Dead Men's s Boots

10

A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.

It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.

In the separate system, though, the cruelty was a bit more refined than that. The designers still made a big deal out of having clear lines of sight and high-mounted guard platforms, but the main inspiration here was to knock the fight out of the prisoners by denying them any human contact. Not only was the prison as a whole split up into a sprawl of different wings that had no contact with each other, but the same separation was enforced at meals, in chapel, even in the exercise yard. Inside, cubicle walls divided every shared space into a honeycomb of miniature rooms, so you were always alone even when there were a thousand people sitting or standing right next to you. Outside, you wore a specially designed cap with a downward-extended peak to hide your face, and nobody ever used your real name. Like Jean Valjean, or Patrick McGoohan, your number became your official identity. If you failed to answer to your number, you got a week in a punishment cell. If you gave your name to another prisoner, you got another year nailed onto your sentence.

It was a roaring success, in terms of making the prisoners docile: after a few months of this treatment, most of them were as meek as lobotomised lambs. Okay, a few of them – maybe more than a few – would slip a little further along the bell-shaped curve, from passivity into apathy, and then into psychotic withdrawal or catatonia. But some people are never going to be happy no matter how much you do for them.

After a high-profile lawsuit brought by the family of a guy named William Ball, who went into Pentonville sane and came out a frothing berserker, they started to liberalise the regime, and the whole idea of control by dehumanisation went into a bit of a decline in the UK until they opened Belmarsh in 1991. Pentonville’s not that bad today, if you compare it to somewhere like Brixton or the Scrubs. It’s even got its own pool room and a big bare hall where you can show movies – and its blindingly whitewashed frontage is so meticulously maintained that it causes regular pile-ups when drivers coming along the Caledonian Road incautiously glance across at it just as the sun breaks out of cloud cover.

All the same, as Juliet and I checked in through the clanging gates and banging doors the next morning, it didn’t seem like the jolliest place on earth. The acoustics in a prison are unique: every echo sounds like a taunt or an insinuation, and there are always a lot of echoes. It didn’t help that the sky outside was blue-grey like a bruise, with the first drops of rain just starting to fall, or that the security procedures, even for remand prisoners, are so much like decontamination protocols: as though you’re bringing the outside world in with you, and they don’t want any atom of it touching the prisoners.

We were randomly chosen to be searched, but given the effect that Juliet has on people of all sexes and persuasions I wasn’t sure how much randomness was actually involved. The women officers who searched her certainly took their time over it, and I had to loiter outside the guard station long after their male counterparts had impounded my hip flask and ceremonial dagger and given me a receipt. When the doors opened and Juliet strode on out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed her looked a little dazed and haunted: it was just a standard non-intimate search – a ‘rub-down’ – but if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes also into you.

Reunited, we were ushered through another set of doors – more bangs and clangs, more echoes, like the opening credits of Porridge – to the interview hall.

Remand prisoners have their own visiting room, and although there’s a guard present the regime is a bit more relaxed than it is for other inmates. Instead of the glass shields and wall-phones you see in the movies, there’s a room like the common room in a school: bare walls enlivened by a few yellowing posters advertising long-defunct public information campaigns, semi-comfortable chairs set up around low tables, and a coin-op coffee machine.

The room was empty, and I threw a questioning look at the guard, who wrenched his stare away from Juliet with an effort.

‘He’s on his way down, sir,’ he said. ‘Won’t keep you more than a minute or two.’

Juliet crossed to one of the clusters of chairs and sat down to wait. I got a coffee from the machine before I joined her. She watched me approach with detached interest.

‘You’re walking a little stiffly,’ she observed as I sat down. ‘I noticed that yesterday but I forgot to ask.’

‘Someone tried to drop me down a lift shaft a few nights ago. It’s okay. I dodged.’

Stuff like that doesn’t faze Juliet in the slightest. She noted my unwillingness to talk and didn’t ask any more. The truth was, that whole incident with the faulty lift had been preying on my mind more than somewhat. If someone tries to kill a private detective, then it’s almost a mark of respect: it means you’re getting close to something, and the opposition are taking you seriously. If someone tries to kill a jobbing exorcist, and if said exorcist is as badly in the dark as I felt right then, it’s probably just a sign of a basic character flaw.

