Dead Men's s Boots

back at me: John’s face, from my dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.

‘Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

Maybe I had some back-up already: maybe John could pitch in for me in just the way I’d refused to do for him.

Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions – my favoured location for all flat valuables – until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria. I took it over to the table, laid it down and smoothed out the worst of the creases.

The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant: begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal people. The skeleton of a song: not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding, on which the rest of the song could be built.

That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.

The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I’d first seen them: vertical flecks of ink densely but as far as I could see randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally a few marks interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a ‘T’ or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk. Nothing to indicate how any of it fitted together or how it could be translated into sound.

Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument: I picked out tunes in a rough-and-ready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than to anything else. So now I didn’t even have much to compare this gibberish with.

If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I was going to need an expert.

I picked up the phone and dialled from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over and my thread-stripped brain transposed two digits.

Tried again.

‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.

‘Louise?’ I said.

The same voice, a little sharper. ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

‘Felix Castor.’

‘Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?’

‘What’s the name of your band, Lou?’

‘My band?’ she echoed with pained incomprehension.

‘You still play, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what’s the name of-?’

‘The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—’

‘No,’ I interrupted her, ‘I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.’

21

His real name was Luke Pomfret, Louise had said, but he played under the assumed splendour of Speedo Plank. I’d arranged to meet him at noon, allowing a generous seven hours for restorative unconsciousness. When I woke up, my head banging and my throat feeling like someone had tamped a couple of bagfuls of silica down into it, it was one-thirty. I called Louise again, getting a livelier and more varied torrent of abuse this time because she was properly awake. I apologised profusely, swore to God and a bunch of other guys that I’d never pull this shit on her again, and got her to call up Mister Plank and reschedule.

Then I called Juliet’s house, but it was Susan who picked up. She sounded cheerful enough until I told her where I was and asked her if she’d heard from her other half. ‘But Jules is with you,’ Susan protested, confused.

‘Not any more,’ I admitted. I told her about my little difference of opinion with Juliet at the Golden Coffee House in Brokenshire, omitting some of the more colourful details like her kicking my arse around the room. Susan got more and more unhappy as she listened.

‘But how will she get home!’ she protested. ‘Felix, you shouldn’t have just left her there. She doesn’t know how to behave without scaring or upsetting people. She’s going to get into trouble.’

The anxiety in her voice made me ashamed, even though there hadn’t been any point in the proceedings where I’d felt like I had a choice. ‘She just walked out on me,’ I said, hearing the words as I said them and realising how lame and evasive they sounded. ‘She was really angry and she warned me not to follow her. Which I wasn’t in any position to do in any case: long story, don’t ask.’

‘But does she have her ticket? Her passport?’

‘Susan,’ I said, trying to head off her alarm and anger, ‘she’s back in the country already. She got back before I did. If she hasn’t come home, that’s because she’s been . . . well, busy with other things. I was just hoping she might have got in touch with—’

‘What kind of other things, Felix? What do you mean?’

I hedged. I didn’t want to tell Susan Book that the woman [sic] she loved had been involved in a jailbreak – to free another woman (although one who was forty years dead and very convincingly disguised as a man) so that she wouldn’t have to stand trial for murder. It was probably a conversation that the two of them needed to have between themselves at some point, maybe over a glass of wine and a candlelit supper for two.

‘It’s something to do with the work she was doing for the Met,’ I said. Truth as far as it goes. ‘I’m sure she’s fine, but it was something she felt very strongly about and she didn’t want to wait. That’s what I need to talk to her about, in fact. I’ve got some new information that I want to go over with her. If she comes home, or gets in touch, could you tell her to call me?’

Susan said she’d pass the message along, but her tone was cold. She was blaming me for all this, in spite of my weasel words: as far as she was concerned, she’d invited me over for dinner and I’d dragged a big bag of crap and chaos in with me and dumped it all over her floor. Even without knowing the whole story, she knew that much: and she was right.

I fixed myself a quick breakfast of toast and dry cereal – the milk in the fridge having transubstantiated into something green and malevolent. My neck and back ached so badly that I was moving like an arthritic grandad. The day was off to a great start.

Nicky said they had Gary Coldwood in traction over at the Royal Free. A hop, a skip and a jump and I was treading the streets of Hampstead, a place where I’ve always felt as welcome as a slug in a salad. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten to shave. Or maybe it did: at least people didn’t seem inclined to intrude on my privacy.

There were two uniformed cops on duty outside the private ward where Coldwood was holed up, but they didn’t stop me going in or ask to take my name or anything: I wasn’t sure whether they were there to stop Gary leaving – in which case they should probably have had more faith in his broken legs – or if they’d been assigned to protect him from his screaming fans. Either way, they were earning their overtime fairly painlessly.

Coldwood wasn’t feeling any pain either, but that was because he was doped up to the eyeballs and only about one-tenth conscious. I sat there for ten minutes or so, wondering if he was going to surface far enough to realise that he wasn’t alone. I wasn’t even sure why I was there: or at least where the balance lay between apologising and debriefing.

Eventually I admitted defeat and got up to leave. Coldwood mumbled something, but it wasn’t to me and it wasn’t intelligible. As I headed for the door, though, a nurse walked briskly in and cut off my escape. She was about forty and built like a Victorian wardrobe: a solid trapezoid with a single undifferentiated mound of breast like a