Dead Men's s Boots

7

There’s something you should know about Juliet, just so – unlike, say, DS Coldwood – you get the right picture in your head to start with. Oh, don’t misunderstand me: she’s every bit as drop-dead gorgeous as he says she is. It’s just that in Juliet’s case, the ‘drop-dead’ part of that phrase is more than a simple intensifier.

Juliet is a succubus: a sex-demon. Her real name is Ajulutsikael, so you can see why she doesn’t use it much any more. She feeds by stoking up your lust to the point where you’re about to drown in your own drool and then consuming you, body and soul. She’s tried to explain to me why the lust is a necessary component in all of this: it provides a conduit, a psychic drinking-straw that she can use to suck up your spirit like a blood-warm milk shake.

There was a time, back when she was just starting out in the business, when we used to share a lot of our cases. You could say that I showed her the ropes, or at least taught her some knots that she didn’t already know: but if I’m honest, what I was mainly doing was trying to domesticate a big, scary jungle predator into behaving like a house cat. It was a bumpy process, with a number of very memorable upsets along the way.

And going back before that, Juliet tried to make a meal of me once but stopped halfway. In some ways, halfway is where I’ve been ever since: unable even to decide whether I’m relieved or frustrated that she didn’t go through with it. Either way, I find it curiously hard to bear the fact that she’s now shacking up with someone else – someone who (because she’s female and Juliet’s triggers are all male hormones) can get physical with her without arousing her other appetites.

All of which is by way of an explanation for why I didn’t take up Gary Coldwood’s suggestion and go and talk to Juliet as soon as I’d left his flat. There’s only so much suffering a body can stand, and in any case there was somewhere else I needed to be. I took the coward’s way out and told myself that my duty to John Gittings’s restless spirit came first: well, that and my curiosity as to what the letter hidden in the pocket watch was all about. If it had anything to do with me almost taking the express elevator all the way to Ropey Doyle’s basement, I felt like I probably ought to know about it.

I was walking up the steps towards Carla’s flat just as Todd was coming down. Four men in identical suits of funereal black, and with identically impassive faces, walked behind him. Todd himself was jauntily dressed in a pale grey pinstripe.

‘I take it you’ve just made a delivery,’ I said.

Todd glanced in mild surprise from my face to the rolled-up sleeping bag I was carrying over my shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The coffin is in the living room. Are you staying the night, Mister Castor?’

‘That I am, Mister Todd.’

The lawyer nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s good. Mrs Gittings probably shouldn’t be alone tonight.’ He made to walk on past me.

‘One quick question,’ I said. ‘When John came in to see you, looking to change his will, how did he seem?’

Todd turned to look back at me with a stare that was suddenly all cold professionalism. ‘In what sense?’

I’d hoped to avoid specifics while I fished for random gobbets of information, but evidently lawyers have built-in radar for that kind of thing.

‘Well,’ I gestured vaguely, ‘in the sense of – did he appear lucid to you? Rational? Or was he looking a little frayed at the edges?’

Todd answered without even a microsecond’s pause. ‘He was in his right mind. Entirely lucid, to use your expression. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to take legal instructions from him. He looked tired. Stressed, perhaps. A man with a lot weighing on his mind. But if his suicide was the result of any kind of . . . mental decay, then it hadn’t started when I spoke with him. Or, at least, it hadn’t begun to show in the way he talked and acted. I’d have said he was as sane as you or me.’

‘Then he wasn’t talking about breaking and entering? Or kicking people in the balls?’

‘Obviously not. Why? Is there some reason why you would have expected him to?’

I didn’t have to answer that question, but I felt in some indefinable way as though I owed Todd a favour. Frankness was probably the only payment I’d ever be able to give him.

‘They all came up in his correspondence,’ I said. ‘I think . . . maybe they’re related to whatever it was that was on his mind when he came to see you. He was working on something, and it had started to obsess him. I’d really like to know what that something was.’

‘Why?’ Todd demanded again. He was looking at me with the lively mistrust that you show to the nutter on the bus.

I shrugged. ‘He told Carla it was important. Maybe . . . a professional commitment of some kind that his estate needs to take care of.’ It felt like a weaselly answer, but it was the best I could do without telling Todd about the lift incident and getting into deeper waters than I wanted to right then. Fortunately he seemed already to have decided that this was something he didn’t want or need to know any more about. He detached himself from me with almost indecent haste and led his four-man cortège away towards a massive hearse that was parked opposite. I went on up the stairs.

