Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  ‘Then the basic should suit you just fine.’

  I helped her take the bedding through, then went back down the steps to collect the rest of the kit I’d brought with me. It was already dark – but then, the slate-grey mountains of cumulonimbus had made it dark for most of the day. The wind had blown most of that mass away to the west now, though, and a sliver of moon as thin as a sickle blade was cutting what was left into grubby-looking tatters. Tomorrow was going to be fine, and as cold as charity.

  I lingered out there, because there was something about the east wind heavy with unborn frost that felt clean and even refreshing. I called Juliet and got Susan Book. I asked her if she could pass a message on: I just needed to talk to Juliet about some work she’d done for the Met. She said she’d tell Juliet as soon as she came in.

  ‘We never seem to see you any more, Fix,’ she chided me. ‘Where are you working these days? In some terrible wilderness on the edge of civilisation?’

  ‘Southgate,’ I said. ‘I think the nearest civilisation is Wood Green Shopping City.’

  ‘Good grief, you’re only twenty minutes’ drive from here! You’ve got to come over for dinner. Jules would love to see you.’

  ‘Well, I will.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Cornered. ‘Okay, tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Actually, could you make it Thursday? I’ve got the prayer circle tomorrow night.’

  ‘Thursday it is, then. Thanks, Sue. See you then.’

  I hung up, pondering on the mysteries of the human spirit. It was inexplicable on the face of it how someone who lived in sin with a succubus – a consenting adult demon of the same sex – could still be so active in the Church and see no inherent contradictions in her lifestyle. Susan Book was one of a kind. I was getting to like her, even if she had stolen my woman.

  I took my time stowing the phone away, collecting my things and climbing the stairs again.

  When I got back inside, I felt the difference even before I saw Carla frozen on the floor in a defensive crouch. Staining the carpet between her and the coffin was an elongated teardrop of spilled beer, with the starburst remains of the broken bottle at its narrower end. Clearly, during the few minutes I’d been outside, John had woken up – in a pretty sour mood.

  Carla was crying. I went over to her, knelt and put a hand around her shoulders. She melted into me, powerful sobs making her shudder and shake. ‘I just –’ she managed to get out ‘ – said goodnight – to him!’

  I’m not good in this kind of situation. I’m familiar with the noises that have to be made, but people who know me, and know what I do for a living, find it as hard to take consolation from me as they would from a professional hangman. I tried anyway. ‘Carla,’ I said, ‘the reason he’s so scared and so angry now is because fear and anger are pretty much all he is. His body’s gone – it’s in the casket there. He’s jumped the rails. Right now he’s just a collection of emotions so strong there isn’t even much room left for memories. That’s why so many ghosts seem to spend their time replaying their own deaths: they’re caught in a loop, going through the same events again and again because there’s so much fear and pain tied up in them.

  ‘John’s not trying to hurt you. You said yourself that none of the things he’s thrown have ever touched you. He’s lashing out because he doesn’t understand what’s happened to him and he doesn’t know how to get free of it. But if he threw that bottle when you touched the side of the coffin –’ her head buried in my chest, she tried to nod, and I felt rather than saw the movement ‘– then that’s a good sign. It means he recognises the body as his own, and wants to protect it. It means he remembers enough of his past to make that identification. On some level, he knows who he was. Who he still is. So you did the right thing, agreeing to this. I think you’ve helped him.’

  Carla still had to cry it out, but the point seemed to sink in and she slowly started to calm. After a minute or so, I let go of her and took my tin whistle out of my pocket.

  ‘I’m going to play him some more music,’ I said.

  That alarmed her all over again. She surfaced from the now slightly soggy depths of my lapels with a look of horror on her face. ‘Fix, if you send him away now—’

  ‘I didn’t send him away the first time,’ I said. ‘I just made him . . . drowsy. These are tunes I use on Rafi, so I’ve had plenty of time to get them down right. This time I won’t even send John to sleep: I just want to calm him a bit so you don’t have to go to bed in full body armour.’

