Dead Men's s Boots fc-3

by Mike Carey

She shrugged dismissively. ‘Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on – the one he kept saying was going to get him into the history books – had something to do with dead killers. And now we know that Kale was on his list.’

  Juliet thought about this. ‘And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,’ she finished, voicing my own thoughts. ‘Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?’

  ‘None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.’

  Juliet nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ she mused. ‘But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more questions than it answers.’

  ‘I meant it a joke,’ I said.

  ‘Then you should have smiled.’

  ‘I’ve finished,’ Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. ‘But you should probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.’

  ‘I will,’ I lied. ‘Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.’ Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind: life throws you some funny curves.

  ‘I saved you some ratatouille,’ Susan said, embarrassed. ‘You can eat it on a tray, if you like.’

  Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of wind-blown trash. The room had changed a lot since I’d been there last. Then, it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana: now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung on white-painted walls. I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognise them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

  ‘So how’s work?’ I asked her. ‘Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.’ Susan had been the verger at a church in West London when she’d met Juliet, but had bailed out when they’d started living together and had gone back to her old career as a librarian. It was a principled decision, based more on the fact that she was in a same-sex relationship than on her shacking up with a demon. The modern Anglican church regards Hell as a state of mind and doesn’t officially believe in demons (unlike the Catholics, who hunt them with papally blessed flamethrowers), but it still has problems with church officers who are openly gay. As an atheist with issues, I have to say I love that shit.

  Susan smiled, genuinely pleased to be asked. ‘No, I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘I’m enjoying it. It’s a little hard, sometimes, because I’m trying to do a lot of ambitious things on no money. But it’s lovely to be working with children. They’re so open-minded and spontaneous. And you’d be amazed how many children’s authors will do readings just for the fun of it. We had Antony Johnston in last week. He wrote the graphic-novel version of Stormbreaker. And he was wonderful. Very funny, and very – whatever the opposite of precious is. Very matter-of-fact about what he does. We got the biggest audience we’ve ever had.’

  ‘Stormbreaker being . . . ?’ I prompted, feeling a little lost.

  ‘It’s one of the best-selling children’s books of the last decade, Felix,’ Susan chided me schoolmarmishly.

  ‘Oh, that Stormbreaker,’ I bluffed.

  ‘They made a movie of it.’

  ‘Not a patch on the book.’

  ‘You don’t need to work,’ Juliet said to Susan, putting a broom handle through the spokes of my small talk.

  There was an awkward pause.

  ‘I like to work, Jules,’ Susan said.

  Juliet met that statement with a cold deadpan ‘Why?’

  Susan didn’t seem very happy with the question: generally anything that looked like an argument looming in the distance made her run for cover, but this time she stood her ground. ‘Because it’s part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you, and warmed your bed, then – well, I’d be a very boring person. And then you’d want to see other people, and then you’d leave me. And then I’d kill myself.’

  Juliet considered. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I can see the logic. I’ve never been romantically infatuated with anyone before, so it’s difficult right now to see how my feelings for you could change. But there’s plenty of evidence from human relationships, so you’re probably right. Go on.’

  But Susan couldn’t. She forgot what she’d been saying, tried to start again, floundered into silence. For the first time in many, many months, I felt sorry enough for her to forget how much I envied her. I changed the subject by main force, swivelling it back around in the direction of shop talk, and ended up regaling both of them with some of my favourite ghost stories. Most of them had happened to other people, not to me, but I stretched the truth to pretty good effect. The moment passed. The tears that I’d seen in Sue Book’s eyes never actually fell.

  ‘Moloch said I should go to the source,’ I told Juliet, when I was a fair way into my fourth glass of Glen acetone.

  ‘Did he?’ Juliet’s tone sounded hard and cold. But when Susan topped up her glass, she reached out to touch her hand for a moment: a very delicate touch, expressing both affection and something a little more proprietorial. After what had passed between them earlier, it was a healing touch – or something close. ‘And did he say what he meant by that?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I admitted. ‘He didn’t. But I’ve got some ideas of my own. Have you got anything on tomorrow afternoon?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Well, there’s something happening in the morning over in Muswell Hill – something I want to be around for. But I’m free after that, and I was wondering how you’d feel about leaning on some people while I ask them a whole bunch of leading questions.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘I’ll know when I see them,’ I said evasively.

  Juliet rolled her eyes. ‘Where?’ she demanded. ‘Where do they live?’

  I swirled the whisky in my glass, studiously avoiding her gaze.

  ‘Alabama,’ I said.

  15

  It may dent my image of macho, gung-ho capability to say this, but the next morning I felt rough. I’d stayed at Juliet’s long enough to work out the logistics of where we were going to go and who we were going to see, and then I’d made some calls before she could change her mind: one to a travel agent to book a couple of cheap tickets to Birmingham, Alabama, and then another to Nicky to tell him what was up and to ask him if he could work out an itinerary for us. He said he wanted to talk to me before I left, but that was all he’d say.

  A third call, to Gary Coldwood, just got me his answering machine. ‘What does something juicy mean?’ I asked it, and hung up.

