Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  That was the rough outline of the story Sumner told, but he embellished it along the way with some fairly elaborate reconstructions of Kale’s sexual encounters with the made men of the Chicago mob scene. I wondered what his sources were for some of the more circumstantial accounts: maybe Kale kept a journal or something. ‘Dear diary, you’ll never guess with which widely feared psychotic gang-lord I had a knee-trembler in the lift at Nordstrom’s today – or what he likes to be tickled with.’

  I was only skimming, but even so my attention was starting to wander long before I got to the end. It’s not that I’m prudish, or even morally fibrous, but pornography that’s written as a list of sexual positions and uses the word ‘turgid’ as though it was punctuation gets old fairly quickly.

  I skipped to the last chapter, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits – the ones she was meant to have carried out from beyond the grave. In 1980 a guy who lived on George Street in Edinburgh was murdered in his own bathroom. Forensic evidence suggested that he’d been murdered immediately after sex, and his cheek and temple were scarred by post-mortem cigarette burns.

  In 1993, ditto: some middle-aged sales rep in Newcastle left work on a Friday night, announcing his intention to ‘get laid, get wrecked and get to bed early’. He was found the next day in the laundry room of a hotel on Callerton Lane, stuffed into one of the baskets. Again, his face had been burned, and again there was evidence that he’d been engaging in coitus before meeting his violent death.

  Cause of death in both cases was blunt-instrument trauma, and the weapons were never recovered. Sumner offered no explanation at all as to why Kale should have chosen the British Isles as the site of her post-mortem adventures: he just presented the facts, humbly and pruriently, for our consideration.

  For a change of pace, I dug out the bag of bits and pieces that Carla had retrieved from behind John’s desk drawer. I flipped through the pages of the A to Z again, this time with my own oversized hardcover London street guide beside me on the bed, and got slightly more out of it this time. The list of place names – Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St Andrew’s Old, St Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield and the rest – turned out to be a list of London cemeteries. A pretty exhaustive list, too, I was guessing, because it ran to well over a hundred sites. Most had either been struck through with a single strike of the pen or had a large cross next to them on the line where they appeared. Whatever John had been looking for, it looked like he’d had really exacting standards.

  At the bottom of the page, set off from the list by a couple of inches of glaringly empty space, was a single word: SMASHNA. It wasn’t crossed out, but John had circled it again and again in red ink. He’d then added three question marks in green. It was a powerful graphic statement: it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.

  The other lists – the ones that consisted of people’s names – were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still just names: some friends, some the opposite of friends, most just strangers.

  That left the key and the matchbook. I picked up the matchbook and looked at that number again, and this time, maybe because I was coming to it in a code-breaking frame of mind, the truth hit me at once.

  The final digits were 76970. That could be a phone number after all – if the phone was a mobile and the number had been written backwards.

  I keyed the number into my mobile and it rang. I had a brief sense of something like vertigo: a peek down the sheer vertical colonnades of a mind under terrible stress. Who had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful? Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia is a survival trait as well as a clinical condition: it hadn’t been that for John, but it looked as though he’d done all he could to keep what he was working on from falling into the wrong hands. Or any hands at all.

  The ring tone sounded three times, then someone picked up.

  ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, brisk and cheerful. ‘What’s the score?’

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of John Gittings . . .’

  There was a muttered ‘Fuck!’ and then the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the phone at the other end rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time: just an expectant silence.

  ‘I really am a friend of John’s,’ I said, trying to sound calm and reassuring and radiantly trustworthy. ‘My name is Felix Castor. I worked with John on a couple of jobs, a little while back. His widow, Carla, gave me some of his things, and your number was in there. I called because I’m trying to find out what he was working on before he died.’

  That was enough to be going on with, I thought. I waited for the line to go dead again. Instead, the same male voice said, ‘Why?’ Not so cheerful now – tense, with an underlying tone of challenge.

  Actually, I had to admit that that was a pretty good question. ‘Because he seemed to think it was something really important,’ I said, slowly because I was picking my words with care in case any of them turned out to be loaded. ‘But he didn’t tell anybody what it was all about. I’m thinking that maybe finishing the job for him might make him rest easier. Because right now he’s not resting easy at all.’

  There was a long, strained silence.

  ‘Not tonight,’ the man said at last. ‘Tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. The usual place.’