Carla had locked the door and bolted it at top and bottom, so it took her a while to let me in. Her face lit up when she saw me: I guess she must have thought it was Todd coming back because he’d forgotten something.

‘Fix!’ she exclaimed. ‘You changed your mind!’ She threw her arms around me, making me feel like a cynical, self-serving bastard because the reason why I was here had so little to do with her and so much to do with my own near-death experience.

The coffin stood on two trestles in the centre of the living room, cleaned and polished so that it was as good as new. It looked as though it ought to have a ROAD CLOSED sign hung from the middle of it. The place was as silent as the grave – maybe more, if my experience was anything to go by. The charm I’d laid on John the day before was still holding, although at the edges of my internal radar I was aware of something stirring every so often, like the worm inside a jumping bean that makes the bean twitch as though it was alive.

I offered to put on some coffee, but it transpired that there wasn’t any left: the packet that we’d emptied back on the previous Sunday had been the last in the house. It had been a while since Carla had remembered to do any shopping.

‘Do you want to go out and grab a bite to eat, then?’ I suggested.

‘Sorry, Fix.’ She shook her head, her gaze flicking across to the coffin and then immediately shying away again towards the neutral ground of my face. ‘I can’t leave him here all by himself.’

‘No, I see that,’ I admitted. ‘Jesus, Carla, there’s no need to apologise. This is the man you spent twenty years of your life with. Still, I think it would probably be a good idea if you took on some ballast. Could you handle a takeaway?’

She smiled weakly. ‘Not hygienic to handle it. I’ll eat one, though.’

I took things in hand, slipping out to the Romna Gate on Southgate Circus for some carry-out, and picking up a bag of other essentials from a mini-mart on the way back.

Carla perked up over gosht kata marsala and a keema naan, washed down by a glass of high-proof Belgian blond. We were eating in the kitchen, where it was possible to forget the looming presence of the coffin for whole minutes at a time. Theoretically possible, anyway: but somehow the talk never seemed to stray very far from John.

I told Carla about the letter inside the watch case, but not about the lift. She nodded, looking resigned. ‘That’s what I was talking about,’ she said. ‘He’d hide things, and then lose them, and then find them and hide them all over again. I had it for months, Fix. I thought I’d got to know most of his hiding places, by the end, but that’s a new one.’

I hesitated. All I knew about John’s death was what Bourbon Bryant had told me, and that was the bare fact that John had stood up one Sunday night while Carla was watching the omnibus edition of Eastenders, locked himself in the bathroom and decorated the walls with the inside of his head. I found that after reading the letter I wanted to know more. What I didn’t want to do was to drag Carla over territory she’d rather not revisit.

‘Did any of those other notes survive?’ I asked. ‘The messages he wrote to himself?’

She thought about that. ‘No,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I’m pretty sure they didn’t. Like I said, he was always changing his mind. Spending most of a day scribbling on bits of paper and envelopes, then burning it all or tearing it up, and then the next day starting all over again.’

‘Those hiding places you mentioned – have you checked them at all, since he died?’

Carla looked at me a little blankly. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘I don’t know. Because there might be something there that would tell us what he was up to. “One for the history books” – remember? Maybe it was as big as he thought it was. Maybe there’s a reason why it turned out to be too much for him to take.’

Carla put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She blinked a few times, quickly, as if there were tears in her eyes that she wanted to keep inside.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, lifting up my hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Forget I asked, Carla. You’ve got enough on your plate without this.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, Fix. It just brought it all back, that’s all.’

‘Exactly. I’ll shut up.’

‘You don’t have to.’ She stood up. ‘It’s not like there’s any getting away from it, is there? There are a few places we can look, if you want to.’

Carla walked through into the living room, then off down a short hallway that led to the bedroom. I followed, a little uneasily, sending up a silent apology to John’s slumbering shade.

The bed had red satin sheets and a coverlet with the Playboy-bunny logo on it: matching his-and-hers pillows, with a halo for her and horns for him. You think you know people, but you never really do. Carla hauled a shoebox out from under the bed on the ‘his’ side, rummaged inside it and turned up nothing more interesting than a venerable set of cheque stubs.

