Dead Men's s Boots

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.’

‘Buy it, sell it on again,’ Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession, with commission to be made twice over. ‘Yeah, maybe. Who’s this “we”, by the way, and what do you want this little keepsake for?’

I got up. ‘Call me if you get a bite,’ I said. ‘Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s life,’ Nicky observed.

When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.

11

Sometimes synchronicity is your friend. Everything flows together, and the thing you’re looking for just turns out to be in the first place where your groping fingers come down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t feeling like one.

I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café, which going by the postcode was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t know who I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t want to miss it. In the meantime though, I had some time to kill. So I strolled back up to Trafalgar Square, for the hell of it and the Harris hawks, and while I was walking I called Jan Hunter to tell her how my meeting with Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet: I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for the sake of getting a second opinion. I didn’t mention Kale, either: not at first. I was afraid of offering her any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder. So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying a passenger, I asked her why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s diagnosis that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line went very quiet for a moment.

‘Incipient psychosis,’ Jan corrected me at last. ‘Not full-blown.’ She sounded defensive, but not apologetic. ‘I just thought that if I told you Doug was losing his mind you might not agree to help me. And really it’s not relevant – not to the case. It’s only come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.’

‘I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,’ I reminded her. ‘And then he went AWOL for a week and didn’t even call you.’

‘But he was still himself.’ Her voice was thick with tears now. ‘Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself it wasn’t like he was mad. Just . . . like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer. I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!’

‘Maybe not,’ I allowed. ‘Anyway, for what it’s worth I think Doctor Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.’

‘You don’t?’ Through the tears, hope and relief showing like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. ‘Then what is it? What’s happening to him?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I hedged. ‘And Jan, I hate to say this but it may not make any difference in any case. Not in terms of the verdict. But there’s a lot more to it than the police have got their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to get you some answers. We’ve got a window – probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary – DS Coldwood – had to say, the trial date hasn’t come down yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck, so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid-’ That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous and formless all my speculations were. ‘Well, whatever I turn up,’ I finished lamely, ‘I’ll hand it over to you and you can decide for yourself what to do with it.’

‘So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mister Castor?’

I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I didn’t have a bastard clue. ‘I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,’ I said. ‘But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the why of it, or at least get some idea of—’

‘“Why” isn’t an issue.’ Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. ‘She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors, or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.’

‘And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.’

Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the obvious answer. Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman . . . Meanwhile my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I was subconsciously looking for a way out of this conversation. A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big that it spilled all the way down to the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons as they flew from one equestrian statue to the next, its tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it. An art student, or maybe just a hobbyist, was sketching Charles the First in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she sat cross-legged on the stones.

But it was almost as though Jan could see the chasm yawning up ahead of her and knew instinctively to veer away from it. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘Whatever you can find, Mister Castor – whatever you can tell me –’

And I could have taken the invitation right there, but like a coward I veered too. I grabbed a question from my mind’s cluttered desktop and waved it like Chamberlain waved his famous autograph from Adolf Hitler.

‘Doug mentioned spraining his ankle,’ I said. ‘Was that something that really happened?’

‘Yes.’ Jan sounded surprised. ‘A few months ago. He was coming down a ladder and his foot slipped. He was in agony. The stupid bastards who are running that site didn’t even have a first-aid kit. And that meant they wouldn’t let anyone call an ambulance, because they didn’t want anyone to twig that they weren’t up to code. Doug had to limp around the corner – two of his mates carried him part of the way – so he could make the call from somewhere else and not get them into trouble. Sodding cowboys. He’s always worked for sodding cowboys!’

I looked at my watch. It was half past eleven and I really needed to be hitting the road. I told Jan, very quickly, what Juliet and I were going to try to do, and I told her I’d let her know how it came out. Then I hung up and went underground.

The Reflections Café Bar turned out to be on Wilton Road, directly opposite the front entrance to Victoria Station and offering a really top-notch view of the bus shelter.

The name promised something eclectic and cosmopolitan. The reality was a narrow glass booth jutting out onto the pavement, containing a coffee machine, a fridge full of Carling Black Label, a counter top and six chairs. A teenaged girl in a maid’s uniform that looked as though it had to have been ordered from a fetish shop took my order for a double espresso with a nod and a smile, and I sat down. She was the only person in the place apart from a stocky, balding man in a drab-looking mid-brown suit, who had a film of sweat on his face as he worked through the Times sudoku – as though sudoku was an illicit thrill of some kind.

I sat down well within his field of vision, but he didn’t react and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was five past twelve by this time, so there was a chance that my man had already been and gone. That seemed more likely when my coffee came and he still hadn’t showed. Taking a sip of the tepid liquid, I stared out of the window at the bus shelter across the street and idly scanned the faces of the people waiting for the number 73. None of them so much as glanced at the window of the café: none of them looked as though they were trying to pluck up the courage to step inside.

The waitress was lost in the intricacies of cleaning out the coffee machine’s drip-tray. The bald guy was working on his puzzle. Nobody seemed to want to make contact with me. Probably time to chalk this one up to