Dead Men's s Boots

5

I took the stairs three at a time, limping only slightly, until the last flight which I cleared in a couple of frenzied bunny hops.

In the block’s front lobby, just to the right of the door, there was a full-sized red fire extinguisher. Red means water, so the damn thing weighed a good forty pounds. I hefted it in both hands, kicked the door open and walked out onto the street.

The blue van was still there. I trudged around to the front of it and peered in. The light from a street lamp overhead shone full on the glass, so all I could see was a couple of dim, more or less human shapes inside. But one of them, the one in the driver’s seat, gave a visible start of surprise as he saw me hefting the fire extinguisher. Maybe in the dark he mistook it for a bright red field mortar.

That’s what it became a second later when I flung it at the van’s windscreen.

It didn’t go through – not quite – but it made a noise like a roc’s egg hitting a concrete floor, and the entire windscreen became instantly opaque as the shatter-proof glass gave up the ghost and sagged inwards, transformed into a lattice of a million fingertip-sized fragments.

The driver and passenger doors slammed open simultaneously, and the two men leaped out onto the street, howling with rage. They were young and they were fast. When it came to handling themselves in a fight, though, their education had been sadly neglected. The first guy to reach me, the one coming from the passenger side, threw a punch that he might as well have put in the post with a second-class stamp on it. I sidestepped and kicked him in the crotch. He folded in on his pain, his universe shrinking to a few cubic inches of intimate agony.

By that time the gent from the driver’s side had come to join us. He got my elbow in his face while he was still bringing his guard up. Then I barged him and tripped him, landing heavily on top of him with my knee on his chest in case he had any more fight left in him.

He didn’t, though. He made a noise like the last gasp from an untied party balloon, then opened and closed his mouth a few times without managing to get out another sound.

I had my fist raised to deliver a knockout – which, with the assistance of the pavement, was virtually assured – but I hesitated. These guys had folded so quickly it was frankly embarrassing. In my mind’s eye I’d had an image of Lou Beddows’s bat-wielding thugs, which was why I’d gone in so hard and so fast: belatedly, I began to wonder if this time I’d got the wrong end of the baseball bat.

I reached into the guy’s corduroy jacket and searched the inside pockets, coming up with his wallet on the first pass. Flicking it open I found an NUS card in the name of Stephen Bass of University College, London. Wolves in sheep’s clothing? How hard could it be to fake an NUS card?

A glance over my shoulder showed me that the first guy – the one whose sex life was likely to be theoretical for the next few weeks – was still down. The one I was kneeling on was trying to speak again, but only the first syllable – ‘My – my – my –’ – was making it out as he gulped for air.

I removed my knee from his chest, 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 woodlouse. ‘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 just 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 just 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 windshield 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’s not even in the AA.’

Any slight temptation I felt towards 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 said, 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. And afterwards 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 all their details down 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 if 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 there? 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, blonde, 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 organisation. 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 towards him and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting any more. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle of the fire extinguisher and jerked it free from the remains of the windshield, which fell like rice 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 start before I reached the stairs.

I went back up to the flat and dialled 999. The police rolled around an hour or so later: a rapid-response unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbours, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement. They ended up, as I’d more or less expected, by 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 a hundred per cent convinced by this diagnosis. The first was that the two other lifts turned out, despite the OUT OF SERVICE notices pasted across them, to be working as well as they ever did. The second was that I’d checked out the name of that courier firm – Inter-Urban – while I was 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 almost had a heart attack from not-surprise. The whole set-up 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 frame when the metal buckled under the force of impact.

Snapped off clean, just 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’d probably put it down to the maintenance engineer: but this was a council block, and the lifts only got inspected 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 just nearly been bludgeoned to death by the force of gravity?

Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind had been starting to go long before he’d died, and that one sign of it had been 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, though, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to just 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 now 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?