Dead Men's s Boots

3

If you come out of High Barnet Tube and head uphill along the Great North Road, you pass the Magistrates’ Court on the left, in between a bathroom supplies shop and an estate agent’s. Or you could stop right there and save yourself a little effort, because it’s not as though Barnet has anything more exciting saved up to show you.

It was the day after the night before, and the night before had involved all the many units of alcohol I’d failed to take in before the funeral. I felt fuzzy-headed and sticky-eyed as I walked in off the street, finding myself in a red-carpeted foyer where tasselled ropes barred off some directions, steered you in others. It was like a cinema, except that there didn’t seem to be anyone selling popcorn.

Nobody challenged me. There was a single usher on duty, but he was talking with strained patience to a belligerent young guy in a hooded jacket outside the door leading to court number one, and he didn’t even look round as I passed. I followed the arrows to courtroom three, where a sign said that the Honourable Mister Montague Runcie was presiding, and slid in quietly at the back. It looked like I’d only missed the warm-up. The magistrate, a man in his late fifties with a pinched, acerbic face and three concentric rings of wrinkles across his cheeks as though his eyes were wells that someone had just dropped a pebble into, was still examining papers and holding a muttered conversation with the court clerk. Pen was sitting right at the front with her back to me, as tense as all hell if the set of her shoulders was anything to go by. But she hadn’t started shouting yet so that was good.

I sat down in an empty seat at the back of the room. There were a lot of empty seats: this was the sort of case that could easily make the local papers, but it didn’t look like any of them had caught onto it yet. In the digital age, cub reporters don’t bird-dog the courts and the cop shops any more: they print out the press releases that come in over the wire, clock off early and spend more time abusing substances.

Eventually the magistrate looked up. He cast his gaze around the room, as if someone at the back had just spoken and he was trying to work out who so he could hand out some lines.

‘Miss Bruckner?’ he said, in a querulous tone. Pen got to her feet, holding up her hand unnecessarily. Her fall of red-gold hair made her hard to miss even when she was sitting down. As always she looked much taller than her five foot and half a spare inch: that effect is even more pronounced when you’re facing her, staring head-on at her scarily vivid green eyes, but it’s noticeable even from the back. Pen may be a small package, but what’s in there was tamped down with a lot of force and the lid stays just barely on most of the time.

‘And Professor Mulbridge?’

On the other side of the court, another woman who’d been scribbling notes in a ring-bound notebook looked up, flicked the book closed and stood. She was older than Pen, and she made a strong contrast to her in a lot of ways. Matt-grey hair – the same grey as Whistler’s mother’s, or a German helmet – in a well-sculpted bob; grey eyes flecked with the smallest hint of blue; an austere, thin-lipped face, but with a healthy blush to her cheeks that suggested a warm smile lurking there under the superficial solemnity. She was dressed in a formal, understated two-piece in shades of dark blue, looking like a probation officer or a Tory MP, whereas Pen was wearing flamboyant African silk. The older woman’s cool self-possession was clearly visible under the self-effacing smile and polite nod. Clearly visible to me, anyway: but then, I go back a long way with Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, and I know where most of the bodies are buried. Hell, in a few cases I even dug the graves. People who don’t know her so well are apt to take away from their first meeting a vague sense of heavy-handed maternal benevolence: and to be fair, if I were going to describe Jenna-Jane to someone who didn’t know her, ‘mother’ might well be the first couple of syllables I’d reach for.

‘Here, your honour,’ Jenna-Jane said mildly. Her voice said ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’: and she is, as far as that goes. Then again, so were Crippen and Mengele, and they both sold patent medicines in their time.

The magistrate tapped the stack of papers in front of him. ‘And I presume Doctor Smart and Mister Prentice are also in attendance?’

‘Yes, your honour’ and ‘Here, your honour’ came from somewhere off to my far right. The magistrate acknowledged them with a curt nod.

‘Thank you,’ he said dryly. ‘You can all be seated again. Now, from what I understand, this is a question of the disposition of an involuntarily held mental patient. A Section 41 case, Mister . . . Rafael Ditko.’

Someone who looked like an extra in Judge John Deed, impossibly young and suave and dark-suited, stood as if on cue on Jenna-Jane’s side of the courtroom, and the magistrate flicked him a glance but went on without giving him a chance to open his mouth. ‘Has there been a tribunal hearing?’ he demanded, lingering on the word tribunal as though it was particularly tasty.

‘Your honour,’ the barrister said, holding up his own wodge of papers as if to prove that he was earning his salary here too, ‘Michael Fenster, representing Haringey health authority. Yes, the review tribunal met three weeks ago. If you look in the court papers, you’ll see the minutes of that meeting. It took place at the Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill. In attendance were Doctor Smart, Mister Prentice, and your colleague Mister Justice Lyle.’

‘And the recommendation?’ The magistrate rummaged in the depths of the paperwork again, looking a little put out.

‘The issue, your honour, is the transferral of Mister Ditko from the Stanger Home to a separate secure facility under the management of Professor Mulbridge – the Metamorphic Ontology Unit at Saint Mary’s in Paddington.’

‘I’m aware of the issue, Mister Fenster. I asked about the recommendation.’

