When I got back inside, I felt the difference even before I saw Carla frozen on the floor in a defensive crouch. Staining the carpet between her and the coffin was an elongated teardrop of spilled beer, with the starburst remains of the broken bottle at its narrower end. Clearly, during the few minutes I’d been outside, John had woken up – in a pretty sour mood.
Carla was crying. I went over to her, knelt and put a hand around her shoulders. She melted into me, powerful sobs making her shudder and shake. ‘I just –’ she managed to get out ‘ – said goodnight – to him!’
I’m not good in this kind of situation. I’m familiar with the noises that have to be made, but people who know me, and know what I do for a living, find it as hard to take consolation from me as they would from a professional hangman. I tried anyway. ‘Carla,’ I said, ‘the reason he’s so scared and so angry now is because fear and anger are pretty much all he is. His body’s gone – it’s in the casket there. He’s jumped the rails. Right now he’s just a collection of emotions so strong there isn’t even much room left for memories. That’s why so many ghosts seem to spend their time replaying their own deaths: they’re caught in a loop, going through the same events again and again because there’s so much fear and pain tied up in them.
‘John’s not trying to hurt you. You said yourself that none of the things he’s thrown have ever touched you. He’s lashing out because he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him and he doesn’t know how to get free of it. But if he threw that bottle when you touched the side of the coffin –’ her head buried in my chest, she tried to nod, and I felt rather than saw the movement ‘– then that’s a good sign. It means he recognises the body as his own, and wants to protect it. It means he remembers enough of his past to make that identification. On some level, he knows who he was. Who he still
Carla still had to cry it out, but the point seemed to sink in and she slowly started to calm. After a minute or so, I let go of her and took my tin whistle out of my pocket.
‘I’m going to play him some more music,’ I said.
That alarmed her all over again. She surfaced from the now slightly soggy depths of my lapels with a look of horror on her face. ‘Fix, if you send him away now—’
‘I didn’t send him away the first time,’ I said. ‘I just made him . . . drowsy. These are tunes I use on Rafi, so I’ve had plenty of time to get them down right. This time I won’t even send John to sleep: I just want to calm him a bit so you don’t have to go to bed in full body armour.’
I waited for her to respond. Finally she gave me the merest hint of a nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.
I played a tune that was vaguely based on Neko Case’s ‘Lady Pilot’, I think purely because of the line in that song about not being afraid to die. Often in these cases it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the song is when it starts out: once I let it out into the open air it grows and changes, as though the vibrations of the music are some sort of insubstantial extension of my own nervous system. It becomes something that I use to touch the world – the invisible world that seems to be idling next to our own right now at some inter-dimensional red light – and to operate on the things I see and feel there.
Opening my mind a little more this time, I met head-on the spirit that was waiting in the dark, and was struck by the sheer intensity of its rage: it was like scalding water, filling the room unseen and unfelt until now. The strength of it – the strength of the will behind it – took me by surprise. None of the interactions I’d ever had with John had made me suspect that he could be capable of that kind of ferocity. Matching it high for high, low for low, I let the music fall into it like a calving iceberg and slowly, gradually, take away its power to hurt.
I lose track of time when I’m doing this stuff. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that time becomes one of the dimensions of the music, and I can only perceive it as something that’s moving in my chest and under my fingers, flowing out into the pattern that I’m making. In any case, when I finally surfaced I found that Carla was asleep next to me.
The geist wasn’t asleep but it was quiescent: it wouldn’t be throwing any more beer bottles around for a while. I felt queasy all over again as I thought about the contrast between the vaguely well-meaning, more or less ineffectual man I’d known for the past fifteen years and this baleful ball of hate and wrath. Death changes you – in some cases, brings out the worst in you – but that didn’t make it any easier to take right then. Particularly since I found myself wondering whether John Gittings might still be alive if I’d taken his calls.
My internal logic-checker kicked in on my side at that point. You can’t save someone from suicide if they’re serious about making the effort. John had wanted and intended to die: that much had to be true. Even in New York City, where they’re meant to have those giant alligators in the sewers, people don’t casually take loaded shotguns into the toilet with them.
And if it was murder dressed up as suicide . . . ? But that really sounded like Mister Paranoia dropping in for tea.
On paper, in theory, in the cold light of day, I had nothing to reproach myself with. But this was the dark night of John Gittings’s soul, and I couldn’t let myself off the hook that easily.
I picked up my stuff and went through into the bedroom, where I unrolled the sleeping bag on the stripped bed. There’s something cold and unlovely about a bare mattress: I tried not to look at it as I unpacked the rest of my gear from a ragged-arsed overnight bag that used to belong to Rafi.
Then I slipped off my shoes, sat back on the bed with my feet up, and finally peeled the layers of duct tape away from the Sainsbury’s bag that John had squirreled away so carefully. The bag started to tear, and a few small items fell out before I’d finished unwrapping it: a small key on a knotted shoelace, and the torn back of a matchbook from some place called the Reflections Café Bar. That left one bulky rectangular object.
From what Carla had already told me, I wasn’t expecting very much. But the biggest item in the bag was an object of such spectacular banality that I felt a sense of bathos and let-down even as I pulled it clear of the plastic and stared at the cover. It was an
I flexed it with my thumb and riffled through it. It had been marked up in black felt tip on almost every page – lines and circles sketched in, and in some cases scribbled out again afterwards, so that you mostly couldn’t see the features they were originally meant to be indicating. At least one of them was a church.
And that was it. Not much to go on, at first glance: not much to indicate what John had meant when he said that this was one for the books. Unless geographical gazetteers were the books he had in mind.
Further examination, though, showed that he’d used the
Other names, set off in a different column, were new to me, or stirred faint echoes in my mind that I couldn’t turn into meanings right then.
The list inside the back cover seemed to be of places rather than people: Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St. Andrew’s Old, St. Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield. They ran across five columns, written in a tiny, crabbed script; some of the names marked with symbols, some circled in different-colored inks, some crossed out and then written in again over the top. I remembered Carla’s description of John writing messages to himself and then tearing them up. It seemed as though he’d been doing more or less the same thing here.
I flicked backwards and forwards between the various lists, my eye drawn automatically to the parts that were easiest to read, avoiding other stretches where the density of the crossing-out and rewriting made individual words hard to decipher. Eventually my sight started to swim and I gave it up.
I turned my attention to the key, on its makeshift boot-lace keyring – and I looked at it with a certain degree of professional interest because breaking and entering has been a hobby of mine at various points in my life. It was small, hollow-barrelled, with the number 167 etched into the diamond-shaped bow-end. It was a Lycett, the very distinctive product of that Midlands locksmithing firm, though it didn’t bear the maker’s name. That was interesting: Lycett did a great many job lots in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly for factories and offices, but very few of them were in London. A man with a lot of time on his hands and a prurient curiosity could probably find the lock that this key fitted. But what would be the point if it turned out to yield only a few more scribbled, near-illegible palimpsests like the ones I’d just looked at?
I put the three items back in the eviscerated bag one by one, thinking that there must be some easier way of