Her next target was a safe on the wall behind a picture of a unicorn with a naked woman riding on its back. The safe had a digital lock which Carla opened by pressing the ‘1’ key six times. ‘Factory default,’ she explained, glancing at me and rolling her eyes. ‘He never bothered to change it.’ Drawing another blank, she crossed to a roll-top desk next to the window. It had a single drawer, which was empty, but Carla didn’t even bother to look inside it: she just pulled it out and put it on the bed, then knelt down and put her arm into the space where it had been.

Faint bumps and thunks told me that she was feeling to right and left in the hollow at the back of the desk. Then she stopped, and her eyebrows rose.

‘Bingo,’ she murmured.

With some difficulty, she pulled out a Sainsbury’s bag wrapped around and around with brown duct tape. She held it out to me, and I took it. I hefted it in my hand, felt the weight. It didn’t feel like there could be a whole hell of a lot in there.

I started to undo the tape, and Carla put her hand on mine to stop me. Then, as if conscious of where we were, and how loaded even a momentary touch like that had to be at the foot of a double bed with Hugh Hefner’s bow-tie-sporting were-rabbit giving us its one-eyed stare, she took her hand away again hastily.

‘Open it somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Or – tomorrow. Not now. It would probably be too much for me right now.’

I nodded and lowered the small package to my side. We were still standing too close to each other: it seemed to need another gesture on my part to defuse the tension.

‘You want another beer?’ I asked her. ‘It’s about eight per cent proof – like Tennant’s Extra, but with taste. Guarantees a good night’s sleep.’

‘I don’t think I’ll sleep much tonight whatever I do,’ Carla said, turning away and taking a step towards the bed. She hauled the sheets and covers off in a single practised movement. ‘Fix, I’m going to sleep in the living room, next to – I mean, with John. So you can have the bed. There’s more sheets and pillow cases in the top of the wardrobe, and a spare duvet in the divan drawer on that side.’ She pointed.

‘I brought a sleeping bag,’ I said. ‘I’ll just spread that on top of the mattress. Unless you want me to bring the mattress through for you.’

She shook her head, looking at me with an expression that was only a couple of hard knocks away from beaten flat. ‘I’m fine with the duvet,’ she said. ‘I’ll fold it like a sandwich and sleep in the middle.’

Seeming to reach a decision, she let the sheets fall to the floor and came back over to me. ‘Thanks for staying with me tonight,’ she said. ‘And for arranging everything. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

She kissed me on the cheek, and there was no tension or awkwardness in it. Not on Carla’s side, anyway: I have to admit, her thanks sat heavily in my stomach right then, given that the main reason I was there was because I thought I might be able to get a clue about who was trying to kill me.

‘It’s part of the basic service,’ I assured her, deadpan. ‘The de luxe includes lawn care.’

‘I haven’t got a lawn.’

‘Then the basic should suit you just fine.’

I helped her take the bedding through, then went back down the steps to collect the rest of the kit I’d brought with me. It was already dark – but then, the slate-grey mountains of cumulonimbus had made it dark for most of the day. The wind had blown most of that mass away to the west now, though, and a sliver of moon as thin as a sickle blade was cutting what was left into grubby-looking tatters. Tomorrow was going to be fine, and as cold as charity.

I lingered out there, because there was something about the east wind heavy with unborn frost that felt clean and even refreshing. I called Juliet and got Susan Book. I asked her if she could pass a message on: I just needed to talk to Juliet about some work she’d done for the Met. She said she’d tell Juliet as soon as she came in.

‘We never seem to see you any more, Fix,’ she chided me. ‘Where are you working these days? In some terrible wilderness on the edge of civilisation?’

‘Southgate,’ I said. ‘I think the nearest civilisation is Wood Green Shopping City.’

‘Good grief, you’re only twenty minutes’ drive from here! You’ve got to come over for dinner. Jules would love to see you.’

‘Well, I will.’

‘Tomorrow.’

Cornered. ‘Okay, tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Actually, could you make it Thursday? I’ve got the prayer circle tomorrow night.’

‘Thursday it is, then. Thanks, Sue. See you then.’

I hung up, pondering on the mysteries of the human spirit. It was inexplicable on the face of it how someone who lived in sin with a succubus – a consenting adult demon of the same sex – could still be so active in the Church and see no inherent contradictions in her lifestyle. Susan Book was one of a kind. I was getting to like her, even if she had stolen my woman.

