by Mike Carey
For Nicky, being dead is a lifestyle.
He’d been a hotshot data analyst when I first met him – selling the secret history of the future to greedy CEOs who were in awe of his ability to predict share prices based purely on the flow of information across digital exchanges. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, too: he pissed people off outrageously just for the hell of it, showing them up with pointless displays of expertise whenever he could. After a friend introduced us at a party I used him a couple of times to chase down information I had no legal right to access: I couldn’t pay him a tenth of what he was worth, but he got me the stuff anyway because it made an interesting change from what he did the rest of the time.
He died young, of a heart attack, which didn’t surprise anybody.
Then he came back, which kind of did.
There were already a lot of zombies around by this time, so it wasn’t the plain fact that Nicky clawed his way out of the grave that was unusual: it was how skilfully he rolled with the situation afterwards.
The dead still don’t have any legal rights, despite endless parliamentary debates and a few orphaned white papers. In theory, Nicky’s living brother and sister could have waltzed off with all his worldly goods and left him cooling in the gutter. But they didn’t, because he hid his money so successfully that – apart from a couple of grand in a current account – no lawyer was ever able to find a penny that was his. And while they were hunting, he was setting up a maze of blind trusts and offshore shelf companies that would give him full control over how the money was used without it ever legally, incontestably, belonging to him.
Then he brought his data-rat brain to bear on the question of survival. Zombies enjoy a whole lot of advantages over ghosts: having bodies, they can interact with the world in most of the same ways that the living can – touch and taste and smell and all the rest of it. But the downside is that the body they’re anchored to is basically a slab of rotting meat. They’ve set sail in a sinking ship, and for most of them it’s a short voyage: even though it’s probably raw will rather than nerve impulses that makes their limbs move, decay and decomposition gradually reduce the body to a state where it can’t hold itself together any more. The inhabiting spirit may still carry on clinging to the increasingly rancid carcass, or it may give up the unequal struggle and strike off on its own, but either way, at that point the ship is aground: you can’t make disarticulated legs move, or see through eyes that have closed up like dead flowers.
Nicky was very keen not to reach that stage, and he realised that the key to long-term survival was to learn as much as he could about his own internal workings. He picked up a stack of biology textbooks and read through the parts on human anatomy, supplementing what he learned by posting queries on medical message boards and talking to real doctors – mostly dead ones – at remorseless length.
He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance: when you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it just rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection. By contrast he began to take a whole pharmacopoeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up for himself from recipes he found online, and steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.
There was more to it than that, I knew. He hooked up with Imelda Probert, more generally known as the Ice-Maker – a faith healer who offered a bespoke deal to the living dead – and now visits her a couple of times a month for a mystical/religious tune-up. He learned meditation techniques, and claims to be able to visit different parts of his body on a cellular level, repairing damage with the cement of self-belief. And, like I said earlier, he stays out of the sun in case he spoils.
But today he was sitting out in the open on a bench on the Pall Mall side of the park, his arms spread across the back of the bench and his crossed legs sticking out in front of him, looking relaxed and expansive. Okay, there was still a heavy overcast and a chill wind, but even so it was shocking to see Nicky out in full daylight.
I sat down next to him, on the edge of the bench because he didn’t bother to move up and make room for me. His gaze flicked sideways to acknowledge me, then he went back to staring up through the leafless branches at the grey, swag-bellied clouds. He was wearing black jeans and a bright red T-shirt. It made his unnatural pallor look all the more unsettling by contrast, which I guess was the point. Given the time of the year, and the unkindness of the weather, it also flaunted the fact that he didn’t have a circulatory system.
I tilted my head upwards, following his gaze. There was nothing to see up there except the black lattice of the branches against the sky – the ribcage of a monster waiting to be reborn. ‘Isn’t Mother Nature wonderful?’ I remarked.
