Dead Men's Boots (60 page)

S
UE BOOK GREETED THE SIGHT OF HER FALLEN LOVER with a wail of anguish, then she wrested Juliet’s body out of my hands and took
her away from me into another room—even Sue could carry Juliet’s negligible bulk without strain—and kicked the door shut behind
her. I took that to mean that if we wanted tea and biscuits, we’d have to rustle them up for ourselves.

But Covington was hungry for something else entirely, and he wasn’t in the mood for delayed gratification. “Where is she?”
he demanded, looking peremptorily around the small hall. “Is she here?”

“Up the stairs,” I said, and he was taking them three at a time almost before the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t follow
straightaway. The energy Juliet had lent me had all drained away, and the events of the last few hours were taking their inevitable
toll. I felt like a piece of windblown crud that had fetched up out of the night at the foot of these stairs and couldn’t
be expected to go any farther. Windblown crud doesn’t defy gravity. It knows its place.

But eventually, I summoned the willpower from somewhere and started to climb. From the bedroom facing me, I heard Covington’s
murmured voice and then a crazed laugh from Doug Hunter’s throat.

I hesitated on the top step, not sure whether this was a private party. Covington’s “We’ll sort this out” gave me no clue
at all as to what he had planned, or even whom the “we” referred to.

Leaning my back against the wall, I enjoyed the momentary sensation of weightlessness that comes with having carried something
very heavy for a long time and finally been allowed to set it down. Tomorrow there was more shit still to come, but tomorrow
was another day—technically, anyway, even though it was probably less than half an hour to sunup.

The weightlessness passed, but I still felt curiously detached from my own emotions. The guilt that had bitten into me when
I heard about Gary Coldwood’s death was mercifully dulled, but there was no sense of triumph or satisfaction in having dealt
with his would-be killers. If anything, Covington’s account had left me feeling as though there was mourning still to be done;
but I couldn’t make a start on it yet.

Covington’s voice rose and fell in the bedroom, his words never quite becoming audible. I could hear Kale’s replies, though.

“No. I didn’t see you. I looked for you and didn’t see you. You left me!”

Murmuring from Covington.

“Oh, that’s fine! That’s wonderful! Whatever you want to call it. Fucking—cocks! Cocks talking, calling themselves men! Love
me? Oh yeah, I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do!”

Murmur.

“Well, this is me now. It’s not him anymore, it’s me.”

Murmur.

“I don’t even know the way. But if I knew the way, I couldn’t do it. Not on my own, Les! Not—not all that way on my own. Don’t
make me. Don’t ask me to.”

Murmur.

“No.”

Murmur.

“You can’t. Don’t lie to me! I won’t even have a fucking hand to hold.”

Murmur.

Long silence.

Kale laughed, and the laugh turned into a sob. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me, Les. I’m so scared.”

For the first time I heard him answer her. “I’m going, Mimi. I’ve made up my mind. And you can’t keep a hold on this body
anymore without me and the others to help you. Come now, with me, or come later, on your own. That’s the only choice you’ve
got.”

Another long silence.

Covington appeared in the doorway. “We need you,” he said.

At any other time, I might have balked at the thought of playing two souls at the same time, but I’d just played two hundred
and come out of it with my mind intact, so this didn’t feel too hard. And Covington didn’t want a full exorcism, only an unbinding.
Something that would lift them both out of their flesh and leave them free to move.

Embarrassingly, though, it was awhile before the music would come. I’d flogged my talent pretty hard that night, and the sense
of dissociation still hung around me like the wooziness after anesthesia. Covington had untied Kale’s arms and upper body,
and they sat together on the bed, his arms around her—or rather, Doug’s—shoulders protectively. She clung to him so hard that
I could see the whitening of her knuckles. The two of them stared at me wordlessly, like already condemned prisoners waiting
to hear the outcome of some last appeal.

At last I ventured a note, and I knew when I heard it that it wasn’t right. I held it anyway, then modulated down the scale
until I locked in to something that felt like it was alive and moving. I let it find its own way out through the bore, almost
unstopped, using breath control alone to shape it. It wasn’t a tune; it was an incoherent wail pretending to be music.

Covington kissed Myriam Kale on Doug Hunter’s forehead, whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the sound of the whistle,
and then slid sideways off the bed. Kale lasted a few moments longer before slumping back onto the pillow, her eyes glazing
over before they closed.

Covington’s ghost was a smudgy blur hovering over his body. Maybe that was a side effect of the protective camouflage that
the risen dead of Mount Grace had used in the days of their ascendancy—or maybe it was a side effect of being so damn old
and having slid and elided through so many different flesh houses over the last hundred years. Maybe he’d distilled down into
this minimal placeholder for a human shape.

But Kale was magnificent. I saw then, for the first time, what the photos had failed to capture: the energy and the feral
grace that had drawn in so many men and made the great Aaron Silver linger and be lost.

The two spirits—the one so painfully vivid, the other so nearly not there—came together in the air over the bed and then started
to waver as though in some kind of heat haze. It was something I’d never seen before: self-exorcism, a willed and wanted abdication.
She smiled as she faded, but then apes smile when they’re afraid, and there was something of blind terror about her eyes.
Still, she was looking at him—at the man who’d been born Aaron Berg and then worn so many other names—and I thought the expression
was softening into something else as it sublimed out of my visible spectrum altogether.