  I waited for her to respond. Finally she gave me the merest hint of a nod, as though she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  I played a tune that was vaguely based on Neko Case’s ‘Lady Pilot’, I think purely because of the line in that song about not being afraid to die. Often in these cases it doesn’t seem to matter all that much what the song is when it starts out: once I let it out into the open air it grows and changes, as though the vibrations of the music are some sort of insubstantial extension of my own nervous system. It becomes something that I use to touch the world – the invisible world that seems to be idling next to our own right now at some inter-dimensional red light – and to operate on the things I see and feel there.

  Opening my mind a little more this time, I met head-on the spirit that was waiting in the dark, and was struck by the sheer intensity of its rage: it was like scalding water, filling the room unseen and unfelt until now. The strength of it – the strength of the will behind it – took me by surprise. None of the interactions I’d ever had with John had made me suspect that he could be capable of that kind of ferocity. Matching it high for high, low for low, I let the music fall into it like a calving iceberg and slowly, gradually, take away its power to hurt.

  I lose track of time when I’m doing this stuff. Or maybe it’s fairer to say that time becomes one of the dimensions of the music, and I can only perceive it as something that’s moving in my chest and under my fingers, flowing out into the pattern that I’m making. In any case, when I finally surfaced I found that Carla was asleep next to me.

  The geist wasn’t asleep but it was quiescent: it wouldn’t be throwing any more beer bottles around for a while. I felt queasy all over again as I thought about the contrast between the vaguely well-meaning, more or less ineffectual man I’d known for the past fifteen years and this baleful ball of hate and wrath. Death changes you – in some cases, brings out the worst in you – but that didn’t make it any easier to take right then. Particularly since I found myself wondering whether John Gittings might still be alive if I’d taken his calls.

  My internal logic-checker kicked in on my side at that point. You can’t save someone from suicide if they’re serious about making the effort. John had wanted and intended to die: that much had to be true. Even in New York City, where they’re meant to have those giant alligators in the sewers, people don’t casually take loaded shotguns into the toilet with them.

  And if it was murder dressed up as suicide . . . ? But that really sounded like Mister Paranoia dropping in for tea.

  On paper, in theory, in the cold light of day, I had nothing to reproach myself with. But this was the dark night of John Gittings’s soul, and I couldn’t let myself off the hook that easily.

  I picked up my stuff and went through into the bedroom, where I unrolled the sleeping bag on the stripped bed. There’s something cold and unlovely about a bare mattress: I tried not to look at it as I unpacked the rest of my gear from a ragged-arsed overnight bag that used to belong to Rafi.

  Then I slipped off my shoes, sat back on the bed with my feet up, and finally peeled the layers of duct tape away from the Sainsbury’s bag that John had squirreled away so carefully. The bag started to tear, and a few small items fell out before I’d finished unwrapping it: a small key on a knotted shoelace, and the torn back of a matchbook from some place called the Reflections Café Bar. That left one bulky rectangular object.

  From what Carla had already told me, I wasn’t expecting very
much. But the biggest item in the bag was an object of such spectacular banality that I felt a sense of bathos and let-down even as I pulled it clear of the plastic and stared at the cover. It was an A to Z of London: one of the larger ones, spiral-bound.

  I flexed it with my thumb and riffled through it. It had been marked up in black felt tip on almost every page – lines and circles sketched in, and in some cases scribbled out again afterwards, so that you mostly couldn’t see the features they were originally meant to be indicating. At least one of them was a church.

  And that was it. Not much to go on, at first glance: not much to indicate what John had meant when he said that this was one for the books. Unless geographical gazetteers were the books he had in mind.

  Further examination, though, showed that he’d used the A to Z as a notebook, too. The inside front and back covers and the blank spaces on the title and copyright pages were filled with densely written lists. They seemed to be lists of names, and the ones at the front of the book included a lot of people that I actually knew – my own name was there, along with Juliet’s, Carla’s, Bourbon Bryant’s, Reggie Tang’s. Some of them had been ticked off, others not: some had been ticked, the ticks crossed through, and then ticked again.

