“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 favor. 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 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 cortege
away toward a massive hearse parked opposite. I went on up the stairs.
Carla had locked the door and bolted it at the 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 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 center 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’s 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 eyes flicking across to the coffin and then immediately shying away toward 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 apologize. 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 minimart on the way back.
Carla perked up over gosht kata masala and a keema naan washed down by a glass of high-proof Belgian blonde. 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 gotten 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 he’d 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, 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.”
Carla put down her fork, pushed her plate away. She blinked a few times quickly, as if there were tears in her eyes that she
wanted to keep inside.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lifting my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Forget I asked, Carla. You’ve got enough on your plate without
this.”
“No,” she said. “It’s all right, Fix. It just brought it all back, that’s all.”
“Exactly. I’ll shut up.”
“You don’t have to.” She stood up. “It’s not like there’s any getting away from it, is there? There are a few places we can
look, if you want to.”
She walked into the living room, then down a short hallway that led to the bedroom. I followed a little uneasily, sending
up a silent apology to John’s slumbering shade.
The bed had red satin sheets and a coverlet with the
Playboy
Bunny logo on it: matching his-and-hers pillows, with a halo for her and horns for him. You think you know people, but you
never really do. Carla hauled a shoe box out from under the bed on the “his” side, rummaged inside it, and turned up nothing
more interesting than a venerable set of check stubs.
Her next target was a safe on the wall behind a picture of a unicorn with a naked woman riding on it. The safe had a digital
lock, which Carla opened by pressing the 1 key six times. “Factory default,” she explained, glancing at me and rolling her
eyes. “He never bothered to change it.” Drawing another blank, she crossed to a rolltop desk next to the window. It had a
single drawer, which was empty, but Carla didn’t even bother to look inside it; she just pulled it out and put it on the bed,
then knelt and put her arm into the space where it had been.
Faint bumps and thunks told me that she was feeling to the right and left in the hollow at the back of the desk. Then she
stopped, and her eyebrows rose. “Bingo,” she murmured.
With some difficulty, she pulled out a Sainsbury’s bag wrapped around and around with brown duct tape. She held it out to
me, and I took it. I hefted it in my hand, felt the weight. It didn’t feel like there could be a whole hell of a lot in there.
I started to undo the tape, and Carla put her hand on mine to stop me. As if conscious of where we were, and how loaded even
a momentary touch like that had to be at the foot of a double bed with Hugh Hefner’s bow-tie-sporting were-rabbit giving us
its one-eyed stare, she took her hand away again hastily.
“Open it somewhere else,” she said. “Or—tomorrow. Not now. It would be too much for me right now.”
I nodded and lowered the small package to my side. We were still standing too close to each other. We seemed to need another
gesture to defuse the tension.
“You want another beer?” I asked her. “It’s about eight percent proof—like Tennent’s Extra but with taste. Guarantees a good
night’s sleep.”
“I don’t think I’ll sleep much tonight, whatever I do,” Carla said, turning away and taking a step toward the bed. She hauled
the sheets and covers off in a single practiced movement. “Fix, I’m going to sleep in the living room, next to—I mean, with
John. So you can have the bed. There are more sheets and pillowcases in the top of the wardrobe, and a spare duvet in the
divan drawer on that side.” She pointed.
“I brought a sleeping bag,” I said. “I’ll just spread that on top of the mattress. Unless you want me to bring the mattress
in for you.”
She shook her head, looking at me with an expression that was only a couple of hard knocks away from beaten flat. “I’m fine
with the duvet,” she said. “I’ll fold it like a sandwich and sleep in the middle.” Seeming to reach a decision, she let the
sheets fall to the floor and came back over to me. “Thanks for staying with me tonight,” she said. “And for arranging everything.
I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
She kissed me on the cheek, and there was no tension or awkwardness in it. Not on Carla’s side, anyway. I have to admit, her
thanks sat heavily in my stomach right then, given my real reason for being here.
“It’s part of the basic service,” I assured her, deadpan. “The deluxe includes lawn care.”
“I haven’t got a lawn.”
“Then the basic should suit you just fine.”
I helped her take the bedding through, then went back down the steps to get a few other bits and pieces I’d brought with me.
