Dead Men's s Boots

The first three digits were 832, so it didn’t look like a phone number – but for the hell of it, even though it was well after midnight, I added a zero to the beginning and dialled it anyway. The shrill, sustained note that meant ‘no connection’ was all I got in response.

I stared at the number for a while longer, wondering if I was missing something obvious, but I was finding it hard to focus through the fuzzy haze inside my head: long day, strong beer. It would keep until the morning.

I put in one more phone call, to a friend of mine named Nicky Heath.

His name was in John’s A to Z, too, but that wasn’t why I called: Nicky’s a ferret, skilled in the digital extraction of information. If anyone could make sense of John Gittings’s annotations, it was him. Also, being a dead man himself – of the zombie persuasion – he might empathise with John’s current situation.

That done, I stripped to my boxers, pulled on a T-shirt by way of a pyjama top and crawled into the sleeping bag.

I was expecting to fall asleep straight away, but the atmosphere of the place made it hard for me to let go of the day’s tensions.

My playing had created a zone of silence in the room, where usually I’m surrounded by a low-level psychic buzz of unformed energies. It was like the disconcerting hush you get when you’re sitting in the kitchen and the fridge suddenly stops humming, filling your senses with an absence that’s somehow louder than the sound it replaces.

I thought about Alastair Barnard’s miserable death, and Jan Hunter’s absolute conviction that her husband hadn’t been responsible for it.

Where was the hammer? Why had it been worth taking away from the scene of the crime, seeing that the evidence agains [vidor t Doug Hunter was already so strong? Maybe because it didn’t fit with the rest of the evidence: maybe because it had the wrong fingerprints on it. In that case either it was the real killer who’d waltzed off with it, or else yet another someone had stepped in and swiped it after the body was found and before the police got there. A pretty narrow window.

In either case, Coldwood was clearly way off-beam when he said that Hunter had taken it himself. Walking through the streets of London with blood on his clothes, Hunter had attracted enough attention for people to stop and watch him pass and then point out to the police where he’d gone. It was inconceivable that he’d been carrying a claw hammer all that time and nobody had noticed when and where he’d dropped it.