  I had one last errand to run before I could limp off home, and I’d managed to get it done with the minimum of fuss even though it involved a certain amount of blackmail – both the emotional kind and the kind that’s a felony.

  When the alarm woke me at seven, I felt like my brain had been melted, decanted through a pipette and left to stand in the Petri dish of my skull until it congealed again. The only thing that could possibly have got me out of bed was the thought of what was going down at the Stanger this morning – and the knowledge that I had to be there to make sure it went down my way rather than Jenna-Jane’s.

  The Charles Stanger Care Home in Muswell Hill was never designed for its current usage. It was originally a set of Victorian workmen’s cottages, then it was converted to a residential and holding facility for the violently disturbed after the former owner – the eponymous Charles Stanger, an enthusiastic psychopath in his own right – bequeathed them to the Crown. The interiors were gutted and replaced with ugly, functional cells, and a much larger annexe was built on as demand grew: it seems that lunatics, like ghosts, are one of the growth industries of the early tw
enty-first century.

  But Rafael Ditko isn’t a lunatic: he’s just someone for whom the criminal justice and psychiatric care systems have no other label that fits. And, after all, he does hear a little voice inside his head, telling him what to do: the voice of the demon Asmodeus, who took up residence about four years ago and – thanks largely to me – has never gone home again.

  It was almost eight when I got to the Stanger, which I hoped would still put me ahead of Jenna-Jane’s agenda. I nodded to the nurse at the reception desk, relieved to see that it was Lily: she’s known both me and Webb long enough to have no illusions about the score, and she nodded me through without asking me to sign the visitors’ book.

  One of the male nurses, Paul, who knew I was coming (another late-night call) was waiting for me outside Rafi’s cell. I gestured a question at him, thumb up and then down. He shrugged massively.

  ‘He’s quiet,’ he said. ‘Kind of. Had a rowdy night and I guess he’s resting now. Still wide awake, though.’ He was unlocking the door as he spoke, but he paused with his hand on the handle to look me full in the eye. ‘You’re not gonna like what they’ve done to him,’ he warned me. ‘Try to keep your cool, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Paul swung the door open and I stepped in, announcing my arrival with an echoing clang because the floor inside Rafi’s cell is bare metal: steel, mostly, but with a lot of silver in the mix too. I know because I paid for it to be installed: cost a small fortune, but it’s worth it because for at least some of the time it keeps Rafi’s passenger from getting too frisky.

  Friskiness didn’t seem to be an issue right now, though: in preparation for transit, Webb had Rafi trussed up tighter than a Christmas turkey.

  They’d built – or perhaps Jenna-Jane had supplied – a massive steel frame, about seven feet high by four wide, standing on three sets of wheels like a mobile dress rack. The resemblance didn’t end there, either: Rafi was hanging inside this construction, in an all-over-body straitjacket fitted with a dozen or more steel hoops to which lengths of elasticated cable had been attached. Like a spider trussed in his own web he dangled at the centre of the frame on a slight diagonal, his face the only part of him that was visible. I would have expected that face to be livid with demonic rage, but it was a near-perfect blank, the eyes – all pupil, no white – staring at me and through me.

  ‘OPG?’ I asked Paul.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Inhaled or injected?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Bastards.’ I could smell the stuff in the air now – although it was the propellants rather than the gas itself that I was smelling: OPG itself is too volatile to linger for more than a couple of seconds after it’s been used. It was produced as a weapon – a nerve toxin, derived from the less potent Tabun – but was banned for military use decades ago. You can still use it on the mentally ill, though, because of a sweet little legal loophole: in tiny, almost homeopathic amounts it’s been proven to slow the onset of Alzheimer’s and to have a sedative effect on manic patients. I was willing to bet that the amounts we were talking about here were more in the bulk haulage range.

  ‘I’m gonna leave you to it,’ Paul said. ‘And if anyone asks I’m gonna lie and say I never saw you. Sorry, Castor. Bastards they are, but for now I still work here. We’re meant to be wheeling him out to the front in a few minutes, so you’d best keep it short.’ He stepped out and pulled the door almost to behind him.

  ‘Hey, Castor,’ said Rafi, his voice crystal clear despite the zoned-out stare.

  ‘Hey, Rafi,’ I answered, giving him the benefit of the doubt until I could be sure. I came in a little closer, but not too close: I wasn’t sure how much give there was in those elastic straps. ‘Asmodeus in there too?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s here. He’s not happy with you.’

  ‘I bet. Can I have a word?’

  There was a long silence. I waited it out, knowing from past experience that there was no way of rushing this. Asmodeus rose or fell under his own steam and at his own pace: and the massive OPG hit, whimsically cross-connecting the circuitry of Rafi’s nervous system, wouldn’t help much either. But slow ripples began to pass across Rafi’s face, each one leaving it subtly altered. The effect was slow enough that you could convince yourself it was an optical illusion, but it didn’t much matter how you rationalised it: after half a minute or so, the fact was you were looking at a different face.

  The new face, wearing Rafi’s features like a savagely ironic quote, stared at me with a sour grimace twisting one corner of its mouth.