Doug Hunter came around after only a few minutes. I was afraid he might draw entirely the wrong conclusion from finding himself
tied to a bed in a room in a strange house with a guy he didn’t recognize sitting on a chair next to the bed, but that was
one complication I didn’t have to worry about. He was too weak and too sick to care much about where he was, and his memories
came back with his strength.

Peter Covington—assuming that was the blond man’s original name—wasn’t so lucky. Like Maynard Todd, he’d been ridden for much
longer by the Mount Grace dead, and it had damaged him more deeply. He lay on the floor, conscious but unable or unwilling
to stir, his lips moving silently.

I helped Doug to untie himself, and then I helped him to stand. “Where’s—Jan?” he slurred.

“Waiting for you at home,” I told him. “You want to go there now?”

He tried to speak but couldn’t get the word out. He nodded instead.

“You’re still wanted for murder, Doug. You probably want to give yourself up rather than let them catch you and bring you
in.”

He nodded again. “To-tomorrow.”

Yeah. There’s always tomorrow.

    
Twenty-seven

T
HE WORLD TURNED UNDER ME, AND I TURNED WITH IT.

These things harrowed me with fear and wonder at the time, but you know how it is. With the endless repetitions of memory,
they lost a lot of their impact. You’ve probably had similar weeks yourself.

With Sue Book guarding her lover like a tenderhearted rottweiler, Juliet recovered almost 100 percent in the space of a couple
of weeks—but there’s a world of meaning in that “almost.” Moloch had wounded her on a level deeper than flesh, and there was
only so much that flesh could do to mend it. She refused to talk about the details, and when I kept pressing anyway, prurient
bastard that I am, she handed me an invitation in a dinky, girly little envelope with a silver border. I stopped when I got
to the line that read CEREMONY OF CIVIL UNION. I’m still hoping that the names, when I get to them, will be those of two people
I don’t know from Eve.

Gary Coldwood recovered, too. He endured six months’ suspension from duty, but he was reinstated at his original rank when
the evidence of a fit-up piled up so high it was in danger of toppling over and hurting someone. The engine block of his car
had been tampered with, and likewise the brakes. There were rope burns on his hands, and his upper lip had been split wide
open by whoever force-fed him the booze; they even found some broken glass from a Bacardi bottle in his upper palate. He used
his half a year of enforced leisure to finish his forensics course, and now you can’t have a conversation with him without
coagulation, postmortem artifacts, or stellate wound patterns getting a mention. But he’s got the limp, and he’s got the scar,
and there’s an unspoken something in the air whenever we meet. He doesn’t expect me to apologize; it wouldn’t help if I did.
Maybe we’ll meet less and less often until either the something or the friendship goes away.

Jan Hunter came and found me at my office in Harlesden one bleak Tuesday afternoon shelving dangerously into evening. She
tried to pay me the rest of the money we’d agreed on when she hired me. I kept my hands in my pockets.

“I do read the papers, Jan,” I said. “Doug got off on the murder charge because they finally decided to allow that hammer
in as evidence. But he still got three years for the jailbreak. You don’t owe me a thing.”

“You know exactly what I owe you, Mr. Castor,” she insisted. “Whoever did the crime, it’s my husband who’s going to serve
that sentence, and it’s my husband who’ll come out—next year, if he keeps his nose clean—to find me waiting for him. If it
wasn’t for you, I might never have seen him again.”

I knew that was a lie, but it was a hard one to explain. Alone, without the Mount Grace trust to carry out the monthly reinscription,
Myriam Kale would have found herself expelled from Doug’s body sooner or later. And if the way we’d done it had eased the
trauma and lessened the damage, the thanks probably belonged to the man who’d died a second time to make it happen. I told
Jan to put the money toward a second honeymoon. If she invests it wisely, it might pay for a dirty weekend in Clacton.

It took me a long time to go through the files I took from Maynard Todd’s office, but the preliminary sweep of the names was
quick and easy—although some of them made my eyebrows skitter across the top of my head and come to rest behind my ears. There
were a couple of cabinet ministers in there for starters, along with a Radio 4 presenter, the head of a major union, and the
CEOs of three companies even I’ve heard of.

But the biggest surprise wasn’t any of those. It was another name that sent me on my travels to the top end of the Northern
Line, five days after all this shit had hit the fan and when the echoes had already started to fade.

Court number one at Barnet had a full docket that morning: I didn’t bother to look at the details, but summary justice was
scheduled to be meted out to an impressive number of people. Never mind the quality, as the saying goes. Feel the burn.

I sat at the back of the court, making myself as inconspicuous as I could, but something was throwing the honorable Mr. Montague
Runcie off his honorable stride. He wasn’t looking in the peak of condition, for one thing: His face was pale, and there was
a sheen of sweat on his forehead, as though he were hunkered down under about five degrees of fever. And he kept looking over
at me in the back row center, getting more and more rattled each time. He fought his way manfully through the first case (a
persistent burglar going down for a three-stretch), but he lost the thread of things a bit in the second (nonpayment of council
tax) and got downright tetchy in the third (bad debt). Finally, he called a recess of half an hour and stormed off the bench
so quickly that we didn’t have time to stand up and sit down again when the door slammed behind him.