by Mike Carey
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.’
‘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, just 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 appear lucid to you? Rational? Or was he looking a little frayed at the edges?’
Todd answered without even a microsecond’s pause. ‘He was in his right mind. Entirely lucid, to use your expression. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to take legal instructions from him. He looked tired. Stressed, perhaps. A man with a lot weighing on his mind. But if his suicide was the result of any kind of . . . mental decay, then it hadn’t started when I spoke with him. Or, at least, it hadn’t begun to show in the way he talked and acted. I’d have said he was as sane as you or me.’
‘Then he wasn’t talking about breaking and entering? Or kicking people in the balls?’
‘Obviously not. Why? Is there some reason why you would have expected him to?’
I didn’t have to answer that question, but I felt in some indefinable way as though I owed Todd a favour. Frankness was probably the only payment I’d ever be able to give him.
‘They all came up in his correspondence,’ I said. ‘I think . . . maybe they’re related to whatever it was that was on his mind when he came to see you. He was working on something, and it had started to obsess him. I’d really like to know what that something was.’
‘Why?’ Todd demanded again. He was looking at me with the lively mistrust that you show to the nutter on the bus.
I shrugged. ‘He told Carla it was important. Maybe . . . a professional commitment of some kind that his estate needs to take care of.’ It felt like a weaselly answer, but it was the best I could do without telling Todd about the lift incident and getting into deeper waters than I wanted to right then. Fortunately he seemed already to have decided that this was something he didn’t want or need to know any more about. He detached himself from me with almost indecent haste and led his four-man cortège away towards a massive hearse that was parked oppos
ite. I went on up the stairs.
Carla had locked the door and bolted it at top and bottom, so it took her a while to let me in. Her face lit up when she saw me: I guess she must have thought it was Todd coming back because he’d forgotten something.
‘Fix!’ she exclaimed. ‘You changed your mind!’ She threw her arms around me, making me feel like a cynical, self-serving bastard because the reason why I was here had so little to do with her and so much to do with my own near-death experience.
The coffin stood on two trestles in the centre of the living room, cleaned and polished so that it was as good as new. It looked as though it ought to have a ROAD CLOSED sign hung from the middle of it. The place was as silent as the grave – maybe more, if my experience was anything to go by. The charm I’d laid on John the day before was still holding, although at the edges of my internal radar I was aware of something stirring every so often, like the worm inside a jumping bean that makes the bean twitch as though it was alive.
I offered to put on some coffee, but it transpired that there wasn’t any left: the packet that we’d emptied back on the previous Sunday had been the last in the house. It had been a while since Carla had remembered to do any shopping.
‘Do you want to go out and grab a bite to eat, then?’ I suggested.
‘Sorry, Fix.’ She shook her head, her gaze flicking across to the coffin and then immediately shying away again towards the neutral ground of my face. ‘I can’t leave him here all by himself.’
‘No, I see that,’ I admitted. ‘Jesus, Carla, there’s no need to apologise. This is the man you spent twenty years of your life with. Still, I think it would probably be a good idea if you took on some ballast. Could you handle a takeaway?’
She smiled weakly. ‘Not hygienic to handle it. I’ll eat one, though.’
I took things in hand, slipping out to the Romna Gate on Southgate Circus for some carry-out, and picking up a bag of other essentials from a mini-mart on the way back.
Carla perked up over gosht kata marsala and a keema naan, washed down by a glass of high-proof Belgian blond. We were eating in the kitchen, where it was possible to forget the looming presence of the coffin for whole minutes at a time. Theoretically possible, anyway: but somehow the talk never seemed to stray very far from John.
I told Carla about the letter inside the watch case, but not about the lift. She nodded, looking resigned. ‘That’s what I was talking about,’ she said. ‘He’d hide things, and then lose them, and then find them and hide them all over again. I had it for months, Fix. I thought I’d got to know most of his hiding places, by the end, but that’s a new one.’
I hesitated. All I knew about John’s death was what Bourbon Bryant had told me, and that was the bare fact that John had stood up one Sunday night while Carla was watching the omnibus edition of Eastenders, locked himself in the bathroom and decorated the walls with the inside of his head. I found that after reading the letter I wanted to know more. What I didn’t want to do was to drag Carla over territory she’d rather not revisit.
‘Did any of those other notes survive?’ I asked. ‘The messages he wrote to himself?’
She thought about that. ‘No,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I’m pretty sure they didn’t. Like I said, he was always changing his mind. Spending most of a day scribbling on bits of paper and envelopes, then burning it all or tearing it up, and then the next day starting all over again.’
‘Those hiding places you mentioned – have you checked them at all, since he died?’
Carla looked at me a little blankly. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘I don’t know. Because there might be something there that would tell us what he was up to. “One for the history books” – remember? Maybe it was as big as he thought it was. Maybe there’s a reason why it turned out to be too much for him to take.’
Carla put down her fork and pushed her plate away. She blinked a few times, quickly, as if there were tears in her eyes that she wanted to keep inside.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, lifting up my hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Forget I asked, Carla. You’ve got enough on your plate without this.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, Fix. It just brought it all back, that’s all.’
