plan it all out on the one sheet because that’s how he was seeing it in his head. As one massively complicated rhythm made out of all these separate bits and pieces.’
I stared at the sheet, trying to translate the dense scribbled marks into sounds inside my mind. They still defeated me.
‘Show me,’ I said.
Pomfret sucked his teeth. ‘Easy to say. I need something to be the drums.’ He looked around the table. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s give it a go.’
He took his coffee cup and turned it upside down in its saucer. ‘High hat,’ he said. Then he did the same with mine. ‘Snare.’ The sugar basin was a steel cylinder full of sealed packets, which he just dumped out onto the table. The basin itself, upturned, was placed next to the coffee cups. ‘Bass.’ That left two spoons, which he put one inside the other, bowl end towards him. ‘Cymbals.’
He demonstrated each item. Flicking the saucers made the coffee cups rattle briefly and hollowly. Thumping the sugar basin made an only slightly deeper note. Tapping the spoons made them scrape against each other with a metallic ring.
‘This is how it starts,’ Pomfret muttered.
I gave it my best shot, unwillingly at first and feeling like an idiot. The waitress at the counter was looking over at us with something that was either concern or annoyance or maybe a mixture of both. But Pomfret didn’t care: he was listening to some inner voice now, head tilted at a slight angle, gaze flicking from the sheet to empty space and then back again. The beat seemed to be accelerating – or at least Pomfret was playing it faster, his fingers flicking across the table so fast they almost became invisible.
And, amazingly, something was starting to show through: as I whacked the table in crude synchrony with his skein of rattling, clanking sounds, there was a dim sense in my mind of random and disconnected things coming tight, coming together, and making meaning as they came – like the loose strings of a cat’s cradle drawn taut between some child’s fingers: noise into signal.
Pomfret seemed less impressed. ‘No, that’s shit,’ he grumbled, stopping abruptly. ‘The sounds are too similar.’ He rotated the bigger of the two coffee cups out of the line-up and replaced it with an empty Coke can from the next table along. He tested it out, seemed satisfied with it, tried again – and again, built up gradually from slow and steady to fast and furious, as if the rhythm had its own internal logic that dictated an
My rough-and-ready accompaniment became more confident, even though I was reading the sheet music upside down: actually I was reading it less and less, because I was starting to see where the rhythm was going and to anticipate what shape my own part of it was meant to take. It was only a beginning, but it was strengthening with every moment that passed. Even though I was well outside my comfort zone I was glimpsing the weave that John had made: the binding that was the first phase of an exorcism.
But Pomfret slowed down and stopped. ‘Look,’ he said, tapping the sheet. ‘He’s adding in extra lines to the stave here. He’s got to have three drummers now – one with a full kit and two with tablas or something. And it all goes crazy, because the new guy is a half-beat out from the other two. He’s just driving a bus through the rhythm.’
‘It closes the gap,’ I murmured, still hearing the beat inside my head. ‘It sneaks around behind them and closes the gap. This is incredible. Don’t stop.’
‘I’ve only got two hands,’ Pomfret said. He looked at his watch. ‘And I’ve got to go, anyway. Look, whatever this stuff is, I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were you. It’s going to sound like shit whatever it’s played on. If it’s something Lou put you onto, she’s probably having a joke with you.’
I came down reluctantly from the one-step-removed-from-reality zone I’d started to float away into. I stood up, gathering the sheet music with care. ‘It’s no joke,’ I assured him. ‘Thanks for your help. When’s your next gig?’
Pomfret blinked owlishly behind his oversized spectacles. ‘Tuesday,’ he said. ‘The Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm.’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘I want to hear what you’re like when you’re Speedo Plank.’ I checked out a couple of places where Juliet might have been; talked to a few people who might have seen her; got nowhere, not particularly fast.
The next few hours were going to be agony. I prowled around central London like a banished ghost looking for somewhere new to haunt. I felt angry and restless, a sour taste in my mouth because even now – having been told where my enemy lived; having had a loaded weapon placed in my hands – I couldn’t act quite yet. Couldn’t move until I’d filled in at least some of the blank spaces in my mental map: the spaces that currently just read ‘
First and foremost, there was the question of what kind of odds I was facing. How many of the born-again killers would be at Mount Grace, and would I meet them in the flesh or in the spirit? It made a difference. John’s symphony for drums might do what he’d obviously designed it to do, but if the souls of the dead were flying around loose when I walked in through the door they could probably get to me before I got to them. If they were wearing other men’s bodies, they’d put up a different kind of resistance but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about being possessed and turned into a meat robot the way I now suspected John had been.
Then there was the even spikier question of how far this network of the evil dead extended. They owned Mount Grace – owned the Palance estate, effectively, through the trustees who employed Peter Covington and ruled in the name of poor, senile old Lionel. They had their own law firm, for Christ’s sake. There could be dozens or hundreds of them out in the field, wearing the bodies of rich and famous men and wielding their names. That would take a bigger nut than me to crack, if it could be cracked at all.
That was why I had to go through Ruthven, Todd and Clay before I went back out to Mount Grace. In some ways it was a lousy idea, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. I had to get hold of Maynard Todd’s files: I had to know how big this was and how deep it went, or all I’d achieve by charging into Mount Grace would be to poke the nest and make sure the wasps came out good and angry.
So I had to go to Todd’s office, and I couldn’t make my move there until after they closed for the night. In the meantime, all I could do was wait – wondering what Juliet was up to, and whether Myriam Kale had added any more notches to her suspender belt.
I did have one more stop on my itinerary, though, and it was welcome in one respect only: because it had nothing at all to do with the mess I’d got myself into. It belonged to a different mess, older and if anything more intractable.
I could have taken a taxi to the Charles Stanger clinic, but my pockets were almost empty and my bank balance was in the last stages of its historic decline. I had to husband my resources. So I took the Tube to East Finchley and walked.
There was good news even before I walked in through the gates: the sound of rhythmic chanting reached me on Coppetts Road as I went along the outer fence. I couldn’t make out any words, but chants are chants: on marches and sit-ins and occupations they all carry the same message, which is a variation on ‘You won’t move us/stop us/intimidate us/make us cut our hair and wear suits’. So the blockade was still in place, and morale was high. That meant, at the very least, that Jenna-Jane hadn’t managed to get her hands on Rafi so far.
The Breath of Lifers were clearly there for the duration: they’d put up tents and benders, and they were ambling between them like early arrivals at a rock concert. Some of them were cooking on portable stoves or the little disposable barbecue sets they sell in Sainsbury’s.
But when I finally located Pen in among the happy campers, she looked so tired and so low that I was dismayed. She seemed to be equally shocked when she got her first look at me, but she didn’t ask how my face came to look like a pound of raw chuck steak. The question would have carried too many messages she didn’t want to send.
‘So how’s it all going?’ I asked, with forced lightness, as we sat together on the crest of a tiny hill away from the main scrum of demonstrators.
Pen’s shoulders twitched in the merest suggestion of a shrug. ‘We’ve managed to hold them off so far,’ she said. ‘They almost got him last night, because we weren’t covering the kitchen entrance. Where they take food
