Dead Men's Boots (25 page)

“
Incipient
psychosis,” she corrected me at last. “Not full-blown.” She sounded defensive but not apologetic. “I just thought that if
I told you Doug was losing his mind, you might not agree to help me. And really, it’s not relevant—not to the case. It’s only
come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.”

“I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,” I reminded her. “And then he went AWOL for a week
and didn’t even call you.”

“But he was still himself.” Her voice was thick with tears. “Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself, it wasn’t
like he was mad. Just… like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer.
I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!”

“Maybe not,” I allowed. “Anyway, for what it’s worth, I think Dr. Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong
with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.”

“You don’t?” Through the tears, hope and relief showed like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage
trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. “Then what is it? What’s happening to him?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I hedged. “And Jan, I hate to say this, but it may not make any difference. Not in terms of the verdict. But
there’s a lot more to it than the police have their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to
get you some answers. We’ve got a window—probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary—Detective Sergeant Coldwood—had
to say, the trial date hasn’t come down yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck,
so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid—” That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous
and formless all of my speculations were. “Well, whatever I turn up,” I finished lamely, “I’ll hand it over to you, and you
can decide for yourself what to do with it.”

“So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mr. Castor?”

I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I didn’t have
a bastard clue. “I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,” I said. “But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the
why of it, or at least get some idea of—”

“‘Why’ isn’t an issue,’” Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. “She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t
know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go
where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she
can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.”

“And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.”

Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the
obvious answer:
Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman…
Meanwhile, my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I were subconsciously looking for a way out of the conversation.
A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big it spilled all the way down to
the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons fly from one equestrian
statue to the next; the cat’s tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it.
An art student, or maybe a hobbyist, was sketching Charles I in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she
sat cross-legged on the stones.

It was almost as though Jan could see the chasm yawning up ahead of her and knew instinctively to veer away from it. “I don’t
understand any of this,” she said. “Whatever you can find, Mr. Castor—whatever you can tell me—”

I could have taken the invitation right there, but like a coward, I veered, too. I grabbed a question from my mind’s cluttered
desktop and waved it like Chamberlain waving his famous autograph from Adolf Hitler.

“Doug mentioned spraining his ankle,” I said. “Was that something that really happened?”

“Yes.” Jan sounded surprised. “A few months ago. He was coming down a ladder, and his foot slipped. He was in agony. The stupid
bastards running that site didn’t even have a first-aid kit. And that meant they wouldn’t even let anyone call an ambulance,
because they didn’t want anyone to twig that they weren’t up to code. Doug had to limp around the corner—two of his mates
carried him part of the way—so he could make the call from somewhere else and not get them into trouble. Sodding cowboys.
He’s always worked for sodding cowboys!”

I looked at my watch. It was half past eleven, and I really needed to be hitting the tube. I told Jan very quickly what Juliet
and I were going to try to do, and I told her I’d let her know how it came out. Then I hung up and went underground.

The Reflections Café Bar turned out to be on Wilton Road, directly opposite the front entrance to Victoria Station and offering
a top-notch view of the bus shelter.

The name promised something eclectic and cosmopolitan. The reality was a narrow glass booth jutting out onto the pavement,
containing a coffee machine, a fridge full of Carling Black Label, a countertop, and six chairs. A teenage girl in a maid’s
uniform that looked as though it had been ordered from a fetish shop took my order for a double espresso with a nod and a
smile, and I sat down. She was the only person in the place apart from a stocky, balding man in a drab-looking mid-brown suit.
He had a film of sweat on his face as he worked through the
Times
sudoku, as though sudoku were an illicit thrill of some kind.

I sat down well within his field of vision, but he didn’t react and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was five past twelve
by this time, so there was a chance that my man had already been and gone. That seemed more likely when my coffee came and
he still hadn’t shown. Taking a sip of the tepid liquid, I stared out the window at the bus shelter across the street and
idly scanned the faces of the people waiting for the number 73. None of them so much as glanced at the window of the café;
none of them looked as though they were trying to pluck up the courage to step inside.

The waitress was lost in the intricacies of cleaning out the coffee machine’s drip tray. The bald guy was working on his puzzle.
Nobody seemed to want to make contact with me. Probably time to chalk this one up to experience and walk away. Might as well
finish my coffee first, though.

And while I did that, I scanned the faces at the bus stop again. Most of them were new, but one of them had been there while
half a dozen buses came and went. He was a skinny guy in his late twenties or thereabouts, in an LL Cool J T-shirt, black
jacket, and jeans. His nose was the size and shape of a rudder and made the rest of his face look like it had been arranged
around it in a space that wasn’t quite wide enough. He had a sallow, unhealthy complexion and the trailing wires of a pair
of headphones dangling from his ears. His crisply ringleted head nodded gently, double-four time, as he soaked up the vibrations
of whatever was playing on his iPod. He still hadn’t looked at me, or if he had, I hadn’t caught him at it.