Or maybe I was close to something, and I was just too dense to see it when it was right under my nose. That was a sobering thought, and I was still soberly thinking about it when a man walked into the room. It obviously wasn’t Doug Hunter: too old, for one thing, and for another he didn’t fit the description Jan had given me in any respect at all. He was slightly built, almost bald and very pale. He wore a nondescript light grey suit that looked as faded as his skin, but his eyes were a darker, colder grey, magnified by strong prescription lenses, and his thin face wore an expression of brusque impatience.

‘Mister Castor?’ he inquired. I was expecting him to do the usual comic double take when he saw Juliet, but from where he was standing she must have been out of sight behind me.

‘That’s me,’ I said.

‘My name’s Maxwell. Doctor Maxwell. I’m one of the medical staff here at the prison. Douglas Hunter is a patient of mine, and I need to speak with you before you see him. If you’ve a moment?’

I nodded, but he was taking my assent for granted and already carrying on. ‘Douglas’s condition is still deteriorating,’ he said. ‘Even just in the last few days, there’s been a marked change, and it’s all for the worse.’

My confusion must have shown on my face. ‘He’s not well?’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise—’

Maxwell made a palms-out ‘don’t put words in my mouth’ gesture. ‘The medical situation is complicated by the legal one,’ he said. ‘Not an unusual occurance in here. I’ve made a diagnosis, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t share it with you. The point is that Douglas has had to be quite heavily medicated. With aripiprazole, if that means anything to you.’

‘It doesn’t,’ I admitted.

Maxwell raised his eyebrows expressively. ‘It will mean something to the defence, mark my words,’ he said. ‘The point is, since this is your first visit you’re apt to find him a little odd to talk to. He’ll be drowsy and unresponsive, but at the same time he’s likely to show a certain restlessness and discomfort. These are side effects of the drug, not of his condition.’

‘And his condition is –?’ I probed.

Maxwell made the same gesture again. ‘I can’t discuss that with you right now,’ he said, ‘although I’ve discussed it at length with Mrs Hunter. The other reason for me coming in to talk to you like this is that I’m advising you very strongly not to excite or upset Douglas in any way. If you do, it could have an adverse effect on his condition and it could be unpleasant – physically unpleasant, I mean – for you. The governor is keen that you should express understanding of these conditions. He would have liked you to sign a waiver, but he’s aware that everything I’m saying here has nuances which could be significant in a court of law.’

I shook my head in complete mystification. I had the unusual and uncomfortable sense of meanings flying over my head, unapprehended.

‘You mean that he’s mentally ill?’ I asked, groping blindly in the dark.

‘The governor? No, he’s very well balanced, taking into account a constitutional tendency towards depression.’

‘Doug Hunter.’

‘That would fall under doctor-patient privilege,’ Maxwell said, with a rigidly impassive face.

Juliet appeared at my side and he blanched. It took some doing, with a face that was already so pale.

‘What is aripiprazole, doctor?’ she murmured in her throat. ‘I’ve always wondered.’

Maxwell looked like a distressed fish – if a fish could be simultaneously caught on a hook and out of its depth. ‘Well, that information is in the public domain,’ he floundered. ‘You could look it up very easily.’

‘And if we did?’ Juliet pressed, without mercy. ‘What would we find?’

‘It’s a partial – a partial agonist to the D2 receptor. A dopaminergic modulator, if you will, in the mesolimbic—’

‘In English?’

‘An anti-psychotic!’ Maxwell blurted. ‘I really have to – this comes under-’

‘Doctor-patient privilege,’ Juliet finished. ‘Of course. Thank you, doctor.’

She moved her head, just a fraction, and Maxwell seemed to wake from a trance. He excused himself with as meaningless a combination of syllables as I’ve ever heard and fled back through the door by which he’d entered.

‘You could have cut him some slack,’ I chided Juliet. ‘He was just trying to do his job.’

