Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  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 were a mobile and the number had been written backward.

  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. Whom had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful? Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia was 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 the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the phone rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time, only 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, 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 it 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 dialed, the phone rang until I got voice mail. I tried twice more with the same results. For some reason—maybe creeping paranoia—I didn’t want to leave a message. But 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 at two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

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

  Ten

  A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO, HM PRISON PENTON-ville 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 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 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 was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison split up into a sprawl of different wings that had no contact with one another, 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. As with 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 lobotomized 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, 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 liberalize the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanization 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 poolroom and a big bare hall where you can show movies, and its blindingly whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pileups when drivers coming along the Caledonian Road incautiously glance across at it as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.

  All the same, as Juliet and I checked in at 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-gray like a bruise, with the first drops of rain 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 involved. The women officers who searched her certainly took their time, 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 out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed her looked a little dazed and haunted. It was a standard nonintimate search—a “rubdown”—but if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes 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, semicomfortable 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 eyes 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 sli
ghtest. 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, it’s almost a mark of respect. It means you’re getting close to something, and the opposition is 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 a sign of a basic character flaw.

  Or maybe I was close to something and I was 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 gray suit that looked as faded as his skin, but his eyes were a darker, colder gray, magnified by strong prescription lenses, and his thin face wore an expression of brusque impatience.

  “Mr. 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. Dr. 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 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 realize—”

  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 unusual 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 defense, 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. “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 that 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 toward 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 antipsychotic!” Maxwell blurted. “I really have to—this comes under—”

  “Doctor-patient privilege,” Juliet finished. “Of course. Thank you, Doctor.”

  She moved her head a fraction, and Maxwell seemed to wake from a trance. He excused himself with as meaningless a combination of syllables as I’ve ever heard and fled back through the door.

  “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 grays. 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 favorites. 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 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 standing to attention.

  But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple 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.

  “Mr. Hunter.” I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room toward us. The guard who’d come in with him moved off to one side but stayed close, keeping him in view, and the other guard who’d been waiting with us took up a position off to the other side, about the same distance away. Remand or not, they knew what Doug was up for—probably knew what Doc Maxwell’s diagnosis was, too—and they weren’t taking any chances.

  Doug ignored my hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, but maybe it was worth noting in this case. Whatever flavor of sexuality Doug generally favored, he seemed to be capable of responding on some level to Juliet’s charms. I filed that fact away for future reference.

  “You know why we’re here?” I asked him.

  He nodded slowly, turning to look at me again with a slight widening of the eyes, as though he’d forgotten in the interim that I was there. “You’re here,” he said simply.

  His voice was different than I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent, and it was so strangely uninflected, it was almost like a robot’s voice. Except that most robots these days use sampled sound from human voices, so they sound more animated and a whole lot warmer than Doug Hunter did.

  Coldwood’s sexual-psychopath hypothesis made sense to me at that moment. Doug sounded like a man whose brain was currently operating only a minimal service during extensive refurbishments. Then again, how much of that was the man and how much was the drug?

  “Right. Exactly. We’re here to talk to you. Would you like to sit down? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far, which isn’t very much, and where we can go from here.”

  He didn’t take the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face-to-face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent. Juliet hadn’t gotten up from her seat or spoken yet. She was watching Hunter intently, unblinkingly.

 
; “From here,” Hunter echoed. For a second I thought he was so zoned out on the antipsychotics that all I would get out of him was echolalia, but then he shook his head very slightly, left and then right and then left again. “Never getting out of here,” he commented, not in the tone of a lament but looking slightly mystified that I’d raised the issue at all. “Not now. Not after all that—everything. Everything else. Going to miss the inscription. Only three days left now. Till the dark of the moon. They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it. They won’t be happy.”

  The inscription? The mention of that word sent a slight frisson down the back of my spine. “Well,” I responded, making an effort not to let any reaction show on my face, “you know what Jan has hired me for. She doesn’t believe you killed Barnard, and she thinks your best bet at trial might be to try to establish that someone else was in that room along with the two of you. A dead someone else, which is why she came to me. But obviously, I’d like to hear your version of what happened.”

  “My version.” He looked down at his hands momentarily, palms up, as though checking to see if they were clean. “Nothing,” he muttered, as if to himself. “Nothing.”

  This was getting us nowhere fast. I sat down next to Juliet, hoping Hunter might follow my lead, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking up at the ceiling.

  “My version’s older than that,” he murmured, so low I almost didn’t catch the words.

  “Was there someone else, Doug?” I asked, trying again. “Did someone else come into the hotel room with you? Or afterward? How did Barnard die?”

  He lowered his head slowly and made eye contact with me almost accidentally at the bottom of that long, gradual arc. “The hammer,” he said. “Isn’t that what she used? I’m not sure anymore, but that’s what I remember. His head—was very—I can ask her. If you like.”

  “Then there was someone else?” I demanded. The eerie dissociation of his mood was in the air like something you could breathe in and catch. I had to fight the urge to push my chair away from him, and to force myself to take normal breaths instead of sipping the tainted atmosphere as shallowly as I could.