Dead Men's s Boots

It was a powerful graphic statement: it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.

The other lists – the ones that consisted of people’s names – were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still just names: some friends, some the opposite of friends, most just strangers.

That left the key and the matchbook. I picked up the matchbook and looked at that number again, and this time, maybe because I was coming to it in a code-breaking frame of mind, the truth hit me at once.

The final digits were 76970. That could be a phone number after all – if the phone was a mobile and the number had been written backwards.

I keyed the number into my mobile and it rang. I had a brief sense of something like vertigo: a peek down the sheer vertical colonnades of a mind under terrible stress. Who had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful? Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia is a survival trait as well as a clinical condition: it hadn’t been that for John, but it looked as though he’d done all he could to keep what he was working on from falling into the wrong hands. Or any hands at all.

The ring tone sounded three times, then someone pick kn stheed up.

‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, brisk and cheerful. ‘What’s the score?’

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of John Gittings . . .’

There was a muttered ‘Fuck!’ and then the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the phone at the other end rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time: just an expectant silence.

‘I really am a friend of John’s,’ I said, trying to sound calm and reassuring and radiantly trustworthy. ‘My name is Felix Castor. I worked with John on a couple of jobs, a little while back. His widow, Carla, gave me some of his things, and your number was in there. I called because I’m trying to find out what he was working on before he died.’

That was enough to be going on with, I thought. I waited for the line to go dead again. Instead, the same male voice said, ‘Why?’ Not so cheerful now – tense, with an underlying tone of challenge.

Actually, I had to admit that that was a pretty good question. ‘Because he seemed to think it was something really important,’ I said, slowly because I was picking my words with care in case any of them turned out to be loaded. ‘But he didn’t tell anybody what it was all about. I’m thinking that maybe finishing the job for him might make him rest easier. Because right now he’s not resting easy at all.’

There was a long, strained silence.

‘Not tonight,’ the man said at last. ‘Tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. The usual place.’

He hung up before I could ask the obvious question, and this time when I dialled again the phone just rang until I got a voicemail service. I tried twice more, with the same results. For some reason – maybe creeping paranoia – I didn’t want to leave a message. But in any case, I thought I knew where the usual place had to be: there was presumably a reason why John had written this number down on the matchbook from the Reflections Café Bar – and fortunately he’d left the postcode showing when he tore off the cover. That plus the yellow pages ought to be enough to get me there. The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.

10

A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.

It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.

In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration here was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison as a whole split up into a sprawl of different wings that h nisoad no contact with each other, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard.