Dead Men's Boots (3 page)

Looking in the rearview mirror, I noticed that we’d picked up a tail. I swore under my breath. It was one of the vans that
the Breathers had arrived in—a big high-sided delivery truck that someone must have borrowed from work, deep blue and with
the words
BOWYER’S CLEANING SERVICES
written in reverse script over the windscreen—because a good idea is a good idea, even if the emergency services think of
it first. I didn’t mention it to Carla: I just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident
that I could lose them long before we got back into London.

“So what was all that shit with the lawyer?” I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good
corrective to grief. Grief paralyzes you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although
it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.

Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie. But then she took a second
pull on the brandy bottle, and away she went.

“John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister, Hailey,” she muttered. “Always. She was
the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone
I recognized.” She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. “There’s a condition—EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. It
got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty, he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced
that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried
to make me promise once that I’d give him pills if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where—you know, where there
was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.

“Anyway, just because it
can
run in families doesn’t mean it will. You don’t know, do you? There’s no point running halfway to meet trouble. But he’d
have days when he couldn’t move, hardly, for brooding about it. I tried to jolly him along when he was in one of those moods.
Wait for him to pull out of it again, and then most times he’d say he was sorry he’d worried me, and that’d be that.

“But a couple of months before Christmas, he went through a bad time. He had a job on—something that was going to pay really
well, but it seemed to prey on his mind a lot.”

“What sort of job?” I asked, sounding a lot more casual than I felt. This was where my guilt was stemming from, in case you
were wondering. I’d already heard a few hints about John’s last big earner, and I had good reason to feel uneasy about it.

“He wouldn’t say. But he put a grand in my hand, sometime back in November, it was, and told me to bank it—and he said there’d
be more later. Well, you know how it is, Fix. Most of the time, no offense, you just work for rent money, don’t you? Oh yeah,
for young men, it’s lovely. Two or three hundred quid for a couple of days’ work, you’re laughing. When you’re a bit older,
it gets to be different, and you never really have a chance to lay anything by. So I was over the moon for him, I really was.
I said, ‘What, is there a ghost in Buckingham Palace or something? Can we say we’re by royal appointment now?’ And he laughed
and said something about East End royalty, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant.

“I think the truth was, whatever this job was all about, he didn’t know if he could handle it. He called those two on the
Collective—Reggie and that friend of his who never washes. But they wouldn’t work with him anymore. They said he was too sloppy,
and they wouldn’t trust him if things went bad on a job.”

She hesitated as if she thought I might want to jump in at this point and defend John’s reputation, but I made no comment.
Because if Reggie had said that, Reggie was right. John had never been the most focused of men, and he’d gotten worse as he
got older. Having him at your back was far from reassuring: Generally, it just gave you one more thing to worry about.

But I didn’t feel comfortable thinking those thoughts, because John hadn’t called only Reggie. He’d called me, too, three
times in the space of a week. The messages were still on my answerphone, since I never bother to wipe the tape. Three times
I’d sat there and listened to him telling me he might have some work to put my way, and three times I hadn’t even picked up
because life’s too short and you tend to avoid things that might make it shorter still.

Then I got a call from Bourbon, the de facto godfather of London’s ghostbusters, with the news that John had kissed a loaded
shotgun.

“Did he say who he was working for?” I asked Carla, crashing the gears as we turned onto the M25 sliproad. The blue van was
still in back of us, but I wasn’t worried; I hadn’t even begun to fight.

Carla shook her head. “I asked him. He didn’t want to talk about it. He just said it was big, and that when it was done, he’d
be in the history books. ‘One for the books,’ he kept on saying. Something nobody’s ever done before.

“And it changed him. He started to get really fretful and really paranoid about forgetting things. He’d make himself little
notes—lists of names, lists of places—and he’d hide them all around the house. I’d open the tea caddy, and there’d be a bit
of paper all folded up inside the lid. Just names. Then the next day he’d go around and collect them all up again. And burn
them. For the first time ever, I started to think he might have been right all along. You know, about the Alzheimer’s. I thought
maybe the stress had brought it on or something.”

She rubbed her eyes again. “It was a terrible time, Fix. I didn’t know who to talk to about it. When Hailey was alive, I’d
have called her over, and we’d have had it out with him all together. But I couldn’t get near him. He started to fly off the
handle whenever I even hinted that he was acting strangely. It got so I had to pretend everything was all right even when
he was sneaking around like a spy in a film, picking up secret messages that he’d left for himself.

“Then one night he got into bed and started to talk about death. Said he thought his time would be coming soon, and he’d changed
his mind about what kind of send-off he wanted. ‘Forget about Waltham Abbey, Carla. You’ve got to cremate me.’ Well, I didn’t
know what to say. What about Hailey? What about the plot he’d already paid for, right next to her? It was the disease talking.
It wasn’t him. So I did just what I did that time when he tried to make me promise to poison him. I kept shtumm. I didn’t
say a word. I wasn’t going to make a promise that I didn’t mean to keep.

“And then after he”—she saw the word looming, swerved away from it—“after he did it, I got this letter from a solicitor. Mr.
Maynard Todd from some company with three names, and one of the names is him. He said John had come to him before he died
and written a new will. Still left all his money to me, but he wanted to make sure he’d be burned instead of buried. Even
picked out someplace over in the East End—Grace something. He’d put it all down in black and white. And he’d written a bit
at the end about how he’d had to go to a stranger because he couldn’t trust his own wife to do right by him.”

