Dead Men's s Boots

18

The waitress at the Golden Coffee House had clearly taken a fancy to Juliet: the fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

‘The blond man from out of town,’ she said. ‘The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.’

‘Yeah.’ I ran the conversation through again in my mind, placed the reference. ‘The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?’

‘He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she heard your accent.’

That made a lot of sense now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that it was the mention of Myriam that had made Ruth weak at the knees: but there couldn’t be many other reasons besides Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. In a different way, though, this didn’t either.

‘When she told that story,’ I said, picking over the logic in my mind, ‘she didn’t give the impression that she was there when Tyler died. In fact I’m pretty sure she said she was told about it afterwards.’

Juliet bit through a chicken leg, flesh and bone and all, and crunched down hard. She nodded, mouth full, but I had to wait for elaboration until she’d chewed and swallowed.

‘She wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘But she met this man later. He’d been sent to kill Tyler by Myriam, that’s fairly obvious. Probably he arranged the other deaths, too – Lucas and the other two brothers. Ruth always knew she had a guardian angel, and she knew who it was. But there was no reason why Myriam couldn’t work through proxies.

‘The man came up to the farm on the day of Myriam’s execution, and he introduced himself. Under the circumstances, which I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you, the fact that he’d helped to beat Tyler Seaforth to death wasn’t much of a barrier to polite conversation. Ruth was much more inclined to kiss his hands than to call the police.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘The name he gave her was Bergson.’

I almost laughed. ‘I think that’s a pretty rarefied piece of wordplay,’ I said. ‘Bergson was a French philosopher back in the 1930s. I think he had some idea about a universe of pure spirit. Kind of like Plato, only with a more outrageous accent.’

‘Ruth didn’t believe that was his real name. The point was that he told her – told her so she knew it was the truth – that he’d worked for Myriam or done favours for her in the past. And he said he was still working on her behalf now. He insisted on that: all of this was for Myriam’s sake.

‘He gave Ruth the address and telephone number of the Illinois State Penitentiary, and he told her everything she needed to know about claiming Myriam’s body. She had an absolute legal right, he said: all she had to do was exercise it. The body should be brought to the farm, and she should refuse all offers of help with the burial. If anyone asked, she was to say that it was all taken care of. And as soon as she was alone – as soon as the circus of cops and journalists and death-junkies was off the premises – she was to call him on a number he gave her.’

‘Ruth had her doubts, but she also felt she had good reasons to trust this man. She argued it backwards and forwards with herself, but in the end she did what she’d been told. She called him and told him when is was safe to come.

‘He drove out in a flat-bed truck, with two other men. They loaded the casket onto the truck, and tied it down. They covered it with a tarpaulin. Then just before they left, Ruth screwed up her courage and asked the blond man where they were taking her dead sister. He didn’t want to answer, but she burst into tears and begged him. She was going to be left alone, she told him. More alone than she’d ever been. She didn’t miss her father or her brothers in the slightest, but now Myriam was gone and she didn’t have anyone. The least he could do was tell her where he was taking her.’

‘And in the end he did. “To the next life,” he said.’

I let a forkful of mashed potato drop back into the mountainous mass I’d scooped it from.

‘Fuck,’ I said blankly. It wasn’t Oscar Wilde but it expressed my feelings. ‘What are we talking about here? Gangsters raising gangsters from the dead? Why? Out of professional courtesy? And how could he promise that if he hadn’t done it before? It’s like some kind of fucking resurrectionist assembly line. Dead men pulling themselves up out of the grave by each other’s bootstraps . . .’

‘You may be exaggerating the scale of this,’ Juliet told me coolly. ‘We still only know for sure about two cases. Kale, and the man who was both Aaron Silver and then Les Lathwell.’

She was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better. ‘The scary thing is that fingerprint,’ I muttered, shoving my plate away still mostly full. ‘If they’ve found a way to cheat, Juliet – to steal the bodies of the living out from under them, the same way you and your brothers and sisters can – and if they can do it on the money, time after time . . .’

‘Two big ifs,’ Juliet observed. I was barely listening. The same ones as before, John had said to me when I met him in my dream. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

Shying away from that unpleasant thought, I found another one that had been niggling at me while she spoke. ‘Did Mister X say why he was doing all this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, we know from all the available evidence that he wasn’t sleeping with Myriam. He wouldn’t have woken up again. So was he trying to recruit her? Did he owe her a favour? What was in it for him?’

