Dead Men's Boots Read online

  I mulled that over and found nothing to say to it. The stuff I’d dodged on the doormat had certainly come a bit too close for comfort. But then, John knew what I was, and what I could do to him: he had good reason to want me to keep my distance. And if Carla had been living with this for six days and not taken so much as a scratch, it was hard to argue with her conclusions. Geists had been known to topple wardrobes on people’s heads and push them out of windows: clearly what was left of John Gittings was pulling its punches – at least as far as his widow was concerned.

  I scooped the pet food back into the bowl and used it to change the subject. ‘I thought you hated animals,’ I said.

  ‘Stray cat,’ Carla muttered, distracted. She tapped the Cona machine with a fingernail as it started to make slupslup-slup noises. ‘It came in through the window one day, and John fed it some tuna. Then it wouldn’t stop coming. I asked him not to encourage it but he wouldn’t listen. Haven’t seen it in a few days, though. Maybe it’s true that they know when someone doesn’t like them.’

  Over coffee, she came back to the question of options.

  ‘I’m going to have to let them do it, aren’t I?’ she asked me glumly, staring at the cream swirling on the surface of her drink. ‘Dig him up again, and burn him?’

  I thought about that. ‘If the will’s as specific as you say it is . . . Your only chance would be to prove that John wasn’t in his right mind when he wrote it.’ I hesitated at that point, thinking about where I was going to be the following morning, and what a tangled thicket the whole question of sanity now was. In your right mind? Sure. But sometimes it all depended on who was in there with you.

  ‘How do you prove something like that?’ Carla asked, echoing my thoughts.

  I took a swig of my coffee. I’d topped up both of the mugs heavily with what was left of the brandy, and it had a very pleasant afterburn. But the bitterness was there too, and I let it seep through me. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Usually it comes down to expert opinions. In my experience you can find an expert who’s willing to say more or less anything, but it costs money. And since John wasn’t getting any kind of medical help before his death, it’ll be harder to make something like that stick.’ I paused for a few moments and raised the next point very tentatively. ‘How important is it to you that he stays where he is?’

  Carla sighed and made a vague, helpless gesture. ‘I thought it was what he wanted,’ she said, her voice a throaty murmur. ‘Underneath it all, I thought – this thing and this thing and this thing, that’s all the disease. And these other things, they’re still him. They’re what’s real. I couldn’t believe he didn’t still want to lie next to Hailey, because he’d told me so many times-’ She faltered and glanced off in the direction of the pillaged living room. ‘But now that there’s all this, I don’t know. Maybe I got it wrong, Fix. And maybe that’s why he’s so angry with me.’

  I’d been thinking the same thing, but I was relieved she’d got that far by herself. ‘Yeah,’ I allowed. ‘That’s a possibility. When did he change his mind, exactly – about being buried, I mean?’

  ‘I told you. End of last year. Before Christmas, sometime. I don’t remember exactly.’

  ‘Did he ever talk it over with you? Give you any reasons?’

  She shook her head. ‘Fix-’ she said, and then there was a long pause. I saw the outline of what was coming, which helped: I kept my face deadpan and waited. ‘I don’t think I can bring myself to talk to that man. Todd. I don’t think I can do it without screaming at him.’

  ‘Well, with lawyers you always want to be sure your shots are up to date.’

  Another pause. I guess Carla was hoping I’d take the hint without being asked: it can’t be easy to beg favours from your dead husband’s friends. But I was feeling like my humanitarian impulses had led me far enough astray today already. I drank off what was left of my coffee, put down the mug and stood.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘try to tell yourself that he’s only doing his job. It’s the truth, more or less. Thanks for the coffee, Carla. If you change your mind, call Pen. She’s got a room free and she’d love the company.’

  Carla nodded, with only the very faintest sign of hurt in her eyes. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said, sabotaging my got-to-be-moving-along routine when it was just getting into second gear. Since I didn’t have any other choice, I stopped and waited while she got up from the table and started to rummage through the drawers of the big Welsh dresser behind her. At last she found what she was looking for and brought it back to the table.

