Dead Men's s Boots

6

Detective 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 there was a heart that would never beat again.

‘Meter’s running,’ he said. Coldwood likes to say things like that because it fits 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’s got the face for it, too – all squared-off chin and over-luxuriant eyebrows – and he used it to scowl at me now. ‘I don’t owe you any favours, 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.

Coldwood dropped the heart – a sheep’s, judging by the size of it – back into the dish instead of answering, 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 of 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 as it moved. ‘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, DS Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioural modelling 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 liked to go to – are purely notional.

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

‘All you need for what, Castor?’

‘Sorry, Gary. Client privilege.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re full of shit in an amazing variety of different shades and textures.’

‘Seriously,’ I persisted. ‘All I need are the basics, nothing that would compromise your professional integrity by even half an inch.’ I pointed at one of the tubercles sticking out of the heart. ‘You missed that one,’ I added helpfully.

‘I didn’t miss it,’ Coldwood muttered. ‘I just didn’t get to it yet. You want me to give you a walk-through of the whole case? Seriously? And you don’t think that would compromise me?’ The emphasis he put on the word was unnecessarily sarcastic. I could see that I was rubbing him up the wrong way.

‘Okay, Gary,’ I said. ‘Just meet me halfway, then. You know you want to. Deep down you’re still feeling guilty because you let me get arrested for murder that time, and then stood there and watched while Basquiat beat the crap out of me.’

‘No,’ he said, drawing in the little additional piece of cardiac plumbing. ‘I’m not feeling guilty, because that whole Abbie Torrington business was your own damn fault. And if I remember rightly you got yourself out of arrest again in very short order. By driving an ambulance through the front wall of the Whittington Hospital, wasn’t it?’

‘I wasn’t driving.’

‘Point stands.’

Coldwood straightened up and looked at his drawing with a critical eye: apparently it passed muster, because he put the pencil down. I thought I could see a couple of other oozy bits of anatomy that he hadn’t captured in his lightning sketch, but maybe they didn’t matter from a policing point of view.

Coldwood’s evening class in forensic science is his latest attempt to get ahead of the baying pack down at Albany Street and make Inspector while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. He goes up to Keighley College two nights a week, gets day release once a fortnight and in theory comes out in a couple of years’ time with a BTEC Higher, which he’ll happily wave in the face of the aforementioned Detective Sergeant Basquiat – a willowy blonde with a pixie-ish disregard for interrogation protocol. In the meantime he spends his free time slicing up internal organs that don’t – anatomically speaking – belong to him.

‘You don’t have a murder weapon,’ I said, deciding to go for a direct approach. Sometimes there’s such a thing as being too subtle.

‘We’ll find it. We still think Hunter ditched it in between leaving the Paragon and being picked up.’

‘Ditched it where? Out on the street?’

‘Maybe, yeah. Or maybe in the boot of a car. Or in a skip behind a shop. It’s a bloody claw hammer, Fix – with a two-and-a-half-inch cross-section on the blunt end. We’ll know it when we see it.’

‘What if you don’t find it? Are you prepared to admit the possibility that there was someone else in that hotel room?’

Coldwood rolled his eyes and shook his head in something like disgust. He picked up the dish and overturned it, letting the heart slide out and fall into his pedal bin. ‘About a thousand someone elses,’ he scoffed. ‘You know the kind of place we’re talking about. Revolving doors, hot and cold running whores. They’re in and out of there like Tom and effing Jerry. We picked up three dozen sets of prints on the bedposts alone.’

‘I’m talking about someone who might not have left any prints,’ I said quietly.

That got his full attention. He wagged a finger at me, nodding to indicate that he got it now. ‘Oh, right. This is Janine Hunter’s vengeful-ghost theory, is it?’ he said derisively. ‘Myriam Kale, back from the dead. How did she get to England? Through the phone lines?’

‘You will admit, though,’ I pressed on regardless, ‘that without a weapon most of your evidence is circumstantial . . .’

‘Circumstantial?’ Coldwood was incredulous. ‘DNA evidence from an anal rape?’

‘Rape’s a question of interpretation – especially if you walk into a bedroom in a knocking shop and lock the door behind you. But in any case we’re talking about the murder, not the sex.’

‘Look at the autopsy report and tell me it’s all interpretation,’ Coldwood suggested. ‘Barnard had been beaten, burned, buggered and bent backwards. Then he’d been tenderised with a fucking hammer. Whether he went into that room for sex or not, I think it’s pretty fair to assume that very little of what was done to him was as per tariff.’

I was fighting a rearguard action here, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. ‘Burned?’ I repeated. ‘You mean on his face? According to Jan Hunter, that happened after he was killed, not—’

Coldwood waved the objection away. ‘Don’t trip me up with semantics, Fix. This isn’t a courtroom. Look, we can place Hunter in the area. We can place him in the room. We can place him – excuse my language – up Barnard’s arse. What more do you want?’

