Dead Men's s Boots

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, Eas [bne

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 agains [vidor t 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.