Dead Men's Boots (29 page)

From Walthamstow to Barnet isn’t that far as the crow flies. As the taxi crawls along the North Circular Road, though, it’s
a fair way. Out of sheer desperation, I offered the driver an extra twenty if he could cut some corners, and he peeled off
onto some backstreets where we seemed to go faster but covered less ground.

I was right about the phone; it was still turned on. But the battery, which was old and needed replacing, had run out of power,
so the point was moot. Sometimes I could coax a minute or two longer out of it by ejecting it and then sliding it back into
place, but not this time. It was definitively dead.

By the time I got to the courthouse, it must have been almost four o’clock. I was hoping that the case might have started
late, but as soon as I saw Pen sitting on the courtroom steps, I knew it was beside the point to hurry now. I also knew from
her face how the hearing had gone.

I sat down next to her. She didn’t look around or seem to notice.

“What happened?” I demanded. She didn’t answer, so I asked again. “Pen, what happened?”

“He said he’d looked at the composition of the panel,” said Pen slowly, sounding almost as though she were reading the words
from a badly printed sheet. “And it wasn’t right. They were supposed to make sure the panel was completely independent—no
conflicts of interest or anything—and they hadn’t. So any decision the panel made wasn’t valid.”

I blinked. That sounded like good news, as far as it went. “Then we’re—”

“But he also said he’d thought about the power-of-attorney thing, and he’d changed his mind about it not being in his jurisdiction.”
She looked at me, her face strained and pale. “He said someone had to look out for Rafi, and it had to be someone who could
be trusted to make decisions in his best interests. Someone who understood the medical background and knew what was at stake
and wasn’t going to act out of emotion or prejudice. Someone with an independent mind and an expert grasp of the issues.”

I saw what was coming, but common sense rebelled at it. So did my stomach. “You’re not fucking telling me—” I protested.

Pen nodded. “He gave it to Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. She’s got power of attorney now, and she’s already signed the consent forms.
She brought them
with
her, Fix. She knew this was going down. Then Runcie let them convene the hearing right there because all the panel members
were present, and it was one, two, three, you’re done.” She blinked away tears. “I thought he was trying to do what was right
for Rafi, but he’s just railroaded us. That cow is going to take Rafi away to the MOU tomorrow, and then she can do what she
likes to him.”

“Over my dead body,” I promised.

But that was the kind of knee-jerk response you have to be wary of. It took only a few moments of sober reflection before
I thought better of it.

“Better yet,” I amended, “over hers.”

    
Thirteen

I
WAS STARING DOWN THE BARREL OF ANOTHER LONG night, and I knew it. I had the ultimate ordeal of dinner with Juliet and the
lovely Mrs. Juliet to look forward to. But first I was going to get some errands run.

I got to the Paragon at about six, which, according to the desk clerk, Merrill, was when Joseph Onugeta’s shift began. Merrill
was sitting at the desk reading the
Evening Standard
when I walked in. He gestured with his thumb backward over his shoulder. “He’s in the cupboard,” he said, and went back to
his paper.

The cupboard turned out to be a room on the ground floor—the same size as the bedrooms, or at least the one I’d seen—lined
with shelves and stacked with boxes of cleaning materials. Joseph Onugeta was changing into his work overalls when I knocked
and entered. I’d been seeing Onugeta as an East African name, but his skin was the rich near-violet black of the Orissa Dalits.
He had a frizz of ash-gray hair, so tightly curled that it almost looked sheer, that came down to a widow’s peak above intense
brown-black eyes with heavy lids. His mouth was set in the dour line of someone who’s seen a lot of shit and expects to see
a lot more. Then again, I have that effect on a lot of people.

I introduced myself and told him what I was there for—that I was interested in what he’d seen and heard on the day of the
murder. He listened with gloomy indifference, his mouth tugging down at the corners as though it made him very sad to have
to listen to me.

“I told the police already,” he pointed out.

“I know that,” I agreed. “I’m just checking the details. Especially this thing about you hearing a woman’s voice from the
room…”

At the word “woman,” the man’s whole demeanor changed. A tremor went through him. He seemed to still it with some difficulty,
clenching his hands into tight fists.

“Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked. “You didn’t see her go into the room?”

Silently, he shook his head.

“Can you remember anything she said?”

Another jerk of the head that I took to be a negative, but before I could throw another question at him Onugeta was speaking
in a tense, urgent monotone. “ ‘I hate you,’ ” he muttered. “ ‘I fucking hate all of you. If I could kill every rat bastard
of you, one after another after another, I’d do it.’ ” It took me a second to realize that he wasn’t talking to me but quoting
from memory. “ ‘I want it to fucking hurt you so bad, so bad. I want to see in your eyes how much it hurts. And when you’re
dead, I wish I could bring you back and make it hurt some more.’ ”

He fell silent, turned his back on me, and took down a pair of marigold gloves from one of the shelves. “Like that. On and
on like that. And the one man, he was saying, ‘You don’t mean that, you don’t mean that.’ Scared. Really scared. And then
the other man said, ‘Make her stop.’”

I had to be careful with the next question—careful not to let it sound like an accusation. “You didn’t think of going into
the room?” I asked.

Joseph shot me a bitter look. “I hear worse than that every day,” he said. “Much worse. I-love-you-I-hate-you-I’ll-fuck-you.
Everyone says that here. Or thinks it. I kept on walking. None of my business. All I do is empty the wastebins. There’s nightmares
enough for anyone right there.

