Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “Doug Hunter. Only if she comes, it won’t be to visit him. It’ll be to break him out.”

  “Well, thanks for that little tip-off, sir. I’m sure we’ll keep a lookout for her.”

  “You’ll need to put up some wards,” I said, persisting without much hope. “On the tops of the walls, as well as on the doors, because she doesn’t have to use a door. And it’s probably a good idea to have a priest handy if you’ve got one on staff. He can draw a line in holy water around the cell block, or bless the—”

  “We’ll keep a lookout for her,” the duty officer repeated, and hung up.

  I swore bitterly at the innocent phone receiver in my hand.

  “Have a good trip, Castor?”

  I turned in time to have a heavy briefcase shoved brusquely into my arms and into my stomach. Winded, I stared into the cold, hard glare of Nicky Heath. I took hold of the briefcase as he let go of it. Nicky examined my swollen, discolored face with something like satisfaction. He had a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, and he used it to point at my bruised cheek.

  “No,” he said. “I can see you had a bad one. Great! I’m really happy the suffering is being spread around. Where’s the lap dancer from hell?”

  “Flying under her own steam. Why? You got something for us, Nicky?”

  The glare shot up the emotional register toward the hysterical. “Yeah, Castor, and what I got is a fucking news flash. You did it to me again, you bastard. Pulled me into your stupid grandstanding shit so people are knocking on my door because they want to cut pieces out of you. So this is the parting of the fucking ways. I just came over here to sign off on the job and tell you not to fucking bother to write.”

  I stared at him in numb perplexity. I was running on empty, and I didn’t want to have to work out the translation for myself. “Someone tried to lean on you?” I asked.

  “Someone tried to torch me. That someone is now dog meat. But they know where I live, so presumably, someone is gonna send someone else to finish the fucking job.”

  There was something surreal about the scene. Nicky was keeping his voice level and conversational so that people wouldn’t look around and try to tune in to the conversation, but his teeth were bared in a snarl, and his pale, waxen face looked like the mask of an angry ghost in a Noh play.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s starting to look as though the opposition is a bit better organized than I was expecting. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “Yeah?” Nicky smiled grimly. “Well save some of that sorry for when you hear the rest of the story, Castor. Get us a cab. I’ll ride back into town with you and tell you what I got. After that, you’re on your lonesome fucking own.”

  I raided a cashpoint machine, scraping the bottom of the hollow barrel that was my bank account. It was getting on for midnight, but there were a few taxis in the rank, and one of them crawled toward us as we came out from the terminal onto the pickup bay. Nicky looked at the driver, eyes narrowed, and his hand thumped into my chest as I stepped forward. “Not that one.”

  “What? Why?”

  The taxi driver, a burly guy with way too much hair on his arms, was looking at us expectantly. “Roll on, motherfucker,” Nicky told him.

  The cabbie’s face went blank with surprise and then livid. “Why, you fucking piece of—” He started to open his door, but a middle-aged couple came out of the terminal behind us, walked right past us, and got into the cab. The door closed again, and the cab rolled away, the driver shooting us a look of frustrated venom.

  “Nicky,” I said, “if you’re going to pick fights with guys who are bigger than me, could you give me at least a couple of seconds’ warning?”

  “First cab could be a plant,” Nicky said. “Second, too.” He was already walking past the next cab in line as he spoke, and now he pulled open the door of the third.

  “You’ve got to go from the front of the—” the driver began.

  “Just drive,” Nicky snapped. “I’m not paying you to fucking talk at me.”

  Nicky scooched over, and I climbed in beside him, putting the briefcase at my feet. This driver was—fortunately—older and less solidly built than the first. His balding head, his wispy hair clinging in loose tufts around his ears, and his bulbous nose made him look like a moonlighting circus clown. He turned a solemn gaze on Nicky, then on me, weighed dignity against discretion, and went for the easy option. We pulled away while the cabbie in front leaned on his horn in futile protest.

  “Where to?” our driver demanded.