Nicky snorted dryly. He does everything dryly, of course: no body fluids. ‘Castor,’ he murmured, ‘the only mother around here is you. Don’t try to small-talk me, and don’t piss me off, because I’m not in the mood.’
‘Fine. I won’t. I’d hate to spoil your mood, Nicky.’
‘So you want something or not? I didn’t come out all this way to hear your usual bullshit.’
‘Well, I offered to come to you,’ I reminded him. ‘You saw me, raised, and I folded. And I’ve got to say, this is a whole new you.’
He looked at me again, for a second or two longer this time, and shrugged as he looked away again. ‘I’m having some work done on my place,’ he said simply.
That was intended to shut me up, and it worked. Nicky’s been keeping house, ever since he died, in that derelict cinema in Walthamstow: and it had been trashed not so long ago by a pack of crazed American Satanists who only knew about Nicky in the first place because of his association with me. He’d been able to claim a heap of money back on the insurance, and he’d told me he had some big ideas about what to do with it, but he’d refused to be pinned down on the specifics.
The whole experience seemed to have changed him subtly – or maybe not so subtly. He’d been turning into one of those life forms whose house is part of their bodies, like a snail or a tortoise: now, apparently, he’d entered a different phase of his afterlife cycle.
By way of changing the subject – and coming to the point – I handed him the key and the A to Z, which I’d been carrying around with me all day. He pocketed the key without a word – he didn’t need to ask to know that I wanted it matched up with a batch and if possible, a rough location. Then he switched his attention to the book. He turned it over in his hand as though he was checking it for bugs, then flipped it open at the first page and started to scan the list on the inside front cover.
‘It belonged to John Gittings,’ I said. ‘And you’re in the middle column. Any idea why?’
Nicky looked bored as he scanned the names.
‘John the Git was one of my regulars,’ he said.
‘You did data-raids for him?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Recently?’
‘No.’
‘But you did see him recently?’
‘What are you, Castor, my father confessor? Yeah, I saw him.’
‘In the line of work?’
‘Yes. And before you ask, no, I won’t tell you what the work was. It was his business, now it’s mine. You’d be choked if you heard I was advertising your wheelings and dealings to everyone else who waved a fifty under my nose.’
I nodded. He had me there.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I respect your professional integrity. But could you look through the rest of the shit in there and see if it makes any sense to you? John spent the last few weeks before he died writing out those names again and again, so they must have meant something
to him. Or maybe there’s a code there that I’m not picking up. Either way, I’d be grateful for a second opinion.’
Nicky flicked to the back of the book and looked over the list there. The final word, SMASHNA, glared up at us from the heart of the nest of ink-swirls.
‘Smashna,’ I mused aloud. It didn’t sound like a real word. Maybe it was an acronym of some kind.
‘It’s Russian,’ said Nicky. ‘Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.’ He closed the book, and leaned slightly towards me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. ‘What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?’
‘Let’s leave that open for now,’ I parried. ‘There’s something else I need, and it’s big.’
‘Yeah?’ Nicky’s offhand tone suggested that there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him. ‘So what’s that?’
‘I was wondering if you could pick something up for me,’ I said. ‘The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.’
‘Go on.’
‘Memorabilia.’
‘Relating to . . . ?’
‘A dead gangster. A killer, from way back.’
Nicky’s head swivelled round fast and he stared at me for a few moments in dead, perplexed silence. It seemed like something of an extreme reaction: okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections. Still, something was bothering him sufficiently that he hadn’t been able to hide it.
‘I thought we had a “no bullshit” rule in place, Castor,’ he said, his tone unreadable.
‘You think this is bullshit, Nicky?’
‘Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now . . .’ He hesitated and shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.
‘It’s not about John. It’s a different case.’ I reached towards him with my hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually touch him. He hates to be touched by the living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running. And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal space. ‘Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though I didn’t know you had one until now.’
He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. ‘It may not be something you can help me with in any case. There was a gangster back in the 1960s named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get hold of her and sent her to the chair.’