‘Of course, your honour. But as you’ll also note from that document, the tribunal did not in fact manage to complete its deliberations. Miss Bruckner, who represents herself here today –’ he glanced across at Pen ‘– was also in attendance, and claimed – somewhat forcefully – that the tribunal was not properly convened.’

The Honourable Mister Runcie had found his place now. He scanned the pages in front of him, tight-lipped. ‘Yes,’ he said. And then, a little later, ‘Oh yes.’ After reading on for a good half-minute longer, while the rest of us examined our fingernails and the paint on the walls, he put the paper down and stared at Pen.

‘You disrupted the hearing, Miss Bruckner,’ he said, with a slightly pained emphasis. ‘You’re facing criminal charges as a result.’

Pen stood up again. ‘I had to, your honour,’ she said, levelly. ‘They were going to break the law. I needed to stop them.’

I listened carefully to her words, or rather to the tone of them, trying to assess how tightly she was wound up. I estimated about three to four hundred pounds of torque: not terrible, for this stage of the proceedings. If anything she managed to get an apologetic note into her voice, and she bowed her head slightly as she spoke, in an understated pantomime of guilt. She knew she’d blown it at the Stanger hearing, and she was trying to undo the damage she’d done there.

‘You needed to stop them,’ Mister Runcie repeated. ‘Indeed. Well, I’ve no doubt you feel very strongly about this. But still – the transcript suggests that you shouted and scattered documents, and you’ve been accused of actually threatening Doctor Webb, the director of the Stanger Home.’

‘I’m really sorry about that,’ Pen said meekly. ‘The threat, I mean. I did say all those things. But I didn’t mean half of them.’

For a moment I could see the proceedings being derailed by an itemised discussion of which threats Pen did mean: the one about breaking Webb’s arms and legs, or the more elaborate ones involving objects and orifices? But the barrister interposed smoothly to keep things moving along.

‘That case is pending, your honour, and it will be decided elsewhere. The crux of the matter here is that Miss Bruckner was asserting a power of attorney over Mister Rafael Ditko’s affairs and estate, and therefore over the legal disposition of his person.’

‘On what grounds?’ the magistrate asked, still looking at Pen. He was obviously trying to square the butter-wouldn’t-melt picture of penitence in front of him with the written account of her exciting adventures at the Stanger. It didn’t compute.

Pen answered for herself, again with really impressive restraint and civility. ‘On the grounds that I’m the one who signed the forms committing Rafi to the Stanger in the first place, your honour,’ she said. ‘And I pay his bills there, along with a Mister Felix Castor. Doctor Webb has dragged me in every other week for two years, whenever he needed a signature on something. The only reason he doesn’t want me to have a power of attorney now is because it’s not convenient any more. Because now he wants to sign Rafi over to that woman, and he doesn’t want anyone to be able to say no.’

On ‘that woman’ she flicked a glance across the court at Jenna-Jane Mulbridge, the demure mask slipping just for a moment as her eyes narrowed into a glare. Jenna-Jane inclined her head in acknowledgement, the ironic glint in her eye barely perceptible.

‘I see,’ said the magistrate. He turned to the barrister now. ‘Well, if this is a Section 41 case, the safety of the public is the overriding consideration. Consent isn’t necessarily going to come into the equation. Is that the only substantive issue, Mister Fenster?’

‘Your honour, no,’ the barrister said, waving his wodge again. ‘Miss Bruckner further alleges improper collusion between Doctor Webb, Professor Mulbridge and Doctor Smart, who as the medical member of the tribunal would have been making the initial recommendation as to its decision. That is where I come in, since the authority – which convened the panel – feels compelled to rebut these charges.’

‘Charges of collusion?’

‘Just so, your honour.’

The magistrate looked back at Pen with a frown.

‘Miss Bruckner,’ he said, with very careful emphasis, ‘may I ask on what basis you are questioning the credentials and integrity of –’ He scanned the paper that was still in his hand. ‘– of a judge, a doctor and a trained psychologist?’

It was time for me to take some of the pressure off Pen before she could get any closer to blowing. I stood up and gave the bench a friendly wave. ‘Can I answer that one, your honour?’ I asked.

He gave me a slightly nonplussed look. Jenna-Jane looked around too, and I took an unworthy pleasure in the way her thin lips thinned a little more at the sight of me.

‘And you are –?’

‘Felix Castor. Like Miss Bruckner said, I’m the other side of the coin when it comes to paying for Rafi’s fees at the Stanger and signing off on his monthly reviews.’

‘I see. And what is it that you do, Mister Castor?’

Anything honest, I thought. Which lets out most of what you do. ‘I’m an exorcist, your honour.’

‘An –?’

‘Exorcist. Ghostbreaker. Provider of –’ I ran my tongue around the white-bread phrase with a slight reluctance. ‘– Spiritual Services.’

The magistrate gave me an owl-eyed stare, the ripples seeming to spread away almost as far as his neckline now. ‘I see. And you agree with Miss Bruckner’s assertion that the tribunal’s members are not fully impartial?’