  “Walthamstow,” Nicky said. “Top end of Hoe Street. And turn your radio on.”

  The driver leaned forward. Tinny country-and-western music filled the cab.

  “Louder,” Nicky said. “All the way up.”

  I’d gotten to know Nicky’s moods pretty well over the years, so the paranoia came as no surprise. His coming out to meet me, in spite of the fact that he saw me as the source of his troubles, was more revealing. Something heavy would have been needed to counterbalance his spectacularly overdeveloped survival instincts. The only thing I knew that was heavy enough was his spectacularly overdeveloped ego. He wanted—really wanted—to tell me what he’d found.

  “So go ahead,” I invited him as plunky guitar noises echoed around our ears.

  “Make your day?”

  “If you think you can, Nicky, yeah. Make my day. It’s going to be a pretty tall order, though.”

  “How’s this for starters?” He threw the newspaper in my lap. The Sun. With the pressure of his hands removed, it started to unroll. I smoothed it out and read the headline. PREMIER MANAGER IN BUNGS SCANDAL. Okay, that was the sports page. I flipped it over. TWO DIE IN M1 INFERNO.

  And a photo—an old photo, too flattering by about thirty pounds—of Gary Coldwood.

  “Oh Jesus!” I muttered.

  “Guy was a friend of yours, wasn’t he, Castor? And it seems like only yesterday he was promising you ‘something juicy.’ I’m assuming that was work-related rather than some freaky outcrop of your love life. Then he jumps the barrier on the M1 northbound at one in the morning and hits a car coming the other way. Hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour collision. Boom. Smoking spark plugs come down half a mile away. Two people in the other car, mother and ten-year-old daughter, both dead. Coldwood hauled out of the wreckage with both legs broken, stinking of booze. Funny how things work out.”

  I couldn’t answer. I was still staring at the photo. Coldwood was wearing an expression I’d seen on his face at least a hundred times: a tough-guy cockiness that he’d copied from John Woo movies and never managed to get more than half right. He really wanted to be the scourge of evildoers. If he could have gotten away with wearing a cape and mask to work, he would have done it.

  Nicky was still talking. “I checked this stuff out afterward, you understand. After I got broken into in the middle of the fucking night. Two guys, both carrying guns with no serial numbers on them. No ID, no pack drill. Deadfall trap got one of them, and the other died when I routed the mains power through the lock he was trying to pick to get in to me. Coincidence? I asked myself. Old friends getting nostalgic? My fucking batshit family coming in for another pass? But no. After five minutes on the Internet, I turn up this Coldwood thing, and then I know it’s you.”

  “Nicky—” I didn’t even know what I was going to say. There was a tight, wound-up sensation in my chest that felt like it was climbing upward. This was my fault. John Gittings and Vince Chesney counted as negligent homicide, but this was worse somehow. I’d pushed Gary into the line of fire, and then I’d ducked.

  “So now I’m interested,” Nicky was saying. “Hey, pal, you want to turn that radio up? It’s not reaching us in the back here. So now I’m looking for patterns. The first one I find is that Coldwood wasn’t the only stubborn stain that got wiped out on this pass.”

  “There was someone else in the car with him?”

  “Nope. But there were some other cops dying that night, and they were friends of his. A detec
tive constable and a forensics guy named Marchioness. What kind of a name is that for a guy to wear? One of them jumped out of a window, the other was pushed in front of a train. Busy night for the Reaper, last night was. Unsociable hours, the whole fucking deal. He should talk to his union.”

  I turned to Nicky to tell him to get to the fucking point, but the dry black pebbles of his eyes met my stare with implacable calm.

  “One more and then I’m done. You ever hear of a guy named Stuart Langley?”

  “Of course,” I said. “He’s a ghostbreaker. Works out of Docklands.” I suddenly remembered the story that Lou Beddows had told me on the day of John’s funeral: the late-night call, the ambush, and the beating. He lasted for a week, and then they turned the machine off… “He was working with John,” I said. “Wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know, Castor. J the G was going all around the houses looking for a partner to work his big case with him, so sure, maybe Stu Langley said yes. It might help to explain this other weird coincidence.”