I took my time stowing the phone away, collecting my things and climbing the stairs again.

When I got back inside, I felt the difference even before I saw Carla frozen on the floor in a defensive crouch. Staining the carpet between her and the coffin was an elongated teardrop of spilled beer, with the starburst remains of the broken bottle at its narrower end. Clearly, during the few minutes I’d been outside, John had woken up – in a pretty sour mood.

Carla was crying. I went over to her, knelt and put a hand around her shoulders. She melted into me, powerful sobs making her shudder and shake. ‘I just –’ she managed to get out ‘ – said goodnight – to him!’

I’m not good in this kind of situation. I’m familiar with the noises that have to be made, but people who know me, and know what I do for a living, find it as hard to take consolation from me as they would from a professional hangman. I tried anyway. ‘Carla,’ I said, ‘the reason he’s so scared and so angry now is because fear and anger are pretty much all he is. His body’s gone – it’s in the casket there. He’s jumped the rails. Right now he’s just a collection of emotions so strong there isn’t even much room left for memories. That’s why so many ghosts seem to spend their time replaying their own deaths: they’re caught in a loop, going through the same events again and again because there’s so much fear and pain tied up in them.

‘John’s not trying to hurt you. You said yourself that none of the things he’s thrown have ever touched you. He’s lashing out because he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him and he doesn’t know how to get free of it. But if he threw that bottle when you touched the side of the coffin –’ her head buried in my chest, she tried to nod, and I felt rather than saw the movement ‘– then that’s a good sign. It means he recognises the body as his own, and wants to protect it. It means he remembers enough of his past to make that identification. On some level, he knows who he was. Who he still is. So you did the right thing, agreeing to this. I think you’ve helped him.’

Carla still had to cry it out, but the point seemed to sink in and she slowly started to calm. After a minute or so, I let go of her and took my tin whistle out of my pocket.

‘I’m going to play him some more music,’ I said.

That alarmed her all over again. She surfaced from the now slightly soggy depths of my lapels with a look of horror on her face. ‘Fix, if you send him away now—’

‘I didn’t send him away the first time,’ I said. ‘I just made him . . . drowsy. These are tunes I use on Rafi, so I’ve had plenty of time to get them down right. This time I won’t even send John to sleep: I just want to calm him a bit so you don’t have to go to bed in full body armour.’

I waited for her to respond. Finally she gave me the merest hint of a nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.

I played a tune that was vaguely based on Neko Case’s ‘Lady Pilot’, I think purely because of the line in that song about not being afraid to die. Often in these cases it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the song is when it starts out: once I let it out into the open air it grows and changes, as though the vibrations of the music are some sort of insubstantial extension of my own nervous system. It becomes something that I use to touch the world – the invisible world that seems to be idling next to our own right now at some inter-dimensional red light – and to operate on the things I see and feel there.

Opening my mind a little more this time, I met head-on the spirit that was waiting in the dark, and was struck by the sheer intensity of its rage: it was like scalding water, filling the room unseen and unfelt until now. The strength of it – the strength of the will behind it – took me by surprise. None of the interactions I’d ever had with John had made me suspect that he could be capable of that kind of ferocity. Matching it high for high, low for low, I let the music fall into it like a calving iceberg and slowly, gradually, take away its power to hurt.

I lose track of time when I’m doing this stuff. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that time becomes one of the dimensions of the music, and I can only perceive it as something that’s moving in my chest and under my fingers, flowing out into the pattern that I’m making. In any case, when I finally surfaced I found that Carla was asleep next to me.

The geist wasn’t asleep but it was quiescent: it wouldn’t be throwing any more beer bottles around for a while. I felt queasy all over again as I thought about the contrast between the vaguely well-meaning, more or less ineffectual man I’d known for the past fifteen years and this baleful ball of hate and wrath. Death changes you – in some cases, brings out the worst in you – but that didn’t make it any easier to take right then. Particularly since I found myself wondering whether John Gittings might still be alive if I’d taken his calls.

My internal logic-checker kicked in on my side at that point. You can’t save someone from suicide if they’re serious about making the effort. John had wanted and intended to die: that much had to be true. Even in New York City, where they’re meant to have those giant alligators in the sewers, people don’t casually take loaded shotguns into the toilet with them.

