Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “Your move,” I murmured to Webb in a lull between the twenty-first and twenty-second repetitions. “My advice would be to—”

  “I do not,” Webb gurgled, swallowing hard several times, “want your advice, Castor. And this—this will not make a difference.”

  “Well, that’s not strictly true,” I demurred with a mild shrug. I caught Paul’s eye, and he winked solemnly at me over Webb’s shoulder. “I think it’s going to make a difference of at least—let’s say—four or five days. Maybe a week. Depends how cold it gets at night and how much staying power these kids have. They’re young and idealistic, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t make it at least up to the weekend. After that, I’ll have to think of some other way to make your life a misery.”

  I walked away from him before he could answer. I passed Pen in the doorway. “You can take it from here?” I murmured. “Keep things percolating? Make sure they don’t get Rafi out the door?”

  “Trust me,” Pen snarled back. There was a dangerous gleam in her eye as she stared at the restraint frame. She wasn’t faking it. She was really angry.

  “Play it cool, though,” I cautioned her, a little worried. “You’ve already got one assault charge pending. Be the victim and let Webb be the monster.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Pen told me a little curtly. “Where are you going, anyway?”

  “The United States. Alabama.”

  “Looking for a change of scene?”

  “I’m looking for a dead woman.”

  “Get Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to come down here. I’ll make you one.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but only for a moment. I didn’t want to lose it.

  I was hoping the crowd might part for me, but I’m no man’s Moses. I picked my way through the massed ranks of the Breathers, trying not to tread on any fingers or toes, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. They were in a volatile mood, bless their rabid little hearts.

  The flight I’d booked was going out of Heathrow at a few minutes past noon. I checked in with hand luggage at a little after ten and went to wait for Juliet in the grotesquely named Tap & Spile bar.

  She was already there, waiting for me. So was Nicky, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing shades indoors like some vampire wannabe. He gave me a sardonic wave. He had a full glass of red wine in front of him, and Juliet had an empty one. She also had a UK passport in her hands. That was a relief. Nicky hadn’t been sure he could cobble something together at such short notice and have it pass muster.

  “Another?” I asked Juliet, pointing at her empty glass.

  She shook her head. “It reminds me of blood,” she said.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “I’m about to spend ten hours in a confined space with three hundred people, Castor. You tell me.”

  I let that one go and went to the bar, where I ordered a whiskey and water for myself. I took it over to the table and sat down between them.

  Nicky nodded at a folded sheet of paper sitting on the table. “Names and addresses,” he said. “Juliet’s got one, too, in case you get separated.”

  I unfolded the sheet. “Fair enough. Who’s on here?”

  He waved vaguely. “Anyone I could find who might remember Myriam Kale or have anything interesting to say about her,” he said. “I’ve given you the address of the Seaforth farm—where she lived until she got married—but there’s no phone number I can find, so my guess is nobody’s living there now. There’s a maternal uncle—Billy Myers. You’ve got his last address. And I called through to the local paper, the Brokenshire Picayune.”

  “The what?” I winced at my first taste of the lousy blended Scotch.

  “Picayune. Means trivial or everyday. Great name for a newspaper, huh? ‘It doesn’t matter a tinker’s fuck, but you read it here first.’ Anyway, the editor’s a guy named Gale Mallisham. I told him you were digging for information about Kale and might have some to trade.”

  “And he said?”

  “ ‘Fuck. Another one? Why won’t anyone let her lie in her fucking grave?’ ”

  “Thanks for priming the pump there, Nicky.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He put his wineglass underneath his nose and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. Since he died, that’s been Nicky’s most sensual pleasure. I let him spin it out as long as he wanted to. Juliet was following all this with a detached, almost bored look, but I knew she was taking everything in. You don’t get to be as old as she is by letting your attention wander.

  When Nicky put the glass down, I shot him an expectant look. By way of answer he sat back in his chair and made himself comfortable.

  “The stuff in the box,” I prompted.

  “Sure.” He was still in no hurry. “I notice Johnny boy’s gopher is dead.”

  “Meaning Vince Chesney?” I frowned. “Yeah, he is. How’d you know?”

  Nicky looked smug. “Two and two, Castor,” he said. “The baggies that Gittings’s souvenirs were packed in had a name label printed on them—some animal pathology outfit called Nexus. And this morning Nexus was all over the news on account of having lost one of its employees last night in an inexplicable bloodbath at their premises in Victoria. Some security guard got to join the choir invisible, too. No witnesses, no leads, at least when I hacked the Police National Computer at four a.m. Juliet tells me you were there.”

  “Yeah. I was there.” I glanced at Juliet, who shrugged. I hadn’t told her it was a big secret, but I’d still have liked the right of veto on telling Nicky about it.

  “It was a loup-garou, right?”

