‘Your Breathers mentioned a huge fat man. Have you pissed off any huge fat men lately?’
‘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.’
7
There’s something you should know about Juliet, just so – unlike, say, DS 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 says she is. 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 any more. 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.
And 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 the fact that she’s now 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’d 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: well, 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 towards Carla’s flat just as Todd was coming down. Four men in identical suits of funereal black, and with identically impassive faces, walked behind him. Todd himself was jauntily dressed in a pale grey 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, Mister Castor?’
‘That I am, Mister Todd.’
The lawyer nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘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, looking to change his will, how did he seem?’
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.
‘Well,’ 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.’
‘Then he wasn’t talking about breaking and entering? Or kicking people in the balls?’
‘Obviously not. Why? Is there some reason why you would have expected him to?’
I didn’t have to answer that question, but I felt in some indefinable way as though I owed Todd a favour. Frankness was probably the only payment I’d ever be able to give him.
‘They all came up in his correspondence,’ I said. ‘I think . . . maybe they’re related to whatever it was that was on his mind when he came to see you. He was working on something, and it had started to obsess him. I’d really like to know what that something was.’
‘Why?’ Todd demanded again. He was looking at me with the lively mistrust that you show to the nutter on the bus.
I shrugged. ‘He told Carla it was important. Maybe . . . a professional commitment of some kind that his estate needs to take care of.’ It felt like a weaselly answer, but it was the best I could do without telling Todd about the lift incident and getting into deeper waters than I wanted to right then. Fortunately he seemed already to have decided that this was something he didn’t want or need to know any more about. He detached himself from me with almost indecent haste and led his four-man cortège away towards a massive hearse that was parked opposite. I went on up the stairs.
Carla had locked the door and bolted it at top and bottom, so it took her a while to let me in. Her face lit up when she saw me: I guess she must have thought it was Todd coming back because he’d forgotten something.
‘Fix!’ she exclaimed. ‘You changed your mind!’ She threw her arms around me, making me feel like a cynical, self-serving bastard because the reason why I was here had so little to do with her and so much to do with my own near-death experience.
The coffin stood on two trestles in the centre of the living room, cleaned and polished so that it was as good as new. It looked as though it ought to have a ROAD CLOSED sign hung from the middle of it. The place was as silent as the grave – maybe more, if my experience was anything to go by. The charm I’d laid on John the day before was still holding, although at the edges of my internal radar I was aware of something stirring every so often, like the worm inside a jumping bean that makes the bean twitch as though it was alive.
I offered to put on some coffee, but it transpired that there wasn’t any left: the packet that we’d emptied back on the previous Sunday had been the last in the house. It had been a while since Carla had remembered to do any shopping.
‘Do you want to go out and grab a bite to eat, then?’ I suggested.
‘Sorry, Fix.’ She shook her head, her gaze flicking across to the coffin and then immediately shying away again towards the neutral ground of my face. ‘I can’t leave him here all by himself.’
‘No, I see that,’ I admitted. ‘Jesus, Carla, there’s no need to apologise. This is the man you spent twenty years of your life with. Still, I think it would probably be a good idea if you took on some ballast. Could you handle a takeaway?’
She smiled weakly. ‘Not hygienic to handle it. I’ll eat one, though.’
I took things in hand, slipping out to the Romna Gate on Southgate Circus for some carry-out, and picking up
