by Mike Carey
Dead Men's s Boots
( Felix Castor - 3 )
Mike Carey
You might think that helping a friend's widow to stop a lawyer from stealing her husband's corpse would be the strangest thing on your To Do list. But life is rarely that simple for Felix Castor.
A brutal murder in King's Cross bears all the hallmarks of a long-dead American serial killer, and it takes more good sense than Castor possesses not to get involved. He's also fighting a legal battle over the body — if not the soul — of his possessed friend, Rafi, and can't shake the feeling that his three problems might be related.
With the help of the succubus Juliet and paranoid zombie data-fence Nicky Heath, Castor just might have a chance of fitting the pieces together before someone drops him down a lift shaft or rips his throat out.
Or not. . .
Dead Men's Boots
(The third book in the Felix Castor series)
A novel by Mike Carey
To my brother, Dave, with much love. Are you right there, our kid?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Jock for my first lesson in musical notation for drums. If I got it wrong, it’s not his fault. Thanks to Ade and Joel for raising my awareness of the weirder and more arcane bits of London, a process which is ongoing. Thanks to Gabriella Nemeth and Nick Austin for proofing and copy-editing this sprawling monster, and to Meg, Darren and George for their unfailing support.
1
I don’t do funerals all that often, and when I do I prefer to be either falling-down drunk or dosed up on some herbal fuzz-bomb like salvinorin to the point where I start to lose feeling from the feet on up, like a kind of rising damp of the central nervous system. Today I was as sober as a judge, and that was only the start of it. The cemetery was freezing cold – cold enough to chill me even through the Russian army greatcoat I was wearing (I never fought, but poor bloody infantry is a state of mind). The sun was still locked up for winter, a gusty east wind was stropping itself sharp on my face, and guilt was working its slow way through my mind like a weighted cheese-wire through a block of ice.
Ashes to ashes, the priest said, or at least that was what it boiled down to. His hair and his skin were ash-pale in the February cold. The pall-bearers stepped forward just as the wind sprang up again, and the shroud on top of the coffin bellied like a sail. It was a short voyage, though: Two steps brought them alongside the neat, rectangular hole in the ground, where they bent as one and laid the coffin down on a pair of canvas straps held in place by four burly sextons. Then the sextons stepped in from either side, in synchrony, and the coffin slid silently down into the ground.
Rest in peace, John Gittings. The mortal part of you, anyway: for the rest, it was going to be a case of wait and see. Maybe that was why John’s widow Carla looked so strained and tense as she stood directly opposite me in her funereal finery. Her outfit incorporated a brooch made from a sweep of midnight-dark feathers, and staring at it made me momentarily imagine that I was looking down from a great height, the black of her dress becoming the black of an asphalted highway, the remains of a dead bird lying there like road kill.
The priest started up again, the wind stealing his voice away and distributing it piecemeal among us so that everyone got just a beggar’s share of the wisdom and consolation. Sunk in my own thoughts, which were fixed on mortality and resurrection to the exclusion of redemption, I looked around at the other mourners. It was a who’s who of the London exorcist community. Reggie Tang, Therese O’Driscoll and Greg Lockyear were there, representing the Thames Collective; Bourbon Bryant and his hatchet-faced new wife, Cath; Larry Tallowhill and Louise Beddows, Larry looking like a walking corpse himself with the white of his cheekbones showing through his skin like a flame through a paper lantern; Bill Schofield, known for reasons both complicated and obscene as Jonah; Ade Underwood, Sita Lovejoy, Michelle Mooney, all up from the beautiful South (Elephant and Castle, or thereabouts) and among the also-rans a very striking, very young woman with shoulder length white-blonde hair, who kept staring at me all the way through the service. There was something both familiar and unsettling about her face, but I couldn’t place it. That uncertainty did nothing to improve my mood, and nor did the absence of the one London exorcist I’d been hoping to see at this shindig: but then, Juliet Salazar never did hold with cheap sentiment: in fact she probably didn’t have any to sell even at the market price.