“But then when we turned the key and looked into that room…” He was staring at nothing, and his face was set hard, the gloves
dangling forgotten in his hand. “It wasn’t any kind of love that did that,” he muttered. “Love can turn into a lot of things,
but—there wasn’t a square inch of him that hadn’t been—” He gave up on that sentence, shaking his head rapidly like a dog
trying to get itself dry. “It takes a lot of hate to do that. To keep on hating someone after he’s already dead.”

He discovered the gloves in his hand, put them on, and wriggled his fingers into them one at a time with repetitive, robotic
care. His eyes were hooded, his mouth twisted slightly as if he were in pain. I got a glimpse of the truth, then, about what
had made him too sick to come into work. He was talking about a sickness of the soul.

“Joseph,” I said, although I wanted to stop and get the hell out into the fresh air. “You didn’t see her? You never got a
glimpse of her, going into the room or coming out?” It was a question I’d already asked, but given his state of mind, it was
worth one more throw of the dice. Since he couldn’t get away from these memories, maybe if I kept hovering around the edges
of them, some kind of enlightenment, some kind of clue, would come to me.

“I’ll know her if I see her,” Joseph said, tapping his gloved finger against his right temple. “I dreamed about her that night.
Dream about her most nights. My daddy had the sight, and I got it, too, whether I want it or not.

“She’s not a woman, though. Not a real woman. It sounds stupid, but I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. She’s got a devil face.
Long red hair. Tall as a man, strong as a man. And a circle here, over her eye, like a crater. Like a little bomb hit her
and left a crater. Or like someone shot her and the bullet bounced off.”

The hairs rose on the nape of my neck as he talked. He was describing Myriam Kale; he’d even gotten the chickenpox scar. But
the look on his face told me that carrying on with this line of questioning was going to lead to some ugly eruption that I
probably couldn’t handle.

“Joseph,” I said, switching tack, “your boss, Merrill, said something to me that didn’t get a mention in the police evidence.
He said another man came into the Paragon a little later than Barnard and Hunter. An old man. By himself. Does that ring any
bells with you?”

“Yeah.” Joseph nodded. “I bumped into him in the corridor. I was coming out of a room with an armload of sheets and stuff.
Next thing I know, I’m going backward instead of forward. I hit him and bounced off.” He picked up a plastic bucket and hung
two J-cloths over the side of it. “He wasn’t an old man, though. I don’t know where Mr. Merrill got that idea from. I didn’t
get a good look at him, but he was solid. Very strong. And he walked like—you know—like a big strong guy walks. All swaggering.
That wasn’t any old man.”

Something stirred in my mind as he said that, but I didn’t try to drag the thought up into the light. Not yet. It would come
in its own good time if I didn’t reach for it. I thanked Joseph for his time and offered him a twenty from my dwindling stash.
He took it without even looking at it. Where he was living right now, money couldn’t bring much solace.

I had to get out to Kingsbury next, for my dinner engagement with Juliet and Sue Book, and the easiest way to do that was
to hoof across to Baker Street and change onto the Jubilee. That was what I was going to do, swear to God, but I had that
locker key of John’s burning a hole in my pocket. How long would it take to open a locker and pick up the contents? Five minutes
at the outside. I could still do it and get to Juliet’s in plenty of time. So I found myself heading south instead, without
any recollection of making a decision about it.

The left luggage lockers at Victoria were scattered randomly across the whole station, but the densest concentration was next
to the Pret A Manger at the northern end of the concourse. I tried there first, but locker number 167 wasn’t among them. I
zigzagged back toward the escalators that lead down into the underground, going from one row of lockers to the next, and finally
struck paydirt on the fourth or fifth. But paydirt was a relative term in this case, because when I opened 167, it was empty.

I felt the sudden prick and slow deflation of bathos, but only for a moment. Then I thought about how John had played the
earlier moves in this game. There was the plastic bag, for starters, taped to the space in back of the desk drawer; then the
backward phone number, written on the matchbook of a café that turned out not to be his rendezvous point with Chesney but
a place where the rendezvous point could be spied on. Always that extra, paranoid little wriggle, like the innovations of
a mind determined to catch itself out as well as everyone else.

Going down on hands and knees, and mentally consigning the trousers I was wearing to the dustbin of history, I took a closer
look inside the locker. Still nothing to be seen, but when I stuck my arm inside and felt over all the inside surfaces, there
was something there—something fixed to the top of the locker space. It gave slightly under my hand and was the wrong texture
for metal. I managed to get hold of a corner of the something and pull it free. It was a big, chunky envelope, fixed to the
roof of the locker with duct tape.

I carried on looking, wanting to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t missing anything, but I didn’t unearth any further treasures.
I left the key in the locker and took the package over to the station bar, where I ordered a whiskey and water and then opened
the envelope while I was waiting for the drink to come.

After the
A to Z
, the matchbook, and the key, I was expecting something else with an aura of cheap dime-store mysteries about it, but the
envelope was full of music. At least it was full of sheets of music paper. The notations that were on the paper, though, made
no sense to me at all. The sequences of notes—if that was what they were—had been set down as mere vertical strokes of a felt-tip
pen, with no indication of how long they should be sustained, and they ricocheted all over the scale without rhyme or reason.
If they looked like anything, it was the way Woodstock speaks in the
Peanuts
cartoon. It sure as hell wasn’t music. And in among the thickets of vertical lines were letters of the alphabet, asterisks,
and horizontal dashes.