  What she had in her hands was an antique half-hunter watch, Savonnette style, with a silver case and a silver chain, tarnished but still very beautiful. There was delicate filigree work on the case, and the silver bar that was meant to attach the watch to a waistcoat was not a bar at all but a tiny figure of the crucified Christ, his outstretched arms providing the necessary perpendicular line. It was an amazing piece of work: pair-cased, too, I discovered, as I automatically opened the front and discovered the actual watch nestling inside its bivalved shell. It had to be two hundred years old, and it had to be worth a small fortune.

  I looked at Carla. ‘I can’t take this,’ I said.

  ‘It belonged to his dad, and he wanted you to have it,’ she answered, in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘It was one of the last things he said to me before – when he was still thinking straight. “If anything happens to me, give this to Fix.” So it’s not up to me, or you. It’s yours.’

  I put it into one of the inside pockets of the paletot, bowing to the inevitable. ‘Thanks,’ I said lamely. ‘I’ll – well, I’ll think of John every time I look at it.’ Unpalatable though that prospect was right now.

  ‘Thanks for driving me home,’ Carla said.

  ‘It was my pleasure.’

  And then the twist of the knife. ‘Fix, I hate to do this. You’ve been so kind already. But if John’s going to be dug up and then cremated, I’ve got to know where and when. And I hate that man so much. If it’s not too much to ask—’

  And there it was. No good deed goes unpunished. Come to think of it, probably most of the people you see lying rolled and robbed on the side of the road are good Samaritans who stopped like idiots because they saw someone wringing their hands and looking helpless.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Sure. I can check the details with him. Let you know.’ It was the minimum commitment that the situation seemed to call for. I tried not to sound too grudging as I gave it.

  ‘Oh, Fix. I’d be so grateful. You’re a sweet man. Thank you.’

  She kissed me on the cheek and we hugged again, even more awkwardly than before.

  As she walked me back through the living room I paused briefly, unfocused my eyes and strained my senses for the ghost. It was still there, a faint, unmoving presence like a stain on the air. Dormant. Dreaming.

  ‘The music should keep John quiet for a couple of days at least,’ I told Carla. ‘After that – well, see how you go. If he’s unhappy because you ignored his last request, then maybe after Todd’s done what he needs to do—’

  ‘Why does Pen have a room free?’ Carla demanded, derailing my thoughts.

  ‘Uh – because we had a bit of a falling out,’ I admitted.

  ‘You two? What could make you two row with each other?’

  ‘Rafi,’ I said, and she let the subject drop. Everybody always does. Conversationally, that one word is the ace of trumps.

  3

  If you come out of High Barnet Tube and head uphill along the Great North Road, you pass the Magistrates’ Court on the left, in between a bathroom supplies shop and an estate agent’s. Or you could stop right there and save yourself a little effort, because it’s not as though Barnet has anything more exciting saved up to show you.

  It was the day after the night before, and the night before had involved all the many units of alcohol I’d failed to take in before the funeral. I felt fuzzy-headed and sticky-eyed as I walked in off the s
treet, finding myself in a red-carpeted foyer where tasselled ropes barred off some directions, steered you in others. It was like a cinema, except that there didn’t seem to be anyone selling popcorn.

  Nobody challenged me. There was a single usher on duty, but he was talking with strained patience to a belligerent young guy in a hooded jacket outside the door leading to court number one, and he didn’t even look round as I passed. I followed the arrows to courtroom three, where a sign said that the Honourable Mister Montague Runcie was presiding, and slid in quietly at the back. It looked like I’d only missed the warm-up. The magistrate, a man in his late fifties with a pinched, acerbic face and three concentric rings of wrinkles across his cheeks as though his eyes were wells that someone had just dropped a pebble into, was still examining papers and holding a muttered conversation with the court clerk. Pen was sitting right at the front with her back to me, as tense as all hell if the set of her shoulders was anything to go by. But she hadn’t started shouting yet so that was good.