I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I do. Doctor Smart worked at the MOU under Jenna-Jane – Professor Mulbridge – for five years. He still does all his consultancy work at Praed Street. And that guy Prentice who’s on the panel as the lay member – well, he’s “lay” in the sense of laying low. He’s in my profession, and Professor Mulbridge is more or less his regular employer. She can’t have exorcists on staff so she hires them as security and puts their pay cheques through a different budget. Prentice is as much of a fixture at Saint Mary’s as the scum behind the toilet.’ Prentice, who’d been giving me a hostile glare ever since I mentioned his name, surged to his feet and opened his mouth to speak. ‘If you’ll pardon the expression,’ I added, punctiliously. ‘I wasn’t comparing him to toilet scum in any personal or moral sense.’

‘Your honour-’ Prentice spluttered. Runcie cut over him, giving me a severe frown. ‘Mister Castor, if I hear any repetition of that pugnacious tone, I’ll take it as a contempt of court. Are you seeing proof of association as proof of collusion?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Not automatically. But Professor Mulbridge is desperate to get her hands on Rafi because –’ better pick my words with care here ‘– his condition is so rare and it chimes so well with her own interests. And you’d have to admit, your honour, it smells a little off if the institution that’s trying to swipe Rafael Ditko – to take possession of him against his own wishes and the wishes of those close to him – is able to pad out the tribunal panel with its own staff. It looks like ballot-stuffing.’

Jenna-Jane put her hand up, and the magistrate turned his gaze on her.

‘Your honour,’ she said, sounding just a little reproachful, ‘could I make an observation? Not to rebut Miss Bruckner’s and Mister Castor’s allegations but to indicate the problem that the tribunal was faced with?’

Mister Runcie indicated with a gesture that she could. Jenna-Jane nodded her thanks.

‘The facility I run at Saint Mary’s,’ she said, sounding like someone’s grandmother reminiscing about the Queen’s coronation, ‘is for the study, treatment and understanding of a very specific range of conditions. Many of my patients believe themselves to be possessed by the dead; or to be themselves dead souls inhabiting animal bodies. As you know, the body of scientific evidence on such matters is small. In trying to enlarge it, I’ve had to call on the skills of a great many people whose knowledge is of an empirical rather than an academic nature.’

Knowing the Jenna-Jane juggernaut and how it rolls along, I was listening to all this with a detached interest. I had to give her a 5.9 for artistic effect, but only 5.6 for technical merit: she’d got the respectful tone right, but she’d overdone the beating about the bush. ‘Your point, Professor Mulbridge,’ the magistrate chided her.

‘My apologies, your honour. My point is that Rafael Ditko claims to be demonically possessed. Doctor Webb’s initial diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia, but he admits that there’s some anomalous evidence which brings that diagnosis into question. He wants Ditko transferred both because he represents a danger to the staff at the Stanger Home and because they don’t have the proper facilities there to treat him.

‘So a decision on Mister Ditko’s case requires an awareness of the paranormal as well as of the psychiatric factors presenting in his case. And it would be hard to find anywhere in the United Kingdom any practitioner in those areas – specifically, any exorcist – who hasn’t worked with me or for me at some point in the last ten years. Why, Mister Castor himself –’ with a tolerant smile she turned to indicate me, our eyes locking for the second time ‘– was a very valued colleague of mine at the Metamorphic Ontology Unit until comparatively recently.’

The magistrate looked at me with a certain mild surprise.

‘Is this true, Mister Castor?’

Damn. Sometimes when you’re not knife-fighting with Jenna-Jane on a day-to-day basis you forget how strong her instinct for the jugular really is.

There was no point ducking or weaving. ‘As far as it goes, yeah,’ I admitted. ‘And it’s also true that a lot of exorcists are going to have had associations with the MOU in the past. That’s different from being still on staff there now, though. And you could easily find a psychiatrist who isn’t in Jenna-Jane’s pocket.’

‘A psychiatrist with a background in the behavioural and psychological matrices of bodily resurrection?’ Jenna-Jane inquired, tapping her thumbnail against her notebook.

‘You don’t have a monopoly on-’ Pen broke in.

‘Please,’ said Mister Runcie, with more of an edge to his voice now. ‘I must insist that you address all comments to me, and restrict yourself to answering my direct questions. Sit down. All of you, please sit down. I haven’t asked anybody to stand.’

We all complied, but the magistrate’s feathers were thoroughly ruffled now and he didn’t look any happier.

‘Thank you. It appears that there are two separate issues here – the one concerning Miss Bruckner’s assertion of power of attorney, and the other relating to the legal constitution of the tribunal’s panel. Mister Fenster, are there any other heads under this case of which you’ve failed to apprise me?’

‘None, your honour,’ the barrister said, taking the implied criticism on the chin. ‘Those are the two substantive issues.’

The magistrate glanced at Pen. ‘And do you agree with that summary, Miss Bruckner? I mean, insofar as it states the matter at issue – the substance of your case?’

Pen hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yes, your honour.’

There was a silence. The Honourable Mister Runcie looked far from happy.

‘And the tribunal has no brief to review the terms of Rafael Ditko’s detention – only his transferral from one facility to another?’

‘Your honour,’ said the barrister, looking profoundly sorrowful, ‘Mister Ditko has been involved in incidents of damage or assault at the Stanger Home on five separate occasions within the last year. There are currently no plans – outside of the usual periodic authorisation process – to review his sectioning and detention. Nobody is claiming that he can safely be released back into society.’