It was already dark, but the slate-gray mountains of cumulonimbus had made it dark for most of the day. The wind had blown
most of that mass away to the west now, though, and a sliver of moon as thin as a sickle blade was cutting what was left of
the clouds into grubby-looking tatters. Tomorrow was going to be fine, and as cold as charity.
I lingered out there because there was something about the east wind, heavy with unborn frost, that felt clean and even refreshing.
I called Juliet, got Susan Book. I asked if she could pass on a message: I just needed to talk to Juliet about some work she’d
done for the Met. She said she’d tell Juliet as soon as she came in.
“We never seem to see you anymore, Fix,” she chided me. “Where are you working these days? In some terrible wilderness on
the edge of civilization?”
“Southgate,” I said. “I think the nearest civilization is Wood Green Shopping City.”
“Good grief, you’re only twenty minutes’ drive from here! You’ve got to come over for dinner. Jules would love to see you.”
“Well, I will.”
“Tomorrow.”
Cornered. “Okay, tomorrow,” I said.
“Actually, could you make it Thursday? I’ve got the prayer circle tomorrow night.”
“Thursday it is, then. Thanks, Sue. See you then.”
I hung up, pondering the mysteries of the human spirit. It was inexplicable, on the face of it, how someone who lived in sin
with a succubus—a consenting adult demon of the same sex—could still be so active in the church and see no inherent contradictions
in her lifestyle. Susan Book was one of a kind. I was getting to like her, even if she had stolen my woman.
I took my time stowing the phone away, collecting my things, and climbing the stairs again.
When I got back inside, I felt the difference even before I saw Carla frozen on the floor in a defensive crouch. Staining
the carpet between her and the coffin was an elongated teardrop of spilled beer, with the starburst remains of the broken
bottle at its narrower end. Clearly, during the few minutes I’d been outside, John had woken up in a pretty sour mood.
Carla was crying. I went over to her, knelt, and put an arm around her shoulders. She melted in to me, powerful sobs making
her shudder and shake. “I just”—she managed to get out—“said good night—to him!”
I’m not good in this kind of situation. I’m familiar with the noises that have to be made, but people who know me, and know
what I do for a living, find it as hard to take consolation from me as they would from a professional hangman. I tried anyway.
“Carla,” I said, “the reason he’s so scared and so angry is because fear and anger are pretty much all he is. His body’s gone—it’s
in the casket there. He’s jumped the rails. Right now he’s just a collection of emotions so strong there isn’t even much room
left for memories. That’s why so many ghosts seem to spend their time replaying their own death: They’re caught in a loop,
going through the same events again and again because there’s so much fear and pain tied up in there.
“John’s not trying to hurt you. You said yourself that none of the things he’s thrown has ever touched you. He’s lashing out
because he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him, and he doesn’t know how to get free of it. But if he threw that bottle
when you touched the side of the coffin”—with her head buried in my chest, she tried to nod, and I felt rather than saw the
movement—“then that’s a good sign. It means he recognizes the body as his own and wants to protect it. It means he remembers
enough of his past to make that identification. On some level, he knows who he was. Who he still
is
. So you did the right thing, agreeing to this. I think you’ve helped him.”
She still had to cry it out, but the point seemed to sink in, and she slowly started to calm. After a minute or so, I let
go of her and took my tin whistle out of my pocket. “I’m going to play him some more music,” I said.
That alarmed her all over again. She surfaced from the now slightly soggy depths of my lapels with a look of horror. “Fix,
if you send him away now—”
“I didn’t send him away the first time,” I said. “I just made him drowsy. These are tunes I use on Rafi, so I’ve had plenty
of time to get them down right. This time I won’t even send John to sleep. I just want to calm him a bit so you don’t have
to go to bed in full-body armor.”
I waited for her to respond. Finally, she gave me the merest hint of a nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.
I played a tune that was vaguely based on Neko Case’s “Lady Pilot,” I think purely because of the line in the song about not
being afraid to die. Often in these cases, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the song is when it starts out. Once
I let it out into the open air, it grows and changes, as though the vibrations of the music are some sort of insubstantial
extension of my own nervous system. It becomes something that I use to touch the world—the invisible world that seems to be
idling next to our own right now at some interdimensional red light—and to operate on the things I see and feel there.