Dead Men's s Boots

21

His real name was Luke Pomfret, Louise had said, but he played under the assumed splendour of Speedo Plank. I’d arranged to meet him at noon, allowing a generous seven hours for restorative unconsciousness. When I woke up, my head banging and my throat feeling like someone had tamped a couple of bagfuls of silica down into it, it was one-thirty. I called Louise again, getting a livelier and more varied torrent of abuse this time because she was properly awake. I apologised profusely, swore to God and a bunch of other guys that I’d never pull this shit on her again, and got her to call up Mister Plank and reschedule.

Then I called Juliet’s house, but it was Susan who picked up. She sounded cheerful enough until I told her where I was and asked her if she’d heard from her other half. ‘But Jules is with you,’ Susan protested, confused.

‘Not any more,’ I admitted. I told her about my little difference of opinion with Juliet at the Golden Coffee House in Brokenshire, omitting some of the more colourful details like her kicking my arse around the room. Susan got more and more unhappy as she listened.

‘But how will she get home!’ she protested. ‘Felix, you shouldn’t have just left her there. She doesn’t know how to behave without scaring or upsetting people. She’s going to get into trouble.’

The anxiety in her voice made me ashamed, even though there hadn’t been any point in the proceedings where I’d felt like I had a choice. ‘She just walked out on me,’ I said, hearing the words as I said them and realising how lame and evasive they sounded. ‘She was really angry and she warned me not to follow her. Which I wasn’t in any position to do in any case: long story, don’t ask.’

‘But does she have her ticket? Her passport?’

‘Susan,’ I said, trying to head off her alarm and anger, ‘she’s back in the country already. She got back before I did. If she hasn’t come home, that’s because she’s been . . . well, busy with other things. I was just hoping she might have got in touch with—’

‘What kind of other things, Felix? What do you mean?’

I hedged. I didn’t want to tell Susan Book that the woman [sic] she loved had been involved in a jailbreak – to free another woman (although one who was forty years dead and very convincingly disguised as a man) so that she wouldn’t have to stand trial for murder. It was probably a conversation that the two of them needed to have between themselves at some point, maybe over a glass of wine and a candlelit supper for two.

‘It’s something to do with the work she was doing for the Met,’ I said. Truth as far as it goes. ‘I’m sure she’s fine, but it was something she felt very strongly about and she didn’t want to wait. That’s what I need to talk to her about, in fact. I’ve got some new information that I want to go over with her. If she comes home, or gets in touch, could you tell her to call me?’

Susan said she’d pass the message along, but her tone was cold. She was blaming me for all this, in spite of my weasel words: as far as she was concerned, she’d invited me over for dinner and I’d dragged a big bag of crap and chaos in with me and dumped it all over her floor. Even without knowing the whole story, she knew that much: and she was right.

I fixed myself a quick breakfast of toast and dry cereal – the milk in the fridge having transubstantiated into something green and malevolent. My neck and back ached so badly that I was moving like an arthritic grandad. The day was off to a great start.

Nicky said they had Gary Coldwood in traction over at the Royal Free. A hop, a skip and a jump and I was treading the streets of Hampstead, a place where I’ve always felt as welcome as a slug in a salad. It didn’t help that I’d forgotten to shave. Or maybe it did: at least people didn’t seem inclined to intrude on my privacy.

There were two uniformed cops on duty outside the private ward where Coldwood was holed up, but they didn’t stop me going in or ask to take my name or anything: I wasn’t sure whether they were there to stop Gary leaving – in which case they should probably have had more faith in his broken legs – or if they’d been assigned to protect him from his screaming fans. Either way, they were earning their overtime fairly painlessly.

Coldwood wasn’t feeling any pain either, but that was because he was doped up to the eyeballs and only about one-tenth conscious. I sat there for ten minutes or so, wondering if he was going to surface far enough to realise that he wasn’t alone. I wasn’t even sure why I was there: or at least where the balance lay between apologising and debriefing.

Eventually I admitted defeat and got up to leave. Coldwood mumbled something, but it wasn’t to me and it wasn’t intelligible. As I headed for the door, though, a nurse walked briskly in and cut off my escape. She was about forty and built like a Victorian wardrobe: a solid trapezoid with a single undifferentiated mound of breast like a 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 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. Rattle rattle thump rattle rattle ring thump ring. ‘Then you get a back-beat coming in here like this – just the bass.’ Thump rest thump thump rest thump rest thump thump rest. ‘Okay, and now this. The hand drums. Beat then break. Beat, then two breaks. You do that – on the edge of the table.’