  Other names, set off in a different column, were new to me, or stirred faint echoes in my mind that I couldn’t turn into meanings right then. Silver. Cornell. Moulson. Lathwell. Richardson. Lambrianou. Hart.

  The list inside the back cover seemed to be of places rather than people: Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St Andrew’s Old, St Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield . . . they ran across five columns, written in a tiny, crabbed script; some of the names marked with symbols, some circled in differentcoloured inks, some crossed out and then written in again over the top. I remembered Carla’s description of John writing messages to himself and then tearing them up: it seemed as though he’d been doing more or less the same thing here.

  I flicked backwards and forwards between the various lists, my eye drawn automatically to the parts that were easiest to read, avoiding other stretches where the density of the crossing-out and rewriting made individual words hard to decipher. Eventually my sight started to swim and I gave it up.

  I turned my attention to the key, on its makeshift boot-lace keyring – and I looked at it with a certain degree of professional interest because breaking and entering has been a hobby of mine at various points in my life. It was small, hollow-barrelled, with the number 167 etched into the diamond-shaped bow-end. It was a Lycett, the very distinctive product of that Midlands locksmithing firm, though it didn’t bear the maker’s name. That was interesting: Lycett did a great many job lots in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly for factories and offices, but very few of them were in London. A man with a lot of time on his hands and a prurient curiosity could probably find the lock that this key fitted. But what would be the point if it turned out to yield only a few more scribbled, near-illegible palimpsests like the ones I’d just looked at?

  I put the three items back in the eviscerated bag one by one, thinking that there must be some easier way of solving the John Gittings conundrum. The matchbook cover, I noticed now, had a string of figures written on the back in red biro. A credit-card number? No, only eleven digits, where a credit card would have sixteen. The first three digits were 832, so it didn’t look like a phone number – but for the hell of it, even though it was well after midnight, I added a zero to the beginning and dialled it anyway. The shrill, sustained note that meant ‘no connection’ was all I got in response.

  I stared at the number for a while longer, wondering if I was missing something obvious, but I was finding it hard to focus through the fuzzy haze inside my head: long day, strong beer. It would keep until the morning.

  I put in one more phone call, to a friend of mine named Nicky Heath. His name was in John’s A to Z, too, but that wasn’t why I called: Nicky’s a ferret, skilled in the digital extraction of information. If anyone could make sense of John Gittings’s annotations, it was him. Also, being a dead man himself – of the zombie persuasion – he might empathise with John’s current situation.

  That done, I stripped to my boxers, pulled on a T-shirt by way of a pyjama top and crawled into the sleeping bag.

  I was expecting to fall asleep straight away, but the atmosphere of the place made it hard for me to let go of the day’s tensions. My playing had created a zone of silence in the room, where usually I’m surrounded by a low-level psychic buzz of unformed energies. It was like the disconcerting hush you get when you’re sitting in the kitchen and the fridge suddenly stops humming, filling your senses with an absence that’s somehow louder than the sound it replaces.

  I thought about Alastair Barnard’s miserable death, and Jan Hunter’s absolute conviction that her husband hadn’t been responsible for it. Where was the hammer? Why had it been worth taking away from the scene of the crime, seeing that the evidence against Doug Hunter was already so strong? Maybe because it didn’t fit with the rest of the evidence: maybe because it had the wrong fingerprints on it. In that case either it was the real killer who’d waltzed off with it, or else yet another someone had stepped in and swiped it after the body was found and before the police got there. A pretty narrow window.

  In either case, Coldwood was clearly way off-beam when he said that Hunter had taken it himself. Walking through the streets of London with blood on his clothes, Hunter had attracted enough attention for people to stop and watch him pass and then point out to the police where he’d gone. It was inconceivable that he’d been carrying a claw hammer all that time and nobody had noticed when and where he’d dropped it.

