Dead Men's s Boots

8

Todd had made all the arrangements for the cremation, too. He’d told Carla that the hearse would call at ten in the morning, but he was there himself at nine-thirty to supervise. Carla was in the shower, so I opened the door for him, feeling like I’d been rolled up wet and put away dry.

I must have looked fairly rough, too, because as he walked on inside Todd gave me a glance that was almost supercilious. ‘Sleep well?’ he asked blandly.

I picked up my mug of coffee, which I’d rested on the coffin lid while I was opening the door, and took a deep swig of Carla’s bitter espresso before I answered. ‘Like the dead.’ Todd actually winced. They say that if you can make a lawyer blush you get a free pass to Heaven: I wondered if this would be good for a day trip to Purgatory.

He outlined the route to me, although this time we’d be travelling in one of the official cars so there was nothing to memorise. ‘Mount Grace Crematorium is on Bow Common,’ he said. ‘Behind St Clement’s Hospital. We’ll drive down to Primrose Hill, around the Outer Circle and then east all the way from there. Is Mrs Gittings ready?’

Todd could hear the sound of the shower as well as I could, so I gave him the only answer that question seemed to deserve. ‘Almost.’ He wasn’t listening, in any case: he was prowling around the room looking at the damage that the ghost had done, which of course he was seeing for the first time. He assessed it with a thoughtful, even professional eye, as if he was considering what it might be worth as part of a lawsuit. I finished my coffee and watched him in silence. He seemed nervous and eager to be on his way, which he probably was. I didn’t know how much he charged for estate work, but it didn’t seem likely that John had paid him enough to cover two visits to Waltham Abbey and a slap-up funeral in the East End. Or maybe I was underestimating the strength of John’s determination to have his last wishes respected. Maybe he’d given Todd a big enough retainer to cover all eventualities.

The lawyer’s circuit of the room brought him back to the door at last. It was still open because he hadn’t closed it behind him on the way in. He looked at John’s old wards with the same clinical eye, then glanced at me.

‘These ought to go,’ he said. ‘Before we take the body out.’

It was slightly embarrassing that I hadn’t thought of that myself. Of course, that could be what had caused John’s ghost to be separated from his body and stranded here in the first place. It was hard for the dead to cross magical wards if they’d been put together right in the first place – and although they were mostly used to keep ghosts and zombies out of places where they weren’t wanted, they’d work just as effectively to imprison them. Jenna-Jane’s cheerfully sadistic experiments at the MOU in Paddington had proved that a hundred times over.

I took down the birch sprig myself: it brought my dream back more vividly than I liked. ‘Not much left of me now . . .’ Todd wiped over the chalked ekpiptein with the palm of his hand, and I levered off the mezuzah. Between the two of us, we cleared the doorway inside of a minute. Todd tactfully didn’t point out that as the resident exorcist this was something I ought to have done myself before he arrived.

Carla still hadn’t put in an appearance, and the cars weren’t here yet either, so I went back through into the kitchen and brewed some more coffee – I’d bought a packet the night before, on the same expedition from which I brought back the curries and the beer. Todd accepted some – black, no sugar – and then left it to cool as he paced around the room some more.

‘Did John ever mention why he was so dead set on being cremated at Mount Grace?’ I asked. ‘Is there something special about that one place?’

He turned to glance in my direction, looking a little surprised. ‘Well, perhaps I played a part in that,’ he said. ‘I thought I mentioned this already, but maybe I was talking to someone else. Mount Grace is something of an oddity. The owners – the Palance family – are clients of ours. They bought the crematorium from the borough in the 1920s, although they founded a blind trust to take care of the actual running of the place – its running as a historical site, I mean. It’s hardly ever used for its real purpose any more, except in very rare cases – family and friends, mainly. I had the file on my desk one time when John came into the office. He was talking about cremation and I told him about Mount Grace. The idea of a crematorium that’s something of a select club seemed to appeal to him.’

So whatever it was, John’s concern hadn’t been narrowly geographical. He’d been concerned about what exactly was done to his body, rather than where it was done or where the remains were put afterwards. Burning rather than burial. Why? To close the door on his return? But it didn’t. Although a lot of ghosts tend to stay close to their mortal remains, far more linger in the place of their death, just as John had done. Being cremated only ruled out coming back as a zombie – not coming back per se.

‘Any reason why you suggested Mount Grace, then?’ I asked, for form’s sake. ‘Did John ask for something specific in the way his body was disposed of?’