Runcie gave Jenna-Jane a look that was fairly long and fairly hard. ‘Professor Mulbridge, I take it you were not yourself involved in the selection of the tribunal’s members?’

Jenna-Jane spread her arms expansively. ‘Your honour, these things are the province of the local authority – in this case, Haringey. As far as their internal workings go, I don’t ask and I’m not told.’

The magistrate nodded agreement.

‘Yes. Just so. Still, I have the option of asking, and presumably will be told. On the face of it, it does seem possible that there could be a conflict of interests. I’m keeping an open mind, but I’m going to order a three-day suspension of these proceedings while I look into the selection arrangements and make sure that all proper regulations were followed.’

He pondered. ‘On the question of power of attorney, that’s an issue that goes far beyond these current events. I can’t rule on the a priori assumption. Even if Doctor Webb has been dealing with Miss Bruckner and Mister Castor as though they had such a power, that does not necessarily make it so in the eyes of the law. I believe you should take legal advice, Miss Bruckner, and perhaps give further thought to whether representing yourself is the wisest course of action here.’ He stroked the bridge of his nose, self-consciously. ‘Given that Mister Ditko can’t – legally – give you his informed consent while he’s sectioned on mental health grounds,’ he mused, ‘you’ll almost certainly have to make an application through a higher court . . .’

Pen looked distressed. ‘But your honour-’ she interjected.

The magistrate raised a hand to forestall her. ‘I’m sympathetic to your position, Miss Bruckner. You clearly believe that you have Rafael Ditko’s best interests at heart. But power of attorney would give you very wide-ranging rights over his estate, and over any future decisions about his treatment. The safeguards have to be there, and they have to be observed. I’m sorry. But for what it’s worth, I think you have a strong case. You should get yourself proper representation and do whatever it takes to prepare a full legal argument. My judgement, in the meantime, will focus on the make-up of the review panel.’

He stood up, taking the clerk by surprise so that his ‘All rise’ sounded a little panicked.

The magistrate gathered up his papers. ‘These proceedings are adjourned for three days,’ he said, ‘and will resume on Thursday, in the afternoon session. Make a note, Mister Farrier, if you please.’

He swept out of the room without a backward glance.

Jenna-Jane put on her jacket while Pen just stood there looking like she’d lost a pound and found a plague sore. I knew what was going through her mind: with the power-of-attorney ploy kicked into the long grass, we had to shoot down Jenna-Jane’s stooges on the review panel or the whole thing would go through on the nod. On the other hand, the Honourable Mister Runcie – pompous and self-satisfied though he definitely was – struck me as being nobody’s fool. I still felt like we were in with a chance.

There were exits on both sides of the courtroom, so it had to be deliberate that Jenna-Jane took the longer route and paused in front of Pen on her way out.

‘I’m so sorry, Pamela,’ she said, looking limpidly sincere. ‘I want you to know that if Rafi is given into my care, all the resources of the unit will be brought to bear on him. If it’s possible to make him well again, we’ll do it.’

Pen stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. Then she drew back her arm in a staccato movement, fist clenched. But I was already moving, and I stepped in before she could bring it forward again, sliding between the two of them with my back to Pen. Felix Castor: human shield.

‘Jenna-Jane,’ I said, ‘you’re a sight for sore eyes. Actually, let me rephrase that. My eyes are scabbing over just from looking at you. I’m carrying a voice recorder, so why don’t you stop prejudicing your case and go play with your ECT machines?’

‘Felix.’ Jenna-Jane shook her head with mock exasperation. ‘You’re determined to hate me, but I have only respect and admiration for you. I’m hoping to welcome you back on board some day. There’s going to be a war, and I want you on my side. I’m determined on it. Perhaps your friend Rafi might actually be the bridge that brings us together.’

‘You mean you’re going to lay him down on the ground and trample on him?’ I said. ‘Tell it to the court.’

She raised her hands in surrender and walked on. I turned to Pen, who was trembling like a tuning fork.

‘Well, that went as well as could be expected,’ I said.

‘Fuck off, Fix,’ Pen answered, her eyes welling up with tears and instantly overflowing. ‘Fuck off and don’t talk to me.’

She turned her back and stalked away along the seats, tripping at one point over somebody’s briefcase and then kicking it out of her way as she righted herself. It wasn’t a dramatic exit, but it did the job.

What’s that old Groucho Marx line? No, never mind: I’ve got plenty of enemies. But if they ever start to thin out, most of my friends are right there in the wings ready to audition.

‘There’s going to be a war.’ Jenna-Jane Mulbridge actually believes that shit, and she isn’t the only one.

The dead only rose again because they were running ahead of the demons, the theory went, and now the demons had started to appear. There was a gaping hole in the walls of Creation: Hell was throwing its legions into the breach, and so far our side not only didn’t have an army, it didn’t even have a poster with a pointing finger on it.

The first and greatest of the exorcists, Peckham Steiner, had believed this too, and towards the end of his life he’d devoted his personal fortune to the building of defences that would give the living a fighting chance in that war when it was finally declared: the Thames Collective, a barracks for ghostbreakers on running water, where the dead and the damned couldn’t walk; the safe houses, protected by ramparts of water, earth and air, which I’d assumed were an urban legend until I’d actually seen one and figured out how it worked; a dozen wacky schemes full of customised craziness in every flavour you can think of. It was classic paranoid stuff: but at this point in my life I was finding it a lot harder to laugh it off.

