Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

In the meantime, all I could do was wait – wondering what Juliet was up to, and whether Myriam Kale had added any more notches to her suspender belt.

I did have one more stop on my itinerary, though, and it was welcome in one respect only: because it had nothing at all to do with the mess I’d got myself into. It belonged to a different mess, older and if anything more intractable.

I could have taken a taxi to the Charles Stanger clinic, but my pockets were almost empty and my bank balance was in the last stages of its historic decline. I had to husband my resources. So I took the Tube to East Finchley and walked.

There was good news even before I walked in through the gates: the sound of rhythmic chanting reached me on Coppetts Road as I went along the outer fence. I couldn’t make out any words, but chants are chants: on marches and sit-ins and occupations they all carry the same message, which is a variation on ‘You won’t move us/stop us/intimidate us/make us cut our hair and wear suits’. So the blockade was still in place, and morale was high. That meant, at the very least, that Jenna-Jane hadn’t managed to get her hands on Rafi so far.

The Breath of Lifers were clearly there for the duration: they’d put up tents and benders, and they were ambling between them like early arrivals at a rock concert. Some of them were cooking on portable stoves or the little disposable barbecue sets they sell in Sainsbury’s.

But when I finally located Pen in among the happy campers, she looked so tired and so low that I was dismayed. She seemed to be equally shocked when she got her first look at me, but she didn’t ask how my face came to look like a pound of raw chuck steak. The question would have carried too many messages she didn’t want to send.

‘So how’s it all going?’ I asked, with forced lightness, as we sat together on the crest of a tiny hill away from the main scrum of demonstrators.

Pen’s shoulders twitched in the merest suggestion of a shrug. ‘We’ve managed to hold them off so far,’ she said. ‘They almost got him last night, because we weren’t covering the kitchen entrance. Where they take food deliveries. It’s got its own car park and it’s way over on the other side of the building and we just weren’t thinking.’

‘But you’ve got it covered now?’

‘Oh yeah. We were lucky that the driver was an idiot: he didn’t think to switch off his headlights, so someone saw the van coming and we got there in time to head them off.’

She tugged listlessly at the grass between her feet. ‘But it’s only a matter of time now. They’ve been trying to get a court order telling us to cease and desist. That magistrate up in Barnet –&nbËnbs217sp;Runcie – he’s bumped it up the docket somehow and they’re going to get a verdict tomorrow morning. Mulbridge must have slipped him a bribe or something.’

‘Not J-J’s style,’ I observed. ‘She’d much rather put a knife to your windpipe than a tenner in your back pocket. It’s all a matter of nuance.’

Pen looked at me with glum resentment. ‘I’m not appreciating the nuances right now, Fix. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s all I can do to keep up with the logistics. Can you spell me? I haven’t slept since the last time I saw you.’

‘Sleep now,’ I suggested. ‘They’re not going to try anything in broad daylight – especially not if they’re expecting the courts to give them a thumbs-up to throw you out tomorrow.’

She blinked in slow motion, her shadow-rimmed eyes not wanting to open again once she’d let them close.

‘But you’ll stay?’ she pressed, the words forced out of her. ‘I can’t sleep unless I know someone’s watching. Someone who cares about him.’

It wasn’t what I wanted to do: I was thinking of the fight I had ahead of me; of Myriam Kale riding Doug Hunter back out into the world when I still hadn’t made a single move against the real enemy – when I didn’t even know who or how many they were, and wouldn’t begin to find out until I’d raided Maynard Todd’s office and turned over his files. Time wasn’t on my side. It was hard to just sit here and feel the odds getting longer.

But I could see that Pen’s natural resilience had reached its limits: she looked brittle, strained, liable to break in pieces at any moment.

‘I’ll stay,’ I said. ‘Put your head down. I’ll wake you in an hour.’

As things turned out, I gave her four and some odd minutes. The shadow of the Stanger clinic reached out towards us and then spilled over us while she slept. The Breathers ebbed and flowed, celebrating the oneness of all life, on both sides of the grave, with chants and gestures of defiance that nobody except themselves was listening to.

Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!

I gave them one out of three.