‘An American gangster,’ Nicky said, with careful emphasis.
‘Yeah. Sorry, I thought I said that already. Anyway, you know the way these things work, probably better than I do. There’s always a market for celebrity souvenirs. And it’s kind of like an iceberg – some of it’s above the water, most of it isn’t.’
‘Sure,’ Nicky said. He seemed mollified now. Whatever I’d said to upset him, he’d either bounced back from it or else filed it away for later. I still couldn’t figure out what had got under his skin in that way, but right then didn’t seem like the best time to ask.
‘So,’ I summed up, shielding my eyes as the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds, ‘you think you could lay your hands on something?’
He nodded a few times, not in answer to the question but acknowledging that it was an interesting commission. ‘Funnily enough,’ he said, shooting me another narrow-eyed stare, as if warning me off making any smart one-liners, ‘I’ve got some contacts in that line of business.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding.’ Nicky slid away along the bench, out of the patch of sunlight. He might have reclaimed the day, but he was clearly going to be selective about which parts of it he kept. ‘I’m not making any promises. Stuff like that doesn’t come up for sale too often, and when it does it tends to go for crazy prices. Supply and demand. There’s a whole lot of sickos out there, and only so many dead serial killers. You might not want to pay the asking price.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.’
‘Buy it, sell it on again,’ Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession, with commission to be made twice over. ‘Yeah, maybe. Who’s this “we”, by the way, and what do you want this little keepsake for?’
I got up. ‘Call me if you get a bite,’ I said. ‘Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s life,’ Nicky observed.
When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.
11
Sometimes synchronicity is your friend. Everything flows together, and the thing you’re looking for just turns out to be in the first place where your groping fingers come down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t feeling like one.
I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café, which going by the postcode was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t know who I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t want to miss it. In the meantime though, I had some time to kill. So I strolled back up to Trafalgar Square, for the hell of it and the Harris hawks, and while I was walking I called Jan Hunter to tell her how my meeting with Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet: I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for the sake of getting a second opinion. I didn’t mention Kale, either: not at first. I was afraid of offering her any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder. So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying a passenger, I asked her why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s diagnosis that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line went very quiet for a moment.
‘Incipient psychosis,’ Jan corrected me at last. ‘Not full-blown.’ She sounded defensive, but not apologetic. ‘I just thought that if I told you Doug was losing his mind you might not agree to help me. And really it’s not relevant – not to the case. It’s only come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.’
‘I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,’ I reminded her. ‘And then he went AWOL for a week and didn’t even call you.’
‘But he was still himself.’ Her voice was thick with tears now. ‘Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself it wasn’t like he was mad. Just . . . like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer. I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!’
‘Maybe not,’ I allowed. ‘Anyway, for what it’s worth I think Doctor Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.’
‘You don’t?’ Through the tears, hope and relief showing like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. ‘Then what is it? What’s happening to him?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I hedged. ‘And Jan, I hate to say this but it may not make any difference in any case. Not in terms of the verdict. But there’s a lot more to it than the police have got their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to get you some answers. We’ve got a window – probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary – DS Coldwood – had to say, the trial date hasn’t come down
yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck, so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid-’ That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous and formless all my speculations were. ‘Well, whatever I turn up,’ I finished lamely, ‘I’ll hand it over to you and you can decide for yourself what to do with it.’
‘So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mister Castor?’
I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I didn’t have a bastard clue. ‘I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,’ I said. ‘But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the why of it, or at least get some idea of—’
‘“Why” isn’t an issue.’ Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. ‘She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors, or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.’
‘And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.’
Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the obvious answer. Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman . . . Meanwhile my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I was subconsciously looking for a way out of this conversation. A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big that it spilled all the way down to the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons as they flew from one equestrian statue to the next, its tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it. An art student, or maybe just a hobbyist, was sketching Charles the First in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she sat cross-legged on the stones.