If there was a war coming, then Rafi Ditko was conquered territory. Playing around with black magic, he’d opened up a door to Hell inside his own soul, and something – a big, bad bastard of a something that called itself Asmodeus – had stepped through. Now Rafi was locked up in a ten-by-ten cell in a mental hospital, because the law hadn’t caught up with the facts yet and the only diagnosis that fitted his symptoms was schizophrenia. And the cell was lined with silver because – law or no law – you had to do what worked. Silver weakened Asmodeus and kept him from asserting full control over Rafi for most of the time. The tunes I played to him had the same effect, pushing the demon down further into Rafi’s hindbrain and giving his conscious mind a bit more wriggle room.

Unfortunately, it was also partly my fault that Asmodeus was stuck in there in the first place. Answering a panicked phone call from Rafi’s girlfriend, Ginny, I’d found him burning to death from the inside out. I did what I could to stop it, but this was the first time I’d ever encountered a demon. To put it bluntly, I screwed up. In fact, I screwed up so badly that Rafi and Asmodeus had ended up welded together in some way that nobody had even managed to understand, still less undo.

And then a few months ago, when I’d had the chance to sever the connection permanently, I’d backed off because the price – letting Asmodeus loose on Earth – had seemed too high. I still think I was right, but I’d never been able to explain it so that Pen understood: actually I’d never managed to get more than two words out before she either decked me or walked away.

Pen – Pamela Elisa Bruckner – is Rafi’s ex-lover and my ex-landlady. Ex-friend. Ex a whole lot of other things, one way and another. And what made relations between us even more strained was that this whole business at the Stanger kept throwing us together. The Stanger’s director, Webb, had been trying to divest himself of Rafi ever since an incident about six months earlier in which the demon inside him had cut loose and almost killed two nurses. Now Webb had formed an unholy alliance with Jenna-Jane to get rid of Rafi, effectively gifting him to the MOU at Paddington. And the MOU was a concentration camp for the undead, where Jenna-Jane talked about clinical care and pastoral responsibility while she performed experiments on her helpless charges that were increasingly sadistic and extreme. She was desperate to get her hands on Rafi because her menagerie – replete with ghosts and zombies and werewolves and one poor bastard who thought he was a vampire – didn’t include a demon yet. So Pen and I had to work together to clog her works with spanners, whether we liked it or not.

Meanwhile the war – if it was a war – was still in the ‘cold’ phase. Maybe that was only to be expected when the enemy were the dead.

I’d had more than enough of the legal profession to last me for one day, but a promise is a promise, even if your arm is halfway up your back while you’re giving it. I could have just called, but I needed to pick up some silver amalgam from a dentists’ supplier’s in Manor House, so Stoke Newington was almost on my way.

The offices of Ruthven, Todd and Clay turned out to be in a converted Victorian court built in chocolate-coloured brick, on the corner of a slightly drab row of terraces from a later era. There were window boxes on either side of the door, painted bright blue, but they contained nothing except bare soil. No flowers at this time of year.

The front door was pretty bare too: no wards, no sigils, no come-nots or stay-nots. Maybe the evil dead avoided lawyers out of professional courtesy, like sharks are supposed to do. I walked in off the street and found myself in a small reception area which, judging from its modest dimensions, must originally have been the front hall of a house. A wide, elbowed staircase took up a good half of the available space: what was left was dominated by a large venerable-looking photocopier. The inspection covers had been removed from the machine and were stacked up against the wall: an enormously fat, enormously pale bald man was on his knees in front of it, one hand thrust into its innards up to the elbow, looking like a vet trying to assist with a difficult birth. He glanced up at me as I entered, and then kept on staring as if he was trying to place the face. He had a sheen of sweat on his forehead and his half-open mouth hung down at the corners like a melting clock in a painting by Salvador Dali. A young brunette sitting at the reception desk in under the stairs watched him work with more attention than a busted photocopier seemed to merit. Maybe it was a slow day.

‘I’m here to speak to Mister Todd,’ I said to her as she pulled her attention away from the exhibition of mechanical midwifery. ‘I called earlier. Felix Castor.’

She ran her finger down the very full columns of a double-width appointment book. ‘Felix Castor,’ she confirmed. ‘Yes. Please take a seat.’

There were several, so I took the one furthest away from Mister Fix-It, picked up yesterday’s Times and started to flick through it as the receptionist called upstairs. I glanced across at the fat man once, out of the corner of my eye: he was still on his knees and he was still looking at me, although when I caught him at it he dropped his gaze to the ground with a slight grimace and went back to the job in hand.

‘Any luck, Leonard?’ the receptionist asked.

The man shook his head glumly. ‘There’s no jam,’ he said, in a higher voice than I would have expected – a voice that had a slight fluting quality to it, as though the big man had swallowed that weird little device that gives Mister Punch his voice. ‘I think it’s one of the rollers, come off its bracket.’ He leaned forward and reached into the machine – with both arms, this time. It shifted on its base and creaked ominously.

‘Mister Castor.’ I looked up. Todd was just coming down the stairs, hand outstretched. He had a different suit on – mid-blue instead of grey, and with a subtle dog-tooth. Maybe he had one for every day of the week. I stood, and we shook.