  I dozed off at last, into the kind of fitful sleep where you’re sort of aware that time is passing and it’s passing slowly.

  I had muddy, tedious dreams where I was walking down long streets that I didn’t know, looking for a train station because I had to go somewhere and time was running out. Night was coming on. If I missed the train I’d be stuck there, and in the dream that seemed like a very bad option. I turned corners at random, sure that I’d see the station in the distance, but each turning was either a blind alley or an avenue that stretched into the distance with no station in sight.

  Then I passed a man sitting at the side of the road – in the same attitude, I guess, as Doug Hunter when the cops found him and took him in. But this wasn’t Doug Hunter, a man I’d yet to meet: it was John Gittings.

  I sat down next to him. It would have felt rude to just walk on by.

  He gave me a look – more in sorrow than in anger, which came as something of a relief considering his propensity for violence on the spirit level. He was dressed in the shabby brown jacket and tan chinos he’d worn on the day of the Whipsnade Zoo debacle the year before, when he’d taken his eye off the game during a tag-team exorcism and I’d come within an eighth of an inch of having my head bitten off. It was the last time I’d seen him alive.

  He showed me his hands, which were bloody. My subconscious mind was definitely raiding Doug Hunter’s story for narrative guidelines here.

  ‘Not much left of me now, Fix,’ John said lugubriously. Psychologists tell us that you can’t really hear voices in dreams, but this sounded like the John I remembered: as much vaguely comical self-pity as Morrissey, but John played the drums when he was ghostbusting and no group he was in ever stayed together for very long, so in most respects you’d have to say he was more like Johnny Marr.

  ‘No, mate,’ I agreed. ‘You’ve seen better days, that’s for sure.’

  Since it was my dream, I checked my pockets for booze. Nothing there but a sprig of silver birch: okay, that was the ward that was stuck up on John’s door to keep the restless dead out. I felt almost ashamed: as dreams go, this was turning into something of a busman’s holiday.

  I offered John the silver-birch ward: it was looking a little ragged now, the white thread that bound it starting to unravel, but he didn’t seem to notice it in any case. He shook his head, staring sombrely at the gut
ter where a trickle of black water was now running along past us, detouring around the toes of his shoes. ‘Nobody wants to know, do they, Fix?’

  ‘Wants to know what, John?’ I asked.

  ‘How the bastards killed me.’

  I put the birch twig back in my pocket. ‘Umm – you killed yourself, John,’ I said, as tactfully as I could. ‘You didn’t take any chances about it, either. You stuck a shotgun in your mouth and pulled the trigger. It took Carla two days to get your brains off the walls.’

  John looked up at me, his expression slightly reproachful now. ‘I might not have had to,’ he said, ‘if you ever picked up your phone.’

  I’d been expecting that one: you didn’t need to be Freud to know why I was dreaming about John Gittings while I was sleeping in his bed with his dead body in the room next door. ‘Yeah, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Really, really sorry. On the other hand, you could have left a message that made some kind of sense. You never told me what was at stake, John. You never tried to meet me halfway.’

  He was rummaging in his pockets, patting his jacket, a distracted frown on his face. ‘I thought I could handle it,’ he admitted. ‘By the time I decided to bring someone else in on it, I was already in way over my head. I always was an arrogant sod, Fix. Almost as bad as you. I think I was supposed to give you something.’

  ‘The letter? I got it.’

  ‘No, not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.’

  ‘The whistle?’

  ‘Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.’

  ‘Yeah, well, thanks for the thought, John. I guess I’ll live without it. What’s inscription night, by the way? It sounds like something you’d get at the local bridge club.’

  John sighed and stood up, very slowly, with great reluctance. There was a faint splash as he disturbed the water in the gutter, the rippling after-effects lasting longer than I would have expected. I looked up into his pleading, hangdog face.