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 accelerando tempo.

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 ‘Here be monsters’.

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 deliveries. It’s got its own car park and it’s way over on the other side of the building and we just weren’t thinking.’

‘But you’ve got it covered now?’

‘Oh yeah. We were lucky that the driver was an idiot: he didn’t think to switch off his headlights, so someone saw the van coming and we got there in time to head them off.’

She tugged listlessly at the grass between her feet. ‘But it’s only a matter of time now. They’ve been trying to get a court order telling us to cease and desist. That magistrate up in Barnet – Runcie – he’s bumped it up the docket somehow and they’re going to get a verdict tomorrow morning. Mulbridge must have slipped him a bribe or something.’

‘Not J-J’s style,’ I observed. ‘She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.’

Pen looked at me with glum resentment. ‘I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.’

‘Sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight – especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.’

She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close.

‘But you’ll stay?’ she pressed, the words forced out of her. ‘I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.’

It wasn’t what I wanted to do: I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me; of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy – when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files. Time wasn’t on my side. It was hard to just sit here and feel the odds getting longer.

But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits: she looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.

‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.’

As things turned out, I gave her four and some odd minutes. The shadow of the Stanger clinic reached out towards us and then spilled over us while she slept. The Breathers ebbed and flowed, celebrating the oneness of all life, on both sides of the grave, with chants and gestures of defiance that nobody except themselves was listening to.

Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!

I gave them one out of three.

I killed the time while I was waiting by looking over the sheet music again, reading it as Luke/Speedo had told me to, and trying to sound the rhythms – the beats and the pauses, the overlaps and elisions – inside my head. I was imagining a tune that you could build to clothe that percussive skeleton: trying to translate a symphony for drums into something else. It was hard work, and it sucked me in hypnotically, taking me out of my flesh again into the void where my weird talent operates. I was hardly aware of the passage of time, and it was only when Pen stirred on the grass beside me that I came to myself again – bringing back with me a few more crumbs of possibility, a few more twisted ribbons of not-quite-music. John’s symphony, to a non-drummer, was like a five-thousand-piece jigsaw where you had to put all the pieces in at once by pure guesswork and then see if what you got made any sense.

‘What time is it?’ Pen asked muzzily

I looked at my watch. ‘After five,’ I said. ‘How are you feeling? A bit more human?’

‘Like a limp biscuit,’ she muttered. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. ‘But go, if you need to. I’ll manage.’

I wasn’t sure what cues I’d been giving off that told her how much of a hurry I was in to leave: we’ve known each other long enough that stuff like that reaches the level of telepathy.

‘Okay,’ I said, climbing to my feet. ‘Hold out for tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be back in force.’

Pen stared up at me, shielding her eyes against the setting sun that hung over my shoulder.

‘If you’re back at all,’ she said.

‘I didn’t say that,’ I protested.

‘Yes, you did.’ She stood up too and took a step towards me almost against her will. I thought for a moment that she was going to embrace me, because she seemed to bring her arms up in synchrony but then stopped, retreated, and folded them instead.

‘I’ll never forgive you for what you did to Rafi,’ she said.

‘I’m not looking for forgiveness, Pen. But if I do, I’ll look elsewhere.’

‘But I don’t want you to kill yourself working some stupid case. Werewolves can eat you. Demons can blind you and rape you and suck out your soul. Almost everything out there is faster than you, and all you’ve got is that stupid whistle. Whatever it is you’ve got it in your head to do, Fix, don’t do it. I can see from here that you don’t think it’s going to work.’

I mimed a dealer at a blackjack table. It’s a gesture I’ve used on Pen a lot of times, when she seemed to be trying to give me a tarot reading without her deck in her hands. It always irritates her, and it always pushes her away – which was where I wanted her right then because she was way too close for comfort.

‘Fine, then,’ she snapped. ‘Go and kill yourself. Don’t worry about the shit you’re leaving Rafi in. Let someone else pick up the bill. That’s the default setting, isn’t it?’

‘Reckless hedonism,’ I agreed. ‘Devil take the hindmost.’

‘Which devil, Fix?’

‘Next time I pass by, I’ll bring you a catalogue and some colour swatches.’

I walked away quickly, before Pen could get over the irritation and tackle me from a different direction. I didn’t want to explain any more than I already had, and even more than that I didn’t want to go into this whole exercise with the feeling that there was another way that I was too stupid to see. That just gets you second-guessing yourself, and that just gets you dead. I wanted to live.

But that’s always been my problem. I set my sights way too high.