‘Exactly. I’ll shut up.’
‘You don’t have to.’ She stood up. ‘It’s not like there’s any getting away from it, is there? There are a few places we can look, if you want to.’
Carla walked through into the living room, then off down a short hallway that led to the bedroom. I followed, a little uneasily, sending up a silent apology to John’s slumbering shade.
The bed had red satin sheets and a coverlet with the Playboy-bunny logo on it: matching his-and-hers pillows, with a halo for her and horns for him. You think you know people, but you never really do. Carla hauled a shoebox out from under the bed on the ‘his’ side, rummaged inside it and turned up nothing more interesting than a venerable set of cheque stubs.
Her next target was a safe on the wall behind a picture of a unicorn with a naked woman riding on its back. The safe had a digital lock which Carla opened by pressing the ‘1’ key six times. ‘Factory default,’ she explained, glancing at me and rolling her eyes. ‘He never bothered to change it.’ Drawing another blank, she crossed to a roll-top desk next to the window. It had a single drawer, which was empty, but Carla didn’t even bother to look inside it: she just pulled it out and put it on the bed, then knelt down and put her arm into the space where it had been.
Faint bumps and thunks told me that she was feeling to right and left in the hollow at the back of the desk. Then she stopped, and her eyebrows rose.
‘Bingo,’ she murmured.
With some difficulty, she pulled out a Sainsbury’s bag wrapped around and around with brown duct tape. She held it out to me, and I took it. I hefted it in my hand, felt the weight. It didn’t feel like there could be a whole hell of a lot in there.
I started to undo the tape, and Carla put her hand on mine to stop me. Then, as if conscious of where we were, and how loaded even a momentary touch like that had to be at the foot of a double bed with Hugh Hefner’s bow-tie-sporting were-rabbit giving us its one-eyed stare, she took her hand away again hastily.
‘Open it somewhere else,’ she said. ‘Or – tomorrow. Not now. It would probably be too much for me right now.’
I nodded and lowered the small package to my side. We were still standing too close to each other: it seemed to need another gesture on my part to defuse the tension.
‘You want another beer?’ I asked her. ‘It’s about eight per cent proof – like Tennant’s Extra, but with taste. Guarantees a good night’s sleep.’
‘I don’t think I’ll sleep much tonight whatever I do,’ Carla said, turning away and taking a step towards the bed. She hauled the sheets and covers off in a single practised movement. ‘Fix, I’m going to sleep in the living room, next to – I mean, with John. So you can have the bed. There’s more sheets and pillow cases in the top of the wardrobe, and a spare duvet in the divan drawer on that side.’ She pointed.
‘I brought a sleeping bag,’ I said. ‘I’ll just spread that on top of the mattress. Unless you want me to bring the mattress through for you.’
She shook her head, looking at me with an expression that was only a couple of hard knocks away from beaten flat. ‘I’m fine with the duvet,’ she said. ‘I’ll fold it like a sandwich and sleep in the middle.’
Seeming to reach a decision, she let the sheets fall to the floor and came back over to me. ‘Thanks for staying with me tonight,’ she said. ‘And for arranging everything. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’
She kissed me on the cheek, and there was no tension or awkwardness in it. Not on Carla’s side, anyway: I have to admit, her thanks sat heavily in my stomach right then, given that the main reason I was there was because I thought I might be able to get a clue about who was trying to kill me.
‘It’s part of the ba
sic service,’ I assured her, deadpan. ‘The de luxe includes lawn care.’
‘I haven’t got a lawn.’
‘Then the basic should suit you just fine.’
I helped her take the bedding through, then went back down the steps to collect the rest of the kit I’d brought with me. It was already dark – but then, the slate-grey mountains of cumulonimbus had made it dark for most of the day. The wind had blown most of that mass away to the west now, though, and a sliver of moon as thin as a sickle blade was cutting what was left into grubby-looking tatters. Tomorrow was going to be fine, and as cold as charity.
I lingered out there, because there was something about the east wind heavy with unborn frost that felt clean and even refreshing. I called Juliet and got Susan Book. I asked her if she could pass a message on: I just needed to talk to Juliet about some work she’d done for the Met. She said she’d tell Juliet as soon as she came in.
‘We never seem to see you any more, Fix,’ she chided me. ‘Where are you working these days? In some terrible wilderness on the edge of civilisation?’
‘Southgate,’ I said. ‘I think the nearest civilisation is Wood Green Shopping City.’
‘Good grief, you’re only twenty minutes’ drive from here! You’ve got to come over for dinner. Jules would love to see you.’
‘Well, I will.’
‘Tomorrow.’
Cornered. ‘Okay, tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Actually, could you make it Thursday? I’ve got the prayer circle tomorrow night.’
‘Thursday it is, then. Thanks, Sue. See you then.’
I hung up, pondering on the mysteries of the human spirit. It was inexplicable on the face of it how someone who lived in sin with a succubus – a consenting adult demon of the same sex – could still be so active in the Church and see no inherent contradictions in her lifestyle. Susan Book was one of a kind. I was getting to like her, even if she had stolen my woman.