Shaking hands is always a little jump into the unknown for me. The same morbid sensitivity that makes me good at sensing the presence of the dead sometimes allows me to pick up superficial psychic impressions through skin-to-skin contact. Nothing this time, though, or at least nothing revealing: Maynard Todd exuded only a cool aura of self-possession as immaculate as his tailoring.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. Then he looked past me, and his expression shifted into a slightly perplexed frown. ‘Uh – Leonard, are you sure you know what you’re doing there?’

‘Yes,’ Leonard grunted tersely.

I could see Todd thinking about taking the discussion a stage further, and I could see him giving up on the idea. He turned to the receptionist instead. ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘call the service number.’

‘Yes, Mister Todd.’

‘I can fix it,’ said Leonard, not looking round.

‘Come on upstairs,’ Todd said to me, ignoring Leonard’s answer. ‘You want some tea or coffee?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, and followed him back up the wide staircase. When we turned around the elbow of the stairs Leonard was still on his knees, intent on his veterinary duties.

‘John Gittings,’ Todd said, glancing back down at me as we walked. ‘That’s what you called about, right?’

‘Right,’ I agreed.

‘And I saw you at the funeral.’

‘Right again.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I thought so. You were the one who stepped in when the natives were getting restless. Thanks for that.’

I didn’t answer. It would have sounded a bit graceless to say that I was more worried about Reggie and Greg picking up an assault charge than I was about Todd’s well-being.

The stairwell went up and up, and I lost count of how many turns we took before we got to Todd’s office. It was surprisingly small, but then the courts had been the lower end of Victorian working-class housing: they meted out space as though space was gold. Todd indicated a chair as he walked around to the far side of the desk and pulled open the blinds, which looked onto the court’s central light well and so didn’t make much difference to the grey luminescence filtering into the room: this looked like the kind of place where you’d need the desk lamp on at noon on Midsummer’s Day.

As he sat down, Todd flicked open a green hanging file that was already on his desk. It contained a thick wodge of papers. I took the chair opposite him.

‘John Gittings,’ he said again, flicking through the documents on top of the file with quick, practised hands. ‘I’ve been thinking about this one.’

‘Have you?’ I asked, for form’s sake.

Todd nodded. ‘About Mrs Gittings’s feelings on the matter, I mean,’ he clarified. ‘I’m going to go ahead and get the exhumation order, like I said. Have John disinterred and taken to Mount Grace for cremation. I don’t have any choice about that.’

‘I’m sure.’

He must have caught the sardonic edge in my tone, because he gave me a slightly injured stare.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘You think I enjoyed turning up at the funeral looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, terrorising widows, breaking up the show? I didn’t. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. But my client’s wishes were absolutely specific.’

I didn’t answer right away: I was only here to check the dates. But since he’d given me the opening, it seemed churlish not to at least poke a stick into it.

‘Carla thinks that John was suffering from some kind of dementia.’

Todd looked pained. ‘Mrs Gittings has that luxury. I don’t. Not unless she can prove it in court. I have to assume that John meant what he said, and I have to act on it.’

‘There’s something else you should know about,’ I said. ‘Mrs Gittings is being haunted by her husband’s ghost.’

I left it out there, looked at his face. Like I said, the law takes a while to catch up with how the world turns, and a lot of people with a rational mindset somehow manage never to see anything that might challenge their basic assumptions. For all I knew, Todd was one of them: a Vestal, to use Pen’s word. Someone who’d never seen a ghost or any of the other manifestations of the risen dead, and couldn’t quite bring himself to make the conceptual leap in advance of the evidence.

But he surprised me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, and he looked as though he meant it.

‘It gets worse. Whether or not John was in his right mind when he died, he’s pretty much out of it now. The ghost is restless. Violent. It’s become—’

‘Geist,’ Todd finished, and I nodded, impressed that he knew the technical term. He blew out his cheek. ‘Damn,’ he said simply, and then for a long time he stared at the floor, his thumb running absently along the edge of his desk. ‘Well, that – yes, that’s distressing. She must be very distraught. To see someone you loved – still love, I suppose . . .’

There was a long silence, at the end of which Todd looked at me and nodded as though I’d been pressing an argument. ‘I want this to give her as little stress as possible,’ he said. ‘Especially after what you’ve said. So what I’m proposing is a wake.’

I thought I must have misheard him. ‘A wake?’ I echoed him. ‘You mean a party?’

Todd shook his head brusquely. ‘No, not a party. Just a night when the coffin goes back to the house: when Mrs Gittings can sit with it, and John’s spirit can become a little bit more reconciled to . . . his violent end. Do you think that would be a good idea?’

I mulled it over, and I had to admit – to myself, at least – that it did. It might or might not provide closure for Carla, but it ought to do John’s ghost a power of good to see that his last request was being carried out to the letter. In theory, it ought to stop the haunting. You didn’t need an exorcism if you gave the dead what they wanted.

What I said, though, was, ‘It doesn’t really matter what I think. I’ll talk it over with Carla. See what she says.’

Todd pushed the papers back into the file, closed it and stood up, very abruptly. ‘You do that,’ he said. ‘If there’s a way of making this happen that spares her feelings, then that’s the way we’ll take. Thanks for coming in, Mister Castor. I’m glad you told me all this.’