He turned his back on me, pulling a generous length of kitchen towel from a rack on the wall and wiping his gory hands on it. ‘We’ve done our homework,’ he went on. ‘Among other things, we talked to the rent boys around the back of St Pancras, and they say Hunter’s been a regular down there for the past three months. They hate his kind – skin divers, they call them. Gay men who come down to head off a punter, but don’t charge for it. He got into a fight with one of the street boys, and he threw some kind of a wobbly – very nasty. Went for the guy’s face and marked him so he couldn’t work. They left him alone after that. Just swore at him and gave him the finger from a distance.’

Coldwood had finished wiping his hands by now, and had gone on to wash them under the tap and dry them on a tea towel. Now he opened the fridge and took out two cans of Asda lager, one of which he offered to me. I took it for the sake of solidarity.

‘And besides,’ he added, sounding very slightly, almost imperceptibly defensive, ‘we got someone to read the scene for us.’

‘Someone?’ Taken slightly off guard, I snapped off the end of the ring-pull without actually opening the can. ‘What sort of someone? You mean an exorcist?’

‘Yeah.’ He nodded. ‘Exactly. Your sort of someone.’

‘Son of a bitch!’ I tossed the can back to Coldwood, suddenly not so keen on enjoying his hospitality. ‘You said you’d get me back on the roster as soon as the heat died down.’

‘It’s not that easy, Castor. You resisted arrest.’

‘Wrongful arrest,’ I countered. ‘You dropped the charges.’

‘Yeah, we did. You still did eighty thousand quids’ worth of damage to the Whittington and left two injured officers behind you when you walked out.’

‘When I was carried—’

‘Fix, what can I tell you? The heat didn’t die down yet. Your name is still John Q. Shit as far as the department is concerned. Frankly, they’d rather have Osama Bin Laden on the payroll than you. At least he helps towards the ethnic-recruitment quotas. Anyway, this is someone you know. An old friend of yours. So you can ask her yourself, and she can tell you a fuck of a lot more than I can.’

She? Someone I knew? Suspicion formed inside me, filling a small void left when my stomach dropped into my shoes. ‘Is this-?’

‘I met her last year when I was interviewing Sue Book, the verger at Saint Michael’s church – you know, after it got set alight by those American Satanists. Beautiful woman. I mean, you know – incredible. I was choked when I found out that she and Book were—’

‘You mean Juliet Salazar,’ I said bleakly, cutting him off before he could go on to tell me what a waste it was that Juliet was a lesbian – or worse, start speculating on what it might take to turn her around.

‘Salazar,’ he repeated distantly, looking past me in a way that made it quite clear that he was still seeing her in the private theatre of his visual cortex. ‘Yeah. Got it in one.’

I waited patiently until Coldwood pulled himself out of the happy reverie. It cost him an effort. ‘So, anyway,’ he said, ‘you said there were two things you wanted to see me about. What’s the other one?’

‘Someone’s trying to kill me.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Oh yeah.’ I told him about the falling lift, and the man-sized footprint in the oil and shit on the roof of the car. He was interested, but he didn’t want to show it.

‘I hate it when you play junior detective, Castor,’ he said ruefully. ‘Some other poor bastard always ends up getting the sticky end of the lollipop.’

‘Yeah, well, everyone’s entitled to a second opinion, Gary. Metal fatigue? Give me a fucking break!’

‘Well, if the cable’s been tampered with, it’ll be easy to tell,’ Gary allowed. ‘I’ll send a team down to get an impression of that footprint, anyway. Probably get some virtuals off the cable, too, if the gent wasn’t wearing gloves. You got any idea who he might have been? Whose cage have you been rattling?’

I didn’t want to mention John’s letter: it sounded too much like one of Nicky Heath’s paranoid fantasies. I just shrugged.

‘Your Breathers mentioned a huge fat man. Have you pissed off any huge fat men lately?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

‘Have you even met any?’

‘Well, yeah, there was one,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Go on.’

‘Guy named Leonard. I don’t know his last name. He works at a law office over in Stoke Newington. Ruthven, Todd and Clay. I saw him for, like, five minutes as I was waiting to see one of the partners. But he did seem to be staring at me a lot.’

‘He’s a lawyer?’

‘No, I don’t think so. Some kind of clerk, maybe. He was fixing the photocopier.’

‘Okay.’ Coldwood looked thoughtful. ‘Ruthven, Todd and Clay. I’ll look into it. Tell you if I find anything.’

‘Officially, or unofficially?’

‘The latter. I do homicide, Fix, remember? Not metal fatigue.’