Dead Men's s Boots

‘Joseph,’ I said, switching tack, ‘your boss, Merrill, said something to me that didn’t get a mention in the police evidence. He said another man came into the Paragon, a little later than Barnard and Hunter. An old man. By himself. Does that ring any bells with you?’

‘Yeah.’ Joseph nodded. ‘I bumped into him, on the corridor. I was coming out of a room, with an armload of sheets and stuff. Next thing I know, I’m going backwards instead of forwards. I hit him and bounced off.’ He picked up a plastic bucket, hung two J-cloths over the side of it.

‘He wasn’t an old man, though. I don’t know where Mister Merrill got that idea from. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was solid. Very strong. And he walked like – you know – like a big strong guy walks. All swaggering. That wasn’t any old man.’

Something stirred in my mind as he said that, but I didn’t try to drag the thought up into the light. Not yet. It would come in its own good time if I didn’t reach for it.

I thanked Joseph for his time and offered him a twenty from my dwindling stash. He took it without even looking at it. Where he was living right now, money couldn’t bring much solace.

I had to get out to Kingsbury next, for my dinner engagement with Juliet and Sue Book, and the easiest way to do that was to hoof across to Baker Street and change onto the Jubilee. That was what I was going to do, swear to God: but I had that locker key of John’s burning a hole in my pocket.

How long would it take to open a locker and pick up the contents? Five minutes, at the outside. I could st‹ide keill do it and get to Juliet’s in plenty of time. So I found myself heading south instead, without any recollection of making a decision about it.

The left-luggage lockers at Victoria are scattered randomly across the whole station, but the densest concentration is next to the Prêt à Manger at the northern end of the concourse. I tried there first, but locker number 167 wasn’t among them.

I zigzagged back towards the escalators that lead down into the Underground, going from one row of lockers to the next, and finally struck pay dirt on the fourth or fifth. But pay dirt was a relative term in this case, because when I opened 167 it was empty.

I felt the sudden prick and slow deflation of bathos, but only for a moment. Then I thought about how John had played the earlier moves in this game.