Dead Men's s Boots

mouth was set in the dour line of someone who’s seen a lot of shit and expects to see a lot more. But then again, I have that effect on a lot of people.

I introduced myself and told him what I was there for – that I was interested in what he’d seen and heard on the day of the murder. He listened with gloomy indifference, his mouth tugging down at the corners as though it made him very sad to have to listen to me.

‘I told the police already,’ he pointed out.

‘I know that,’ I agreed. ‘I’m just checking the details. Especially this thing about you hearing a woman’s voice from the room . . .’

At the word ‘woman’, the man’s whole demeanour changed. A tremor went through him, which he seemed to still with some difficulty, clenching his hands into tight fists.

‘Can you tell me anything about her?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t see her go into the room?’

Silently, he shook his head.

‘Can you remember anything she said?’

Another jerk of the head, which I took to be a negative, but before I could throw another question at him Onugeta was speaking, in a tense, urgent monotone. ‘I hate you,’ he muttered. ‘I fucking hate all of you. If I could kill every rat bastard of you, one after another after another, I’d do it.’ It took me a second to realise that he wasn’t talking to me but quoting from memory. ‘I want it to fucking hurt you so bad, so bad. I want to see in your eyes how much it hurts. And when you’re dead, I wish I could bring you back and make it hurt some more.’

He fell silent, turned his back on me and took down a pair of marigold gloves from one of the shelves. ‘Like that. On and on like that. And the one man, he was saying you don’t mean that, you don’t mean that. Scared. Really scared. And then the other man said “Make her stop.”’

I had to be careful with the next question: careful not to let it sound like an accusation. ‘You didn’t think of going into the room?’ I asked.

Joseph shot me a bitter look. ‘I hear worse than that every day,’ he said. ‘Much worse. I-love-you-I-hate- you-I’ll-fuck-you. Everyone says that here. Or thinks it. I kept on walking. None of my business. All I do is empty the waste bins. There’s nightmares enough for anyone right there.

‘But then when we turned the key and looked into that room . . .’ He was staring at nothing now, and his face was set hard, the gloves dangling forgotten in his hand. ‘It wasn’t any kind of love that did that,’ he muttered. ‘Love can turn into a lot of things, but – there wasn’t a square inch of him that hadn’t been-’ He gave up on that sentence, shaking his head rapidly like a dog trying to get itself dry. ‘It takes a lot of hate to do that. To keep on hating someone after he’s already dead.’

Joseph discovered the gloves in his hand, put them on and wriggled his fingers into them one at a time with repetitive, robotic care. His eyes were hooded, his mouth twisted slightly as if in pain. I got a glimpse of the truth then, about what had made him too sick to come into work. He was talking about a sickness of the soul.

‘Joseph,’ I said, although I wanted to stop now and get the hell out into the fresh air. ‘You didn’t see her? You never got a glimpse of her, going into the room or coming out?’ It was a question I’d already asked, but given his state of mind it was worth one more throw of the dice. Since he couldn’t get away from these memories, maybe if I kept hovering around the edges of them some kind of enlightenment, some kind of clue, would come to me.

‘I’ll know her if I see her,’ Joseph said, tapping his gloved finger against his right temple. ‘I dreamed about her that night. Dream about her most nights. My daddy had the sight, and I got it too, whether I want it or not.

‘She’s not a woman, though. Not a real woman. It sounds stupid, but I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. She’s got a devil face. Long red hair. Tall as a man, strong as a man. And a circle, here, over her eye, like a crater. Like a little bomb hit her and left a crater. Or like someone shot her and the bullet bounced off.’

The hairs rose on the nape of my neck as he talked. He was describing Myriam Kale: he’d even got the chickenpox scar. But the look on his face told me that carrying on with this line of questioning was going to lead to some ugly eruption that I probably couldn’t handle.