  He hung up before I could ask the obvious question, and this time when I dialled again the phone just rang until I got a voicemail service. I tried twice more, with the same results. For some reason – maybe creeping paranoia – I didn’t want to leave a message. But in any case, I thought I knew where the usual place had to be: there was presumably a reason why John had written this number down on the matchbook from the Reflections Café Bar – and fortunately he’d left the postcode showing when he tore off the cover. That plus the yellow pages ought to be enough to get me there. The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

  I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.

  10

  A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.

  It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.

  In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration here was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison as a whole split up into a sprawl of different wings that had no contact with each other, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard. Inside, cubicle walls divided every shared space into a honeycomb of miniature rooms, so you were always alone even when there were a thousand people sitting or standing right next to you. Outside, you wore a specially designed cap with a downward-extended peak to hide your face, and nobody ever used your real name. Like Jean Valjean, or Patrick McGoohan, your number became your official identity. If you failed to answer to your number, you got a week in a punishment cell. If you gave your name to another prisoner, you got another year nailed onto your sentence.

  It was a roaring success, in terms of making the prisoners docile: after a few months of this treatment, most of them were as meek as lobotomised lambs. Okay, a
few of them – maybe more than a few – would slip a little further along the bell-shaped curve, from passivity into apathy, and then into psychotic withdrawal or catatonia. But some people are never going to be happy no matter how much you do for them.

  After a high-profile lawsuit brought by the family of a guy named William Ball, who went into Pentonville sane and came out a frothing berserker, they started to liberalise the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanisation went into a bit of a decline in the UK until they opened Belmarsh in 1991. Pentonville’s not that bad today, if you compare it to somewhere like Brixton or the Scrubs. It’s even got its own pool room and a big bare hall where you can show movies – and its blindingly whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pile-ups when drivers coming along the Caledonian Road incautiously glance across at it just as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.

  All the same, as Juliet and I checked in through the clanging gates and banging doors the next morning, it didn’t seem like the jolliest place on earth. The acoustics in a prison are unique: every echo sounds like a taunt or an insinuation, and there are always a lot of echoes. It didn’t help that the sky outside was blue-grey like a bruise, with the first drops of rain just starting to fall, or that the security procedures, even for remand prisoners, are so much like decontamination protocols: as though you’re bringing the outside world in with you, and they don’t want any atom of it touching the prisoners.

  We were randomly chosen to be searched, but given the effect that Juliet has on people of all sexes and persuasions I wasn’t sure how much randomness was actually involved. The women officers who searched her certainly took their time over it, and I had to loiter outside the guard station long after their male counterparts had impounded my hip flask and ceremonial dagger and given me a receipt. When the doors opened and Juliet strode on out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed her looked a little dazed and haunted: it was just a standard non-intimate search – a ‘rub-down’ – but if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.

  Reunited, we were ushered through another set of doors – more bangs and clangs, more echoes, like the opening credits of Porridge – to the interview hall.

  Remand prisoners have their own visiting room, and although there’s a guard present the regime is a bit more relaxed than it is for other inmates. Instead of the glass shields and wall-phones you see in the movies, there’s a room like the common room in a school: bare walls enlivened by a few yellowing posters advertising long-defunct public information campaigns, semi-comfortable chairs set up around low tables, and a coin-op coffee machine.

  The room was empty, and I threw a questioning look at the guard, who wrenched his stare away from Juliet with an effort.

  ‘He’s on his way down, sir,’ he said. ‘Won’t keep you more than a minute or two.’

  Juliet crossed to one of the clusters of chairs and sat down to wait. I got a coffee from the machine before I joined her. She watched me approach with detached interest.

  ‘You’re walking a little stiffly,’ she observed as I sat down. ‘I noticed that yesterday but I forgot to ask.’

  ‘Someone tried to drop me down a lift shaft a few nights ago. It’s okay. I dodged.’

  Stuff like that doesn’t faze Juliet in the slightest. She noted my unwillingness to talk and didn’t ask any more. The truth was, that whole incident with the faulty lift had been preying on my mind more than somewhat. If someone tries to kill a private detective, then it’s almost a mark of respect: it means you’re getting close to something, and the opposition are taking you seriously. If someone tries to kill a jobbing exorcist, and if said exorcist is as badly in the dark as I felt right then, it’s probably just a sign of a basic character flaw.

  Or maybe I was close to something, and I was just too dense to see it when it was right under my nose. That was a sobering thought, and I was still soberly thinking about it when a man walked into the room. It obviously wasn’t Doug Hunter: too old, for one thing, and for another he didn’t fit the description Jan had given me in any respect at all. He was slightly built, almost bald and very pale. He wore a nondescript light grey suit that looked as faded as his skin, but his eyes were a darker, colder grey, magnified by strong prescription lenses, and his thin face wore an expression of brusque impatience.