Todd shook his head firmly, looking bored and perhaps even a little resentful at being questioned. ‘It was nothing like that. It was just that he wanted the whole thing settled quickly – almost on the spot. Because of my firm’s connection with the Palances, I was able to make arrangements at Mount Grace with a single phone call. And it seemed to meet John’s requirements in other respects, too. The cost is nominal, because as I said the trust sees the place mostly as a site of historical interest, and there’s a bequest that covers its maintenance.

‘There’s a garden of remembrance, where Mister Gittings’s ashes will be laid, and it’s in a rather beautiful spot. At least, it was beautiful and I’m sure it will be again when the building works on the site next door are finished. The crematorium has its own formal gardens. I think they were designed by Inigo Jones. In fact, that’s why the Palances acquired the site in the first place: the buildings and the grounds are very fine, and there’d been some talk of bulldozing them and building houses there. Michael Palance, who’s dead now, tried to get the building adopted by the National Trust, which was fairly new in those days, and when that failed he bought it himself.’

Carla walked in at this point, looking more than a little stunning in her widow’s weeds. She clearly wasn’t all that happy to see Maynard Todd in her living room, but almost at the same moment there was a knock at the door – the four pall-bearers reporting for duty. They hefted the coffin and we got under way immediately, avoiding any need for an unpleasant scene. A few of the neighbours watched from behind lightly twitching curtains as John went off to the next instalment of his eternal reward. Carla walked regally down the steps and into the hearse, not sparing any of them so much as a glance.

Since all three of us rode together in the hearse, conversation was sparse and strained. That left me plenty of time to mull over the change in John’s will, and to chase my thoughts around in decreasing circles until I was sick of them. Cremation. Why had it mattered to John so much that he had drawn up a new will, and gone to a new law firm to make sure that his instructions were followed – no matter how much distress it might cause to Carla?

Nicky Heath, who as a zombie takes a lively (sic) interest in stuff like this, told me once that in early civilisations cremation was kind of a patriarchal thing. ‘You could think of the smoke as a ghost phallus if you wanted to,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s last stand, kind of thing. Or if that strikes you as a little off-colour, you could go for the official symbolism. You’re seeing the soul ascend to heaven to sit at God’s right hand. Matriarchies didn’t go for that whole heaven argument so much – they favoured burial because it was going back to the womb of Mother Earth. Closing the big circle. You can’t get born again until you put yourself back.’ Needless to say, Nicky sides with the mothers on this one. Anyone who comes near him with a can of kerosene is likely to return to Mother Earth in a lot of separate pieces.

But John was a ghostbreaker through and through: there’re very few of us who have any time for religion. When you spend your life dealing with the crude mechanics of life and death, you tend to find the elegant theories less than compelling. So maybe Carla was right: maybe John’s mind had started to go, and maybe that explained both his aberrant behaviour in the last few weeks of his life and his scary transformation after death.

Or maybe there was something else going on – although it was hard to imagine what sort of something that could be if it required him to burn his body after he died as though his body contained a secret message of some kind. For just a moment, an idea stirred in the fuzzy depths of my mind, but it submerged again before I could reach for it.

Todd brought me out of my thoughts by leaning forward to tell the driver to hang a left: the unexpected sound made Carla tense, showing how strained the silence in the car had become even as it broke it. As though the ice had been broken, too, Todd turned to Carla and offered her an affable smile.

‘I haven’t made any specifications about the service, Mrs Gittings,’ he said, ‘but I believe there will be a clergyman on hand. If you want any kind of a prayer spoken over the casket, or a hymn . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished, no doubt realising as he said it how pathetic the three of us would sound striking up a chorus of ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.

‘I just want it to be over,’ Carla said, in a low, curt tone that left no room for further conversational pleasantries.

Our route took us through a part of London that’s one of my favourites. Mile End is steeped in tragic and tragicomic history in the same way that, say, a pickled pig’s trotter is steeped in vinegar. This was where the first of Hitler’s flying bombs rained down; where the spectacularly cocked-up launch of HMS Albion killed dozens of local kids who’d taken the day off school to see it glide off the slipway; where the resurrection men plied their trade and where Bishop and Williams murdered the Italian Boy. The rising of the dead is a fairly recent thing: but in Mile End the ghosts have soaked into the stone.