  “What other—”

  “The mother and daughter. In the car that hit Coldwood. Elspeth Langley and little Niamh Langley. Does it strike you that there’s a pattern emerging here? I know I tend to see patterns where there aren’t any: That’s what paranoia is all about, right? But I trust I’ve set the scene for the big fucking revelations I’m about to lay on you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, the tightness coiling in my throat now. “You’ve set the scene.”

  “Right. You asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the notes in John-boy’s A to Z…”

  It wasn’t what I was expecting. “We’re kind of past that,” I reminded him curtly. “The latest thing I asked you to do was to find out where the bodies were buried.”

  Nicky nodded a little impatiently. “Yeah, and I put the feelers out. Nothing at first. A lot of nothing, because I put out a lot of feelers. So I went back to square one.”

  “The lists in John’s book.”

  “Exactly. But this time I applied some fuzzy logic. Because it seemed to me that the key word was gonna be the one at the very end. After all, that’s where Gittings finished up. If he was trying to solve a puzzle, then there’s a good chance that last word was the answer: the output for all that fucking crazy input.”

  I thought back to the lists in the A to Z. The pages and pages of clotted scribble, annotated and underlined almost to critical mass. “The last word was smashna,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Nicky. “Except it wasn’t. John couldn’t spell worth a flying fuck in English, and this wasn’t English. So I fed it through some online translators, and I found the word he was really looking for.” He looked at me, signaling that the punch line was coming and he didn’t want to miss any detail of my reaction when I heard it. “It wasn’t smashna—sweet, cool, great, fabuloso. It was smashana—the Hindi word for a cremation ground.”

  Obvious. So fucking obvious. Not the word, which I’d never heard before, but the payoff. Not a cemetery at all. John had tried the cemeteries and crossed them out one by one until he got to the truth. I smacked my forehead. It was a bad move, though, because it sent needles of pure agony through my bruised face and jarred neck.

  “Thus forearmed,” Nicky said, exuding grim smugness, “I narrowed my search fields and got much better results. All but a few of the badass dearly departed boys on Gittings’s list—”

  “—were cremated,” I finished.

  Nicky trumped my ace. “Were cremated in the same fucking place. Mount Grace. It’s a private crematorium in East London. But you already know that, don’t you, Fix? Because it’s where John the Git was relocated when Carla decided to make light of grave matters.”

  Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fit, at least up to a point. “But then why would John…” I started, then I trailed off into silence. That wasn’t the right question. We had at least two people verifiably risen from the dead. Les Lathwell’s fingerprints on that bullet suggested that he’d returned in his own flesh, because he’d still had his own fingers, but Myriam Kale had possessed someone else’s body, theoretically impossible though that was. Maybe John had been taken over, too. Maybe the weird things he’d done in the last weeks of his life had just been preparing the ground so that his suicide, when it came, would be taken at face value.

  Or maybe I was being too subtle. Maybe John had finished his investigation by going native: switching horses in the middle of the River Styx. I could sort of see how that would work. If there was a gateway to immortality just off the Mile End Road, and if I knew exactly where it was, I might be tempted to stand in line and take my chances.

  Because what Lathwell and his friends had, or seemed to have, was a lot better than the alternatives on offer. Ghosts could drink only the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally fall to pieces; and loupgarous had all the disadvantages of trying to remain human while living in the skin of an animal, a battle that in the long run they all lost.

  To come back as yourself—in living human flesh—was a sweet deal. And to come back again and again (because Les Lathwell’s fingerprints were the same as Aaron Silver’s), well, that was the cherry on top of the sempiternal trifle.

  Either way, Mount Grace was the link. That was where the killers were buried. That was where John had gone after he’d engaged Todd to change his will. And I was willing to bet a rupee against a rollover lottery win that was where Myriam Kale had been taken after Ruth gave up her sister’s mortal remains to Mr. Bergson, the charming killer with the bleached blond hair.

  “Thanks, Nicky,” I said. “I owe you.”

