Dead Men's Boots (12 page)

I removed my knee, backing off and standing up. He rolled over onto his side and drew a few shuddering, raucous breaths.

“My—brother’s—van!” he gasped. “You’ve—eurghhhh! Bastard! Bastard! My—brother’s—”

“You think I give a stuff about the van?” I growled. “You tried to kill me, you psychopathic fuckwits! You’re lucky I didn’t
torch the fucking van with the pair of you in it!”

He tried to sit up, failed, tried again, and still couldn’t make his bruised chest muscles bend sufficiently to reach the
vertical. He was staring at me in horror, and now he shook his head in tight, trembling arcs. “No!” he moaned. “Didn’t—didn’t—”

Righteous wrath was still propelling me, but with less and less momentum by the second. “What about the graffiti?” I demanded.
“‘Exorcist equals deceased’! You left me your fucking calling card. You wanted me to
know
you were setting this up.”

The guy finally managed to get semi-upright. He looked across at his comrade, who was still curled up in a tight spiral like
a dead wood louse. “I told you, Martin!” he wailed. “I told you we’d get into trouble!”

Those words put the whole thing beyond doubt. Stone-cold killers simply don’t talk like that.

Anticlimax washed over me in a nauseating wave. Whoever had sabotaged the lift would be miles away by now, and I’d just torn
into a couple of feckless students who were probably guilty of nothing worse than a preemptive paint job. My knees trembling
slightly, I went across to check the damage on the other guy. He was beginning to be aware of the outside world again, and
I helped him to his feet. By the time I’d done that, the driver—Stephen Bass, Esquire, if his NUS card was to be believed—had
turned his attention back to the van and was trying to pull the fire extinguisher free without making the punctured windscreen
collapse in on itself. He gave up quickly, because every attempt to move it precipitated a small shower of broken glass.

“He’s gonna kill me!” he kept moaning. “He’s gonna kill me!” Then he turned and pointed at me, tears in his eyes. “I’m calling
the police, you bastard. You won’t get away with this.”

I shrugged. “Sorry, friend. Threatening to murder people can give them the wrong impression. I don’t think the police are
going to be too sympathetic under the circumstances.”

He sat down on the van’s step-up board, overcome with misery. “My brother needs the van for work,” he said, his voice choked.
“He only lets me borrow it when my car’s off the road. He doesn’t even have any insurance.”

Any slight temptation I felt toward sympathy was quelled by the extravagance of his self-pity. Arseholes who play stalker
when they should be writing term papers can’t really complain when their world turns upside down. All I wanted to do was to
make absolutely sure these idiots weren’t the ones who’d just tried to kill me. Then I’d be only too happy to leave them to
mourn their various losses in privacy.

I tossed Bass’s wallet down on the road to get his attention. “Why were you staking me out in the first place?” I demanded.

“Oh yeah, like you don’t know,” Bass sneered, raising his head to glare at me accusingly. “We know all about you and what
you’ve got planned.”

“What I’ve got planned?” I echoed, interested in spite of myself. “What’s that, exactly?”

“Mass exorcisms across London,” the other guy said from behind me in a strained, trembly voice. “Spiritual cleansing—getting
rid of all the dead in one go. You’re the big wheel, aren’t you? Felix Castor.”

“Is this a joke?” I was starting to feel like I’d stepped into a parallel universe—one where Frank Spencer was God and lifts
only went down. “I’m Castor, yes, but I’m nobody’s wheel—big, small, or indifferent. Who’s been feeding you this garbage?”

“The lieutenant—” the other guy started, but Bass cut him off with a brusque gesture.

“We had a meeting,” he said. “You don’t know it, but the Breath of Life have been keeping tabs on you for ages. We had an
operative at that funeral watching you from undercover. She’s from our underground task force. Afterward she made contact
with us and told us to keep you under surveillance. And that’s what we’ve done. Wherever you go, we’ll be with you. Whoever
you see, we’ll see them, too, and we’ll take down all their details and circulate them to everyone in the movement. You’re
ours, Castor, whenever we want to take you.”

A secret operative? A Breather working undercover among the London ghostbreakers? I tried that on for size, then I turned
it upside down and discovered that it fitted a lot better that way. Dana McClennan. Dana McClennan stopping to talk to the
pickets as she walked away from John Gittings’s funeral.
You see that man over here? Well, he’s not a man at all. He’s the big bad wolf.

“You fucking berk,” I said sternly. “This secret operative—this sweet, blond, sexy, plausible secret operative who let you
in on the big secret and made you feel so important—her name is Dana McClennan, and she’s not even in your sodding organization.
She was just using you to bust my balls.”

Bass gave me a pitying look. “You can’t trick me into giving away the names of our people. Your sort are finished, Castor.
You just don’t know it yet.”

I walked toward him, and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting anymore. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle
of the fire extinguisher, and jerked it free from the remains of the windscreen, which fell like rice paper at a wedding onto
the van’s front seats. Bass gave an anguished wail. I hefted the extinguisher onto my shoulder and turned to face him and
his blue-balled friend.

“Stephen Bass,” I said. “UCL, wasn’t it? I don’t know which faculty, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If I so much
as see your sodding face again, I’ll come round to your hall of residence with some friends of mine, and we’ll whistle your
soul right out of your body. You’ll be like a zombie, only with less personality.”

Bass almost swallowed his tongue. “You wouldn’t dare,” he scoffed with less conviction than Bart Simpson saying “It was like
that when I got here.”

“Try me,” I suggested. “Listen, you’ve been sitting out here watching the building all this time. Did you see someone go in?”

