Dead Men's s Boots

Todd glanced in mild surprise from my face to the rolled-up sleeping bag I was carrying over my shoulder. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The coffin is in the living room. Are you staying the night, Mister Castor?’

‘That I am, Mister Todd.’

The lawyer nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s good. Mrs Gittings probably shouldn’t be alone tonight.’ He made to walk on past me.

‘One quick question,’ I said. ‘When John came in to see you, looking to change his will, how did he seem?’

Todd turned to look back at me with a stare that was suddenly all cold professionalism.

‘In what sense?’

I’d hoped to avoid specifics while I fished for random gobbets of information, but evidently lawyers have built-in radar for that kind of thing.

‘Well,’ I gestured vaguely, ‘in the sense of – did he appe [sp;>

Todd answered without even a microsecond’s pause. ‘He was in his right mind. Entirely lucid, to use your expression. If he hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to take legal instructions from him. He looked tired.

Stressed, perhaps. A man with a lot weighing on his mind. But if his suicide was the result of any kind of . . . mental decay, then it hadn’t started when I spoke with him. Or, at least, it hadn’t begun to show in the way he talked and acted. I’d have said he was as sane as you or me.’

‘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 favour.

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 to 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.