two men emerge again half an hour later and walk away in different directions.
In this case, it didn’t happen, but the clerk didn’t see anything unusual in that because he’d forgotten all about them. It
was a Friday afternoon, and there were a lot of comings and goings—nothing compared to the traffic that would be coming through
later in the evening, but plenty to keep the clerk busy.

But when nine o’clock rolled around and the pressure on the rooms started building up, he noticed that that key was still
out. Five hours? Even with a double dose of Viagra and a pint of amyl nitrate, nobody can keep it up that long. And now they
owed him money, because they’d only paid for an hour. With the sour suspicion that the men had fucked and run, he summoned
the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta, who was the only other guy on the Paragon’s daytime staff. Together they took the master key
up to the second floor and unlocked the door.

“Barnard was on the floor,” Jan said, frowning slightly as though quoting from memory. “He’d fallen off the bed, and he’d
brought the sheets and the coverlet with him. He was all tangled up in them so you could only see him from the waist up. His
head had been smashed into pulp.”

The desk clerk started screaming, which brought people running from the other rooms. Most of them took one look at the devastation
and fled. None had come forward since. It was the cleaner who called the police, explaining in heavily accented English that
there’d been an accident of some kind and a man was dead.

The cops dismissed the accident hypothesis as soon as they walked in the door. Barnard had been hit more than two dozen times
with something hard and heavy, wielded with frenzied energy. Other things—crueler and sicker things—had been done to him,
too, presumably before the hammer came down. He’d died on his stomach, crawling across the floor away from the bed, trying
to make it to the door.

As far as the damage to his skull went, there were two different kinds of wounds. Some of them had been made with something
blunt and round-ended; some were narrower and had penetrated right through the bone instead of impacting on it. Preempting
the forensics team who arrived later, one of the uniformed constables—the only one with the stomach to get close enough to
see—immediately and confidently predicted that when the implement used on Mr. Barnard was found, it would turn out to have
been a claw hammer.

“Was he right?” I asked.

Jan halted in her recitation, which had assumed a deadpan, running-on-automatic quality. “They haven’t found it yet,” she
said. “Why?”

“If the weapon was a hammer,” I said, picking my words carefully, “I guess you’re talking about a certain degree of premeditation.
It couldn’t have been a—crime of passion, spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The killer brought the thing in with him.”

I was aware that I’d used the male pronoun, not the female. But unless I’d miscounted somewhere, there wasn’t a woman in the
case yet. In fact, if memory served—“You mentioned rape,” I said. “Rape and murder.”

Jan nodded. “This man—Barnard—he’d had what they call ‘receptive anal sex.’ And it had been rough.”

“Rough enough to have been nonconsensual?”

“Rough enough to raise a doubt. There was—damage.”

It was time for the make-or-break question. “Where does Doug fit in to all this?”

Jan dropped her gaze to the table, where the photo of her husband was still lying. “He hadn’t even gone a hundred yards,”
she said almost matter-of-factly. “He had blood all over him, so people were staring at him, getting out of his way. Someone
called the police, and they just routed the call to one of the cars that had been sent out to the Paragon. When the squad
car got to Cheney Road, they didn’t even have to ask—people saw them coming along the road, pointed the way, and they found
Doug sitting on the edge of the pavement a block up from the station. Just sitting there, staring at his hands like he couldn’t
believe what he was seeing. They brought him in right there. Then they got a DNA match and charged him.”

“A DNA match?” I echoed. “Then—”

She didn’t flinch. Under the circumstances, that was mightily impressive. “Yes. It was my husband’s semen they found inside
Alastair Barnard.”

I turned the expression “open-and-shut case” over in my mind, checking to make sure it had no sordid double meanings that
would make it inadvisable to use. Before I could say it, though, Jan was carrying on at a rush.

“There’s no denying that part of it,” she said. “Doug had sex with this man. I suppose he went there, to that hotel, specifically
to do that. But I don’t believe he killed anyone, Mr. Castor. I don’t believe he’s even capable of doing that.