Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “Yes,” Leonard grunted tersely.

  I could see Todd thinking about taking the discussion a stage further, and then I could see him giving up on the idea. He turned to the receptionist instead. “Carol,” he said, “call the service number.”

  “Yes, Mr. Todd.”

  “I can fix it,” said Leonard, not looking around.

  “Come on upstairs,” Todd said to me, ignoring Leonard’s answer. “You want some tea or coffee?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and followed him back up the wide staircase. When we turned around the elbow of the stairs, Leonard was still on his knees, intent on his veterinary duties.

  “John Gittings,” Todd said, glancing back down at me as we walked. “That’s what you called about, right?”

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “And I saw you at the funeral.”

  “Right again.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I thought so. You were the one who stepped in when the natives were getting restless. Thanks for that.”

  I didn’t answer. It would have sounded a bit graceless to say that I was more worried about Reggie and Greg picking up an assault charge than I was about his well-being.

  The stairwell went up and up, and I lost count of how many turns we took before we got to Todd’s office. It was surprisingly small, but then the courts had been the lower end of Victorian working-class housing: They meted out space as though it were gold. Todd indicated a chair as he walked around to the far side of the desk and pulled open the blinds, which looked onto the court’s central light well and so didn’t make much difference to the gray luminescence filtering into the room. It looked like the kind of place where you’d need the desk lamp on at noon on midsummer’s day.

  As he sat down, Todd flicked open a green hanging file that was already on his desk. It contained a thick wodge of papers. I took the chair opposite him.

  “John Gittings,” he said again, flicking through the documents on top of the file with quick, practiced hands. “I’ve been thinking about this one.”

  “Have you?” I asked, for form’s sake.

  Todd nodded. “About Mrs. Gittings’s feelings on the matter, I mean,” he clarified. “I’m going to go ahead and get the exhumation order, like I said. Have John disinterred and taken to Mount Grace for cremation. I don’t have any choice about that.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He must have caught the sardonic edge in my tone, because he gave me a slightly injured stare.

  “Seriously,” he said. “You think I enjoyed turning up at the funeral looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, terrorizing widows, breaking up the show? I didn’t. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. But my client’s wishes were absolutely specific.”

  I didn’t answer right away; I was only here to check the dates. But since he’d given me the opening, it seemed churlish not to at least poke a stick into it. “Carla thinks that John was suffering from some kind of dementia.”

  Todd looked pained. “Mrs. Gittings has that luxury. I don’t. Not unless she can prove it in court. I have to assume that John meant what he said, and I have to act on it.”

  “There’s something else you should know about,” I said. “Mrs. Gittings is being haunted by her husband’s ghost.”

  I left it out there, looked at his face. Like I said, the law takes a while to catch up with how the world turns, and a lot of people with a rational mind-set somehow manage never to see anything that might challenge their basic assumptions. For all I knew, Todd was one of them: a vestal, to use Pen’s word. Someone who’d never seen a ghost, or any of the other manifestations of the risen dead, and couldn’t quite bring himself to make the conceptual leap in advance of the evidence.

  But he surprised me. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and he looked as though he meant it.

  “It gets worse. Whether or not John was in his right mind when he died, he’s pretty much out of it now. The ghost is restless. Violent. It’s become—”

  “Geist,” Todd finished, and I nodded, impressed that he knew the technical term. He blew out his cheek. “Damn,” he said simply, and then for a long time he stared at the floor, his thumb running absently along the edge of his desk. “Well, that—yes, that’s distressing. She must be very distraught. To see someone you loved—still love, I suppose—”

  There was a long silence at the end of which Todd looked at me and nodded as though I’d been pressing an argument. “I want this to give her as little stress as possible,” he said. “Especially after what you’ve said. So what I’m proposing is a wake.”

  I thought I must have misheard him. “A wake?” I echoed him. “You mean a party?”

  Todd shook his head brusquely. “No, not a party. Just a night when the coffin goes back to the house—when Mrs. Gittings can sit with it, and John’s spirit can become a little bit more reconciled to… his violent end. Do you think that would be a good idea?”

  I mulled it over, and I had to admit—to myself, at least—that it did. It might or might not provide closure for Carla, but it ought to do John’s ghost a power of good to see that his last request was being carried out to the letter. In theory, it ought to stop the haunting. You didn’t need an exorcism if you gave the dead what they wanted.