  I sat down in an empty seat at the back of the room. There were a lot of empty seats: this was the sort of case that could easily make the local papers, but it didn’t look like any of them had caught onto it yet. In the digital age, cub reporters don’t bird-dog the courts and the cop shops any more: they print out the press releases that come in over the wire, clock off early and spend more time abusing substances.

  Eventually the magistrate looked up. He cast his gaze around the room, as if someone at the back had just spoken and he was trying to work out who so he could hand out some lines.

  ‘Miss Bruckner?’ he said, in a querulous tone. Pen got to her feet, holding up her hand unnecessarily. Her fall of red-gold hair made her hard to miss even when she was sitting down. As always she looked much taller than her five foot and half a spare inch: that effect is even more pronounced when you’re facing her, staring head-on at her scarily vivid green eyes, but it’s noticeable even from the back. Pen may be a small package, but what’s in there was tamped down with a lot of force and the lid stays just barely on most of the time.

  ‘And Professor Mulbridge?’

  On the other side of the court, another woman who’d been scribbling notes in a ring-bound notebook looked up, flicked the book closed and stood. She was older than Pen, and she made a strong contrast to her in a lot of ways. Matt-grey hair – the same grey as Whistler’s mother’s, or a German helmet – in a well-sculpted bob; grey eyes flecked with the smallest hint of blue; an austere, thin-lipped face, but with a healthy blush to her cheeks that suggested a warm smile lurking there under the superficial solemnity. She was dressed in a formal, understated two-piece in shades of dark blue, looking like a probation officer or a Tory MP, whereas Pen was wearing flamboyant African silk. The older woman’s cool self-possession was clearly visible under the self-effacing smile and polite nod. Clearly visible to me, anyway: but then, I go back a long way with Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, and I know where most of the bodies are buried. Hell, in a few cases I even dug the graves. People who don’t know her so well are apt to take away from their first meeting a vague sense of heavy-handed maternal benevolence: and to be fair, if I were going to describe Jenna-Jane to someone who didn’t know her, ‘mother’ might well be the first couple of syllables I’d reach for.

  ‘Here, your honour,’ Jenna-Jane said mildly. Her voice said ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’: and she is, as far as that goes. Then again, so were Crippen and Mengele, and they both sold patent medicines in their time.

  The magistrate tapped the stack of papers in front of him. ‘And I presume Doctor Smart and Mister Prentice are also in attendance?’ ‘Yes, your honour’ and ‘Here, your honour’ came from somewhere off to my far right. The magistrate acknowledged them with a curt nod.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said dryly. ‘You can all be seated again. Now, from what I understand, this is a question of the disposition of an involuntarily held mental patient. A Section 41 case, Mister . . . Rafael Ditko.’

  Someone who looked like an extra in Judge John Deed, impossibly young and suave and dark-suited, stood as if on cue on Jenna-Jane’s side of the courtroom, and the magistrate flicked him a glance but went on without giving him a chance to open his mouth. ‘Has there been a tribunal hearing?’ he demanded, lingering on the word tribunal as though it was particularly tasty.

  ‘Your honour,’ the barrister said, holding up his own wodge of papers as if to prove that he was earning his salary here too, ‘Michael Fenster, representing Haringey health authority. Yes, the review tribunal met three weeks ago. If you look in the court papers, you’ll see the minutes of that meeting. It took place at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill. In attendance were Doctor Smart, Mister Prentice, and your colleague Mister Justice Lyle.’

  ‘And the recommendation?’ The magistrate rummaged in the depths of the paperwork again, looking a little put out.

  ‘The issue, your honour, is the transferral of Mister Ditko from the Stanger Home to a separate secure facility under the management of Professor Mulbridge – the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Saint Mary’s in Paddington.’

  ‘I’m aware of the issue, Mister Fenster. I asked about the recommendation.’

  ‘Of course, your honour. But as you’ll also note from that document, the tribunal did not in fact manage to complete its deliberations. Miss Bruckner, who represents herself here today –’ he glanced across at Pen ‘– was also in attendance, and claimed – somewhat forcefully – that the tribunal was not properly convened.’