We drove on through Stepney to Bow Common, and just after Mile End Station we turned off the main drag, skirted the shapely backside of St Clement’s and turned in through the gates of the Mount Grace crematorium. We had no choice in any case, because the bottom of Ropery Street was blocked off: the building site that Todd had mentioned extended on both sides of the road, and oversized earth movers prowled behind the plywood hoardings like wind-up dinosaurs in some mechanical equivalent of Jurassic Park.

Mount Grace had a small frontage out on the street, but the grounds were deceptively spacious. They opened out in front of us as we rounded the oxbow drive, lined on both sides with tall yews, and we got a glimpse of the formal gardens of cmalronf to our left. They were a pretty but slightly sombre prospect, dominated by funereal cypress trees and heavy, po-faced stone balustrades. Two massive stone urns flanking an arched gateway with passion flowers trained up it on both sides marked the entrance to the garden of remembrance. Kind of an odd choice, was my first thought: then I remembered someone telling me that the passion referred to is the passion of Christ, so I guess it was all as per the party line. Death and resurrection: pay now, and live later.

The crematorium itself was pretty damn impressive, though. It was built in cream-coloured stone, its main mass coming forward to meet the drive while two wings extended towards the rear of the grounds on either side. It was crenellated, with scalloped curves rather than straight ups and downs: the overall effect made it look as though the building had been assembled out of jigsaw pieces.

I enjoyed it while I could. As I got closer, the presence of the dead announced itself first as a pressure, then as something like a continuous bass throbbing at the limits of my perception. As I think I mentioned before, I hate cemeteries. Crematoria are no better and no worse: they’re places where my death-sense wakes up like a jumpy nerve in a tooth.

The cortège rolled onto the gravel drive, the hearse itself taking pole position in front of the crematorium’s massive oak door. From this close up I got an even better view of the architecture. There were ornate carved crowns over the windows, and the remains of some very weathered bas-relief sculptures on the corners of the building – faceless caryatids supporting the actual cornices on their bent backs, scarred and blackened by generations of rainwater to the point where you couldn’t even guess what figures they’d been meant to represent. The four winds? The four elements? The Four Tops?

Our bearers had been travelling in the car behind. They got out first, opened the back of the hearse and slid out the runners, ready to move on Todd’s command. At the same time a man who had been standing on the front steps of the crematorium came down to greet us. From his appearance, I guessed that he wasn’t the clergyman Todd had mentioned: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, with white-blond hair and a craggy, stolidly handsome face. He was built like a rugby forward, but his face wore a solemn, measured expression that made me wonder whether my first impressions had been wrong: maybe he had taken holy orders, out in Beverly Hills somewhere. His slate-grey linen suit was as good as Todd’s; maybe better. The one I was wearing came from Burton’s. I generally pick them up in the sales when they’ll throw you in an extra pair of trousers for free, so you’ll appreciate that there are gaps in my sartorial education: once you get past the thousand-quid mark, my eye’s not good enough to make the fine distinctions.

We got out of the hearse. Todd and the newcomer locked stares in a way that was definitely hostile: viscerally, bitterly hostile, and bleeding out of their pores despite the constraints of the situation.

‘Maynard.’ The blond man held out his hand, and Todd stared at it for a moment, nonplussed. Then, looking cornered and unhappy, he took it, shook it in a single staccato up-down movement, and let it go again.

‘Mister Covington,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here. It’s very good of you to come.’ There was a slight thickening in his voice: it cost him an effort to get those words out.

The blond man shrugged easily. ‘I was in the neighbourhood,’ he said. ‘It seemed silly to pass the keys on to Fenwick or Digby when I could just come and open up myself.’

There was a perceptible pause. ‘Yes,’ said Todd. ‘I see. This is Mrs Gittings, and this is Felix Castor. And – umm –’ turning to us ‘– this is Peter Covington.’

Covington gave me the briefest of nods and turned his attention to Carla. I could see she was impressed: there was a sudden warmth that I could feel from where I was standing – a wave of easy benevolence that made the air around us ripple with a virtual heat haze. ‘I was sorry to hear about your loss,’ he said, and I think she believed him. Certainly she let him take her hand and squeeze it. He looked soulfully into her eyes, and for a long moment she looked back. Like I said, Carla generally goes for older men, but when she finally took possession of her hand again I thought I could detect a little reluctance on her side at least.