And if it was murder dressed up as suicide . . . ? But that really sounded like Mister Paranoia dropping in for tea.

On paper, in theory, in the cold light of day, I had nothing to reproach myself with. But this was the dark night of John Gittings’s soul, and I couldn’t let myself off the hook that easily.

I picked up my stuff and went through into the bedroom, where I unrolled the sleeping bag on the stripped bed. There’s something cold and unlovely about a bare mattress: I tried not to look at it as I unpacked the rest of my gear from a ragged-arsed overnight bag that used to belong to Rafi.

Then I slipped off my shoes, sat back on the bed with my feet up, and finally peeled the layers of duct tape away from the Sainsbury’s bag that John had squirreled away so carefully. The bag started to tear, and a few small items fell out before I’d finished unwrapping it: a small key on a knotted shoelace, and the torn back of a matchbook from some place called the Reflections Café Bar. That left one bulky rectangular object.

From what Carla had already told me, I wasn’t expecting very much. But the biggest item in the bag was an object of such spectacular banality that I felt a sense of bathos and let-down even as I pulled it clear of the plastic and stared at the cover. It was an A to Z of London: one of the larger ones, spiral-bound.

I flexed it with my thumb and riffled through it. It had been marked up in black felt tip on almost every page – lines and circles sketched in, and in some cases scribbled out again afterwards, so that you mostly couldn’t see the features they were originally meant to be indicating. At least one of them was a church.

And that was it. Not much to go on, at first glance: not much to indicate what John had meant when he said that this was one for the books. Unless geographical gazetteers were the books he had in mind.

Further examination, though, showed that he’d used the A to Z as a notebook, too. The inside front and back covers and the blank spaces on the title and copyright pages were filled with densely written lists. They seemed to be lists of names, and the ones at the front of the book included a lot of people that I actually knew – my own name was there, along with Juliet’s, Carla’s, Bourbon Bryant’s, Reggie Tang’s. Some of them had been ticked off, others not: some had been ticked, the ticks crossed through, and then ticked again.

Other names, set off in a different column, were new to me, or stirred faint echoes in my mind that I couldn’t turn into meanings right then. Silver. Cornell. Moulson. Lathwell. Richardson. Lambrianou. Hart.

The list inside the back cover seemed to be of places rather than people: Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St. Andrew’s Old, St. Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield. They ran across five columns, written in a tiny, crabbed script; some of the names marked with symbols, some circled in different-colored inks, some crossed out and then written in again over the top. I remembered Carla’s description of John writing messages to himself and then tearing them up. It seemed as though he’d been doing more or less the same thing here.

I flicked backwards and forwards between the various lists, my eye drawn automatically to the parts that were easiest to read, avoiding other stretches where the density of the crossing-out and rewriting made individual words hard to decipher. Eventually my sight started to swim and I gave it up.

I turned my attention to the key, on its makeshift boot-lace keyring – and I looked at it with a certain degree of professional interest because breaking and entering has been a hobby of mine at various points in my life. It was small, hollow-barrelled, with the number 167 etched into the diamond-shaped bow-end. It was a Lycett, the very distinctive product of that Midlands locksmithing firm, though it didn’t bear the maker’s name. That was interesting: Lycett did a great many job lots in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly for factories and offices, but very few of them were in London. A man with a lot of time on his hands and a prurient curiosity could probably find the lock that this key fitted. But what would be the point if it turned out to yield only a few more scribbled, near-illegible palimpsests like the ones I’d just looked at?

I put the three items back in the eviscerated bag one by one, thinking that there must be some easier way of solving the John Gittings conundrum. The matchbook cover, I noticed now, had a string of figures written on the back in red biro. A credit-card number? No, only eleven digits, where a credit card would have sixteen. The first three digits were 832, so it didn’t look like a phone number – but for the hell of it, even though it was well after midnight, I added a zero to the beginning and dialled it anyway. The shrill, sustained note that meant ‘no connection’ was all I got in response.

I stared at the number for a while longer, wondering if I was missing something obvious, but I was finding it hard to focus through the fuzzy haze inside my head: long day, strong beer. It would keep until the morning.

I put in one more phone call, to a friend of mine named Nicky Heath. His name was in John’s A to Z, too, but that wasn’t why I called: Nicky’s a ferret, skilled in the digital extraction of information. If anyone could make sense of John Gittings’s annotations, it was him. Also, being a dead man himself – of the zombie persuasion – he might empathise with John’s current situation.