  ‘Can’t hear the cavalry,’ Asmodeus said, sounding like he was crunching down on a mouthful of ground glass.

  ‘They’re coming,’ I answered, with more confidence than I felt. ‘In the meantime I was going to ask a favour.’

  ‘I love doing you favours, Castor. Come in a little closer. Kiss me on the lips.’

  ‘I want you to burrow down, as deep as you can. Go all the way to sleep, if you can. I’ll play for you: listen to the music instead of trying to avoid it. Let it work through you, and use it to get as much distance from Rafi as you can.’

  Asmodeus smiled politely. ‘And why should I do this thing?’

  ‘Because someone who looks like one of my species but acts like one of yours is coming to get you. And she’ll pick you to pieces with tweezers and she’ll mount you on slides and she’ll label all the pieces of you. You know this is true.’

  There was silence for a moment except for the puncturedtyre hissing of Asmodeus’s breath. ‘The bitch,’ he said at last, without heat. ‘The bitch with the fishing rod and the big ambitions. When she hits the wall, it will make a very sweet sound.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I allowed. ‘Maybe not. She’s a crafty player, Asmodeus, and too fucking big for you right now.’

  ‘And for you, Castor.’

  ‘Goes without saying.’ Knowing what Asmodeus was, I felt seriously uncomfortable with all of this: almost, as though the phrase has any meaning at all, like a species-traitor. I was discussing tactics with a demon, trying to keep him out of the hands of the closest thing the human race had to a predator of demons. This was what Jenna-Jane Mulbridge had brought me to, and at that moment I hated her for it.

  ‘The people outside need to see Rafi,’ I said, taking my whistle – it was the first alternate, and I hadn’t properly worn it in yet – out of my pocket. ‘They don’t need to see you. If they see you, they’ll think she’s right. You understand?’

  ‘Humans can’t think, Castor. They can only think that they think.’

  ‘Point stands. Maybe I’ll see you later, but I sure as fuck don’t want to see you now. And I’ve said all I’m going to say.’

  I stopped talking and played. It started out as a recognisable tune but then became a crazy medley, fast at first but decelerando, working down through the scale with a certain doleful urgency. Asmodeus bobbed his head in time with the beat, ironically showing me that he was keeping up. He sang improvised words in a guttural language that the human voice box was never shaped for, and I hoped I’d never meet anyone who could provide me with a translation.

  But his eyes were closing, and his voice was faltering. The movements of his head dropped out of sync with the music, then slowed and stopped.

  When the door finally swung open behind me, he was still.

  ‘Got to move the patient,’ Paul said brusquely.

  I turned around, tucking the whistle back in my coat. Paul wasn’t alone; a Welsh guy named Kenneth and a third Stanger staffer I didn’t recognise stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him on either side, while further back I could see Doctor Webb, the Stanger’s director, directing proceedings along with a bald, austere stick-figure of a man in a dark grey suit. Paul’s face was impassive: he barely even looked at me. Webb, on the other hand, was dismayed and outraged to see me there ahead of him.

  ‘Castor!’ he exclaimed, spitting up my name in much the same way that a cat spits up a hairball. ‘Who let Castor in here? He’s tr
espassing! Move him aside!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, stepping determinedly into the path of the little party as they came forward. ‘Got to move the patient where, exactly? Who says? What are you talking about? I’m the patient’s next of kin so why don’t I know about this?’

  ‘You’re not his next of kin!’ Webb snarled. He snapped his fingers under Kenneth’s nose and pointed at me imperiously. Kenneth put a hand on my chest and pushed me firmly to one side, allowing Paul and the other male nurse to walk past me and take either end of the metal frame. They manoeuvred it round so that they could wheel it end-on through the door, but I wasn’t done yet. I ducked under Kenneth’s hand, crossed to the door and slammed it shut. The mortise lock clicked home, which meant that Paul would have to leave off what he was doing, get his keys out and open it again. And that meant he had to come through me.

  Webb bought me another few seconds, obligingly. Turning three shades south of purple he stalked towards me, then stood in front of me with his clenched fists hovering an inch from my face, paralysed by an approach-avoidance conflict so painfully visible that I couldn’t look away. He wanted to hit me: he knew there were witnesses. But he wanted to hit me: but then there were those darn witnesses . . .

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the room at large, ‘but I’m performing a citizen’s arrest.’

  Kenneth looked pained as he advanced on me again, having to step around the good doctor. ‘You’re performing a what, my lovely?’ he demanded.

  ‘A citizen’s arrest. I’m arresting all five of you for the attempted abduction of a mentally ill person against his-’ Kenneth clamped a massive hand on my lapels. I swatted it vigorously away. He came back again with both hands, and although I parried again he managed to get a better grip this time and keep his purchase.

  He outweighed me by a good fifty pounds: I could have taken him, but only by playing dirty, and getting myself banged up for assault at this stage of the game wasn’t a risk I could take. I let him pull me aside and pin me into a corner of the cell while Paul got the door open again and he and his colleague manhandled the massive steel frame through it, hindered rather than helped by Webb’s unnecessary instructions and ubiquitous presence. ‘To the right, Paul. No, to the left . . .’