Dead Men's s Boots

continental shelf.

‘Who are you?’ she demanded brusquely.

‘Friend of the family,’ I hedged.

‘Well, you’ll have to come back after I’ve given the sergeant his bed bath.’

‘I was hoping I could have a word with him about—’

‘After his bed bath. Move along, please, or I’ll do the both of you together.’

I was about to protest at this ugly threat, but the noise of our voices made Coldwood stir and open his eyes, so we both shut up hurriedly.

‘Fix,’ he mumbled. ‘Is that – fuck, it is.’

I hurried back to his bedside, ignoring the toxic glare of the nurse.

‘It’s me, Gary,’ I said, kneeling down beside him in a posture familiar from a million tear-jerking movie scenes.

‘Yeah.’ He voice was slurred and slow. ‘Thought I was just having a bad dream.’

‘You dream about me? Then what they’re saying down at Uxbridge Road nick is true.’

‘Shut the-’ He tailed off in the middle of the abuse, his eyes defocusing. When they found me again he winced with the effort of concentration, obviously not sure what the hell I was doing there.

‘Ruthven, Todd and Clay,’ I reminded him. ‘You had something juicy.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Client base.’

‘Big-time gangsters?’

A shake of the head. ‘Judges. Politicos. Big businessmen. Ten pages of – fucking Who’s Who.’

‘So?’

‘So they meet once a month for a shindig at a fucking crematorium. Why’d you suppose that is?’

‘They all went to the same school. Gary, once a calendar month, or-?’

The nurse interrupted me, looming at my shoulder. ‘I think you’re getting Sergeant Coldwood agitated,’ she chided me coldly.

‘Lunar month,’ Coldwood mumbled. ‘Twenty-eight days. Every twenty-eight days. When it’s—’

Dark of the moon.

Inscription night.

Its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together.

I clapped him on the shoulder, even though he probably didn’t feel it, and stood up. ‘Thanks, Gary,’ I said. ‘Feel better.’ When I left, the nurse was putting rubber gloves on. I wonder why people fetishise those things: they always scare the shit out of me.

I met Luke/Speedo at the National Gallery, because in his day job he worked there as a tour guide: that didn’t seem to fit the profile somehow, but maybe I stereotype drummers unfairly.

He was a bit of a let-down to look at, as well. Very young, for one thing, and very short-sighted for another, wearing thick lenses of the kind that make you look not so much like an intellectual as like some human-alien hybrid. His hair was short and neatly combed, with a faint sheen to it as of gel or pomade. When he spoke, in a quiet and diffident voice, I was inclined to think that I’d been put onto a bum steer.

‘You’re a friend of Lou’s,’ he said.

‘Yeah.’

‘So what can I do for you? I can give you twenty minutes, then I’ve got to meet my next group.’

We were in the gallery’s main atrium, in between the cloakroom counter and the shop. Pomfret had been waiting at the desk when I arrived, visibly keen to get this over with, and he didn’t seem any happier with me at first glance than I was with him. Then again, given the state of my face, I probably looked like a bare-knuckle fighter fallen on hard times.

I took the sheet music out of my pocket, unfolded it and handed it to him. He scanned it with a critical eye. ‘What’s the tune?’ he demanded at last.

‘Well, that’s what I’m asking you,’ I answered. ‘Is there a tune in there? You’re a drummer, so you’d know, right?’

He looked up from the music, shaking his head very emphatically. ‘No. I wouldn’t. This is only a rhythm map. It’s in hybrid notation, so it’s not the easiest thing in the world to follow, but I’ve used both systems before so I can roll with it. The thing is, it doesn’t give you a tune: it only gives you the rhythms. And this one’s really complicated, too. If I knew what the tune was, I’d be able to see how it all fits together.’

‘If I knew what the tune was, Speedo,’ I growled irritably, ‘I wouldn’t be here. The tune’s what I’m looking for.’

Pomfret fired up all of a sudden, as though he had a reheat button and someone had just hit it. ‘Now why are you pulling that crap on me?’ he asked, on a rising tone.

‘What crap?’ I asked, looking over my shoulder and then back at him, as if maybe he’d been hit by some crap flung by a chance passer-by.

‘Calling me Speedo. I’m Luke here. Luke Pomfret. My stage name’s not a stick for you to poke me with, man. I don’t want to hear it again in this conversation. Not if you expect me to do you a favour. I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, and I don’t have to put up with it. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I acknowledged, giving him a gesture that was halfway between a shrug and a hands-in-the-air surrender. ‘I’m sorry. I’m working in the dark on this, and it’s putting me on edge. I didn’t mean to sound like I’m taking the piss out of you.’

Only partially mollified, Pomfret nodded. ‘Well, don’t,’ he said. ‘Just don’t, and we’ll get along fine. I’ll show you how the system works – what you can get out of this sheet and what you can’t. And that’s all I’ll have time for, so you’ll have to do the rest yourself. Let’s go to the café.’

The café was more or less deserted, which suited me fine. I bought a cappuccino for Pomfret and a double espresso for me, adding a packet of crisps as a token gesture towards lunch – or whatever meal my jet- lagged intestines were expecting to receive.

Pomfret took a sip of his coffee, wiped the foam from his upper lip with the back of his thumb, and spread the sheet music out on the table.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Can you read ordinary sheet music?’

‘Barely,’ I said. ‘I don’t come across it all that much but I know what all the bits and pieces mean.’

‘Okay. So you’re used to the idea of the stave as a way of indicating a sequence of notes, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, in drum music they don’t. Obviously. How could they? So when drum music is done like this, on standard-form music paper, it uses the stave to do something else. Each line stands for a voice – one of the drums in the rig. Top line is high hat. Middle line, or anywhere around it, is the snare drum. Bottom line is the bass. So each of these vertical strokes is just a hit on one of the drums. Unless they’re crossed, like this.’ He pointed to one crossed line, then another, then a third. ‘Those are probably cymbals.’

I blinked. It wasn’t that it was so hard to absorb: it was just that I was already being taken in a direction I hadn’t expected to be going. When John Gittings did an exorcism he used a little hand-held tambour: anything more than that would tend to be a bit unwieldy in the field.

‘So this is scored for a whole drum kit?’ I said.

Pomfret nodded. ‘Yeah, most likely. I mean, you can make the lines stand for any assortment of drums: doesn’t have to be high-snare-bass-cymbal. But it usually is.’

‘Okay,’ I said, letting the point ride for now. ‘What about all these other marks? Are they letters? That one looks like a T, and that one could be a K. And we’ve got asterisks, Morse-code dots and dashes . . .’

‘That’s frame notation,’ Pomfret said. ‘Different system altogether. Different letters stand for different sounds. D is for “doum”: that’s the bass sound. T and K – “tek” and “ka” – both stand for the treble sound, depending on whether you’re using the strong hand or the weak hand to make it. Asterisks or dashes stand for rests. The thing is, you’d normally use this system for a hand drum, not a full rig. It’s a bit weird to see the two being thrown in together like this. It’s like . . .’

He hesitated, frowning, as though he wasn’t entirely happy with whatever he was about to say.

‘Like what?’ I demanded.

‘Well, it’s like the drummer was scoring for different players – at least two, maybe three – but he wanted to