That done, I stripped to my boxers, pulled on a T-shirt by way of a pyjama top and crawled into the sleeping bag.

I was expecting to fall asleep straight away, but the atmosphere of the place made it hard for me to let go of the day’s tensions. My playing had created a zone of silence in the room, where usually I’m surrounded by a low-level psychic buzz of unformed energies. It was like the disconcerting hush you get when you’re sitting in the kitchen and the fridge suddenly stops humming, filling your senses with an absence that’s somehow louder than the sound it replaces.

I thought about Alastair Barnard’s miserable death, and Jan Hunter’s absolute conviction that her husband hadn’t been responsible for it. Where was the hammer? Why had it been worth taking away from the scene of the crime, seeing that the evidence against Doug Hunter was already so strong? Maybe because it didn’t fit with the rest of the evidence: maybe because it had the wrong fingerprints on it. In that case either it was the real killer who’d waltzed off with it, or else yet another someone had stepped in and swiped it after the body was found and before the police got there. A pretty narrow window.

In either case, Coldwood was clearly way off-beam when he said that Hunter had taken it himself. Walking through the streets of London with blood on his clothes, Hunter had attracted enough attention for people to stop and watch him pass and then point out to the police where he’d gone. It was inconceivable that he’d been carrying a claw hammer all that time and nobody had noticed when and where he’d dropped it.

I dozed off at last, into the kind of fitful sleep where you’re sort of aware that time is passing and it’s passing slowly.

I had muddy, tedious dreams where I was walking down long streets that I didn’t know, looking for a train station because I had to go somewhere and time was running out. Night was coming on. If I missed the train I’d be stuck there, and in the dream that seemed like a very bad option. I turned corners at random, sure that I’d see the station in the distance, but each turning was either a blind alley or an avenue that stretched into the distance with no station in sight.

Then I passed a man sitting at the side of the road – in the same attitude, I guess, as Doug Hunter when the cops found him and took him in. But this wasn’t Doug Hunter, a man I’d yet to meet: it was John Gittings.

I sat down next to him. It would have felt rude to just walk on by.

He gave me a look – more in sorrow than in anger, which came as something of a relief considering his propensity for violence on the spirit level. He was dressed in the shabby brown jacket and tan chinos he’d worn on the day of the Whipsnade Zoo debacle the year before, when he’d taken his eye off the game during a tag-team exorcism and I’d come within an eighth of an inch of having my head bitten off. It was the last time I’d seen him alive.

He showed me his hands, which were bloody. My subconscious mind was definitely raiding Doug Hunter’s story for narrative guidelines here.

‘Not much left of me now, Fix,’ John said lugubriously. Psychologists tell us that you can’t really hear voices in dreams, but this sounded like the John I remembered: as much vaguely comical self-pity as Morrissey, but John played the drums when he was ghostbusting and no group he was in ever stayed together for very long, so in most respects you’d have to say he was more like Johnny Marr.

‘No, mate,’ I agreed. ‘You’ve seen better days, that’s for sure.’

Since it was my dream, I checked my pockets for booze. Nothing there but a sprig of silver birch: okay, that was the ward that was stuck up on John’s door to keep the restless dead out. I felt almost ashamed: as dreams go, this was turning into something of a busman’s holiday.

I offered John the silver-birch ward: it was looking a little ragged now, the white thread that bound it starting to unravel, but he didn’t seem to notice it in any case. He shook his head, staring sombrely at the gutter where a trickle of black water was now running along past us, detouring around the toes of his shoes. ‘Nobody wants to know, do they, Fix?’

‘Wants to know what, John?’ I asked.

‘How the bastards killed me.’

I put the birch twig back in my pocket. ‘Umm – you killed yourself, John,’ I said, as tactfully as I could. ‘You didn’t take any chances about it, either. You stuck a shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger. It took Carla two days to get your brains off the walls.’

John looked up at me, his expression slightly reproachful now. ‘I might not have had to,’ he said, ‘if you ever picked up your phone.’

I’d been expecting that one: you didn’t need to be Freud to know why I was dreaming about John Gittings while I was sleeping in his bed with his dead body in the room next door. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Really, really sorry. On the other hand, you could have left a message that made some kind of sense. You never told me what was at stake, John. You never tried to meet me halfway.’