  ‘Mister Castor?’ he inquired. I was expecting him to do the usual comic double take when he saw Juliet, but from where he was standing she must have been out of sight behind me.

  ‘That’s me,’ I said.

  ‘My name’s Maxwell. Doctor Maxwell. I’m one of the medical staff here at the prison. Douglas Hunter is a patient of mine, and I need to speak with you before you see him. If you’ve a moment?’

  I nodded, but he was taking my assent for granted and already carrying on. ‘Douglas’s condition is still deteriorating,’ he said. ‘Even just in the last few days, there’s been a marked change, and it’s all for the worse.’

  My confusion must have shown on my face. ‘He’s not well?’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise—’

  Maxwell made a palms-out ‘don’t put words in my mouth’ gesture. ‘The medical situation is complicated by the legal one,’ he said. ‘Not an unusual occurance in here. I’ve made a diagnosis, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t share it with you. The point is that Douglas has had to be quite heavily medicated. With aripiprazole, if that means anything to you.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I admitted.

  Maxwell raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘It will mean something to the defence, mark my words,’ he said. ‘The point is, since this is your first visit you’re apt to find him a little odd to talk to. He’ll be drowsy and unresponsive, but at the same time he’s likely to show a certain restlessness and discomfort. These are side effects of the drug, not of his condition.’

  ‘And his condition is –?’ I probed.

  Maxwell made the same gesture again. ‘I can’t discuss that with you right now,’ he said, ‘although I’ve discussed it at length with Mrs Hunter. The other reason for me coming in to talk to you like this is that I’m advising you very strongly not to excite or upset Douglas in any way. If you do, it could have an adverse effect on his condition and it could be unpleasant – physically unpleasant, I mean – for you. The governor is keen that you should express understanding of these conditions. He would have liked you to sign a waiver, but he’s aware that everything I’m saying here has nuances which could be significant in a court of law.’

  I shook my head in complete mystification. I had the unusual and uncomfortable sense of meanings flying over my head, unapprehended.

  ‘You mean that he’s mentally ill?’ I asked, groping blindly in the dark.

  ‘The governor? No, he’s very well balanced, taking into account a constitutional tendency towards depression.’

  ‘Doug Hunter.’

  ‘That would fall under doctor-patient privilege,’ Maxwell said, with a rigidly impassive face.

  Juliet appeared at my side and he blanched. It took some doing, with a face that was already so pale.

  ‘What is aripiprazole, doctor?’ she murmured in her throat. ‘I’ve always wondered.’

  Maxwell looked like a distressed fish – if a fish could be simultaneously caught on a hook and out of its depth. ‘Well, that information is in the public domain,’ he floundered. ‘You could look it up very easily.’

  ‘And if we did?’ Juliet pressed, without mercy. ‘What would we find?’

  ‘It’s a partial – a partial agonist to the D2 receptor. A dopaminergic modulator, if you will, in the mesolimbic—’

  ‘In English?’

  ‘An anti-psychotic!’ Maxwell blurted. ‘I really have to – this comes under-’ ‘Doctor-patient privilege,’ Juliet finished. ‘Of course. Thank you, doctor.’

  She moved her head, just a fraction, and Maxwell seemed to wake from a trance. He excused himself with as meaningless a combination of syllables as I’v
e ever heard and fled back through the door by which he’d entered.

  ‘You could have cut him some slack,’ I chided Juliet. ‘He was just trying to do his job.’

  ‘I was only asking for clarification, Castor.’

  ‘Sure you were.’

  ‘And I respected his holding to those professional standards. I admire men whose passions are intellectual and moral. In fact I find that really arousing.’

  I gave her a hard look to see if she was taking the piss, but she bowed her head demurely and sat down so I didn’t get a good look at her face. At that moment the door opened again and Doug Hunter came in between two burly guards.

  He made quite a strong impression, even in his prison greys. As Jan had already told me, he was big and well muscled: handsome, too, I was prepared to assume, in that his face was symmetrical and featured a square jaw and vividly blue eyes, two perennial favourites. Or three, if you count each eye as a separate feature. His striated mid-brown hair looked as though it might originally have been a darker brown, but had then been bleached by years of working in the open air until it looked like flax and straw bundled together. He stood slightly stiffly, legs together, almost as though he was standing to attention.

  But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple, just above his eye. His nails left livid marks on his pale skin: three parallel lines, like the feverish crossings out in John Gittings’s A to Z.