Dead Men's s Boots

Since he couldn’t get away from these memories, maybe if I kept hovering around the edges of them some kind of enlightenment, some kind of clue, would come to me.

‘I’ll know her if I see her,’ Joseph said, tapping his gloved finger against his right temple. ‘I dreamed about her that night. Dream about her most nights. My daddy had the sight, and I got it too, whether I want it or not.

‘She’s not a woman, though. Not a real woman. It sounds stupid, but I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. She’s got a devil face. Long red hair. Tall as a man, strong as a man. And a circle, here, over her eye, like a crater. Like a little bomb hit her and left a crater. Or like someone shot her and the bullet bounced off.’

The hairs rose on the nape of my neck as he talked. He was describing Myriam Kale: he’d even got the chickenpox scar. But the look on his face told me that carrying on with this line of questioning was going to lead to some ugly eruption that I probably couldn’t handle.

‘Joseph,’ I said, switching tack, ‘your boss, Merrill, said something to me that didn’t get a mention in the police evidence. He said another man came into the Paragon, a little later than Barnard and Hunter. An old man. By himself. Does that ring any bells with you?’

‘Yeah.’ Joseph nodded. ‘I bumped into him, on the corridor. I was coming out of a room, with an armload of sheets and stuff. Next thing I know, I’m going backwards instead of forwards. I hit him and bounced off.’ He picked up a plastic bucket, hung two J-cloths over the side of it. ‘He wasn’t an old man, though. I don’t know where Mister Merrill got that idea from. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was solid. Very strong. And he walked like – you know – like a big strong guy walks. All swaggering. That wasn’t any old man.’

Something stirred in my mind as he said that, but I didn’t try to drag the thought up into the light. Not yet. It would come in its own good time if I didn’t reach for it. I thanked Joseph for his time and offered him a twenty from my dwindling stash. He took it without even looking at it. Where he was living right now, money couldn’t bring much solace.

I had to get out to Kingsbury next, for my dinner engagement with Juliet and Sue Book, and the easiest way to do that was to hoof across to Baker Street and change onto the Jubilee. That was what I was going to do, swear to God: but I had that locker key of John’s burning a hole in my pocket. How long would it take to open a locker and pick up the contents? Five minutes, at the outside. I could st‹ide keill do it and get to Juliet’s in plenty of time. So I found myself heading south instead, without any recollection of making a decision about it.

The left-luggage lockers at Victoria are scattered randomly across the whole station, but the densest concentration is next to the Prêt à Manger at the northern end of the concourse. I tried there first, but locker number 167 wasn’t among them. I zigzagged back towards the escalators that lead down into the Underground, going from one row of lockers to the next, and finally struck pay dirt on the fourth or fifth. But pay dirt was a relative term in this case, because when I opened 167 it was empty.

I felt the sudden prick and slow deflation of bathos, but only for a moment. Then I thought about how John had played the earlier moves in this game. There was the plastic bag, for starters, taped to the space behind the desk drawer; then the backwards phone number, written on the matchbook of a café which turned out not to be his rendezvous point with Chesney but a place from where the rendezvous point could be spied on. Always that extra paranoid little wriggle: like the innovations of a mind determined to catch itself out as well as everyone else.

Going down on hands and knees, and mentally consigning the trousers I was wearing to the dustbin of history, I took a closer look inside the locker. Still nothing to be seen, but when I stuck my arm inside and felt over all the inside surfaces, there was something there – something fixed to the top of the locker space, which gave slightly under my hand and was the wrong texture for metal.

I managed to get hold of a corner of the something and pull it free. It was a big, chunky envelope, fixed to the roof of the locker with duct tape.

I carried on looking, wanting to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t missing anything, but I didn’t unearth any further treasures.

I left the key in the locker and took the package over to the station bar, where I ordered a whisky and water and then opened the envelope while I was waiting for the drink to come.

After the A to Z, the matchbook, the key, I was expecting something else with an aura of cheap dime-store mysteries about it, but the envelope was full of music. At least, it was full of sheets of music paper: the notations that were on the paper, though, made no sense to me at all.