He was rummaging in his pockets, patting his jacket, a distracted frown on his face. ‘I thought I could handle it,’ he admitted. ‘By the time I decided to bring someone else in on it, I was already in way over my head. I always was an arrogant sod, Fix. Almost as bad as you. I think I was supposed to give you something.’

‘The letter? I got it.’

‘No, not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

‘The whistle?’

‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks for the thought, John. I guess I’ll live without it. What’s inscription night, by the way? It sounds like something you’d get at the local bridge club.’

John sighed and stood up, very slowly, with great reluctance. There was a faint splash as he disturbed the water in the gutter, the rippling after-effects lasting longer than I would have expected. I looked up into his pleading, hangdog face.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to wait for another time. You won’t let them get me, will you, Fix? I can rely on you for that much? Blow me away, if you have to. Play me a song and blow me out like a candle. I don’t mind. Just don’t let them get me.’

I stood up too, because the street was filling with water now. The trickle in the gutter had grown into a flood while I wasn’t looking, and it was already up to our knees. It was cold, and completely opaque – like a rising tide of ink.

‘Who, John?’ I asked. ‘Who wants to get you?’

‘The same ones as before,’ he said, with a helpless shrug. He stared into my eyes, his jaw tightening with fear. ‘Always the same ones, again and again and again. That’s the point. Kill me if you have to, Fix. Better you than them, God knows.’

He took a few steps away from me, out into the road, then stopped and looked off to the right and then to the left as if he wasn’t sure which way to go – or maybe as if he was checking for traffic. You’ve got to keep your wits about you when you cross the road in London: as if to underscore that point, he tripped and fell, vanishing into the water almost up to his shoulders. There was a hole of some kind in the middle of the street. Roadworks, maybe. But it wasn’t roadworks, and I knew.

I stepped out into the still-rising flood, feeling the vicious undertow trying to pull my legs out from under me. I picked my way forward, one step at a time, feeling with my toes for the edges of the unseen pits. The road was a cemetery, the open graves hidden by the water so that you couldn’t see them until you fell.

Who’d dig graves in the middle of a road? Maybe it was like housing: location was all-important, and a dead man with somewhere important to be would want to be buried somewhere that was handy for the shops and the Tube.

I rounded one of the graves and almost stepped sideways into another. The water was up to John’s neck now, and he was staring in all directions, his eyes wide with dread.

Before I could get to him, something pulled him under. He gave a wail of terror, cut off very abruptly when his head went below the surface. When I got to the spot there was nothing to show where he’d been except for a ragged stream of bubbles, drifting away on the midnight-black flow of the urban river.

Something brushed against my leg, under the surface: something big enough to push me aside as it glided past, unseen. I jumped away, seeing the roiling water it left in its wake. It turned in a vast lazy arc and headed back towards me. I took one step back, and then another, and on the third step there was nothing there to put my foot down on. I slipped on the rim of the submerged grave pit and went under, mouth clamped shut.

I woke up gasping for air as though I really had half-drowned. Like someone in a movie I came bolt upright, my body sheathed in already cooling sweat. I groped for a bedside light, found one and after a few seconds of floundering succeeded in turning it on.

A big tabby cat that had been sitting at the foot of the bed yowled in protest, jumped down onto the floor and padded to the door, shooting me a glance of cool disapproval as it left. The stray that Carla had told me about, obviously.

Shit! That had been the worst nightmare I’d had in years. With slightly shaky hands I unzipped the sleeping bag and swung my legs out. There was no way I was getting any more sleep until my pulse rate had come back down to normal.

I went to the door, then trekked along the short passage and looked out into the living room. Turning the light on had robbed me of my night sight, so I couldn’t make out many details in the scene before me: I could hear Carla’s rhythmical breathing, though, and I could see the shadowy bump that was her sleeping form.

The coffin still stood on its trestles, undisturbed. The cat walked under it, rubbed its cheek against the legs of the nearer trestle, then strolled on with regal indifference.

A couple of cautious steps into the dark brought me to the foot of the coffin. I put a hand on its lid, the smooth wood chilly under my fingertips.

All right, mate, I said beneath my breath. Nothing formal. No promises, because when all’s said and done I don’t owe you a damn thing.

But I’ll do what I can.