by Mike Carey
‘How’s the music going?’ I asked, in a ham-fisted effort to raise the mood. Louise played bass in a band that had had many more names than gigs. I had a vague feeling that their current nom de sound-stage was something vaguely punk, like All-Star Wank, but it would be something different tomorrow.
‘It’s good,’ Louise said. ‘It’s going good. We’ve got a new manager. He reckons he can get us in at the Spitz.’
Larry Tallowhill came up alongside Louise at this point and slid an arm around her waist. ‘Felix Castor,’ he said, with mock sternness. ‘Leave my fucking woman alone.’
‘Can I help it if I’m irresistible?’ I asked. ‘How are the new drugs working?’
Larry shrugged expansively. ‘They’re great,’ he said. ‘I’ll live until something else kills me. Can’t ask for more than that.’
Larry was always amazingly upbeat about his condition, which was the result of the sort of arbitrary bad luck that would fill most people with rage or despair to the slopping-over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth point. He’d contracted HIV from a bite he got when he was trying to subdue a loup-garou – you might call it a werewolf, except that the animal component here was something leaner and longer-limbed and altogether stranger than that word suggests. It wasn’t even a paying job: he just saw this monster chasing a bunch of kids across a Sainsbury’s car park, and stepped in without even thinking about it. The thing was looking to feed, but it turned its attention to Larry as soon as it realised he was a threat, and like I said it was sleek and fast and very, very mean. Larry took the damage, finished the job with one arm hanging off in strips, then walked a mile and a half to the hospital to get himself patched up. They did a great job: stabilised him, took the severed finger he’d brought with him and sewed it back on, stopped him from bleeding to death or getting tetanus, and eventually restored ninety-five per cent of nervous function. About ten or eleven months later he got the bad news.
For an exorcist, it all falls under the heading of occupational hazard: there aren’t very many of us who get to die of old age.
I changed the subject, which sooner or later was going to bring us around to the even more painful issue of how John Gittings had died – locked in the bathroom with the business end of a shotgun in his mouth. I’m not squeamish, but I’d been shying away from that particular image all afternoon.
‘Business good?’ I asked, falling back once more on the old conversational staples.
‘It’s great,’ Larry said. ‘Best it’s ever been.’
‘Three bloody jobs all at once yesterday,’ Louise confirmed. ‘He’s fast.’ She nodded at Larry. ‘You know how fast he is, but even he can’t do three in a day. They get in the way of each other. The second’s harder than the first, and the third’s impossible. So I did the middle one, and of course that was the one that turned out to be an absolute bastard. Old woman – very tough. Fought back, and I lost my lunch all over the client’s carpet.’
‘Your breakfast,’ Larry corrected. ‘It was only eleven o’clock.’
‘My brunch. And this bloke – company director or something, lives in Regent Quarter – he says “I hope you’re going to clean that up before you go.” And I would have done, too, but not after he said that. I hit him with the standard terms and conditions and walked out. Now he’s saying he won’t pay, but he sodding will. One way or another he will.’
As changes of subject go, it hadn’t got us very far away from death. But that’s exorcists’ shop talk for you.
After a few more pleasantries Lou and Larry strolled away arm in arm, and I walked back over to the grave to say my goodbyes. Carla was now standing in deep conversation with the priest. Maybe a little too deep for comfort: at any rate, she took the opportunity as I walked up to extricate herself, thank him and disengage.
‘I’m heading out,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself, Carla. I’ll be in touch, okay?’ But she was holding something out to me, and the something turned out to be her car keys.
‘Fix,’ she said apologetically, ‘could you drive me home? I really don’t feel up to it. And there’s something I want to ask you about.’
I hesitated. They say misery loves company but I’m the kind of misery who usually doesn’t. On the other hand, I’d missed Bourbon’s charabanc and I needed a lift back into town. Maybe a half-second too late to look generous, I nodded and took the keys. ‘Thanks again, father,’ Carla called over her shoulder. I glanced back. The priest was watching us as we walked away, the expression on his face slightly troubled.
‘He asked me if I had any doubts,’ Carla said, catching the movement as I looked around. ‘Any bits of doctrine I wanted to talk over with him. Then, before I could get a word in, he was pumping me for clues.’
‘Men of the cloth are the worst,’ I agreed. ‘They don’t approve, but they have to look. It’s the same principle as the News of the World.’ That was slightly unfair, but it’s something you come across a lot. People assume that we’re sitting on a big secret: we have to be, because how could we do what we do without knowing how it’s done? But it’s not like that at all. Would you ask Steve Davis for an explanation of Brownian motion, or Torvill and Dean how ice crystals form? We’ve got a skill set, not the big book of answers.