‘Joseph,’ I said, switching tack, ‘your boss, Merrill, said something to me that didn’t get a mention in the police evidence. He said another man came into the Paragon, a little later than Barnard and Hunter. An old man. By himself. Does that ring any bells with you?’

‘Yeah.’ Joseph nodded. ‘I bumped into him, on the corridor. I was coming out of a room, with an armload of sheets and stuff. Next thing I know, I’m going backwards instead of forwards. I hit him and bounced off.’ He picked up a plastic bucket, hung two J-cloths over the side of it. ‘He wasn’t an old man, though. I don’t know where Mister Merrill got that idea from. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was solid. Very strong. And he walked like – you know – like a big strong guy walks. All swaggering. That wasn’t any old man.’

Something stirred in my mind as he said that, but I didn’t try to drag the thought up into the light. Not yet. It would come in its own good time if I didn’t reach for it. I thanked Joseph for his time and offered him a twenty from my dwindling stash. He took it without even looking at it. Where he was living right now, money couldn’t bring much solace.

I had to get out to Kingsbury next, for my dinner engagement with Juliet and Sue Book, and the easiest way to do that was to hoof across to Baker Street and change onto the Jubilee. That was what I was going to do, swear to God: but I had that locker key of John’s burning a hole in my pocket. How long would it take to open a locker and pick up the contents? Five minutes, at the outside. I could still do it and get to Juliet’s in plenty of time. So I found myself heading south instead, without any recollection of making a decision about it.

The left-luggage lockers at Victoria are scattered randomly across the whole station, but the densest concentration is next to the Prêt à Manger at the northern end of the concourse. I tried there first, but locker number 167 wasn’t among them. I zigzagged back towards the escalators that lead down into the Underground, going from one row of lockers to the next, and finally struck pay dirt on the fourth or fifth. But pay dirt was a relative term in this case, because when I opened 167 it was empty.

I felt the sudden prick and slow deflation of bathos, but only for a moment. Then I thought about how John had played the earlier moves in this game. There was the plastic bag, for starters, taped to the space behind the desk drawer; then the backwards phone number, written on the matchbook of a café which turned out not to be his rendezvous point with Chesney but a place from where the rendezvous point could be spied on. Always that extra paranoid little wriggle: like the innovations of a mind determined to catch itself out as well as everyone else.

Going down on hands and knees, and mentally consigning the trousers I was wearing to the dustbin of history, I took a closer look inside the locker. Still nothing to be seen, but when I stuck my arm inside and felt over all the inside surfaces, there was something there – something fixed to the top of the locker space, which gave slightly under my hand and was the wrong texture for metal.

I managed to get hold of a corner of the something and pull it free. It was a big, chunky envelope, fixed to the roof of the locker with duct tape.

I carried on looking, wanting to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t missing anything, but I didn’t unearth any further treasures.

I left the key in the locker and took the package over to the station bar, where I ordered a whisky and water and then opened the envelope while I was waiting for the drink to come.

After the A to Z, the matchbook, the key, I was expecting something else with an aura of cheap dime-store mysteries about it, but the envelope was full of music. At least, it was full of sheets of music paper: the notations that were on the paper, though, made no sense to me at all. The sequences of notes – if that was what they were – had been set down as mere vertical strokes of a felt-tip pen, with no indication of how long they should be sustained, and they ricocheted all over the scale without rhyme or reason. If they looked like anything, it was the way Woodstock speaks in the Peanuts cartoon. It sure as hell wasn’t music. And in among the thickets of vertical lines there were letters of the alphabet, asterisks and horizontal dashes.

It was going to be another code, I realised wearily. Another stupid secret message from John to himself, which when decoded would probably reveal the secret location of another secret message, and so on to the goddamn crack of doom.

My whisky arrived and I studied the sheets as I drank, trying to figure out if there was any way they could be laid on top of each other or read from an odd angle to yield actual words. It didn’t work: the letters that were present were all Ds, Ts and Ks, and they were sprinkled around the page seemingly at random. As far as I could