Bass hesitated, torn between wanting to play it cool in the face of my threats and not wanting to piss off a man who now knew
more or less where he lived. “There was a big fat man,” he said.

“And did you see him come out again?”

“What?” Evidently, Bass had worn himself out on the starter for ten.

“Did he come out again?” I repeated more slowly. “Did you see him come back out onto the street?”

“No.”

Interesting. Very.

“Okay, thanks for your time,” I said, dropping the fire extinguisher at Bass’s feet and making him jump. “If you do feel a
burning desire to talk to the police, I’m about to call them. All you have to do is wait right there. They’ll be along presently.”

I heard the doors of the van slam behind me as I went back into the block, and the engine started before I reached the stairs.

I went back up to the flat and dialed 999. The police rolled around about an hour or so later—a rapid-response unit, obviously.
Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbors, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. As I’d more
or less expected they ended up putting the whole thing down to accident. The cables had snapped off clean, the nice constable
said, which ruled out any foul play with bolt cutters or hacksaws. Probably down to metal fatigue.

Two things made me less than 100 percent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts had turned out,
despite the
OUT OF SERVICE
notices pasted across them, to be working as well as ever. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm—Interurban—while
waiting for the boys in blue to show, and it didn’t exist. I hadn’t really expected anything different. To quote Iago the
parrot, I’d almost had a heart attack from not surprise. The whole setup had been too pat, the timing too convenient.

After the police had left, I waited a half hour or so for the last of the onlookers to go back to their interrupted evenings,
and then I went down to the basement to look at the remains of the lift car. It had hit the bottom of the shaft with enough
force to demolish the motor housing, and the splayed remains of it kept the lift doors open. Ignoring the incident tape and
the warning sign, I climbed inside and inspected what I could see of the roof of the car, which was easy enough, since the
inspection hatch had popped right out of its housing as the metal buckled under the force of impact.

Snapped off clean, like the man said. But the few feet of cable that were still attached to the roof of the lift were shiny
and uncorroded. Metal fatigue doesn’t show to the untrained eye, of course. But footprints do. In the sooty grease at one
corner of the car roof, there was a nice one, size eleven or so, perfectly captured. If the Met boys had seen it at all, they
probably would’ve put it down to the maintenance engineer, but this was a council block, and the lifts got inspected only
on alternate blue moons.

The coincidence of this happening immediately after I’d read that letter hidden in the pocket watch had shaken me more than
slightly.
Warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target.
And then my name scribbled in the margin. So had someone else read those words besides me? Was that why I’d nearly been bludgeoned
to death by the force of gravity?

Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind was starting to go long before he died, and one sign of it was this business
of hiding notes to himself all over the place. It was more than possible that he’d written the letter to himself. I didn’t
know his handwriting well enough to tell.

Either way, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to stick a knife in my back, like regular folks—presumably
because they wanted my tragic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.

And either way, I was feeling more curious about the job that John had been working on when he died. Maybe I would turn up
for the wake after all. I’d probably kill the mood, but what can you do?

    
Six

D
ETECTIVE SERGEANT GARY COLDWOOD HAD BLOOD ON his hands, and it wasn’t his. Not just blood, in fact: Gobbets of red-black tissue
hung from his fingers and from the business end of the wickedly thin filleting knife he held in his right hand. In his left
hand was a heart that would never beat again.

“Meter’s running,” he said. He liked to say things like that because they fit in with his image of himself as a tough, ruthless
cop doing his balls-out thing in the canyons and arroyos of the urban wasteland. He had the face for it, too—all squared-off
chin and overluxuriant eyebrows—and he used it to scowl at me now. “I don’t owe you any favors, Castor, and I’m not telling
you anything that wasn’t already reported in the papers, so don’t ask.”

“Because a punch in the face often offends,” I finished for him.

“Exactly.”

“Then why are we meeting here instead of down at the cop shop?”

“Here” was the kitchen of his maisonette in East Sheen. It was the afternoon of the next day, and given the Victor Frankenstein
vibe that Coldwood was currently putting out, I was grateful for the touches of normality provided by the sinkful of dirty
dishes, the Dress-up Homer Simpson fridge magnets, and the FHM calendar on the wall.

Instead of answering, Coldwood dropped the heart—a sheep’s, judging by the size of it—back into the dish and wiped his free
hand on an apron that was already foul. Then he picked up a pencil and stared at the sad, half-dismantled piece of offal with
a hard frown of concentration.

“We’re meeting here because I can’t trust you to shut up when shutting up is the only sane option,” he growled. He touched
the business end of the pencil to a page in an open A4 pad and began to draw the heart with great care but no particular skill.
A couple of pink smears extended across the paper like a wake behind his wrist. “You’ll ask questions you shouldn’t ask, make
stupid guesses to see if you can gauge anything from my reactions, and generally show me up in front of people whose opinions
matter to me.”

There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t bother. Might as well try the sympathy card, though, because you never knew.
“Basquiat still got your balls?”

Coldwood laughed mirthlessly. “When the Paragon Hotel case broke, Detective Sergeant Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking
to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioral modeling in detective work. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone
is holding anyone’s balls here…” He tailed off, aware that the metaphor had unexpectedly run aground. Ruth Basquiat is as
hard as tungsten-tipped nails, but her balls—unless she throws the kind that Cinderella likes to go to—are purely notional.

To show my good faith, I left that thought unspoken. “I’m not asking for any trade secrets anyway,” I told Coldwood, comfortable
with the outrageous lie because the next sentence exposed it straightaway. “All I need is an idea of how strong the case against
Doug Hunter is.”