Meanwhile, seeing as how this was a cemetery, the dead had turned up in considerable force. They clustered around us at a safe distance, sensing the power gathered here and what it could do to them, but so starved of sensation that they couldn’t keep away. It was hard not to look at the sad multitude, even though looking at ghosts often makes them come in closer, as though your attention is a gradient they slide down towards you. There were dozens, if not hundreds, packed so closely together that they overlapped, thrusting their heads through each other’s limbs and torsos to get a better look at us, and maybe at the new kid on the block. The ghosts of the most recent vintage still carried the marks of their deaths on them in wasted flesh, oddly angled limbs and in one case a gaping chest-hole that was almost certainly a bullet wound. The tenants of longer standing had either learned or forgotten enough to look more like themselves as they’d been in life; or else had started to fade to the point where some of the more gruesome details had been lost or smudged over.
The priest seemed oblivious to his larger audience, which was probably a good thing: he looked old enough and frail enough that he might not weather the shock. But people in my profession have the sight whether they like it or not, and it’s not something you can turn on and off. At one point during the funeral oration Bourbon Bryant reached into his pocket and half-drew from it the book of matches he always carried there – the particular tool he uses to get the whip hand on the invisible kingdoms, just as a tin whistle (Clarke’s Sweetone, key of D) is mine. I put a hand on his arm, shook my head.
‘Not the time,’ I said tersely, speaking out of the corner of my mouth.
‘I’ll just torch one or two, Fix,’ he muttered back. ‘The rest will scatter like pigeons.’
‘I’ll break your jaw if you do,’ I said equably. Bourbon shot me a surprised, affronted look, read my own expression accurately and put the matches away.
Why hadn’t I got drunk before coming here? Judging by the faces around me, I sure as hell wouldn’t have been the only one. Exorcists often resort to booze to stifle their death-perception, just as a lot of them use speed when they want to put a particular edge on it. But I’m careful about how I deploy my crutches: today it would have felt like I was hiding from something specific that I was ashamed to face, rather than just dulling unpleasant distractions. Bad precedent.
I defocused as far as I could, staring through the massed ranks of the dead towards the cemetery’s high wrought-iron fence, which was topped with very un-Christian razor wire. No respite there, though: the Breath of Life protesters were pressed up against the bars like tourists at the zoo, shouting abuse at us that we were too far away to decipher. The Breathers, as we dismissively call them, are radical dead-rights extremists, and they view us ghostbreakers in much the same light in which staunch Catholics tend to see abortionists: you can always rely on them to break up the funeral of an exorcist if they get a tip-off that it’s going down. Most likely the priest or one of the sextons was a closet sympathiser and had sent the word down the line.
Things were starting to wind down now. Carla threw some earth into her husband’s grave, and a few other people got in line to do the same. Then the sextons took over for the serious shovelling. Now that we’d made that ritualistic nod towards ploughing the fields, we were free to scatter as soon as was decent. Carla
’s earlier plan for a post-funeral gathering at her house in Mill Hill had been cancelled at the last moment for reasons that weren’t entirely clear – and the service, which on the black-edged invitations had been set for three p.m., had been moved forward to one-thirty without explanation. Maybe that was why Juliet hadn’t showed.
But, just as I was congratulating myself on getting away easy, a shout from back towards the main gates made me turn my head in that direction. There was a man there, running towards us at a flat-out sprint which sat oddly with his immaculately cut Italian suit. By and large, people don’t wear Enzo Tovare to go jogging: all the muck sweat’s not good for that delicate stitching.
This johnny-come-lately looked pretty striking in other ways, too. His mid-brown hair was back-combed into an Errol Flynn-style college cut, and he had the Hollywood face to go with it – hard to get without plastic surgery or sterling silver genes. He looked to be about thirty, but there was something in his face that read as either premature experience or some kind of innate calm and seriousness. He was old for his age, but he wore it pretty well.
And he had a folded sheet of paper in his hand which he was holding up like Neville Chamberlain for our appreciation. That plus the sharp suit made it less likely that he was what I’d taken him to be at first: one of the Breath of Life guys trying to disrupt proceedings with a paint bomb or a noise-maker.