Juliet impaled me on a cold stare. ‘Ruth thinks he loved her. Passionately.’

‘Then why was he still alive?’

‘Perhaps he never raped her.’

‘Alastair Barnard never raped her, either,’ I pointed out. ‘If anything, it was the other way around, but he’s still dead. And not because he was an abuser of women. He was fucking gay.’

‘Married and gay.’

‘Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.’

‘And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?’

I blinked. ‘Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.’

‘By exorcising her.’

‘Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the programme.’

‘Not for me.’

The sudden hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said: it was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room was listening.

‘Say how what now?’

Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly off-handed shrug. ‘Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathise. More. I find a certain elegance in it.’

I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Where’s the elegance in a random murder spree spanning half a century? Getting your own back on the men who abused you is one thing: carving your way through the whole male gender is another.’

I could see from Juliet’s expression that this little speech hadn’t made the slightest dent in her. With an unpleasant going-down-in-a-lift feeling in my stomach, I saw where this was going. If Juliet enlisted in Myriam Kale’s cause, things could get messy: so messy I didn’t want to think about it.

‘What about your rep?’ I asked her, changing tack. ‘You said it was a big thing to you to deliver as promised. Doug Hunter didn’t kill Barnard. We know that now. He was possessed.’

‘It was his hand that held the hammer.’

‘But not his mind that decided to. Like you said, you were paid to uncover the truth about what happened in that hotel room. Are you going to stop halfway because suddenly you’re a cheerleader for the real murderer? And what about the others – Mister X and his friends? All the other fun-loving criminals who’ve been buried in coffins fitted with sliding doors? They’re all men, apart from Myriam. They may have been using her in some game of their own. They’ve certainly left her to carry the can for this latest killing.’

Juliet had gone back to eating. She was listening to me, but I wasn’t having any impact. I was unnerved by the mask-like impassivity in her face. Normally Juliet doesn’t bother to disguise her feelings because her feelings come out like water from a high-pressure hose. Right there and then I couldn’t read her at all. And I had just the one shot left in my locker.

‘You think she’s happy?’ I asked.

Juliet set down the nub-end of bone that was all that was left of her chicken leg. Her eyes impaled mine.

‘What?’

‘Kale. Do you think she’s happy? Because she didn’t look happy to me, staring out from behind Doug Hunter’s face. One prison inside another prison, that’s how I saw it. She looked like someone stuck in a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. And Jan said she used to hear Doug crying at night, for hours—’

‘All right.’ Juliet’s tone was cold, clipped. ‘So?’

‘So carry on working with me. Let’s at least find out what the fuck is really going on, and where she comes into it. Maybe find out what she really wants. What’s keeping her walking, and killing, and raping, forty years after she fried. Then you can decide what you want to do.’

I looked up to find the waitress standing at my shoulder with the menus. She stared at me with big, startled eyes: she must have heard most of that last speech.

‘Umm – you want any coffee or dessert?’ she blurted. ‘Or should I just –?’ She mimed turning around and walking away.

‘I think we’re good,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Just the bill.’

The waitress fled, and Juliet stood, moving with a slight stiffness that suggested she still wasn’t fully recovered from her earlier evisceration.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But I take the point. Perhaps she isn’t happy. And perhaps that is my responsibility, at least partly, since I provided some of the evidence that Coldwood used to arrest her.’

Jumping up myself, I caught her wrist. ‘Juliet, no,’ I said, appalled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what she needs at all. She’s trapped in a loop. She’s still getting revenge for things that were done to her half a century ago. You’re thinking of her as some kind of demon, but she’s not. She’s not like you. Alive or dead, she’s human, and for humans there’s a law that always applies – action and reaction. What you do sticks to you, and becomes a part of you. The more she kills, the more lost and fucked up she’s going to get.’

‘Let go of my hand, Castor.’

‘Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.’

‘I’ll do what I think is best.’

Juliet was still staring at me. I did my best to lock onto those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.

‘I can’t let you,’ I said simply. ‘Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was – imprinted. I heard you, as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died – and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.’

