Dead Men's s Boots

Ignoring the incident tape and the warning sign, I climbed inside and inspected what I could see of the roof of the car, which was easy enough since the inspection hatch had popped right out of its frame when the metal buckled under the force of impact.

Snapped off clean, just like the man said. But the few feet of cable that were still attached to the roof of the lift were shiny and uncorroded. Metal fatigue doesn’t show to the untrained eye, of course. But footprints do. In the sooty grease at one corner of the car roof there was a nice one, size eleven or so, perfectly captured.

If the Met boys had seen it at all, they’d probably put it down to the maintenance engineer: but this was a council block, and the lifts only got inspected on alternate blue moons.

The coincidence of this happening immediately after I’d read that letter hidden in the pocket watch had shaken me more than slightly. Warn them that as soon as there names in the frame there a target. And then my name, scribbled in the margin.

So had someone else read those words besides me? Was that why I’d just nearly been bludgeoned to death by the force of gravity?

Probably not. Carla had said that John’s mind had been starting to go long before he’d died, and that one sign of it had been this business of hiding notes to himself all over the place. It was more than possible that he’d written the letter to himself: I didn’t know his handwriting well enough to tell.

Either way, though, someone wanted me dead.

And they didn’t even have the decency to just stick a knife in my back, like regular folks: presumably because they wanted my tragic demise to look like an argument for urban renewal rather than a murder.

And, either way, I was feeling more curious now about the job that John had been working on when he died. Maybe I would turn up for the wake after all. I’d probably kill the mood, but what can you do?

6

Detective Sergeant Gary Coldwood had blood on his hands, and it wasn’t his.

Not just blood, in fact: gobbets of red-black tissue hung from his fingers and from the business end of the wickedly thin filleting knife he held in his right hand. In his left-hand there was a heart that would never beat again.

‘Meter’s running,’ he said. Coldwood likes to say things like that because N/p>it fits in with his image of himself as a tough, ruthless cop doing his balls-out thing in the canyons and arroyos of the urban wasteland.