He slowed down as he got in among us and I noticed as he passed me that he wasn’t breathing hard, despite the run. I wondered if he worked out in Italian linen, too.
‘Mrs Gittings,’ he said, offering the paper to Carla. ‘This is a warrant executed this morning by Judge Tilney at Hendon magistrates’ court. Will you please read it?’
Carla smacked the paper out of the man’s hand so that he had to flail briefly to catch it again before it fell into the grave.
‘Go away, Mister Todd,’ she said coldly. ‘You’ve got no business being here. No business at all.’
‘I have to disagree,’ Italian-suit-guy said, politely enough, unfolding the paper and showing it to Carla. ‘You know what my business is, Mrs Gittings, and you know why I couldn’t just allow this to happen. What you’re doing here is illegal. This warrant forbids you from burying the mortal remains of the late Jonathan Gittings, and it requires you to appear at—’
He ran out of steam very abruptly. He was looking into the grave, and he clearly registered the fact that it was already occupied and half-full of earth. There was maybe a second when he seemed false-footed: all dressed up, writ in hand, and nowhere to go. Then he refolded his warrant and tucked it away in his breast pocket with a decisive motion, his expression sombre.
‘Obviously I’m already too late,’ he said. ‘I was under the impression that this service was scheduled to start at three o’clock. I’m sure that was what I was told when I called the funeral parlour this morning. Perhaps there was a last-minute cancellation?’ Carla flushed red, opened her mouth to speak, but Todd raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’m not going to try to interrupt a funeral that’s already in progress – and I apologise for disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. If I’d been in time to stop the burial, it was my legal duty to do so. Now . . . I’ll retire and consider the other avenues that are available to me. We’ll talk again, Mrs Gittings. And you can expect an exhumation order in the fullness of time.’
Carla gave a short cry of pain, as if the words had physically wounded her. Then Reggie Tang – an unlikely Galahad – stepped in between her and the lawyer, fixing him with a look full of violent promise.
‘Can I see your invitation, mate?’ he demanded. At the same time I saw Reggie’s deceptively scrawny-looking friend Greg Lockyear moving in behind Todd, looking to Reggie for his cue. I couldn’t believe that they were planning to lay some hurt on a lawyer in front of fifty witnesses, but the grim set of Reggie’s face was impossible to misread. Like most of us he knew John from way back, and like most of us he’d teamed up with him a fair few times when there was nothing better on offer. That tended to be how it worked, and I guessed that maybe, like me, he was feeling some belated pangs of guilt that he’d only ever seen John as a last resort. So maybe beating up a man in a sharp suit seemed like an easy way to burn off some of the bad karma.
Stepping forward as much to my own surprise as anyone else’s, I put a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. He turned his glare on me, surprised and indignant to be interrupted when he was still warming up.
‘Behave yourself, Reggie,’ I said. ‘You’re doing no one a favour by starting a fight here, least of all Carla.’
We held each other’s stares for a moment longer, and I was half-convinced he was going to take a swing at me. I took a step to the left to keep Greg Lockyear in view, because that way at least I wouldn’t be fighting on two fronts. But the moment passed, and Reggie turned away with a disgusted shrug.
‘Frigging parasites,’ he said. ‘Have it your way, Fix. But if he doesn’t get the fuck out of here I’m gonna put something through his face.’
I gave Todd a look that asked him what he was waiting for. ‘Mrs Gittings will be in touch,’ I said.
‘I’m sure,’ he agreed. ‘But I really need to proceed with—’
‘You need to pick your time. She’ll be in touch. Leave it until then, eh?’
Todd looked at the grim faces ringing him, and probably did some calculations. He glanced around for Carla, but she’d stepped back into the supportive crowd and was being comforted by Cath and Therese. ‘I’m prepared to wait a day or so,’ he said, ‘out of respect. A day or so – no longer.’
‘Good plan,’ I agreed.
