Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

I didn’t say any of that. I just asked her whether she’d mentioned her theory to the police. She snorted contemptuously. ‘Oh yes. Of course I did. The detective in charge – Coldwood – didn’t even listen to me. He’d made up his mind already, and it didn’t matter what I said, he wasn’t going to—’

‘Coldwood?’ I interrupted, making sure I hadn’t misheard.

‘Yes. Coldwood. He’s a sergeant.’ She read it in my face. ‘Do you know him or something?’

‘I worked with him a few times. I used to do consulting work for the Met when business was thin.’

That seemed to knock Jan back a little. ‘The police use exorcists?’

I nodded. ‘Sometimes we can get a fix on how or where someone died. Sometimes we can confirm that someone who’s missing isn’t dead at all. It’s standard practice now, although we can’t give evidence in court. Most judges hate us like poison, just on general principle. Most cops too, come to that. But I always got on okay with Gary Coldwood.’

That was a slight exaggeration. Our relationship had actually become fairly strained when I was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who in fact I only got to meet after she was already dead. My association with the Met was a dead letter now, and I hadn’t seen Coldwood in four months or more: but we’d parted on good terms, more or less, and he’d stuck his neck out for me at least once when it would have been easier to leave me swinging in the wind. And, as cops went, I’d found he had a more open mind than most.

All of this was pushing me towards a decision. If Coldwood was involved I could at least talk it over with him, get the bigger picture if there was one.

‘If I agree to take this on,’ I told Jan, ‘I’ll be asking for a grand in all, and at least three hundred up front. Is that going to be a problem?’

‘No,’ she said, reaching for her handbag again. ‘I was expecting that you’d want some kind of down payment. I only brought two hundred and fifty, but—’

‘Two hundred and fifty is fine,’ I said. ‘And it’s refundable if I change my mind.’

She froze, hand inside the bag in the process of drawing out her purse. ‘If you-?’

‘If I look into it and it turns out there’s nothing I can do. I’ll give you the money back.’

Jan looked at me hard. ‘And what about if you talk to your old friends in Scotland Yard and decide not to rock the boat?’ she demanded.

‘Victoria Street,’ I said.

She was false-footed. ‘What?’

‘The Met moved to Victoria Street. Around about the same time that Myriam Kale was shooting G-men at the Salisbury. People just use the old name out of nostalgia.’ I lifted my glass for one last swig of beer but changed my mind when I felt how close it now was to room temperature. ‘I said I knew Coldwood. That doesn’t mean we’re picking out curtains.’

She gave a grudging nod, no doubt remembering Cheryl Telemaque’s personal recommendation. Probably better if she didn’t know how Cheryl and I had behaved back when our paths had crossed. It hadn’t been exactly my high point as far as professional ethics were concerned.

We exchanged contact details and Jan counted out the money into my hand, most of it in ten-pound notes. As I tucked it away in yet another pocket of my always-accommodating greatcoat, she gave me a searching look.

‘You were going to say no,’ she said. ‘I could see it in your face. Why did you change your mind?’

I had to think about that one. ‘Two reasons,’ I said at last. ‘Coldwood’s one. On a job like this, it helps if I can at least get some of the facts straight, and I know he’ll level with me as far as he can. And then . . .’ I paused, wondering how best to phrase this.

‘And then?’

‘Well, then there’s the hammer. I’m presuming from what you said that Doug didn’t have it on him when he was arrested?’ She shook her head, eyes a little wide. ‘No. And I’m willing to bet that the boys in blue have been over every square inch of Battle Bridge Road – in fact, the whole of King’s Cross – with a fine-toothed comb. If it was there, they’d have found it.’

I stood up to leave.

‘So it wasn’t with Doug, and it wasn’t out on the street. Which means that somebody else took it, presumably out of the hotel room.’

‘You believe me,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice.

I gave a slight grimace. I really didn’t want to lead her on when I knew so little about what I was getting into. ‘I’m prepared to believe – for the sake of argument – that there was someone else in that room.’ I finished the pint anyway, to fortify me against the night chill. ‘And if the “someone else” turns out to have been the ghost of an American serial killer, then we’re in business.’

Walking home I got a repeat of the prickling premonitions: the sense of being watched that had dogged me all the way back from Stoke Newington. But this time I was out in the open, on a busy street. I looked around. Plenty of people walking by, plenty of traffic passing on the road. The feeling was oddly directionless, and there was no way to narrow it down. Reluctantly, I gave it up. I’d have to pick a better time and a better place.

The Breathers’ van was still parked in the same place: two men sitting in it now, again not much more at this distance than blobby silhouettes. No prickle or itch or tingling spider-sense: whatever I was feeling, whatever was watching me, it had nothing to do with these tosspots. I shot them a wave as I walked past, which they stoically ignored. I was almost sorry they didn’t get out and try for a rumble: I would have welcomed the release of tension.

Back at the flat I dumped my coat over the back of a chair, poured myself a whisky and then left it to stand while I picked out some bluesy chords on my whistle.

The couple next door were no longer coupling, which was good news. But though I’d missed the climax I hadn’t missed the epilogue, which as usual was taking the form of a stand-up fight. Sex and violence, always in the same order: they seemed to have a stripped-down, back-to-basics sort of lifestyle.

I gave up on the music practice after ten minutes or so because the bellowed profanities and the crash of breakables breaking were throwing me off tempo. I put one of Ropey’s death-metal CDs on instead, not because I like Internal Bleeding – with or without the capital letters – but out of sheer self-defence.

But the noises of destruction put me in mind of John Gittings’s ghost, and my mood wobbled again. Then thinking about John brought the pocket watch to mind. I went across to my coat and fished it out to check that it was okay. It was a beautiful thing all right: you could see even through the black oxidation stains that the filigree work on the silver – a motif of fleur-de-lis – was very fine. By a natural extension, I decided to wind it and see if it still worked. That meant taking it out of the outer case, since with a Savonnette watch you can’t always get enough of a purchase on the winding stem with the watch nestled inside its two separate shells.

As I took the watch out of the case, a small piece of paper fell to the floor. I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. It was the kind of very light, thin blue paper that people used to use for airmail letters before there were such things as emails. It had handwriting on it in a flowing, cursive script, and it had been folded over on itself several times.

I opened it out: three folds, four, five. When I had it fully open, I found that it was a complete page from a letter – from the middle of a letter, because there was no superscription and it started in mid-sentence. I read it with growing and slightly uneasy fascination.