‘I was only asking for clarification, Castor.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘And I respected his holding to those professional standards. I admire men whose passions are intellectual and moral. In fact I find that really arousing.’

I gave her a hard look to see if she was taking the piss, but she bowed her head demurely and sat down so I didn’t get a good look at her face. At that moment the door opened again and Doug Hunter came in between two burly guards.

He made quite a strong impression, even in his prison greys. As Jan had already told me, he was big and well muscled: handsome, too, I was prepared to assume, in that his face was symmetrical and featured a square jaw and vividly blue eyes, two perennial favourites. Or three, if you count each eye as a separate feature. His striated mid-brown hair looked as shaiyes though it might originally have been a darker brown, but had then been bleached by years of working in the open air until it looked like flax and straw bundled together. He stood slightly stiffly, legs together, almost as though he was standing to attention.

But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple, just above his eye. His nails left livid marks on his pale skin: three parallel lines, like the feverish crossings out in John Gittings’s A to Z.

‘Mister Hunter.’ I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room towards us. The guard who’d come in with him moved off to one side but stayed close, keeping him in view, and the other guard who’d been waiting with us took up a position off to the other side, about the same distance away. Remand or not, they knew what Doug was up for – probably knew what Doc Maxwell’s diagnosis was, too – and they weren’t taking any chances.

Doug ignored the hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, of course, but maybe it was worth noting in this case. Whatever flavour of sexuality Doug generally favoured, he seemed to be capable of responding on some level to Juliet’s charms. I filed that fact away for future reference.

‘You know why we’re here?’ I asked him.

He nodded slowly, turning to look at me again with a slight widening of the eyes, as though he’d forgotten in the interim that I was there.

‘You’re here,’ he said simply.

His voice was different from what I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent at all, and it was so strangely uninflected that it was almost like a robot’s voice. Except that most robots these days use sampled sound from human voices, so they sound more animated and a whole lot warmer than Doug Hunter did.

Coldwood’s sexual-psychopath hypothesis made sense to me at that moment. Doug sounded like a man whose brain was currently operating only a minimal service during extensive refurbishments. But then again, how much of that was the man and how much was the drug?

‘Right. Exactly. We’re here to talk to you. Would you like to sit down? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far, which isn’t very much, and where we can go from here.’

He didn’t take up the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face to face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent. Juliet hadn’t got up from her seat, or spoken yet. She was watching Hunter intently, unblinkingly.

‘From here,’ Hunter echoed. For a second I thought he was so zoned out on the anti-psychotics that all I was going to get out of him would be echolalia, but then he shook his head very slightly, left and then right and then left again. ‘Never getting out of here,’ he commented, not in the tone of a lament but looking slightly mystified that I’d raised the issue at all. ‘Not now. Not after all that – everything. Everything else. Going to miss it. Only three days left, now. Till the dark of the moon. They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it. They won’t be happy.’

He frowned and shook his head in slow, sombre disapproval.

‘Well,’ I responded, as though everything he’d just said made perfect sense to me, ‘you knew what Jan hired me for. She doesn’t believe that you killed Barnard, and she thinks that your best bet at trial might be to try to establish that someone else was in that room along with the two of you. A dead someone else, which is why she came to me. But obviously I’d like to hear your version of what happened.’

‘My version.’ Hunter looked down at his hands momentarily, palms up, as though he was checking to see if they were clean. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, as if to himself. ‘Nothing.’

This was getting us nowhere fast. I sat down next to Juliet, hoping Hunter might follow my lead, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking up at the ceiling.

‘My version’s older than that,’ he murmured, so low I almost didn’t catch the words.

‘Was there someone else, Doug?’ I asked, trying again. ‘Did someone else come into the hotel room with you? Or afterwards? How did Barnard die?’

He lowered his head slowly, making eye contact with me almost accidentally at the bottom of that long, gradual arc.

‘The hammer,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what she used? I’m not sure any more, but that’s what I remember. His head – was very – I can ask her. If you like.’