  What I said, though, was “It doesn’t really matter what I think. I’ll talk it over with Carla. See what she says.”

  Todd pushed the papers back into the file, closed it, and stood up very abruptly. “You do that,” he said. “If there’s a way of doing this that spares her feelings, then that’s the way we’ll do it. Thanks for coming in, Mr. Castor. I’m glad you told me all this.”

  “The cremation,” I reminded him. “When is it going to be?”

  “Wednesday, most likely. But it depends how soon I can get the disinterment done. It might have to be Thursday. Talk to Mrs. Gittings and let me know what she says. Oh, and please leave a number with Carol. I think under the circumstances Mrs. Gittings won’t appreciate a call from me, so if you don’t mind continuing to act as a go-between—”

  “Happy to,” I said stolidly. “Thanks for listening.”

  I went downstairs again and left my address and phone numbers with the bored brunette. The photocopier was in a state of even more advanced disassembly, and Leonard was nowhere to be seen.

  I stepped back out onto the street. It was about five o’clock, and although there was still some light from the low, loitering sun, a roiling rope of heavy gray cloud was in the process of swallowing it whole like a python gulping down a guinea pig.

  A scarecrow-thin old man crusted with the filth of years on the streets, dressed in a long, trailing outercoat so dirty and tattered you couldn’t guess what color or even what kind of garment it might once have been, came shambling along the pavement toward me. I stepped aside automatically, but he zigged at the same time and walked right into me. His mad mud-brown eyes stared into mine.

  “At the water hole,” he said, his voice a dry, throat-tearing rasp. “With the others there behind you. Pushing. Pushing. Nowhere to go.” He laughed out loud, delighted by some sudden revelation, and the stench of his breath hit me across the face like a solid slap.

  I winced and leaned away from the searing smell, but he was already walking on—singing now in the same harsh, agonized tone. “‘Oh, the devil stole the beat from the Lord, and it’s time we put things straight…’ ” I didn’t recognize the tune, but that ragged voice was shredding it pretty effectively.

  An involuntary shudder went through me, and with it came a nagging prickle somewhere at the edge of consciousness—the slight sensation of pressure that comes when I’m being looked at by one of the risen dead. I looked around. Nobody in sight except the decayed tramp, who was heading away from me and had his back turned, and a woman on the other side of the street, wheeling a baby in a stroller. Maybe recent events had put me on something of a hair trigger: I slipped my hand inside my coat to make sure that my whistle was there and forgot about it. Probably nothing, but if it wa
s something, I was all tooled up.

  I headed north, aiming to grab a train at Finsbury Park. That gave me two choices—the immense dogleg of Stamford Hill and Seven Sisters Road, or the back cracks. I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow alleys. The sense of being watched—watched and followed—ebbed and flowed as I walked: It wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of aftereffect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost. All ghosts impinge on my death sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterward. Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.

  I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately, I’d break out onto the Seven Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile, the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the earth, and the prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, then an itch with a sick heat in back of it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.

  I turned again, onto an alley that ran between the backyards of a row of terraces and a high blind wall that presumably had the reservoir on the other side of it. I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving anymore, I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner, but the silence was absolute.

  Before me was thick shadow, thick enough that if something dead or undead rounded the bend, I might lose the initiative because I couldn’t get a clear enough look to know what it was. Impatient, I took a few steps back toward the corner I’d just turned, and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.

  Tomcat, big and fat, out on the pull.

  With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then around it and back out onto the street. Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d have been surprised if there had been, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavor, the extrasensory prickle faded out again into nothingness.

  Which, for something so liminal and barely there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.

  I was about to say that I went home, but when I use that word, I still think of Pen’s creepy old place on Turnpike Lane, with its Noah’s ark freighting of rats and ravens and its Mobius strip architecture (it’s built into the side of a hill, so the ground floor at the back becomes a basement at the front).

  Now, though—just for a few weeks or maybe a month—I was living in a flat in a high-rise block along the Wood Green High Road: high enough up in the stack so I could look out of my window and see the Centrepoint Tower giving me the finger across the length of London.

  It belonged to a friend of a friend, a guy named Ronald “Ropey” Doyle, who’d gone back to the Republic of Ireland to deal with some family crisis and didn’t want to lose his place on the council housing list while he was away. He needed a sitting tenant who could pretend to be him if the need arose, and I needed a place to dump my stuff until I came up with a better idea. It seemed like a sweet deal.