The usual place.
Maybe I’d jumped to conclusions. Maybe the late Mr. Gittings had outparanoided me yet again. Leave the matchbook, yeah, and
the phone number, but don’t quite join the dots, because then everyone else will see the shape of what you’re making. Maybe
the usual place was somewhere you could
watch
from the Reflections Café Bar.

I finished my coffee, paid up at the counter, and walked out onto the street. The guy at the bus stop moved off at the same
time, still—as far as I could tell—without glancing in my direction. I followed him at a medium-fast stroll, crossing the
street as he tacked away to the south toward Bridge Place.

We were in the maze of bus lanes and bollards in front of Victoria, and I thought he might veer off to the right and go into
the station. He didn’t, though, and he didn’t look behind him. He kept ambling along, his head still bobbing slightly in time
to his personal sound track. I kept pace with him, ten feet behind. I slid my hand inside my coat, found my mobile, and took
it out. Almost out of charge, I noticed—already showing empty, in fact—but there ought to be enough juice for this, I thought.
Pressing the recent calls button, I found the number I’d dialed the night before—the one John had written down on the matchbook
cover—selected it, and called it up.

A second. Two. Then I heard the tinny, boppy, tooth-jangling strains of the Crazy Frog sound from right ahead of me.

The skinny guy’s head jerked in a belated double take. His hand snaked into his jeans pocket to turn off his phone, and he
turned to look back at me, locking eyes with me for the first time. He must have had the phone set to vibrate, too—either
that or there was no music on his headphones in the first place.

Abruptly, without warning, he bolted.

I sprinted after him, instinctively bearing right to cut him off if he headed for the station concourse. If he got inside
there with even a few seconds’ lead on me, I’d never see him again.

But he wasn’t trying for the station. He sprinted straight out across Bridge Place, almost getting sideswiped by a bus, which
cost me a second or two as I slowed to let it pass. He plunged into a side street.

I was almost thirty feet behind him, and by the time I got to the corner of the street, he was already out of sight. I kept
running anyway, scanning the street on both sides to see if there were any clues as to where he might have gone. Only one
turnoff on the left. I took that and was in time to see him vanish around another corner away up ahead of me.

Maybe I don’t exercise as much as I should; I know health experts recommend half an hour a day. I did half an hour back in
1999 and then sort of fell behind, what with all that excitement about the new millennium and all. I was already feeling winded
when I reached the next corner, while the guy I was chasing seemed to be accelerating, if anything.

I got a lucky break, though, when a door opened ahead of him and a woman came out into the street leading two children by
the hand. They turned toward us, forming a pavement-wide barrier and giving him the choice between trampling them underfoot
or making a wide detour. He skidded to a halt, almost slamming into the startled woman, then swerved across the street, past
a skip full of someone’s defunct living room furniture, and into an alley.

I took the hypotenuse and won back enough time to snatch the base unit of a standard lamp from the skip as I passed it. Aerodynamically,
it was piss-poor, but this was no time to be picky. Putting on a last, desperate spurt of speed, I held it out beside me like
a vaulter’s pole, but then I flung it like a javelin.

It didn’t have the balance of a javelin, and the heavy end dipped at once toward the ground as it flew. Another couple of
feet, and it would have hit the pavement and spun away end over end. But I was riding my luck, and it stayed with me. The
shaft went squarely between the guy’s pounding feet, and he tripped, smacking down heavily on the stone slabs.

He was winded, but he managed to scramble up and limp forward another couple of steps. By that time, I was on him. I knocked
him down again with a shoulder charge; then I jumped on top of him, planting one knee in the small of his back to pin him
to the ground. He squirmed and tried to get up, but I had the advantage of weight and position.

“What the fuck!” he spluttered. “Let go of me! Are you frigging insane?”

“We haven’t met,” I panted, my pulse pounding and my breath coming in ragged hiccups. “Well, except on the phone. But I’m
hoping we can be friends. I’m Castor. Who are you?”

“I’m gonna scream,” the guy snarled, still struggling. He snaked his head around to glare at me, his nose looking like a raptor’s
beak. “You think you can do this in broad daylight? Out on the street?”

“I think,” I said, still breathless, “that you wanted to take—a look at me without—committing yourself. And for some reason,
you got cold feet. I told you, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just a friend of John’s.”

“Then let me up!”

I did. He looked to be in even worse shape to run again than I was, but I could see that the alley was a dead end. There was
nowhere for him to run. I stood up and stepped back, letting him climb slowly to his feet.

“What’s your name?” I asked him again. “And tell me the goddamn truth. I was in a bad mood when I got here, and it’s not getting
any better.”

He rubbed his knee, favoring me with a sneering grin. “Yeah, I’m not surprised. Sitting there in the café like you’re waiting
for a blind date. Should’ve worn a white carnation in your—Chesney,” he added hastily as I took a step toward him. “Vincent.
Vincent Chesney.” He threw up his hands to protect himself.