Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

And, amazingly, something was starting to show through: as I whacked the table in crude synchrony with his skein of rattling, clanking sounds, there was a dim sense in my mind of random and disconnected things coming tight, coming together, and making meaning as they came – like the loose strings of a cat’s cradle drawn taut between some child’s fingers: noise into signal.

Pomfret seemed less impressed. ‘No, that’s shit,’ he grumbled, stopping abruptly. ‘The sounds are too similar.’ He rotated the bigger of the two coffee cups out of the line-up and replaced it with an empty Coke can from the next table along. He tested it out, seemed saË oue rtisfied with it, tried again – and again, built up gradually from slow and steady to fast and furious, as if the rhythm had its own internal logic that dictated an accelerando tempo.

My rough-and-ready accompaniment became more confident, even though I was reading the sheet music upside down: actually I was reading it less and less, because I was starting to see where the rhythm was going and to anticipate what shape my own part of it was meant to take. It was only a beginning, but it was strengthening with every moment that passed. Even though I was well outside my comfort zone I was glimpsing the weave that John had made: the binding that was the first phase of an exorcism.

But Pomfret slowed down and stopped. ‘Look,’ he said, tapping the sheet. ‘He’s adding in extra lines to the stave here. He’s got to have three drummers now – one with a full kit and two with tablas or something. And it all goes crazy, because the new guy is a half-beat out from the other two. He’s just driving a bus through the rhythm.’

‘It closes the gap,’ I murmured, still hearing the beat inside my head. ‘It sneaks around behind them and closes the gap. This is incredible. Don’t stop.’

‘I’ve only got two hands,’ Pomfret said. He looked at his watch. ‘And I’ve got to go, anyway. Look, whatever this stuff is, I wouldn’t waste too much time on it if I were you. It’s going to sound like shit whatever it’s played on. If it’s something Lou put you onto, she’s probably having a joke with you.’

I came down reluctantly from the one-step-removedfrom-reality zone I’d started to float away into. I stood up, gathering the sheet music with care. ‘It’s no joke,’ I assured him. ‘Thanks for your help. When’s your next gig?’

Pomfret blinked owlishly behind his oversized spectacles. ‘Tuesday,’ he said. ‘The Lock Tavern in Chalk Farm.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘I want to hear what you’re like when you’re Speedo Plank.’ I checked out a couple of places where Juliet might have been; talked to a few people who might have seen her; got nowhere, not particularly fast.

The next few hours were going to be agony. I prowled around central London like a banished ghost looking for somewhere new to haunt. I felt angry and restless, a sour taste in my mouth because even now – having been told where my enemy lived; having had a loaded weapon placed in my hands – I couldn’t act quite yet. Couldn’t move until I’d filled in at least some of the blank spaces in my mental map: the spaces that currently just read ‘Here be monsters’.

First and foremost, there was the question of what kind of odds I was facing. How many of the born-again killers would be at Mount Grace, and would I meet them in the flesh or in the spirit? It made a difference. John’s symphony for drums might do what he’d obviously designed it to do, but if the souls of the dead were flying around loose when I walked in through the door they could probably get to me before I got to them. If they were wearing other men’s bodies, they’d put up a different kind of resistance but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about being possessed and turned into a meat robot the way I now suspected John had been.

Then there was the even spikier question of how far this network of the evil dead extended. They owned Mount Grace – owned the Palance estate, effectively, through the trustees who employed Peter Covington and ruËovieviled in the name of poor, senile old Lionel. They had their own law firm, for Christ’s sake. There could be dozens or hundreds of them out in the field, wearing the bodies of rich and famous men and wielding their names. That would take a bigger nut than me to crack, if it could be cracked at all.

That was why I had to go through Ruthven, Todd and Clay before I went back out to Mount Grace. In some ways it was a lousy idea, but I couldn’t come up with a better one. I had to get hold of Maynard Todd’s files: I had to know how big this was and how deep it went, or all I’d achieve by charging into Mount Grace would be to poke the nest and make sure the wasps came out good and angry.

So I had to go to Todd’s office, and I couldn’t make my move there until after they closed for the night.