She didn’t answer. For a moment we just stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.

Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.

Actually, hard isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall – except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving I went pinwheeling backwards through the air. The sound was like a gunshot – sharp and clear and very, very loud.

Nothing else was clear, though. Suddenly, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.

Then, equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me, one-handed, up close to her own lithe, unyielding body. It was somewhere I often fantasised about being, but the agonising pain in my back and shoulders and the vice-like grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.

‘You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.’

This time the silence all around us was real: everyone frozen in unnatural, off balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement. I struggled to speak and managed to choke out a few words.

‘We – going Dutch – this time?’

With a wince of disgust she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. Then, after a few seconds more of just enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and picked myself up. For a second I thought I was going to black out: the wound in my shoulder, given to me by the loup-garou at the Nexus lab, felt as though it had been torn open when I fell, and the whole of my right side was on fire.

Nobody approached me: they just watched, expectantly, with the rapt anticipation of people who’ve just called the cops and are keen to see what happens when they arrive. I threw down a couple of twenties for the meal, nodded my thanks to the waitress and limped out of the door.

The Cobalt made it all the way back to Birmingham, raising sparks from the asphalt for the last ten miles or so: I was amazed not to be pulled over on the way, but by the time I climbed out of the car in the airport car park I’d realised why that was. Juliet sucks in people’s gazes and holds them so completely that nobody in the Golden Coffee House had registered me at all. When the cops had finally arrived and taken statements, I was willing to bet that most of the descriptions had included some variation on ‘just this guy’.

There was paperwork to be filled in on the car, but surprisingly few recriminations. I invented a story about a collision with a concrete bollard: the clerk at the counter transcribed it faithfully and made me sign it. There was an excess of a hundred dollars, which I paid without a murmur. It seemed like the least I could do.

Then I was sitting in the departure lounge again, waiting for the next plane to Heathrow while the huge bruise on the right side of my face spread and deepened. I found myself wondering how Juliet was going to get back: I was pretty damn sure that she wouldn’t leave the ground, anyway, but I had no idea what she’d do instead. Or whether it would be faster or slower than a transatlantic flight.

By the time I landed at Heathrow I was thinking straight again, so the first thing I did was to get to a phone and make the call I should have made from the States. It didn’t do me a lot of good, though: at Pentonville the highest I could get up the chain of command was the night duty officer, and something in his tone told me that he wasn’t taking me seriously.

‘A woman?’ he kept on repeating, every time I let him get a word in edgeways.

‘No,’ I repeated, with the brittle, strained patience you keep in reserve until you need it to deal with morons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. ‘She looks like a woman. But she’s actually a demon. A succubus.’

‘A demon. Right.’ I was getting the same strained patience bouncing right back at me, and I wasn’t enjoying it much. ‘And who’s she coming to visit, again?’

‘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, discoloured 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 towards the hysterical.

‘Yeah, Castor, and what I got is a fucking newsflash. 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 organised 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 towards us as we came out from the terminal onto the pick-up 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,’ he 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 skootched 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, 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 of us in the rank 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’ve got to know Nicky’s moods pretty well over the years, so the paranoia came as no surprise. His coming out here 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.’

‘Well, 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 seemed 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 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 got away with wearing a cape and mask to work, he would have done it.

Nicky was still talking. ‘I checked this stuff out afterwards, 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 feeling in my chest that felt like it was climbing upwards. 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 detective 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 in any case 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. Well, you asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the sleeve 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 notebook.’

‘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, signalling that the punchline was coming and that 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 pay-off. Not a cemetery at all: he 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 bad-ass 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 to when Carla decided to make light of grave matters.’

Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fitted – at least, up to a point. ‘But then why would John . . . ?’ I demanded, 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 only drink the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally fall to pieces; and loup-garous had all the disadvantages of trying to remain human while living in the skin of an animal, a battle which in the long run they all lost.

To come back as yourself – in living, human flesh – that 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 went. 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 roll-over lottery win that that was where Myriam Kale had been taken, after Ruth gave up her sister’s mortal remains to Mister Bergson, the charming killer with the bleach-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 of 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 some time in the next twenty-four hours, looking to let a serial killer 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 email 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 Nags Head 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 further down.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Who do you know all the way out here?’ Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He’s 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.