‘Stephen Bass,’ I said. ‘UCL, wasn’t it? I don’t know which faculty, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If I so much as see your sodding face again, I’ll come round to your hall of residence with some friends of mine, and we’ll whistle your soul right out of your body. You’ll be like a zombie, only with less personality.’
Bass almost swallowed his tongue.
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he scoffed, with less conviction than Bart Simpson saying ‘It was like that when I got here.’
‘Try me,’ I suggested. ‘Listen, you’ve been sitting out here watching the building all this time. Did you see someone go in?’
Bass hesitated, torn between wanting to play it cool in the face of my threats and not wanting to piss off a man who now knew more or less where he lived.
‘There was a big fat man,’ he said.
‘And did you see him come out again?’
‘What?’ Evidently Bass had worn himself out on the starter for ten.
‘Did he come out again?’ I repeated more slowly. ‘Did you see him come back out onto the street?’
‘No.’
Interesting. Very.
‘Okay, thanks for your time,’ I said, dropping the fire extinguisher at Bass’s feet and making him jump. ‘If you do feel a burning desire to talk to the police, I’m about to call them. All you have to do is wait right there. They’ll be along presently.’
I heard the doors of the van slam behind me as I went back into the block, and the engine start before I reached the stairs.
I went back up to the flat and dialled 999. The police rolled around an hour or so later: a rapid-response unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbours, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. They ended up, as I’d more or less expected, by putting the whole thing down to accident. The cables had snapped off clean, the nice constable said, which ruled out any foul play with bolt-cutters or hacksaws. Probably down to metal fatigue.
Two things made me less than a hundred per cent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts turned out, despite the OUT OF SERVICE notices pasted across them, to be working as well as they ever did. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm – Inter-Urban – while I was waiting for the boys in blue to show, and it didn’t exist. I hadn’t really expected anything different: to quote Iago the parrot, I almost had a heart attack from not-surprise. The whole set-up had been too pat, the timing too convenient.
After the police had left, I waited a half-hour or so for the last of the onlookers to go back to their interrupted evenings, and then I went down to the basement to look at the remains of the lift car. It had hit the bottom of the shaft with enough force to demolish the motor housing, and the splayed remains of it kept the lift doors open. Ignoring the incident tape and the warning sign, I climbed inside and inspected what I could see of the roof of the car, which was easy enough since the inspection hatch had popped right out of its frame when the metal buckled under the force of impact.
Snapped off clean, just like the man said. But the few feet of cable that were still attached to the roof of the lift were shiny and uncorroded. Metal fatigue doesn’t show to the untrained eye, of course. But footprints do. In the sooty grease at one corner of the car roof there was a nice one, size eleven or so, perfectly captured. If the Met boys had seen it at all, they’d probably put it down to the maintenance engineer: but this was a council block, and the lifts only got inspected on alternate blue moons.
The coincidence of this happening immediately after I’d read that letter hidden in the pocket watch had shaken me more than slightly.
Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind had been starting to go long before he’d died, and that one sign of it had been this business of hiding notes to himself all over the place. It was more than possible that he’d written the letter to himself: I didn’t know his handwriting well enough to tell.
Either way, though, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to just stick a knife in my back, like regular folks: presumably because they wanted my tragic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.
And, either way, I was feeling more curious now about the job that John had been working on when he died. Maybe I would turn up for the wake after all. I’d probably kill the mood, but what can you do?
6
Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood had blood on his hands, and it wasn’t his. Not just blood, in fact: gobbets of red-black tissue hung from his fingers and from the business end of the wickedly thin filleting knife he held in his right hand. In his left-hand there was a heart that would never beat again.
‘Meter’s running,’ he said. Coldwood likes to say things like that because it fits in with his image of himself as a tough, ruthless cop doing his balls-out thing in the canyons and arroyos of the urban wasteland. He’s got the face for it, too – all squared-off chin and over-luxuriant eyebrows – and he used it to scowl at me now. ‘I don’t owe you any favours, Castor, and I’m not telling you anything that wasn’t already reported in the papers, so don’t ask.’
‘Because a punch in the face often offends,’ I finished for him.
‘Exactly.’
‘Then why are we meeting here, instead of down at the cop shop?’
‘Here’ was the kitchen of his maisonette in East Sheen. It was the afternoon of the next day, and given the Victor Frankenstein vibe that Coldwood was currently putting out, I was grateful for the touches of normality provided by the sinkful of dirty dishes, the Dress-Up Homer Simpson fridge magnets and the FHM calendar on the wall.
Coldwood dropped the heart – a sheep’s, judging by the size of it – back into the dish instead of answering, and wiped his free hand on an apron that was already foul. Then he picked up a pencil and stared at the sad, half- dismantled piece of offal with a hard frown of concentration.
‘We’re meeting here because I can’t trust you to shut up when shutting up is the only sane option,’ he growled. He touched the business end of the pencil to a page of an open A4 pad and began to draw the heart, with great care but no particular skill. A couple of pink smears extended across the paper like a wake behind his wrist as it moved. ‘You’ll ask questions you shouldn’t ask, make stupid guesses to see if you can gauge anything from my reactions, and generally show me up in front of people whose opinions matter to me.’
There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t bother. Might as well try the sympathy card, though, because you never knew. ‘Basquiat still got your balls?’
Coldwood laughed mirthlessly. ‘When the Paragon Hotel case broke, DS Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioural modelling in detective work. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone is holding anyone’s balls here . . .’ He tailed off, aware that the metaphor had unexpectedly run aground. Ruth Basquiat is as hard as tungsten-tipped nails, but her balls – unless she throws the kind that Cinderella liked to go to – are purely notional.
To show my good faith, I left the punchline unspoken. ‘I’m not asking for any trade secrets anyway,’ I told Coldwood, comfortable with the outrageous lie because the next sentence exposed it straight away. ‘All I need is an idea of how strong the case against Doug Hunter is.’
‘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 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
