After the police had left, I waited a half-hour or so for the last of the onlookers to go back to their interrupted evenings, and then I went down to the basement to look at the remains of the lift car. It had hit the bottom of the shaft with enough force to demolish the motor housing, and the splayed remains of it kept the lift doors open. Ignoring the incident tape and the warning sign, I climbed inside and inspected what I could see of the roof of the car, which was easy enough since the inspection hatch had popped right out of its frame when the metal buckled under the force of impact.
Snapped off clean, just like the man said. But the few feet of cable that were still attached to the roof of the lift were shiny and uncorroded. Metal fatigue doesn’t show to the untrained eye, of course. But footprints do. In the sooty grease at one corner of the car roof there was a nice one, size eleven or so, perfectly captured. If the Met boys had seen it at all, they’d probably put it down to the maintenance engineer: but this was a council block, and the lifts only got inspected on alternate blue moons.
The coincidence of this happening immediately after I’d read that letter hidden in the pocket watch had shaken me more than slightly. Warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. And then my name, scribbled in the margin. So had someone else read those words besides me? Was that why I’d just nearly been bludgeoned to death by the force of gravity?
Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind had been starting to go long before he’d died, and that one sign of it had been this business of hiding notes to himself all over the place. It was more than possible that he’d written the letter to himself: I didn’t know his handwriting well enough to tell.
Either way, though, someone wanted me dead. And they didn’t even have the decency to just stick a knife in my back, like regular folks: presumably because they wanted my tragic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.
And, either way, I was feeling more curious now about the job that John had been working on when he died. Maybe I would turn up for the wake after all. I’d probably kill the mood, but what can you do?
6
Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood had blood on his hands, and it wasn’t his. Not just blood, in fact: gobbets of red-black tissue hung from his fingers and from the business end of the wickedly thin filleting knife he held in his right hand. In his left-hand there was a heart that would never beat again.
‘Meter’s running,’ he said. Coldwood likes to say things like that because it fits in with his image of himself as a tough, ruthless cop doing his balls-out thing in the canyons and arroyos of the urban wasteland. He’s got the face for it, too – all squared-off chin and over-luxuriant eyebrows – and he used it to scowl at me now. ‘I don’t owe you any favours, Castor, and I’m not telling you anything that wasn’t already reported in the papers, so don’t ask.’
‘Because a punch in the face often offends,’ I finished for him.
‘Exactly.’
‘Then why are we meeting here, instead of down at the cop shop?’
‘Here’ was the kitchen of his maisonette in East Sheen. It was the afternoon of the next day, and given the Victor Frankenstein vibe that Coldwood was currently putting out, I was grateful for the touches of normality provided by the sinkful of dirty dishes, the Dress-Up Homer Simpson fridge magnets and the FHM calendar on the wall.
Coldwood dropped the heart – a sheep’s, judging by the size of it – back into the dish instead of answering, and wiped his free hand on an apron that was already foul. Then he picked up a pencil and stared at the sad, half-dismantled piece of offal with a hard frown of concentration.
‘We’re meeting here because I can’t trust you to shut up when shutting up is the only sane option,’ he growled. He touched the business end of the pencil to a page of an open A4 pad and began to draw the heart, with great care but no particular skill. A couple of pink smears extended across the paper like a wake behind his wrist as it moved. ‘You’ll ask questions you shouldn’t ask, make stupid guesses to see if you can gauge anything from my reactions, and generally show me up in front of people whose opinions matter to me.’
There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t bother. Might as well try the sympathy card, though, because you never knew. ‘Basquiat still got your balls?’
Coldwood laughed mirthlessly. ‘When the Paragon Hotel case broke, DS Basquiat was up in the Midlands talking to a roomful of local plod about the use of behavioural modelling in detective work. I think it’s fair to say that if anyone is holding anyone’s balls here . . .’ He tailed off, aware that the metaphor had unexpectedly run aground. Ruth Basquiat is as hard as tungsten-tipped nails, but her balls – unless she throws the kind that Cinderella liked to go to – are purely notional.
To show my good faith, I left the punchline unspoken. ‘I’m not asking for any trade secrets anyway,’ I told Coldwood, comfortable with the outrageous lie because the next sentence exposed it straight away. ‘All I need is an idea of how strong the case against Doug Hunter is.’
‘All you need for what, Castor?’
‘Sorry, Gary. Client privilege.’
He shook his head. ‘You’re full of shit in an amazing variety of different shades and textures.’
‘Seriously,’ I persisted. ‘All I need are the basics, nothing that would compromise your professional integrity by even half an inch.’ I pointed at one of the tubercles sticking out of the heart. ‘You missed that one,’ I added helpfully.
‘I didn’t miss it,’ Coldwood muttered. ‘I just didn’t get to it yet. You want me to give you a walk-through of the whole case? Seriously? And you don’t think that would compromise me?’ The emphasis he put on the word was unnecessarily sarcastic. I could see that I was rubbing him up the wrong way.
‘Okay, Gary,’ I said. ‘Just meet me halfway, then. You know you want to. Deep down you’re still feeling guilty because you let me get arrested for murder that time, and then stood there and watched while Basquiat beat the crap out of me.’
‘No,’ he said, drawing in the little additional piece of cardiac plumbing. ‘I’m not feeling guilty, because that whole Abbie Torrington business was your own damn fault. And if I remember rightly you got yourself out of arrest again in very short order. By driving an ambulance through the front wall of the Whittington Hospital, wasn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t driving.’
‘Point stands.’
Coldwood straightened up and looked at his drawing with a critical eye: apparently it passed muster, because he put the pencil down. I thought I could see a couple of other oozy bits of anatomy that he hadn’t captured in his lightning sketch, but maybe they didn’t matter from a policing point of view.
Coldwood’s evening class in forensic science is his latest attempt to get ahead of the baying pack down at Albany Street and make Inspector while he’s still young enough to enjoy it. He goes up to Keighley College two nights a week, gets day release once a fortnight and in theory comes out in a couple of years’ time with a BTEC Higher, which he’ll happily wave in the face of the aforementioned Detective Sergeant Basquiat – a willowy blonde with a pixie-ish disregard for interrogation protocol. In the meantime he spends his free time slicing up internal organs that don’t – anatomically speaking – belong to him.
‘You don’t have a murder weapon,’ I said, deciding to go for a direct approach. Sometimes there’s such a thing as being too subtle.
‘We’ll find it. We still think Hunter ditched it in between leaving the Paragon and being picked up.’
‘Ditched it where? Out on the street?’
‘Maybe, yeah. Or maybe in the boot of a car. Or in a skip behind a shop. It’s a bloody claw hammer, Fix – with a two-and-a-half-inch cross-section on the blunt end. We’ll know it when we see it.’