Dead Men's s Boots

Plenty of people walking by, plenty of traffic passing on the road. The feeling was oddly directionless, and there was no way to narrow it down. Reluctantly, I gave it up. I’d have to pick a better time and a better place.

The Breathers’ van was still parked in the same place: two men sitting in it now, again not much more at this distance than blobby silhouettes. No prickle or itch or tingling spider-sense: whatever I was feeling, whatever was watching me, it had nothing to do with these tosspots. I shot them a wave as I walked past, which they stoically ignored. I was almost sorry they didn’t get out and try for a rumble: I would have welcomed the release of tension.

Back at the flat I dumped my coat over the back of a chair, poured myself a whisky and then left it to stand while I picked out some bluesy chords on my whistle.

The couple next door were no longer coupling, which was good news. But though I’d missed the climax I hadn’t missed the epilogue, which as usual was taking the form of a stand-up fight. Sex and violence, always in the same order: they seemed to have a stripped-down, back-to-basics sort of lifestyle.

I gave up on the music practice after ten minutes or so because the bellowed profanities and the crash of breakables breaking were throwing me off tempo. I put one of Ropey’s death-metal CDs on instead, not because I like Internal Bleeding – with or without the capital letters – but out of sheer self-defence.

But the noises of destruction put me in mind of John Gittings’s ghost, and my mood wobbled again. Then thinking about John brought the pocket watch to mind. I went across to my coat and fished it out to check that it was okay. It was a beautiful thing all right: you could see even through the black oxidation stains that the filigree work on the silver – a motif of fleur-de-lis – was very fine. By a natural extension, I decided to wind it and see if it still worked. That meant taking it out of the outer case, since with a Savonnette watch you can’t always get enough of a purchase on the winding stem with the watch nestled inside its two separate shells.

As I took the watch out of the case, a small piece of paper fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It was the kind of very light, thin blue paper that people used to use for airmail letters before there were such things as emails. It had handwriting on it in a flowing, cursive script, and it had been folded over on itself several times.

I opened it out: three folds, four, five. When I had it fully open, I found that it was a complete page from a letter – from the middle of a letter, because there was no superscription and it started in mid-sentence. I read it with growing and slightly uneasy fascination.

could get along a bit faster, but its not a good idea to take risks. If they know youve got an idea about whats really happening, theyll take you out one way or another.

Youll just get the one pass, and its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take backup: take lots of back-up, and warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. It ends with you dead or them dead, thats the only way.

Dont make the mistake of reconasance: the wall isnt a wall, if you take my point. Not really. They can get out further than that, so they could attack you even when youre a long way out and you think theres nobody anywere near you.

If you go in through the building, you better expect therell be heavy security. That may seem like the least of your problems but dont underestimate it. Remember you can still threaten them. Physically, I mean. If you pull your foot back to kick, a man is going to cover his balls. I know that sounds crude, but if you look at it in those terms you’ll

And that was it – or almost. In the margin, opposite the phrase ‘Take back-up’, someone had scribbled two more words in red biro.

Felix Castor.

I was still staring blankly at those two words when the phone rang. Actually, it was more like I became aware that it was ringing: a sound that had been going on for some time underneath Internal Bleeding’s relentless bass beat and the equally unremitting noises of my neighbours dismantling their flat. Not my mobile: Ropey’s phone. I picked up by reflex, even though I couldn’t remember ever giving the number to anyone.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Mister Castor?’ A man’s voice, slightly breathless and thin: not a voice I recognised.

‘Yes.’

‘Inter-Urban Couriers. Can you come down and sign for a package?’

‘A package?’ I echoed, slightly false-footed. ‘Who from?’

A short pause. ‘Well, the address is E14, but there’s no name.’

The only guy I knew out that way was Nicky Heath, a data rat who sometimes ran searches for me: but he wasn’t working on anything for me right then, and he wouldn’t be likely to use a regular courier service. Being both paranoid and dead, he has his own specialised ways of working.

‘Mister Castor?’

‘Yeah, okay. I’ll be right down.’

I got up and went to the front door of the flat, unlocked it and stepped into the corridor. A few steps brought me to the lifts: I pressed the buttons until I found the one that was currently working – the council tenant’s equivalent of the ‘find the lady’ game. It was on the fifth floor, only three floors below me, but instead of going up it went down. Someone else must have pressed the button at the same time.

As I waited for it to make its stately way back up the stack, I listened – since there wasn’t any other choice – to the shouting and swearing echoing from further up the corridor. It amazed me that the other residents on this floor weren’t poking their heads out to add their own shouts of protest to the overall row: judging by their prurient interest in my comings and goings, it couldn’t be out of an exaggerated regard for other people’s privacy.

Something snapped in me at long last, and I walked back up the corridor to give my psychopathic neighbours’ door a dyspeptic kick. ‘Turn it in, for Christ’s sake,’ I shouted. ‘If you want to kill each other, use poison or something.’

A door opened at my back, and I turned to find the woman in number eighty-three glaring at me.

‘Noise was getting to me,’ I said, by way of explanation. She just went on glaring. ‘Sorry,’ I added. She slammed her door shut in my face. While I was still staring at the NO CIRCULARS sign, I heard a ping from back the way I’d come, followed by a muffled thump: the lift warning bell, and the sound of the doors opening.

I jogged down the corridor, determined to catch it before it changed its mind. I stepped inside, found it empty, and pressed G. Then just as the doors started to close I saw through the narrowing gap the front door of Ropey’s flat standing open. In the five minutes that I was downstairs, the neighbours could have the TV, the stereo and the three-piece suite. Irritably, I hit DOOR OPEN with my free hand and the doors froze, jerked, froze, with about a foot of clearance still to spare.

But before they could make up their mind whether to close again or slide all the way open, the entire lift lurched, the floor tilting violently. Taken by surprise, I staggered and almost lost my footing. From above me came a sound of rending metal.

I had half a second to react. As the lift shuddered and lurched again, grinding against the wall of the shaft with a sickening squeal, I fought the yawing motion, barely keeping my feet under me, and flung myself through the half-open doors back out into the hallway. An explosive outrush of air followed me: I snapped my head round to look behind me – and saw the lift drop like several hundredweight of bricks into the shaft. Some buried survival instinct made me snatch my right foot back across the threshold just as the roof of the car whipped past like the blade of a guillotine. The sole of my shoe was torn off completely and my ankle was wrenched so agonisingly that I thought for a moment that my foot had gone too. I didn’t scream, exactly, but my bellow of pain was on a rising pitch: I think we’re probably just talking semantics.

This time, all the doors along the corridor opened and everyone on the whole floor came out to see what all the noise was about. Well, all except two. My neighbours stayed behind their own closed front door and went right on calling each other obscene names at the tops of their voices. They probably had a quota to fill.

And as I sat there staring into the darkness of the lift shaft, the asinine, obvious thought echoed in my head: well, fuck, that was close. But it was followed by another thought in a different register.

All right, you bastards, you called it.