I was half-hoping that Blondie would offer the same hand to me, for curiosity’s sake – he had a lot of poise for a guy ten years my junior, and I would have been interested in reading him, but he just stepped back and indicated the doors with a gesture that was almost a bow.

‘I presume everything is ready inside,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to check – I’ve got a lot to do elsewhere, and I’m running late already. And I wouldn’t presume to join you for the actual ceremony. But my very best wishes to you all – and especially to you, Mrs Gittings. If there’s anything I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call.’

He took a card from his pocket and gave it to her with a decorous flourish. Carla took it without even looking at it. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured throatily.

The personable young man swept us all with a frank blue-eyed gaze, and then with a final murmur of farewell to Todd he headed off towards a small sleek black sports car parked at the other end of the drive. Todd watched him go, his attention taken up to the exclusion of everything else around him.

‘The owner?’ I said, as the bearers slid John’s coffin noisily onto the runners and drew the lawyer out of his reverie

Todd looked surprised for a moment, then he laughed with a slightly odd inflection. ‘No, Mister Castor. The owner is a man named Lionel Palance. He lives a long way from here, in Chingford Hatch, and he hardly ever leaves his house at all now. No, that was Peter Covington, a man who Mister Palance employs as a sort of – personal assistant.’ He rattled off these facts with a lawyer’s precision, as though it mattered that I should get the details straight in my head. Then he seemed to recollect himself, and his tone became more formal and solemn. ‘Mrs Gittings, shall we go in?’

We crossed the drive, following behind the bearers. Carla was still holding Covington’s card, because she’d left her handbag inside the car. ‘Fix,’ she said. ‘Would you . . . ?’ I took the card and secreted it away in the well-worn leather wallet where I keep my mostly useless credit cards.

The front doors of the crematorium opened onto a narrow entrance hall, almost long enough to count as a corridor, whose dark woods and vaulted ceiling confirmed the impression of age I’d got outside. Four huge inlaid panels dominated the space, two to each side of the door: a lion and an eagle to the left, an ox and a robed angel to the right. The symbols of the four evangelists. The carpet was royal blue, scuffed pale in places by the passage of many feet.

Ahead of us was another door. Black-suited men, presumably also hired by Todd, stood to either side of it and nodded respectfully to us as we passed. They looked like bouncers at a nightclub.

We walked though into a large high-ceilinged room that looked like any church hall anywhere, except for the dumbwaiter-like doors at the far end and the slightly sinister platform placed in front of them: a platform whose surface was a plain of slick, frictionless plastic rollers. I abreact to furnaces, probably because of having had to take my dad his lunch a couple of times when he worked behind the ovens in a bread factory. Places like this one always put me in mind of Satan’s locker room.

The bearers placed the coffin on the platform and stepped back, and at the same time a very short man in a black ecclesiastical robe came out through a curtained doorway off to one side. Todd went forward and had a brief murmured conversation with him, presumably along the lines of ‘This is the action replay, but let’s dispense with the slow motion and get it over with.’ The man nodded briskly. He had a slender face with a very long, sharp nose that made me think of a fox or a wolf. I’d seen a Japanese ivory once – a tiny figure, barely bigger than the top joint of my thumb – of a fox dressed as a priest, with a long robe and a staff and a pious expression: maybe it was unfair, because the nose must have been enough of a burden to bear in itself, but this young cleric brought the statuette vividly into my mind.

Todd had presumably told him that Carla didn’t want any prayers said, but he clearly wasn’t happy to let the occasion go by without ruminating on mortality just a little: force of habit, I figured, although technically he was wearing a surplice.

‘In the midst of life,’ he said, ‘we are in death.’ Two cheers and a thump on the tub for the Book of Common Prayer. Sitting in the front row, with Carla to my left and Todd to my right, I let my attention wander. Unfortunately it wandered to the furnace doors, where it found no comfort and shied away again pretty fast.

I was still feeling tired and rough: worse than I had when I woke up, if anything. The chill in the room was creeping into me, and the half-floral, half-chemical smell was turning my stomach. It didn’t help that beyond the walls the dead souls were massed thickly, sounding to my overdeveloped senses like a swarm of desert locusts.

There was another soul here, too: stronger, or at any rate closer. It hovered around our heads like an invisible cloud, making the lights in the room suddenly seem a fraction dimmer. But a cloud suggests something dispersed and diffuse, and this presence was localised: as my gaze panned across the room, it reached the coffin and stopped as if the coffin was a black hole, pulling light and matter and everything else in towards it.

