At a nod from the detective sergeant, the grab-and-dab boys gingerly fished up one of the bags and both of the notebooks with plastic-gloved hands and took them away to the desk, looking like kids at Christmas. Coldwood was still looking at me – a look that said the time for teasing was past. He wanted the whole story.
But so did I. I don’t prostitute my talents for just anyone, especially anyone with a rank and a uniform, and when I’m dragged into a situation I know sod all about I like to play just a little coy until I find my feet. So I threw him a question by way of an answer.
‘Is your man about six-two, stocky, ginger-haired, wearing Armani slacks and one of those poncey collarless jackets in a sort of olive brown?’
Coldwood made a sound in his throat that might have been a laugh if laughter was in his repertoire. ‘That’s him,’ he said. ‘Now stop playing Mystic Meg and tell me where he is.’
‘Tell me who he is,’ I countered.
‘Fuck! Castor, you’re a civilian adviser, so just do what you’re being paid to do, okay? You don’t get to look at my fucking case notes.’
I waited. This was my fifth or sixth outing with DS Coldwood, and we’d already established a sort of routine. But like I said, he wasn’t in the best of tempers right then – hence his attempt to lead me to water and then shove my head under it.
‘I could arrest you for withholding evidence and hindering an investigation,’ he pointed out darkly.
‘You could,’ I agreed. ‘And I’d wish you joy proving it.’
There was a short pause. Coldwood breathed out explosively.
‘His name’s Leslie Sheehan,’ he said, his tone flat and his face deadpan. ‘He deals whatever drugs he can get his hands on, plus some nasty fetish porn on the side as a bit of a hobby. That’s probably what those DVDs are all about. He’s maybe two steps up the ladder from the mules and the street runners, and he doesn’t matter a toss. But he answers to a man named Robin Pauley, who we’d dearly love to get our hands on. So we’ve spent the last six months watching Sheehan and building up a case against him because we think we can turn him. He narked before, about ten years back, to get out of a conspiracy-to-murder charge. When they’ve done it once, you’ve got a bit more of a handle on them. Only now he’s gone missing and we think Pauley may have sussed what we were up to.’
‘Sheehan won’t be talking now, in any case,’ I said, with calm and absolute conviction.
Coldwood was exasperated. ‘Castor, you’re not qualified even to have a fucking opinion on—’ he snarled. Then he got it. ‘Oh,’ he muttered, followed a second or so later by a bitter ‘Fuck!’ He was about to say something else, probably equally terse, when one of the lab rats called across to him.
‘Sergeant?’
He turned, brisk and expressionless. Always deal with the matter in hand: keep your imagination holstered like your side arm. Good copping.
‘It’s heroin,’ the tech boy said, with stiff formality. ‘More or less uncut. About ninety-five, ninety-six per cent pure.’
Coldwood nodded curtly, then turned back to me.
‘So I’m assuming Sheehan’s somewhere in here, is he?’ he asked, for the sake of form.
I nodded, but I needed to spell it out in case he got his hopes up. ‘His ghost is in here,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t mean his corpse is. I’ve told you before how this works.’
‘I need to see him,’ said Coldwood.
I nodded again. Of course he did.
Slipping a hand inside my greatcoat, I took out my tin whistle. Normally it would be a Clarke Original in the key of D, but some exciting events on board a boat a few months prior to this had left me temporarily without an instrument. The boat in question was a trim little yacht named the Mercedes, but if you’re thinking Henley Regatta you’re way off the mark: the wreck of the Hesperus would probably give you a better mental picture. Or maybe the Flying Dutchman. Anyway, as a result of that little escapade I ended up buying a Sweetone, virulently green in colour, and that had become my new default instrument. It didn’t feel as ready and responsive to my hand as the old Original used to, and it looked a bit ridiculous, but it was coming along. Give it another year or so and we’d probably be inseparable.
I put the whistle to my lips and blew G, C, A to tune myself in. I was aware that all the eyes in the room were focused on me now: Coldwood’s expressionless, most of the others bright with prurient interest – but one of the uniformed constables was definitely looking a little on the nervous side.
The trouble with what I was about to do was that it doesn’t always work: at best it’s fifty-fifty. There’s something about a rationalistic world view that arms you against seeing or hearing anything that would contradict it – like mermaids, say; or flying pigs; or ghosts. Overall, about two people in three can see at least some of the dead, but even then it depends a lot on mood and situation: and in certain professions that ratio drops to something very close to zero. Policemen and scientists cluster somewhere near the bottom of the league table.
I didn’t know what I was going to play until I blew the first notes. It might have been nothing much: just the skeleton of a melody, or an atonal riff with a rough-hewn kind of a pattern to it. It turned out to be a Micah Hinson number called ‘The Day Texas Sank to the Bottom of the Sea’ – I’d seen Hinson perform at some café in Hammersmith, and I found something powerfully satisfying in the lilting harshness of his voice and the hammering, inescapable repetitions of his lyrics. But even without that, the song appealed to me for the title alone.
Nothing seemed to happen at first: but then, from my point of view nothing was going to. Hopefully the perspective from where Coldwood was standing was starting to look a bit different. Just before I hit the second chorus there was a gasp from one of the forensics officers over by the desk. Good. Then another one cried out aloud, and pointed, and I knew the plangent little tune had done the trick.
What they were pointing at was a man who was standing on nothing very much, in the exact centre of the well which the trapdoor had covered. He’d always been there, perfectly visible to me from the moment I’d walked in: but Coldwood’s boys had been walking past him and through him without so much as a premonitory shudder and a muttered ‘Hail Mary’, so I’d felt safe in assuming that I was the only one who could see him.
But the music had changed all that. This tune – at this time, in this place, played in this tempo and all the rest of it – was for me a description of the ghost. It’s a knack I’ve got: not just to see the dead, but to perceive them with a sense that’s nine-tenths hearing, one-tenth something I can only describe as else. I can catch the essence of a ghost in music, and once I’ve caught it there are other things I can do with it. One of them, which I’d discovered fairly recently and spectacularly, was to make other people see it, too.
So now the music was bringing this dead man inside the perceptual orbit of Coldwood and his coppers – which meant that they were seeing Sheehan’s ghost materialise out of that proverbially popular substance, thin air. The plods gaped, and the men in white coats visibly bridled and tensed as they saw this piece of superstition and unreason made manifest before their eyes. Coldwood has a more pragmatic cast of mind: he walked right up close to the ghost and began his examination. It stared at him with mournful, frightened eyes.
Leslie Sheehan clearly hadn’t been dead for very long, and he hadn’t had time yet to get used to the idea. He’d come here because ‘here’ was a place he had strong associations with – or possibly he’d just stayed here because this was where he’d died: but in either case, now that he’d materialised here that seemed to be the upper limit of his capabilities for the time being. He couldn’t reinsert himself into life because his phantasmal body couldn’t lift or move or touch any physical objects, and wouldn’t even reliably do what his phantasmal mind told it to. Some ghosts got trapped into re-enacting their deaths for the whole of eternity: others just stood, as Sheehan was doing now, looking lost and frightened – defeated and broken down by the no-longer-avoidable fact of their own mortality. He was aware of us, on some level, and his stare followed Coldwood as the sergeant squatted down on his haunches to get a better look at some detail that had caught his eye. But it was as if Sheehan was frozen to the spot: he couldn’t form the decision or the desire to move from where he was.