‘The cremation,’ I reminded him. ‘When is it going to be?’

‘Wednesday, most likely. But it depends how soon I can get the disinterment done. It might have to be Thursday. Talk to Mrs Gittings and let me know what she says. Oh, and please leave a number with Carol. I think under the circumstances Mrs Gittings won’t appreciate a call from me, so if you don’t mind continuing to act as a go-between . . .’

‘Happy to,’ I said stolidly. ‘Thanks for listening.’

I went downstairs again and left my address and phone numbers with the bored brunette. The photocopier was in a state of even more advanced disassembly and Leonard was nowhere to be seen.

I stepped back out onto the street. It was about five o’clock, and although there was still some light from the low, loitering sun, a roiling rope of heavy grey cloud was in the process of swallowing it whole like a python gulping down a guinea pig.

A scarecrow-thin old man crusted with the filth of years spent on the streets, dressed in a long trailing outer coat so dirty and tattered you couldn’t guess what colour or even what kind of garment it might once have been, came shambling along the pavement towards me. I stepped aside automatically, but he zigged at the same time and walked right into me. His mad, mud-brown eyes stared into mine.

‘At the waterhole,’ he said, his voice a dry, throat-tearing rasp. ‘With the others there behind you. Pushing. Pushing. Nowhere to go.’ He laughed out loud, delighted by some sudden revelation, and the stench of his breath hit me across the face like a solid slap.

I winced and leaned back, away from the searing smell, but he was already walking on – singing now, in the same harsh, agonised tone, ‘Oh, the Devil stole the beat from the Lord, and it’s time we put things straight . . .’ I didn’t recognise the tune, but that ragged voice was shredding it pretty effectively in any case.

An involuntary shudder went through me, and with it came a nagging prickle somewhere at the edge of consciousness – the slight sensation of pressure that comes when I’m being looked at by one of the risen dead. I looked around: nobody in sight except the decayed tramp, who was heading away from me and had his back turned, and a woman on the other side of the street wheeling a baby in a stroller. Maybe recent events had put me on something of a hair-trigger: I slipped my hand inside my coat to make sure that my whistle was there and forgot about the psychic twinge. Probably nothing, but if it was something I was all tooled up.

I headed north-west, aiming to grab a train at Finsbury Park. That gave me two choices – the immense dog-leg of Stamford Hill and Seven Sisters Road, or the back cracks. I took the latter, turning off the main drag into a maze of terraced streets and narrow alleys. The sense of being watched – watched and followed – ebbed and flowed as I walked: that wasn’t something that had ever happened to me before, and it made me wonder if I was experiencing some kind of after-effect from my contact with John Gittings’s ghost. All ghosts impinge on my death-sense, but geists have an intense, indelible presence that you can’t just shake off afterwards. Maybe it had been lurking in the background of my perceptual field ever since.

I took another street, another back alley, tacking alternately north and west so that ultimately I’d break out onto Seven Sisters Road somewhere past the reservoir. Meanwhile the darkness leaked down out of the sky to cover the Earth, and the prickle at the back of my mind became an itch, and then an itch with a sick heat underlying it like the raw tenderness of sunburn.

I turned again, along an alley that ran between the back yards of a row of terraces and a high, blind wall that presumably had the reservoir on the other side of it. I took ten steps forward, then pivoted on my heel and waited, looking back the way I’d come. Now that I wasn’t moving any more I ought to have been able to hear the footsteps of anyone approaching the corner I’d just walked around, but the silence was absolute.

Before me was thick shadow: thick enough so that if something dead or undead rounded the bend I might lose the initiative because I couldn’t get a clear enough look at it to know what it was. Impatient, I took a few steps back towards the corner I’d just turned and my foot came down on something that moved. A black shape streaked past me with a whuff of air that I felt even as I yelled and jumped aside. The squawl of protest reached me a moment later.

Tom cat, big and fat, out on the pull.

With a muttered curse, I ran to the corner, then round it and back out onto the street. Nothing and nobody in sight. I’d have been surprised if there was, after the early warning I’d just given out. As ambushes went, it was a sod of a long way from the Little Big Horn. And as if to confirm the futility of the endeavour, the extrasensory prickle faded out again into nothingness.

Which, for something so liminal and barely-there to start with, wasn’t a long haul at all.

I was about to say that I went home, but when I use that word I still think of Pen’s creepy old place in Turnpike Lane, with its Noah’s Ark freighting of rats and ravens and its Möbius-strip architecture. (It’s built into the side of a hill, so the ground floor at the back becomes a basement at the front.)

Now, though – just for a few weeks, or maybe a month or so – I was living in a flat in a high-rise block just off Wood Green High Road: high enough up in the stack so that I could look out of my window and see the Centre Point tower giving me the finger across the length of London.

The flat belonged to a friend of a friend – a guy named Ronald ‘Ropey’ Doyle, who’d gone back to the Republic of Ireland to deal with some family crisis and didn’t want to lose his place on the council housing list while he was away. He needed a sitting tenant, who could pretend to be him if the need arose, and I needed a place to dump my stuff until I came up with a better idea. It seemed like a sweet deal.

