Dead Men's s Boots

’

‘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.’

7

There’s something you should know about Juliet, j V1"" ust 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 appe [sp;>

Todd answered without even a microsecond’s pause. ‘He was in his right mind.