Carla’s car was the only one left in the car park: a big, roomy old Vectra GLS in a dark grey that showed the splatter-stains of old birdshit off to good effect. I let Carla in – no central locking – and walked around to the driver side, taking an appraising look at her in the process. She was calmer now that it was all over, but she looked a little tired and a little old. That wasn’t surprising: having someone you love commit suicide has to be one of the nastiest low blows life can throw at you. In other respects, she was still very much the woman I’d known back in the early 1990s, before she’d ever met John – when she was a brassy, loud blonde I’d met at a poker session and almost gone to bed with, except that my fear of intimacy and her preference for older men had kicked in at about the same time and turned a promising fumble into an awkward conversation about micro-limit hold ’em. There’s a line in a Yeats poem somewhere where he asks whether your imagination lingers longest on a woman you won or a woman you lost: while you’re puzzling over that one, you can maybe give him an estimate on how long a piece of string is. If things had worked out differently, Carla and me could have got a whole Mrs Robinson thing going, although even in those days I was less of a Benjamin Braddock, more of a Ratso Rizzo.
I started the car and pulled away, noticing that the priest followed us with his sad-eyed gaze as we drove by. I sympathised, up to a point: it couldn’t be an easy way to earn a living these days.
We eased our way out between the Breather pickets, collecting a fair share of abuse and ridicule along the way but no actual missiles or threats. Most of the people waving placards and chanting rhythmically were in their teens or early twenties. What did they know about death? They hadn’t even got that far with life yet.
The cemetery was all the way out in Waltham Abbey, and John and Carla lived – or rather Carla still lived and John didn’t any more – on Aldermans Hill just outside Southgate, in a flat over a dress shop. It was going to be a long haul, and the Vectra handled like a half-swamped raft. Joining the traffic, I remembered the half-bottle of Metaxa in my inside pocket, fished it out one-handed and passed it across to Carla. She took it without a word, unscrewed the top and downed a long swallow. It made her shudder: probably it made her eyes water, too, but there were plenty of other explanations available for why she rubbed the heel of her hand quickly across her face.
Looking in the rear-view mirror, I noticed that we’d picked up a tail. I swore under my breath. It was one of the vans that the Breathers had arrived in – a big high-sided delivery truck that someone must have borrowed from work, deep blue and with the words Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse script over the windscreen because a good idea is a good idea, even if the emergency services think of it first. I didn’t mention it to Carla: I
just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident that I could lose them long before we got back into London.
‘So what was all that shit with the lawyer?’ I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good corrective to grief. Grief paralyses you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.
Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie. But then she took a second pull on the brandy bottle and away she went.
‘John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister Hailey,’ she muttered. ‘Always. She was the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone I recognised.’
She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. ‘There’s a condition – EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. It got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried to make me promise once that I’d give him pills, if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where – you know, where there was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.
‘Anyway, just because it can run in families doesn’t mean it will. You don’t know, do you? There’s no point running halfway to meet trouble. But he’d have days when he couldn’t move, hardly, for brooding about it. I just tried to jolly him along when he was in one of those moods. Wait for him to pull out of it again, and then most times he’d say he was sorry he’d worried me and that’d be that.
‘But a couple of months before Christmas he went through a bad time. He had a job on – something that was going to pay really well, but it seemed to prey on his mind a lot.’
‘What sort of job?’ I asked, sounding a lot more casual than I felt. This was where my guilt was stemming from, in case you were wondering. I’d already heard a few hints about John’s last big earner, and I had good reason to feel uneasy about it.
‘He wouldn’t say. But he put a grand in my hand, some time back in November it was, and told me to bank it – and he said there’d be more later. Well, you know how it is, Fix. Most of the time, no offence, you just work for rent money, don’t you? Oh yeah, for young men it’s lovely. Two or three hundred quid for a couple of days’ work, you’re laughing. When you’re a bit older it gets to be different, and you never really have a chance to lay anything by. So I was over the moon for him, I really was. I said “What, is there a ghost in Buckingham Palace, or something? Can we say we’re by royal appointment, now?” And he laughed and said something about East End royalty, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant.
‘I think the truth was, whatever this job was all about he didn’t know if he could handle it. He called those two on the Collective, Reggie, and that friend of his who never washes. But they wouldn’t work with him any more. They said he was too sloppy, and they wouldn’t trust him if things went bad on a job.’
She hesitated, as if she thought I might want to jump in at this point and defend John’s reputation, but I made no comment – because if Reggie had said that, Reggie was right. John had never been the most focused of men, and he’d got worse as he’d got older. Having him at your back was far from reassuring: generally it just gave you one more thing to worry about.
But I didn’t feel comfortable thinking those thoughts, because John hadn’t only called Reggie. He’d called me, too: three times in the space of a week. The messages were still there on my answerphone, because I never bother to wipe the tape. Three times I’d sat there and listened to him telling me that he might have some work to put my way, and three times I hadn’t even picked up because life’s too short and you tend to avoid things that might make it shorter still.
Then I got a call from Bourbon, the de facto godfather of London’s ghostbusters, with the news that John had kissed a loaded shotgun.