  The Honourable Mister Runcie had found his place now. He scanned the pages in front of him, tight-lipped. ‘Yes,’ he said. And then, a little later, ‘Oh yes.’ After reading on for a good half-minute longer, while the rest of us examined our fingernails and the paint on the walls, he put the paper down and stared at Pen.

  ‘You disrupted the hearing, Miss Bruckner,’ he said, with a slightly pained emphasis. ‘You’re facing criminal charges as a result.’

  Pen stood up again. ‘I had to, your honour,’ she said, levelly. ‘They were going to break the law. I needed to stop them.’

  I listened carefully to her words, or rather to the tone of them, trying to assess how tightly she was wound up. I estimated about three to four hundred pounds of torque: not terrible, for this stage of the proceedings. If anything she managed to get an apologetic note into her voice, and she bowed her head slightly as she spoke, in an understated pantomime of guilt. She knew she’d blown it at the Stanger hearing, and she was trying to undo the damage she’d done there.

  ‘You needed to stop them,’ Mister Runcie repeated. ‘Indeed. Well, I’ve no doubt you feel very strongly about this. But still – the transcript suggests that you shouted and scattered documents, and you’ve been accused of actually threatening Doctor Webb, the director of the Stanger Home.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about that,’ Pen said meekly. ‘The threat, I mean. I did say all those things. But I didn’t mean half of them.’

  For a moment I could see the proceedings being derailed by an itemised discussion of which threats Pen did mean: the one about breaking Webb’s arms and legs, or the more elaborate ones involving objects and orifices? But the barrister interposed smoothly to keep things moving along.

  ‘That case is pending, your honour, and it will be decided elsewhere. The crux of the matter here is that Miss Bruckner was asserting a power of attorney over Mister Rafael Ditko’s affairs and estate, and therefore over the legal disposition of his person.’

  ‘On what grounds?’ the magistrate asked, still looking at Pen. He was obviously trying to square the butterwouldn’t-melt picture of penitence in front of him with the written account of her exciting adventures at the Stanger. It didn’t compute.

  Pen answered for herself, again with really impressive restraint and civility. ‘On the grounds that I’m the one who signed the forms committing Rafi to the Stanger in the first place, your honour,’ she said. ‘And I pay his bills there, along with a Mister Felix Castor. Doctor
Webb has dragged me in every other week for two years, whenever he needed a signature on something. The only reason he doesn’t want me to have a power of attorney now is because it’s not convenient any more. Because now he wants to sign Rafi over to that woman, and he doesn’t want anyone to be able to say no.’

  On ‘that woman’ she flicked a glance across the court at Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the demure mask slipping just for a moment as her eyes narrowed into a glare. Jenna-Jane inclined her head in acknowledgement, the ironic glint in her eye barely perceptible.

  ‘I see,’ said the magistrate. He turned to the barrister now. ‘Well, if this is a Section 41 case, the safety of the public is the overriding consideration. Consent isn’t necessarily going to come into the equation. Is that the only substantive issue, Mister Fenster?’

  ‘Your honour, no,’ the barrister said, waving his wodge again. ‘Miss Bruckner further alleges improper collusion between Doctor Webb, Professor Mulbridge and Doctor Smart, who as the medical member of the tribunal would have been making the initial recommendation as to its decision. That is where I come in, since the authority – which convened the panel – feels compelled to rebut these charges.’

  ‘Charges of collusion?’

  ‘Just so, your honour.’

  The magistrate looked back at Pen with a frown.

  ‘Miss Bruckner,’ he said, with very careful emphasis, ‘may I ask on what basis you are questioning the credentials and integrity of –’ He scanned the paper that was still in his hand. ‘– of a judge, a doctor and a trained psychologist?’

  It was time for me to take some of the pressure off Pen before she could get any closer to blowing. I stood up and gave the bench a friendly wave. ‘Can I answer that one, your honour?’ I asked.

  He gave me a slightly nonplussed look. Jenna-Jane looked around too, and I took an unworthy pleasure in the way her thin lips thinned a little more at the sight of me.