Dead Men's s Boots

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 m Smpru we?’ 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.