The priest’s voice had taken on a hollow echo. There was an arrhythmical vibration rising behind it like a pulse, and the vibration danced against the surface of my skin, wave after wave, as though it was looking for a way in.

Neither Carla nor Todd seemed to be aware of any of this: they were both watching the priest, whose lips were still moving although I was damned if I could hear a word he was saying now. For a moment I wondered if I was just imagining the whole thing – if the nightmare and the lack of sleep were all just taking their toll – but then the feeling of general, overall pressure narrowed in on the front of my head and intensified into one of actual pain.

Todd slipped something into my hand, and I found myself staring down dully into a hip flask a little like my own, except that this one was slimmer and cased in black leather. Reflexively I raised it to my lips and took a hit. The liquor was very potent and very bitter, and it took a real effort not to gag. I passed the flask back to Todd and he slid it away into some recess of his suit where it didn’t spoil the hang.

The priest pressed a switch on the catafalque, and the coffin moved forward on its rollers. The waves of pressure in my skull built to a new crescendo as John Gittings’s body trundled towards the double doors like a very short wagon train rolling over black plastic prairie. The doors slid open on either side to receive him into the furnace beyond.

The pain was so intense now that I actually gasped. It was as if John had thrown out an invisible grapnel, trying to keep a purchase in this world, and one of the flukes had embedded itself in my skull.

Carla looked around at me in surprise. She put a hand on my arm but I waved it away: I had to get out of there. As casually as I could I lurched to my feet and stepped out into the aisle. I was heading for the door but suddenly I wasn’t even sure which way the door was. Instinctively, I walked away from the force that was pulling on me so hard: away from the coffin, half-convinced that I must be dragging it along behind me like a sheet anchor because the sensation of weight, of resistance, was so palpable.

The doors loomed into my field of vision and I took another step towards them. Carla was on her feet at my side, and Todd too. Hot air which must have been entirely imaginary billowed across my back. The hook bit deeper and I couldn’t move, couldn’t move at all now; couldn’t make myself walk forward, because a force as unanswerable as gravity was pulling me back towards that hot mouth behind me – pulling me back and down into the dark.

Someone shouted a name – a single syllable. My name? Possibly. I wouldn’t have wanted to be categorical on that subject right then, because I didn’t seem to have a name of my own: only a vague sense of a space that was me and a space that was everything else. And the oven’s searing heat was making the space that was me shrink away like the film of breath you leave on a window-pane.

Then suddenly the doors ahead of me were thrown open, and something miraculously beautiful filled my sight. It was Juliet. Vivid, ineffable, irreducible Juliet, a bookmark in the stodgy, samey script of the world that always lets you find your place. I fell into her arms like a drowning man, aware even through the sweltering ruck inside my head of her strength, the incredible ease with which she took my weight. The last thing I saw as the red of the furnace rose before my eyes was her face staring down into mine, a little surprised.

She said something too long and complicated for me to catch, but I was pretty sure that my name was in there somewhere.

Castor. Yeah, of course: I knew that.

Voices came towards me across a fractal landscape of synaesthetically throbbing shadow. They were raised in argument.

Todd telling Juliet that this was a private ceremony and she couldn’t just walk in off the street and interrupt it.

Juliet telling Todd in a calm and neutral tone that if he didn’t step way back out of her face he was likely to lose some internal organ that he couldn’t do without. No more from Todd after that.

The foxy priest asking if everyone would please, please sit down again so that the cremation could continue. Juliet telling him that he could go ahead and burn whoever he liked – she hadn’t come along to watch.

Carla asking Juliet who in hell she was, and Juliet saying that it was funny she should ask.

I must have been out for all of ten seconds. Ten seconds was more than enough, though, if Juliet was in a sour mood. It was lucky for all of us – and probably for Todd most of all – that she’d got out of the right side of Susan Book’s bed this morning.

I was lying on the ground, though, and that was a bad sign. If Juliet had put me down to free up her hands, things could be about to escalate. I started to sit up, my stomach lurching slightly as gravity sloshed around me like cooling soup.

‘Fix, are you all right?’ Carla knelt beside me and supported me as I tried to get my upper body vertical.