With a wry nod to me, Todd turned on his heel. He took the path back to the gate a lot more slowly this time and stayed in sight for the better part of a minute, further dampening the already tense and sombre mood.
We broke up by inches and ounces, swapping halfhearted conversation at the turning circle by the car park because nobody wanted to seem to be in an indecent hurry to escape. I said hello to Louise, who I hadn’t seen in a year or more, and we played the ‘ain’t it awful’ game, trading stories about the Breathers.
‘They’re running ambushes now,’ Louise said in her lugubrious Tyneside drawl, igniting a cigarette with a gold lighter shaped like a tiny revolver. ‘Picking us off. Can you believe it? Stu Langley got a call in the early hours of the morning. Some woman saying she’d just moved into a new house and there was a ghost in the bloody downstairs lavvy. He told her he’d come the next morning, but she started crying and pleading. Laying it on thicker and thicker, she was, and Stu’s too polite to hang up on her. So in the end he got dressed and went out there. I’d have told her to hold it in or piss out of the window.
‘Anyway, he gets to this place, out in Gypsy Hill somewhere, and look at that. There’s a house with a FOR SALE sign up, exactly where she said it would be, and the front door’s open. So he went on in, like a bloody idiot. Didn’t stop to ask himself why there were no lights on, or why the sign still said FOR SALE if this whingeing old biddy had already moved in.
‘There were four of them, with baseball bats. They laid into him so hard they put him in a coma. He lasted for a week and then they turned the machine off. I’m telling you, Fix, they won’t be happy until they’ve killed us all.’
‘Won’t do them much good if they do,’ I observed, shaking my head as Louise offered me a drag on the cigarette. ‘Exorcism is in the human genome now. Probably always was, only it didn’t show itself until there was something there to use it on. Killing us doesn’t make the problem go away.’
She blew smoke out of her nose, hard. ‘No, but beating the shit out of a few of us gives the rest of us something to think about.’
Another knot of mourners walked on past us, heading for their cars. One of them was the acid-blonde girl, walking alongside two guys I didn’t know, and she gave me another killing look as she passed.
‘Any idea who that is?’ I asked Louise, rolling my eyes to indicate who I meant with
out being too obvious about it.
‘Which one?’
‘The girl.’
Louise expelled breath in a forced sigh and made a weary face.
‘Dana McClennan.’
‘McClennan?’ Something inside me lurched and settled at an odd angle. ‘Any relation to the late, great Gabriel McClennan?’
‘Daughter,’ said Louise. ‘And she’s following on in the family tradition, Fix. Bigger arsehole than he was, if anything. When she found out Larry was HIV positive, she backed off at a hundred miles an hour. You’d think he’d tried to give her a Frenchie or something. Or maybe she thinks you can catch it by talking about it, like my mum.’
I didn’t answer. The mention of Gabe McClennan’s name had triggered a whole lot of very unpleasant memories, most of them dating from the night when I’d killed him. Okay, it was kind of by proxy: actually I just made it really easy for someone else to kill him. It wasn’t like he left me much choice, either, since he was out for my blood; and the wolf I threw him to was one he’d brought to the party himself, so you could say what goes around comes around. Lots of great arguments to mix and match. None of them made me feel any better about it, though: and there was no way I’d ever be able to explain it to the wife and kid he left behind.
‘So what’s she doing here?’ I asked.
‘She came with Bourbon. I think he put the word out at the Oriflamme that John was going into the ground today – said he’d lay on cars for any exorcists who wanted to come along.’
‘She’s a ghostbreaker?’
Louise shrugged. ‘That’s what she’s calling herself, yes. Following in father’s footsteps. I don’t know if she’s any good or not.’
I took it on the chin, but it wasn’t great news. If Gabe’s daughter was in the same line of business as me now, and if she was operating in London, then we were going to keep running across each other’s trails whether we liked it or not. Not a happy prospect. I watched Gabe’s daughter down to the gates: saw her stop, her two escorts walking on without her, and exchange words with the Breathers on picket duty. Someone ought to have a word with her about that: it’s not a great idea to encourage the lunatic fringe.