‘Then there was someone else?’ I demanded again. The eerie dissociation of his mood was in the air like something you could breathe in and catch. I had to fight the urge to push my chair back away from him, and to force myself to take normal breaths instead of sipping the tainted atmosphere as shallowly as I could.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Just me,’ he muttered. ‘Just me and her. Nobody else. Maybe a dead man. Maybe some people who were dead. Nobody else.’ A ponderous frown passed across his face like a ripple across muddy water. ‘I think he sucked me. My cock. But I can’t remember why now. That’s really disgusting.’

He sighed, long and deep, and sat down at last, opposite me. ‘I sprained my ankle,’ he said, sounding slightly wistful. ‘And they took me next door. To the church. If they’d had a first-aid kit – but it was all cash in hand, no tax, no pack drill. Nobody to keep the site up to code. Thought they might have some painkillers, or a surgical bandage. Stupid.’

There was a long silence, which I didn’t try to fill. I had a feeling that if I let him free-associate he might lead me to something important. But after a minute or two I realised that he’d retreated back into his own head and wasn’t coming out again without coaxing.

‘When was this, Doug?’ I asked. ‘When you were working at the site?’

He blinked – once, twice, three times. ‘They gave me – glass of water,’ he said. ‘Called an ambulance. Told me to wait. Too late by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.’

Hunter’s eyes seemed to clear abruptly and opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt: he stared at me suddenly with intense, unreadable emotion. I kept waiting for him to blink again but he didn’t.

‘You don’t know,’ he said, with aching bitterness in his voice.

‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more and more uneasy about how this was going. ‘I don’t. But I’m trying to find out. I’m an exorcist. Your wife hired me to try to find out whether there’s any possibility that Myriam Kale – the ghost of Myriam Kale – was involved in Alastair Barnard’s death. She believes that if we can find evidence Kale’s ghost was in the room at the time of the murder we might be able to raise a reasonable doubt about your guilt. Is that something you have an opinion on?’

I was assuming that most of this would wash over Hunter but to my surprise he responded with something coherent. His blue-eyed unsettling stare still locked on my face, but his eyes narrowed now, which I’ll admit was something of a relief.

‘I think that’d be a good one,’ he said, ‘if anyone could do it. Not in the room, though. Not when he was lying there. If you’d seen what it was like when she was working on him, you wouldn’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. She’s not a ghost. She’s never been a ghost.’

‘What is she, then?’ I asked, fighting the urge to push my chair back and get some distance from that tortured, unblinking gaze.

To my surprise, Hunter laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. ‘She says she’s the one thing they never wanted to happen. Because it’s not a game for her. It’s not a job. She can’t stop. They want to make her stop but they don’t know how. And she doesn’t know either. So she works and works and works at it, one man at a time, and – she used a hammer. I’m pretty sure it was one of mine. But there aren’t enough hammers in the whole damn world for—’

He frowned suddenly, and it was like a light going off behind his face. ‘An exorcist?’ he demanded, and I realised that he was echoing what I’d said a minute or so before.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m an exorcist.’

Hunter shook his head in pained wonder.

‘Won’t work,’ he said, sounding angry and impatient. ‘If it was that easy, they’d all have gone years ago. But they won’t like it, all the same. If I were you, and believe me I’d sooner be the shit on your shoe, I’d be running now. I’d be taking a train to somewhere a long way away and changing my name to – to fucking Smith or something. You idiot. What do you think you can do? You can’t do anything.’

‘I’m still going to try,’ I said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Jan sent you, didn’t she?’ Hunter demanded, his voice modulating weirdly so that the wrong words were emphasised and the sounds fought against the sense. ‘She can’t help me now. You – just leave. Just get out of here. And you tell her – tell her to forget about him. He didn’t ask any of you to get involved in –’ he hesitated, blinking rapidly now ‘– in my life, or in what’s happening to me. In fact, I’m telling you not to. You don’t have the right.’ The guards stepped in closer, alert to the change in Hunter’s tone, but he didn’t make any move towards me. He seemed to be in pain as well as angry.