  “Right. Nicky, have you got something for me or not? Because twenty questions was never my game.”

  He gave me a languid grin, stubbornly determined not to pick up the pace. “I know your game, Castor. It’s blind man’s buff.” I opened my mouth to curse him out, and he raised a hand, forestalling me. “Okay, don’t start on me. I’m just in an expansive mood, that’s all. I like days when I throw out the questions and the answers bounce right back.”

  “So you’re saying…?”

  “I went through the stuff on the disk and cross-checked it myself in a couple of places. It was mostly bullshit—your man measured everything he could touch a ruler to, whether it mattered or not—but if you want a smoking pistol, then I think you got one.”

  “Go on.” I could tell by his lingering smile that he had a bombshell to drop, or he thought he did. He reached into his pocket and handed me one of the evidence bags. I remembered the object inside the bag pretty well, because it stood out from the mostly innocuous stuff in Chesney’s treasure chest like a dildo in a nun’s bootlocker.

  “The bullet,” I said, resigning myself to the role of straight man.

  “Bullet casing, actually. It’s from a ten-millimeter auto round, and according to your now deceased doggy pathologist, it was fired out of a Smith and Wesson 1076. Got a lovely clear print on it, too—Les Lathwell’s. You know, the East End gangster? The one they called the Krays’ heir apparent?”

  “To be honest,” I said, “I’m a little hazy on social history. I know the name, but—”

  “Kind of an entrepreneur in the violence and intimidation line. He went to America to learn from the greats. Came home and built his own little mafia on the Mile End Road. You should read about this stuff; it’s inspirational. Anyway, I went online and did some rooting around—that’s why I hacked the PNC—and the print checks out A-one at Lloyd’s. I’m no expert, but I think the ballistics do, too. And that’s where things get interesting.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “Lathwell died in 1979. The ten-millimeter round didn’t even get introduced until 1983, in a Swedish hand pistol that kicked like an unlimbered cannon and broke people’s arms if they weren’t expecting it. It didn’t get popular—and I use that word in heavy quotes—until the FBI picked it up in eighty-eight. In other words, Lathwell couldn’t have fired that round, or loaded it into a gun, because he died before the gun ever came off t
he assembly line. So there’s your Rod Serling moment. Enjoy.”

  He indulged in another deep snort of the wine breath, drawing it out for maximum dramatic impact. He got the timing just about right, because I was struggling to fit that spiky fact into what I already knew—which was possible only because I knew jack shit. Looked at from one angle, though, it made a queasy kind of sense.

  “You think Lathwell rose in the flesh, then?” Juliet asked, voicing my thoughts. “As a zombie?”

  Nicky put down his glass, basking in our undivided attention. “Could be. Or maybe someone flayed his fingertips and wore them for a joke. There are a couple of other tidbits like that in the notes on the disk. Anachronisms, I mean. My favorite is a letter from Tony Lambrianou to his brother, Chris. You know the hearse that carried Lambrianou’s body had a message from Chris, in the middle of a wreath the size of Canary Wharf? It said, ‘See you on the other side.’ Well, this letter is dated about six months later, and it’s exactly three words long: ‘I made it.’ Sick joke or mystical revelation. You decide.”

  He leaned forward, more animated. “Okay, that’s what’s on the disk, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service. You get this because I’m obsessive and because I’m dead—in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t need to sleep ever, if he’s got something on his mind. Look at this—and look at this.”

  I was expecting him to give me some more of the evidence bags, but instead, he held out two badly photocopied fingerprint charts—copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and smears.

  Juliet looked over my shoulder. Her pattern recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine. “They’re the same,” she said. “Or almost the same. The differences are very few and very small. Is that the point?”

  “Yeah, that’s the point. But here’s the kicker. The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is different by about three ridges and one friction artifact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-granddad of all East End psychopaths. There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys. Only they’re not. They’re the same guy twice.”

  I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right. This was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book. In fact, it was a whole roomful of smoking machine guns. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

  Who wants to get you?

  The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

  “They’re coming back,” I summarized. “All the East End bad boys. All the biggest bastards.”

  “But how are they coming back?” Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them. “Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time—become more like the flesh they inhabit. In the long term, the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal, diluted to the point where it’s really not there anymore. As for the revenants—the zombies—their bodies seldom last longer than a year, two at most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them together.”

  The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky, saw him staring at her with a grim deadpan. “I’m sorry if that was tactless,” she added. “I’m talking in general terms.”

  “Sure,” said Nicky tightly. “I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?”

  Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow. “No, obviously you’re subject to the same—”

  “Shut the fuck up. Please.” Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl; he’d drawn in a large breath beforehand for exactly that purpose. “I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just— Don’t talk, okay? Don’t talk about things you know fuckall about.”

  The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions, and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them. Tactfully, though, she made no reply.