‘Did he say who he was working for?’ I asked, crashing the gears as we turned onto the M25 slip road. The blue van was still there in back of us, but I wasn’t worried: I hadn’t even begun to fight.
Carla shook her head. ‘I asked him. He didn’t want to talk about it. He just said it was big, and that when it was done he’d be in the history books. “One for the books,” he kept on saying. Something nobody’s ever done before.
‘And it changed him. He started to get really fretful, and really paranoid about forgetting things. He’d make himself little notes – lists of names, lists of places – and he’d hide them all around the house. I’d open the tea caddy and there’d be a bit of paper all folded up inside the lid. Just names. Then the next day he’d go around and collect them all up again. And burn them. And for the first time ever, I started to think he might have been right all along. You know, about the Alzheimer’s. I thought maybe the stress had brought it on or something.’
She rubbed her eyes again. ‘It was a terrible time, Fix. I didn’t know who to talk to about it. When Hailey was alive I’d have called her over and we’d have had it out with him, all together. But I couldn’t get near him. He started to fly off the handle whenever I even hinted that he was acting strangely. It got so I had to pretend everything was all right even when he was sneaking around like a spy in a film, picking up secret messages that he’d left for himself.
‘Then one night he got into bed and started to talk about death. Said he thought his time would be coming soon, and he’d changed his mind about what kind of send-off he wanted. “Forget about Waltham Abbey, Carla. You’ve got to cremate me.” Well, I didn’t know what to say. What about Hailey? What about the plot he’d already paid for, right next to her? It was the disease talking. It wasn’t him. So I did just what I did that time when he tried to make me promise to poison him. I kept shtum. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to make a promise that I didn’t mean to keep.
‘And then, after he . . .’ Carla saw the word looming, swerved away from stved awa it, ‘after he did it . . . I got this letter, from a solicitor. Mr Maynard Todd, from some company with three names and one of the names is him. He said John had come to him before he died and written a new will. Still left all his money to me, but he wanted to make sure he’d be burned instead of buried. Even picked out some place over in the East End – Grace-something. He’d put it all down in black and white. And he’d written a bit at the end about how he’d had to go to a stranger because he couldn’t trust his own wife to do right by him.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ Carla said, with bitter satisfaction. ‘I ignored it. I thought fuck it, let the bastard sue me. I’ll do what my John wanted when he was still in his right mind. So I went ahead with the funeral, even though this Maynard Todd said he was going to stop me, and I moved the time from three o’clock back to half past one so as he’d miss it and get there too late. Which he did.’ Her voice had been getting thicker, and now she burst into shuddering sobs. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more, Fix. I don’t care what they do to John’s body. I just want him to be at peace. Oh God, let him find some peace!’
There wasn’t anything I could say to that, so I didn’t try. I just concentrated on making life hideous for the driver of the blue van. The League against Cruel Sports wouldn’t approve, but if you know you’re being tailed there are all sorts of subtle torments and indignities you can inflict on the guy who’s chasing you. By the time we’d reached the Stag Hill turn-off I’d shaken him loose and relieved some of my own tensions in the process.
I drove on in silence, turning off the motorway and coaxing the uncooperative car through the congested streets of Cockfosters and Southgate. Meanwhile Carla went through three handkerchiefs and most of what was left in the bottle.
When I pulled up at Aldermans Hill she was more than half drunk. I parked
in front of the costume shop, which was closed for Sunday, leaving the car on a double yellow line because it seemed more important right then to get her back onto her home turf and more or less settled.
The flat was on the first floor, up an external flight of steps with a dog-leg. On the door frame there were a good half-dozen wards against the dead, ranging from a sprig of silver birch bound with white thread to a crudely drawn magic circle with the word ekpiptein written across it in Greek script. That translates as ‘Bugger off until you’re wanted, you bodiless bastards’: Greek is a very concise language.
Carla fumbled with her keys, and I noticed that her hands were trembling. I was quite keen to get out of there now that I’d done my civic duty: I’m fuck-all use as a shoulder to cry on.
‘I’m sure he is,’ I said clumsily – and belatedly. ‘At peace, I mean. John was a good man, Carla. He didn’t have any enemies in this world. You know I don’t believe in Heaven, but if anyone deserved—’
I stopped because she was looking at me with the sort of expression you give to dangerous madmen.
‘No,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s not in Heaven, Fix, or anywhere else. He’s here. He’s still here.’
She turned the key and shoved the door open, but she made no move to go in. I stepped past her into the small hallway. I was aware of a slightly musty, unused smell as though nobody had been there in a few days.
Three steps took me on into the living room, and I stopped dead, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking in a scene of devastation and ruin. Most of the furniture was overturned. The television lay in the corner like a poleaxed drunk, staring blindly up at the ceiling: three deep dents scarred the screen, a fish-scale pattern of fracture marks spreading out from each one. Broken glass crunched under my feet.