‘I’m sorry about Jan,’ Hunter said, and the catch in his voice as he spoke her name made me pretty sure he meant it. ‘Really, really sorry. I know – how much she’s got to be missing me. But he’s not coming back. Not after what I did. I can’t help that now. I can’t even make the inscription. She should find somebody else. She needs to.’

The word ‘inscription’ jolted me out of my seat, but Hunter was up again too before I could get a word out. He kicked the chair away with his heel, muscles working in his broad neck as he ground his teeth together. ‘He’s not coming back,’ he repeated. ‘I’m going to sort this out for myself and I’m going to go my own way. Don’t try to save me. She killed a man. She doesn’t deserve to be saved, and she doesn’t want to be.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but Juliet stood up very abruptly, stepped around the table and came up very close to Hunter, her face only an inch or so from his, her eyes and his locked in a point-blank staring contest. He froze for a moment, then a shiver went through him. I had a worm’s-eye view, from directly underneath, so I saw his fist clench. The guards saw it too and they all moved at the same time, but I was closer so I got there first. I caught the fist two-handed as it came up and back, using Hunter’s own momentum to pull him off balance so that he lurched and had to shift his weight to keep from falling. He tried to yank his hand away from me but only succeeded in pulling me to my feet: I kept my two-handed grip as long as I could, until finally the guards got hold of Hunter by his shoulders and forearms and hauled him backwards out of my reach: even then I followed for a couple of steps, letting go at the last moment as the guards half-marched, half-carried him back through the doors and out of the room.

‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted at me. ‘Don’t come near me! I’m not doing this any more! I’ve had enough! Just let me go! Just let me-!’

The doors slammed to with a terminal click, drowning out the rest of his words.

I sat down again, very abruptly, feeling a little like a puppet with its strings cut. Juliet stared down at me with measured curiosity.

‘You felt it,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded, but when she opened her mouth to speak again I raised my hand in a stop gesture.

‘Outside,’ I parried. ‘Not here.’ The truth was that I didn’t want to put it into words. I didn’t want to look at it yet, although I realised as I sat there and finished my cold coffee that it was impossible to look away from. Juliet waited in silence, making no attempt to hide her impatience.

A guard – one of the two who’d entered with Hunter – came in at last through the prisoners’ door and let us out through the visitors’ one.

‘Is he all right?’ I asked.

‘Not really, sir, no,’ the guard grunted. ‘He’s quieter, though. And Doctor Maxwell will come along in a little while and give him another shot.’

Yeah, I thought. I just bet he will.

We threaded our way through the door and gates and screens, reclaimed our effects at the front desk and escaped back out into the big wide world, where the chains are mostly metaphorical and easier to cope with.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Juliet asked as we walked towards the Tube station in a chill, soul-sapping drizzle.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, hedging. ‘If Hunter is losing his mind, a lot of this becomes academic. Even if he ducks a murder rap, he’s going into a secure mental unit and he’s not coming out for a long time.’

‘Is he losing his mind?’ Juliet countered.

‘I’m just talking about how he’ll come across to a jury,’ I said. ‘Nobody hearing him talk is going to believe his picnic is fully catered.’

Juliet stopped, so I had to stop too. We stared at each other: I didn’t enjoy that as much as I usually do.

‘All right,’ I admitted, feeling eerily detached from myself so that I heard my own words as I spoke them. ‘Kale is in there with him. He’s possessed.’

Juliet nodded brusquely. ‘Of course he is.’

‘Although we both know that’s not possible,’ I added, feeling the need to wave a feeble flag on behalf of common sense.

‘It’s possible for my kind. It’s easy for my kind.’

‘Yeah, but not for human ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘You know what the loup-garous are, Juliet, and why they are. And the zombies, come to that. If human ghosts could possess living human bodies, they wouldn’t cling to their own dead flesh or take up residence in fully furnished vermin. A demon versus a human soul, that’s one thing. But soul against soul is different: the home team always wins. There isn’t a single example on record of – this. Of a dead soul driving out a living one.’