It became less sweet when the lights went out and I discovered that all the utilities were on a meter – and soured altogether the first time the lift broke down. The flat itself smelled of root vegetables and when it rained the walls wept discoloured tears that left brown-edged tracks down the paintwork. The decor ran to black leather and three-inch-deep orange shag-pile. But, to give it its due, it had four walls and a ceiling. Beggars can’t be choosers.

Tonight, though, walking down Lordship Lane from Wood Green Tube station, I felt a definite desire to be somewhere else. If anything, that feeling only increased when I turned onto Vincent Road and saw what was parked in front of the block: a high-sided blue van with Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse over the windscreen.

Son of a bitch! I’d been solid-gold certain I’d ditched the Breathers on the M25. Now it seemed that they’d not only stayed with me all the way to Southgate, they’d planted a walking tail on me when I left Carla’s and came home by Tube. They knew where I lived. Taken in conjunction with Louise Beddows’s tales of ambushes and punishment beatings, it wasn’t a happy thought. More than anything, it made me ashamed. How could I have let myself be rolled up by a shower of amateurs? Normally my instincts are better than that.

There was a guy sitting in the driver’s seat of the van. The fractured sodium glare of a street lamp was splattered over the curve of the windscreen, so that all I could see of him was an outline, immobile and sinister. I couldn’t even tell if he was looking at me or not. I fought the urge to wrench the door open and have it out with him there and then: the back of the van was probably stuffed three-deep with his mates.

An even nicer surprise was waiting for me when I got up to the flat. Someone had painted across the door in thick, still-dripping black paint the words EXORCIST EQUALS DISEASED EQUALS DECEASED. I stared at it in dead silence for about half a minute, considering my options. It wasn’t my front door, of course, it was Ropey’s: but still, I was living behind it, and it was my arse he’d want to kick when he saw this. But was it worth getting my head used as a baseball? On balance, still probably not. I’d wait until the odds were more in my favour, and then I’d put these little fuck-ups through some changes.

The first thing I did when I got inside was to call Carla and tell her Todd’s idea about the wake. She was iffy at first, but she talked herself into it: I said I’d call him and tell him it was a goer.

A pregnant pause at the other end of the line, punctuated in the middle by a muffled sob.

‘Fix?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you – could you come over and be here, with me? When they bring John’s body back?’

I thought about that one for all of two seconds. ‘I’d love to, Carla,’ I lied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll have my mobile with me, though. If the geist – I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to sleep again.’

I hung up before she could find another angle to come in at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone and I left a message there. That ought to have let me off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.

It didn’t, though. I wandered from room to room, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block was like a howl of pain, sampled and playeI wled andd back through some aeolian synthesiser: it made me think about the late John Gittings, prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes of noisy passion, which meant that they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other some time within the next hour.

I felt the call of the wild. So I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.

Okay, ‘the call of the wild’ is a relative term, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about: but you’ve got to love a pub that’s painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit; and the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.

It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then when he came over I nodded towards the IPA pump.

‘Usual,’ I said.

‘Someone wants to meet you, Fix,’ he said as he pulled the pint.

‘What sort of someone?’

‘Woman.’

‘Young? Old? Nun? Policewoman?’

‘See for yourself.’

As Paul handed me the pint he nodded his head, barely perceptibly, off to my right. I handed him a fiver, took a sip on the beer and then, casually, took a glance in that direction.

There was a woman sitting by herself at a table off to one side of the door, dressed in a smart cutaway jacket over shirt and slacks, the whole outfit built around a motif of rust-red and black. Something about her look reminded me of Carla: the intangible suggestion of widow’s weeds, which was odd and unsettling because she couldn’t have been more than thirty. Dark brown hair in a tightly curled perm: bronzed eyelids and metallic highlights on her lips. She was staring at the wall, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing it. The gin and tonic in front of her hadn’t been touched.

I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted: and maybe I just jumped at the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table, gave her a nod as she turned to stare at me.

‘Paul said you were asking after me,’ I said.

She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. ‘Felix Castor?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.’ She put out a hand and I shook it. ‘I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re good. I’d like to hire you.’

‘Okay if I sit down?’ I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at: given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it might be kind of a loaded question.

I took a seat opposite Janine Hunter and she swivelled round to face me.

‘So what’s the problem?’ I asked – the standard opening phrase for doctors, mechanics and ghostbreakers.

‘My husband,’ she said, and then seemed to hesitate. ‘He’s . . .’

The pause went on: whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over it. I tried to help.

‘Passed on?’ I suggested.

She looked surprised. ‘No! He’s on remand, at Pentonville.’ Another leaden pause. ‘For sexual assault and murder.’

‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

‘And he didn’t do it, Mister Castor. Doug looks really tough, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s – I’ve got to find the real killer. I want her to tell everybody what she did. So they’ll let Doug go.’

I noted the female pronoun in passing. This was getting stranger by the second: it was also veering gracefully away from what I think of my core competencies.

‘I’m an exorcist, Mrs Hunter,’ I reminded her, as gently as I could manage. ‘I could only find this killer for you if she happened to be—’

And before I could get the word out, Jan Hunter cut across me with the inevitable punchline. ‘She is, Mister Castor. She’s dead. She’s been dead for forty years.’