  I tried to pull the conversation back to less controversial topics. “They’ve still got their own fingerprints,” I said, answering Juliet’s question. “So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—”

  “Nineteen oh eight,” Nicky supplied sullenly.

  “Nineteen oh eight. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the sixties and seventies, his body would have been spectacularly well embalmed.”

  Juliet shook her head. “It doesn’t work, in any case,” she pointed out. “This other man—Les Lathwell—he had friends? Family?”

  “Two brothers, both dead,” said Nicky. “A sister who’s still alive.”

  “And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?”

  Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. “Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.”

  “Then how—and when—did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?”

  It was a more than reasonable question. Something was niggling at me, something that felt as though it might be part of the answer, but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.

  “Not plastic surgery,” Nicky said. “They could do it now, fingerprints and all, but in the sixties the technology wasn’t that advanced. Except on Mission Impossible. You know, that guy with all the masks.”

  “Flesh is plastic enough, in any case,” Juliet said, and I almost had it.

  But then Nicky spoke again, and I lost whatever connection my subconscious was trying to make. “I haven’t managed to find any Myriam Kale memorabilia,” he said. “Turns out East End gangsters are easy compared to sexy American assassins for hire. A few things came up, but they all smelled like scams. I’m still looking. But since you’re going to where she lived, maybe you’ll pick something up along the way. In which case, throw it to me when you’re through with it, and I’ll find it a new home.”

  So Chesney’s Kale piece had come from some other source. I decided not to mention that. Nicky was touchy enough already without being told that someone else had outscored him. “I’ll do that, Nicky,” I said, blandly. “In the meantime, could you check something else out for me?”

  “I’m always at your disposal, since, obviously, I don’t have a fucking life,” Nicky observed dryly, flicking a cold glance at Juliet.

  “Can you find out where all these guys are buried?”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s easy. Why, you want to put some flowers on their graves?”

  “I want to find out if there’s any connection here to John Gittings’s list of London cemeteries. If there’s a pattern—if they all ended up in the same place—”

  “Yeah, I get it, Castor. The thing about the flowers? Joke. Is your mobile triband?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea. But the battery’s flat, in any case.”

  “Fine.” Nicky gave it up, getting to his feet and shoving away the untouched wine away with a disgruntled air. “So you get yourself a stack of dimes and call me. I know you don’t travel much, so I probably ought to make it clear that dimes are what Americans use for currency. Have a nice flight, the both of you. I’ll see you when I see you.” He was about to walk away but then turned and held out his hand, palm up. I almost shook it, misinterpreting the gesture, but he clicked his tongue impatiently. “The bullet casing. You go through the metal detector with that in your pocket, there could be all kinds of humorous misunderstandings.”

  I gave it back to him. “Thanks for everything, Nicky.”

  “You’re more than welcome.” There was something in his tone, in his face, that I couldn’t read. “You want to pay me back, then keep me in the loop. I want to see
how this comes out. By the way, someone else knows you’re coming.” He threw that out with carefully measured casualness, playing for the double take.

  “What? What do you mean, Nicky?”

  “When I got your names off the airport data system, there was a nice little trip wire set up there. I saw it because I was coming in on a machine code level.”

  “A trip wire?”

  “Yeah. Like, a relay. So if your name comes up on any flight, someone gets told.”

  “My name? Or Juliet’s?”

  “Just yours, Castor. Anyone wants to know a demon’s whereabouts, they only have to stick their nose into the wind.”

  He walked away without waiting for an answer. “I hurt his feelings?” Juliet asked. She wasn’t contrite; she was asking for the sake of information. Something to add to her database of human foibles.

  “You shoved his face in his own mortality,” I said. “Nobody likes that much.”

  “He’s already dead.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier to live with.”

  A few moments later, the tannoy told us that our flight was ready to board at gate 17. I just about had time to finish my whiskey. When we left, Nicky’s wine remained on the table behind us, untouched.

  In the departure lounge, Juliet stood at the window and watched the planes taking off. She seemed fascinated, and it made her oblivious to the covetous stares she was collecting from the male passengers sitting around her. I hadn’t thought about it much, but this was her first flight.

  Joining her at the window, I told her about some of the side effects she could expect to encounter. She wasn’t troubled about the changes in pressure and what they might do to her ears. “I’ll adjust” was all she said. She seemed to be looking forward to the experience.

  We boarded at the tail end of the line because Juliet preferred not to join the crush until the last moment. Our seats were forward of the toilets at the very back of the cabin, in what once would have been the smoking seats. Explaining the concept of smoking seats to Juliet took us all the way through the safety lecture. She was amused at the fences and barricades that humans had built around their pleasures, but then she was amused at the whole notion of deferred gratification. Demons, she said, tended to work more in terms of reaching out and grabbing.