Juliet ladled a lot of sardonic emphasis into her next words. ‘I’m sorry, Castor. You’re the expert. But you said yourself that the situation is more complicated than that. She hasn’t driven him out: she’s merely cohabiting. As you said, they’re sharing that body. Sometimes he spoke as Hunter, sometimes as Kale. It probably wouldn’t take you very much effort to cut her loose.’

The casual, brutal observation took me by surprise. ‘Exorcise her? Yeah, I could do that. But I’d have to get in close to Hunter and stay there for a good long while, until I got a strong enough sense of Kale to be able to play her out. He’s not going to let me do that, is he?’

‘Or she isn’t.’

I grimaced and carried on walking again. Juliet’s footsteps don’t make any sound unless she wants them to, so I had to look out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was still with me.

We walked along in silence for a while, and then I threw her own question back at her.

‘What are you planning to do? I suppose you’re good now, right? You fingered Hunter for Gary Coldwood, and now we know that Hunter did it. Or at least Hunter’s body did it. And if Kale is still in residence, then you got the right man. Woman. Whatever.’ Something that had occurred to me briefly while Hunter had been talking came back to niggle at me again. What about the missing hammer? My hypothesis that someone had taken it to shield the real killer looked pretty sick if the real killer was the one that all the rest of the evidence already pointed at. You might just as well steal a pillow off the bed or a towel out of the bathroom. Unless-

‘I think we need to know more,’ Juliet said bluntly, sending the fugitive thought skittering.

‘About Hunter?’ I demanded. ‘Or about Kale?’

‘About both, probably. Coldwood hired me to tell him what happened in room seventeen of the Paragon. I thought I’d done that, but now I’ll have to go back and tell him that I was wrong. That he’s brought in a dead murderer as well as a living one. When I do that, I want to be able to answer any questions that he might have.’

‘And is that all?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, it isn’t. You don’t catch ghosts like you catch a cold, Castor. If Kale is inside Hunter, there’s an explanation for how she got there, and we ought to know what that is. We need to know. Because it changes the nature of the game, for all of us. All the ghostbreakers. Everyone who binds the dead and the undead for a living.’

I was relieved that Juliet was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option I had right now. Apart from anything else, it meant I’d have to look over my shoulder every time I got into a goddamn lift. And Hunter – or the thing speaking through Hunter’s mouth – had used that word. Inscription. The same word that had cropped up in the fragment of notepaper inside John Gittings’s pocket watch: and, probably less significantly, in my dream.

‘We can backtrack Hunter’s movements,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can figure out where and when he picked up his passenger.’

‘By talking to his wife?’

‘To start with, yeah. And there’s something else we can do. Something a little bit more radical – but it’ll take some time to set up.’

‘Go on.’

‘We can raise the ghost of Myriam Kale.’

Juliet looked at me and laughed – a liquid, musical sound. ‘Raise? You don’t think she might already have ideas above her station?’

‘I mean pull as opposed to push,’ I snapped, her cold amusement stinging me probably more than it was meant to. ‘It’s another way of getting to the same place. If we can find something that belonged to her when she was alive – something she’s got a strong enough link to – then we don’t need to get close to Hunter. We can call her from a distance. Bring her out from inside him and make her come and talk to us. Two birds with one stone: we set Hunter free and we get a chance to get the story out of Kale’s own mouth.’

‘Well, that’s going to the source,’ Juliet observed dryly. ‘I like it. But to bring up the obvious objection: do you think you can obtain something that was hers?’

You can use clichés on Juliet with a certain amount of impunity, because most of them aren’t clichés in the ninth circle of Hell. ‘No,’ I admitted, deadpan. ‘But I know a man who can.’

I’d agreed to meet Nicky Heath in St James’s Park – his idea, and coming from him it was a pretty weird one.

Nicky lives in an abandoned cinema out in Walthamstow, and he has as little to do with daylight as he can. He’s not afraid of it, exactly, but he’s morbidly aware of his core temperature and he keeps it as low as he can. That means staying in the dark whenever it’s an option, using eco-friendly light bulbs because they produce less waste heat than the regular variety, spending a part of every day sitting in a big chest freezer with the lid down, and not getting too close to anyone who’s warm and breathing.

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 sormise 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.