Dead Men's s Boots

There was the plastic bag, for starters, taped to the space behind the desk drawer; then the backwards phone number, written on the matchbook of a café which turned out not to be his rendezvous point with Chesney but a place from 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, which 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 whisky and water and then opened the envelope while I was waiting for the drink to come.

After the A to Z, the matchbook, 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 there were letters of the alphabet, asterisks and horizontal dashes.

It was going to be another code, I realised wearily. Another stupid secret message from John to himself, which when decoded would probably reveal the secret location of another secret message, and so on to the goddamn crack of doom.

My whisky arrived and I studied the sheets as I drank, trying to figure out if there was any way they could be laid on top of each other or read from an odd angle to yield actual words.