  It became less sweet when the lights went out and I discovered all the utilities were on a meter, and it soured altogether the first time the lift broke down. The flat itself smelled of root vegetables, and when it rained, the walls wept discolored tears that left brown-edged tracks down the paintwork. The decor ran to black leather and three-inch-deep orange shag pile. But to give it its due, it had four walls and a ceiling. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  Tonight, though, walking down Lordship Lane from Wood Green tube, I felt a definite desire to be somewhere else. If anything, that feeling only increased when I turned onto Vincent Street and saw what was parked in front of the block: a high-sided blue van with BOWYER’S CLEANING SERVICES written in reverse over the windscreen.

  Son of a bitch! I’d been solid-gold certain I’d ditched the Breathers on the M25. Now it seemed that they’d not only stayed with me all the way to Southgate, they’d planted a walking tail on me when I left Carla’s and came home by tube. They knew where I lived. Taken in conjunction with Louise Beddows’s tales of ambushes and punishment beatings, it wasn’t a happy thought. More than anything, it made me ashamed. How could I have let myself be rolled up by a shower of amateurs? Normally, my instincts were better than that.

  There was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van. The fractured sodium glare of a streetlamp was splattered over the curve of the windscreen, so that all I could see of him was an outline, immobile and sinister. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me. I fought the urge to wrench the door open and have it out with him there and then. The back of the van was probably stuffed three deep with his mates.

  An even nicer surprise was waiting for me when I got up to the flat. Someone had painted across the door in thick, still-dripping black paint the words EXORCIST EQUALS DISEASED EQUALS DECEASED. I stared at it in dead silence for about half a minute, considering my options. It wasn’t my front door, of course, it was Ropey’s, but still, I was living behind it, and it was my arse he’d want to kick when he saw this. But was it worth getting my head used as a baseball? On balance, probably not. I’d wait until the odds were more in my favor, and then I’d put these little fuckups through some changes.

  The first thing I did when I got inside was to call Carla and tell her Todd’s idea about the wake. She was iffy at first, but she talked herself into it. I said I’d call him and tell him it was a goer.

  A pregnant pause at the other end of the line, punctuated in the middle by a muffled sob. “Fix?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you—could you come over and be here with me? When they bring John’s body back?”

  I thought about that one for all of two seconds. “I’d love to, Carla,” I lied, “but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll have my mobile with me, though. If the geist— I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to sleep again.”

  I hung up before she could find another angle to come at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone, and I left a message there. That ought to have left me feeling off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.

  It didn’t, though. I prowled around the flat, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block was like a howl of pain sampled and played back through some aeolian synthesizer. It made me think about the late John Gittings, prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes of noisy passion, which meant they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other sometime within the next hour.

  I felt the call of the wild, so I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.

  Okay, “the call of the wild” is relative, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about; but you’ve got to love a pub that’s painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit. And the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.

  It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then, when he came over, I nodded toward the IPA pump. “Usual,” I said.

  “Someone wants to meet you, Fix,” he said as he pulled the pint.

  “What sort of someone?”

  “Woman.”

  “Young
? Old? Nun? Policewoman?”

  “See for yourself.”

  As he handed me the pint, he nodded, barely perceptibly, off to my right. I handed him a fiver, took a sip on the beer, and casually took a glance in that direction.

  There was a woman sitting by herself at a table off to one side of the door, dressed in a smart cutaway jacket over shirt and slacks, the whole outfit built around a motif of rust red and black. Something about her look reminded me of Carla: the intangible suggestion of widows’ weeds, which was odd and unsettling because this woman couldn’t have been over thirty. Dark brown hair in a tightly curled perm, bronzed eyelids, and metallic highlights on her lips. She was staring at the wall, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing it. The gin and tonic in front of her hadn’t been touched.

  I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted; and maybe I jumped at the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table and gave her a nod as she turned to stare at me. “Paul said you were asking after me,” I said.

  She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. “Felix Castor?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.” She put out a hand and I shook it. “I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re good. I’d like to hire you.”

  “Okay if I sit down?” I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at. Given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it might be kind of a loaded question.

  I took a seat opposite Jan, and she swiveled to face me. “So what’s the problem?” I asked. The standard opening phrase for doctors, mechanics, and ghostbreakers.

  “My husband,” she said, then seemed to hesitate. “He’s—” The pause went on. Whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over it. I tried to help.