‘I’m fine, Carla,’ I said, and it was true that the blood-red haze was fading out to the corners of my eyes. I could think again, without feeling as though my brain was about to explode out of my ears like silly string. It was obvious I could think because I was doing it: I was thinking about Juliet’s legs, which were on a level with my face. Juliet’s legs are long and shapely, and they deserve a lot of very serious thought – especially when, as now, they were encased in tight black leather trousers and stiletto-heeled boots. But it wouldn’t help to restore dignity to the proceedings if I started howling like a wolf.

I stood up, taking in the rest of her outfit only in my peripheral vision. More blacks – her favourite colour, and she goes for every possible shade of it. Her arms and shoulders were bare, though, because her shirt was really only a vest, and it was made out of something almost diaphanous that allowed you to guess at the shape of the body underneath it. Sometimes, with Juliet, even peripheral vision was too much.

Todd was taking her in his stride, though, which was an impressive feat. Her threat to eviscerate him had made him stop talking, but he was staring at her with a cold composure that I still haven’t managed to master. Maybe lawyers are wired differently from the rest of us.

‘Mister Castor,’ he said, ‘is this a friend of yours?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Juliet, this is Carla Gittings – John’s widow. And Maynard Todd. John’s solicitor. Both of you, Juliet Salazar, a former colleague of mine.’

She gave each of them a glance that you could only call minimal. ‘You left a message with Sue,’ she said to me. ‘Something you wanted to ask me about.’

‘Yeah, but-’ I was about to ask her how she’d found me here, but I realised before I got the question out that it was like asking a dog how it had found a bone it had once buried. Juliet was a predator, and she had my scent: she could find me any time, anywhere, without the benefit of my number, my address or my permission. ‘I meant . . . afterwards,’ I finished lamely, conscious of the little priest looking at me with bristling resentment. ‘Could you wait for me outside? I’ll just be another ten minutes or so.’

Juliet considered, then nodded. ‘Ten minutes,’ she agreed, and she turned and walked out without another word. Again, Juliet walking out is something that stays in your mind for a long time after you’ve seen it, but I wouldn’t want to give you the impression that I’m obsessive in any way: it’s a side effect of what she is, that’s all. I tore my stare away, apologised to Carla and discovered with wry amusement that she was still staring at Juliet’s departing back.

The bride forgets it is her marriage morn;

The bridegroom too forgets as I go by.

But this wasn’t a wedding, it was a funeral, and I’d disrupted it more than enough. We went back to our seats. I looked across at the coffin, and listened, too – listened on the frequencies that the living don’t use all that much. Nothing. The dead still kept up their cricket-chirping from the garden of remembrance, but from John there wasn’t so much as a tinker’s fart. I had my answer now, at any rate: John’s vengeful ghost had anchored itself in his flesh again and come along with us for the ride. But if I’d been hoping that falling in with his plans for the afterlife would sweeten his disposition, then it looked as though I’d been mistaken.

On the credit side that last attack, if it was an attack, had spent him: as the priest pressed the switch again John Gittings in his sustainable-hardwood casket rolled through the furnace doors into eternity without valediction. What happened next would be a combination of the banal and the unknowable. His body would burn: the rest of him would start out on a different journey, and there were no maps or roadside services. I was obscurely sorry that my last goodbye to him had taken the form of a psychic wrestling match: even sorrier, maybe, that he’d had me on the ropes.

When it was all over I asked Carla if she’d be okay going back without me. She was easy on that score, because she’d already decided to cut loose and take a cab: she found that a little of Todd’s company went a long way, and it didn’t help at all to know that he was going out of his way to be friendly. From her point of view he’d still played a major part in the nightmare of the last few days, and he stuck in her craw no matter what.

I gave her a hug, promised to be back in touch the next day to see how she was, and headed for the door. Todd ran an intercept, and I stopped because otherwise I’d have had to trample him. He gave me a firm handshake and a hard, speculative glance.

‘Thanks for all your help, Mister Castor,’ he said.

‘My pleasure.’

‘You feeling okay now?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Nervous condition?’

‘Something like that.’ I pushed on past him: I liked the man well enough, but I wasn’t interested in talking about it right then.

Juliet was leaning against the wall in between the Lion of Saint Mark and the Eagle of Saint John, looking like the odd one out in a police line-up. She checked her watch meaningfully as I appeared. It was kind of cute: it’s not like she gives a damn about time in the days, hours and minutes sense, but it’s exactly the sort of human mannerism that fascinates her – and watching her reproducing it is like hearing someone talk in a sexy foreign accent.

