Dead Men's s Boots

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 Sf, hni 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.