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 opposite. 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.’