‘Pushed for time?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got other places to be, yes,’ she confirmed, kicking off from the wall and falling in beside me. ‘I came all the way over here because Sue said you sounded worried. She thought it might be something urgent. If it’s not, just tell me: I’ll go back to where I belong and you can send me a letter.’

‘Where you belong?’ I raised an eyebrow. That’s something of a loaded proposition when you’re an earthbound demon.

‘You know what I mean.’

We walked down the steps and out into bright, clear winter sunlight: the clouds had rolled away while we were inside and the day had taken on an entirely different cast. I welcomed it with something like relief.

‘It’s about a crime scene you read for Gary Coldwood,’ I said, as we walked down the curved drive back towards the street. Silence now from the gardens: the dead were in communion, maybe welcoming a newbie into their hallowed ranks.

‘Alastair Barnard,’ Juliet said.

‘Lucky guess.’

‘Gary called me. He said you were taking an interest in the case, and he reminded me that I’d signed a confidentiality agreement with the Met when I took their retainer.’

‘Good money?’

‘You did it for three years, Castor. I assume that’s a rhetorical question.’

‘So he told you not to talk to me?’

‘Not in so many words. But he’s concerned to do things by the book. He has a past association with you, and now you’ve taken on a commission from somebody – the accused man’s wife? – who has a real interest in sabotaging his case. He doesn’t want to make life difficult for you, but he doesn’t trust you overmuch.’

I laughed at that. ‘He’s right not to,’ I admitted. ‘But I like the delicate nuances there. He’s saying that he could make life hard for me if he wanted to.’

Juliet shrugged. ‘He’s a policeman.’

‘Say cop,’ I suggested.

‘Why?’

‘Just say it. For me.’

‘All right. He’s a cop.’

‘Better. It’s like looking at your watch when you want to say that you’re in a hurry. It sounds more authentic.’

She shot me a sardonic glance. ‘Thank you, Castor.’

‘It’s my pleasure.’

We came out through the gates onto the street, the noise from the building site making further talk impossible for a few moments. As we turned right and back up towards the main drag, a very tall and very lean man in a full-length tan Drizabone coat walked right in between us. Juliet kept on going but I swerved to avoid a collision, and was struck by the guy’s pungent smell, which sat oddly with the way he looked and walked.

I went on a few more steps, then stopped dead. Something about both the smell and the circumstances triggered a small avalanche in my memory: the tramp who’d accosted me in the street outside Todd’s office. He’d looked very different, but he had the same rancid sweat-and-sickness stink about him. There couldn’t be two smells that bad in the world: they’d have to meet and fight it out to the death.

I turned and looked back, but the guy was already out of sight – which was interesting, because the only place he could have gone was in through the crematorium gates. As Juliet stared at me, bewildered, I sprinted back the way we’d come, rounded the nearer gatepost and stared up the long, clear drive. There was no one in sight.

‘Did you leave something behind?’ Juliet asked.

I shook my head as I went back to join her. ‘Nothing I need right now,’ I said. ‘It’ll keep. Okay, you already did pretending that you’re worried about the time. You want to go and pretend you need to eat?’

She nodded. ‘Certainly.’ She put her hand in her pocket and drew it out with something small and dark glinting between her fingers. She pressed it with her thumb and the car that was standing beside her on the pavement – a very jaunty-looking little number that was wasp-yellow and sleek and elongated at the front end in a way that suggested a great amount of discreetly stabled horsepower – made a self-satisfied warbling sound. Juliet opened the door.

‘Get in,’ she said.

I stared incredulously at this transport of delight. I’m not a car fetishist by any means, but I know something way out of my price range when I see it. The badge on the bonnet bore the distinctive trident logo of Maserati – a sweet little touch for a demon’s wheels. It had a very low centre of gravity, the sculpted cowling underneath the front bumper almost touching the road. It had the look of a car that might have ‘Gransport’ in its name, and maybe ‘Spyder’ too.

‘Is there something wrong, Castor?’ Juliet asked, with an edge of impatience.

‘No,’ I assured her. ‘No, I’m fine. It’s just – you can drive now?’

‘Obviously. I’ve been living among human beings for more than a year, Castor. I’m not intimidated by your technologies.’

‘And – you drive this?’

‘It was a gift,’ Juliet said simply, sliding in behind the wheel with the sinuous grace of a cat curling itself up to sleep.

I didn’t ask. But don’t think I didn’t want to know.