“So what did you do?”

“Nothing,” Carla said with bitter satisfaction. “I ignored it. I thought, Fuck it, let the bastard sue me. I’ll do what my
John wanted when he was still in his right mind. So I went ahead with the funeral, even though this Maynard Todd said he was
going to stop me, and I moved the time from three back to one-thirty so he’d miss it and get there too late. Which he did.”
Her voice had been getting thicker, and now she burst into shuddering sobs. “But it doesn’t matter anymore, Fix. I don’t care
what they do to John’s body. I just want him to be at peace. Oh God, let him find some peace!”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that, so I didn’t try. I just concentrated on making life hideous for the driver of the
blue van. The League Against Cruel Sports wouldn’t approve, but if you know you’re being tailed, there are all sorts of subtle
torments and indignities you can inflict on the guy who’s chasing you. By the time we’d reached the Stag Hill turnoff, I’d
shaken him loose and relieved some of my own tensions in the process.

I drove on in silence, exiting the motorway and coaxing the uncooperative car through the congested streets of Cockfosters
and Southgate. Meanwhile, Carla went through three handkerchiefs and most of what was left in the bottle.

When I pulled up at Aldermans Hill, she was more than half drunk. I parked in front of the costume shop, which was closed
for Sunday, leaving the car on a double-yellow line because it seemed more important right then to get her back onto home
turf and more or less settled.

The flat was on the first floor, up an external flight of steps with a dogleg. On the door frame there were a good half-dozen
wards against the dead, ranging from a sprig of silver birch bound with white thread to a crudely drawn magic circle with
the word
ekpiptein
written across it in Greek script. That translates as “bugger off until you’re wanted, you bodiless bastards.” Greek is a
very concise language.

Carla fumbled with her keys, and I noticed that her hands were trembling. I was quite keen to get out of there now that I’d
done my civic duty. I’m fuckall use as a shoulder to cry on.

“I’m sure he is,” I said clumsily—and belatedly. “At peace, I mean. John was a good man, Carla. He didn’t have any enemies
in this world. You know I don’t believe in heaven, but if anyone deserved—”

I stopped because she was looking at me with the sort of expression you give to dangerous madmen.

“No,” she said bluntly. “He’s not in heaven, Fix, or anywhere else. He’s here. He’s still here.”

She turned the key and shoved the door open, but she made no move to go in. I stepped past her into the small hallway, smelling
a slightly musty, unused smell, as though nobody had been there in a few days.

Three steps took me into the living room, and I stopped dead, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking in a scene of devastation
and ruin. Most of the furniture was overturned. The television lay in the corner like a poleaxed drunk, staring blindly up
at the ceiling. Three deep dents scarred the screen, a fish-scale pattern of fracture marks spreading out from each one. Broken
glass crunched under my feet.

And then a framed photo of John and Carla smiling, arm in arm, leaped up from the broken-legged dresser and shot through the
air, spinning like a shuriken, to explode against the wall just inches from my head.

With a muttered oath, I dodged back around the corner and turned to stare at Carla in dazed disbelief. She gave me a curt
nod, her face bitter and despairing.

Despite his faults, most of which I’ve already mentioned, John had always been a pretty easygoing sort of guy. But that was
when he was alive.

In death, it was painfully obvious, he’d gone geist.

    
Two

S
OME APOSTLE NOT NOTED FOR CHARM OR TACT ONCE told an appreciative audience somewhere near the Sea of Galilee that the poor
would always be with us. He could have said the same thing about the dead. Of course, back in Jesus’s time, there were only
maybe a hundred million people in the world, give or take, but even then they were heavily outnumbered by the part of the
human race that was already lying in the ground. The exact ratio wobbles up and down as we ride the demographic roller coaster,
but these days you could bet on twenty to one and probably not lose your money.

Twenty of them to one of us. Twenty ghosts for every man, woman, and child living on this planet. But that was an empty statistic
until just before the turn of the second millennium. Until then most of the dead were content to stay where they’d been put.
In the words of a million headstones, they were “only sleeping.” Then, not too long ago, the alarm clock went off and they
all sat up.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Even now a whole lot of people die and stay dead—trek off across the undiscovered country, or
dissolve into thin air, or go and sit at God’s right hand in sinless white pajamas, or whatever. But a whole lot more don’t:
They wake up in the darkness of their own death, and they head back toward the light of the world they just left, which is
the only direction they know. Most of the time they come back as a visual echo of their former selves, without substance,
mass, or weight, and then we call them ghosts. Sometimes they burrow back into their own dead flesh and make it move; then
we call them zombies. Occasionally, they invade an animal body, subdue the host mind by force majeure, and redecorate the
flesh and bone so it looks more like what they used to remember seeing in the mirror. Then we call them werewolves or loup-garous,
and if we’re smart, we keep the fuck out of their way.

But here’s the wonderful thing: In all their many forms, there were people like me who shouldered the live man’s burden and
came out fighting with the skill and the will to knock them back again. The exorcists. Probably we’d always been there, too—a
latent tendency in the human gene pool, as I’d said to Louise, waiting for its time to shine. Whatever it is that we do, it’s
got sod all to do with sanctity or holy writ. It’s just an innate ability expressing itself through the other abilities that
we pick up as we go through life. If you’re good with words, then you’ll bind the dead with some kind of incantation; if you’re
an artist, you’ll use sketches and sigils. I met a gambler a while back—nice guy named Dennis Peace—who did it with card tricks.