  “Yeah,” he confirmed. “You do. More than you can pay. That briefcase is full of the Git’s bits and pieces. There’s no way I’m gonna try and sell them now. I’m going underground, and they’re too fucking easy to track. So you keep them to remember me by.”

  “Going underground?” I tried to read his expression. “Do you mean that literally, or—”

  “Ask me no questions, Castor, I’ll tell you no fucking lies.”

  I looked out the window. I had the sense of clocks ticking and events accelerating past me, out of control. I’d vaguely assumed that we’d be taking the North Circular, and I could jump out at Wood Green on the way through to Nicky’s gaff in Walthamstow, but the cabbie had taken the M25, and we were coming down on the A10 now, through Enfield and Ponders End. A memory stirred in my mind.

  I looked at my watch. It was very late, but what the hell. If nobody was home, I could always come back another time. It felt like more than coincidence that I was passing this close right after Nicky had dropped that bombshell on me. Then again, that’s how all the best coincidences feel. First things first, though; too much unfinished business was pressing on me. If I could shunt some of it off, I’d travel lighter.

  “Can you get a message through to someone for me?” I asked Nicky. “On your way to wherever it is you’re going?”

  “Maybe,” he allowed warily. “Who’s the someone?”

  “The governor of Pentonville.”

  He gave a sardonic laugh. “Fine. What do you want me to say? That you love him after all?”

  “That a demon from hell is probably going to walk through his front door sometime in the next twenty-four hours, looking to let a murderer back out onto the street. A guy in the remand block. Douglas Hunter.”

  Nicky stared at me. “A demon from hell?”

  “Yeah. Wearing human flesh. Answering to the description of a wet dream.”

  “Juliet?”

  “Obviously.”

  “You’re rolling over on Juliet?”

  “I wish. Look, I don’t think there’s anyone in that place with the balls or the tradecraft to exorcise her. I just want them to keep her out. Otherwise— Well, a shitty situation gets one degree shittier.”

  Nicky considered. “I can drop him an e-mail through a blind proxy. That good enough?”

  “That’s perfect, Nicky.
Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome. Where I’m going, even she won’t find me, so what the fuck do I care?”

  “Hey,” I called to the cabbie, “can you fork a left at NagsHead Road?”

  “I was going to anyway,” he grunted.

  “Great. You can drop me on the other side of the reservoir. That’s Chingford Hatch, right?”

  “Chingford Green. Chingford Hatch is a bit farther down.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Who do you know all the way out here?” Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He is curious about everything, because he knows, deep down, that the huge global conspiracy of which we’re all a part takes in every tiny detail. I think he even believes that one of the tiny details may turn out to be the clue that unlocks everything else.

  “A guy who runs a crematorium,” I said.

  Nineteen

  THE CAB ROLLED AWAY INTO THE NIGHT, LEAVING ME standing on a rain-slick pavement in the middle of a strangely lopsided street. In front of me was an unremarkable row of white-fronted semis. At my back was the Lea Valley reservoir, a broad slash of night-black nothingness barely contained behind a chain-link fence.

  King’s Head Hill lay to the north of me, most of the rest of Chingford to the south. Taking advantage of a streetlight, I fished out my wallet and rummaged through it until I found what I was looking for: the calling card that Peter Covington had given to Carla on the day her husband got cremated, and that Carla had passed on to me because she had nowhere to put it in her funereal glad rags. The address was off New Road, in Chingford Hatch, and it had a name instead of a number: the Maltings. Under a mile away, anyway, even if it was at the farther end of New Road, up by the golf course. I made a start.

  As I walked, I mulled over what I knew and didn’t know. The crematorium was the center of some reincarnation racket whose implications I couldn’t get my head around yet. John Gittings had been investigating it when he died, and he’d known what was going down long before he knew where. He’d spent days and weeks going through every damn cemetery in London, crossing them off laboriously on his list before finally coming to the big revelation that it wasn’t a cemetery he was looking for at all. Smashana. The lightbulb moment.