Dead Men's s Boots fc-3

by Mike Carey

  Because what Lathwell and his friends had, or seemed to have, was a lot better than the alternatives on offer. Ghosts could only drink the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally fall to pieces; and loup-garous had all the disadvantages of trying to remain human while living in the skin of an animal, a battle which in the long run they all lost.

  To come back as yourself – in living, human flesh – that was a sweet deal. And to come back again and again (because Les Lathwell’s fingerprints were the same as Aaron Silver’s) – well, that was the cherry on top of the sempiternal trifle.

  Either way, Mount Grace was the link. That was where the killers went. That was where John had gone after he’d engaged Todd to change his will. And I was willing to bet a rupee against a roll-over lottery win that that was where Myriam Kale had been taken, after Ruth gave up her sister’s mortal remains to Mister Bergson, the charming killer with the bleach-blond hair.

  ‘Thanks, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I owe you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘You do. More than you can pay. That briefcase is full of the Git’s bits and pieces. There’s no way I’m gonna try and sell them now: I’m going underground, and they’re too fucking easy to track. So you keep them to remember me by.’

  ‘Going underground?’ I tried to read his expression. ‘Do you mean that literally, or-?’

  ‘Ask me no questions, Castor, I’ll tell you no fucking lies.’

  I looked out of the window. I had the sense of clocks ticking and events accelerating past me, out of control. I’d vaguely assumed that we’d be taking the North Circular and I could jump out at Wood Green on the way through to Nicky’s gaff in Walthamstow, but the cabbie had taken the M25 and we were coming down on the A10 now, through Enfield and Ponders End. A memory stirred in my mind.

  I looked at my watch. It was very late, but what the hell. If nobody was home I could always come back another time. It felt like more than coincidence that I was passing this close right after Nicky had dropped that bombshell on me. Then again, that’s how all the best coincidences feel. First things first, though. Too much unfinished business was pressing on me: if I could shunt some of it off, I’d travel lighter.

  ‘Can you get a message through to someone for me?’ I asked Nicky. ‘On your way to wherever it is you’re going?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he allowed warily. ‘Who’s the someone?’

  ‘The governor of Pentonville.’

  He gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Fine. What do you want me to say? That you love him after all?’

  ‘That a demon from Hell is probably going to walk through his front door some time in the next twenty-four hours, looking to let a serial killer back out onto the street. A guy in the remand block. Douglas Hunter.’

  Nicky stared at me.

  ‘A demon from Hell?’

  ‘Yeah. Wearing human flesh. Answering to the description of a wet dream.’

  ‘Juliet?’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘You’re rolling over on Juliet?’

  ‘I wish. Look, I don’t think there’s anyone in that place with the balls or the tradecraft to exorcise her. I just want them to keep her out. Otherwise – well, a shitty situation gets one degree shittier.’

  Nicky considered. ‘I can drop him an email through a blind proxy. That good enough?’

  ‘That’s perfect, Nicky. Thanks.’

  ‘You’re very welcome. Where I’m going, even she won’t find me, so what the fuck do I care?’

  ‘Hey,’ I called to the cabbie, ‘can you fork a left at Nags Head Road?’

  ‘I was going to anyway,’ he grunted.

  ‘Great. You can drop me on the other side of the reservoir. That’s Chingford Hatch, right?’

  ‘Chingford Green. Chingford Hatch is a bit further down.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Who do you know all the way out here?’ Nicky demanded, genuinely curious. He’s curious about everything, because he knows, deep down, that the huge global conspiracy of which we’re all a part takes in every tiny detail. I think he even believes that one of the tiny details may turn out to be the clue that unlocks everything else.

  ‘A guy who runs a crematorium,’ I said.

  19

  The cab rolled away into the night, leaving me standing on a rain-slick pavement in the middle of a strangely lopsided street. In front of me was an unremarkable row of white-fronted semis: at my back was the Lea Valley reservoir, a broad slash of night-black nothingness barely contained behind a chain-link fence.

  King’s Head Hill lay to the north of me, most of the rest of Chingford to the south. Taking advantage of a street light, I fished out my wallet and rummaged through it until I found what I was looking for: the calling card that Peter Covington had given to Carla on the day her husband got cremated, and that Carla had passed on to me because she had nowhere to put it in her funereal glad-rags. The address was off New Road, in Chingford Hatch, and it had a name instead of a number: ‘The Maltings’. Less than a mile away, anyway, even if it was at the further end of New Road, up by the golf course. I made a start.

  As I walked I mulled over what I knew and didn’t know. The crematorium was the centre of some reincarnation racket whose implications I couldn’t get my head around just yet. John Gittings had been investigating it when he died, and he’d known what was going down long before he knew where. He’d spent days and weeks going through every damn cemetery in London, crossing them off laboriously on his list before finally coming to the big revelation that it wasn’t a cemetery he was looking for at all. Smashna. The light-bulb moment.

  And what did John do after that? Two things I knew about already, and they didn’t fit together all that well. He changed his will, insisting that he be burned at Mount Grace instead of being buried out at Waltham Cross. He did that even though he knew by this time – or maybe he knew from the start – that whatever the deal was at Mount Grace it was by invitation only, with thugs, murderers and former gangsters forming all or most of the clientele.

  And at the same time he planned an invasion. The letter I’d found inside his watch case, where he’d hidden it with such paranoid care, didn’t bear any other interpretation: Youll just get the one pass, and its got to be on INSCRIPTION night, so you can get them all together. Take back-up: take lots of back-up.

  So did he ever make that pass? Presumably not. He killed himself instead, and gave himself into the tender care of the born-again killers he’d been stalking. I couldn’t see the logic. Even for a man whose mind was crumbling away like a sandcastle at high tide, I just couldn’t for the life of me see how that would work.

  One thing I could see, though: whatever was going on, Maynard Todd was at the heart of it. He’d said he handled most of Lionel Palance’s business affairs, which meant he was de facto in charge of the crematorium if Palance didn’t ask too many questions. He’d told me it was his suggestion that John Gittings should choose Mount Grace after he’d decided on cremation. Then he’d moved Heaven and Earth to make it happen, calming Carla’s fears and bringing her on board with a tact and sensitivity that didn’t go hand-in-hand with the word ‘lawyer’ in my personal lexicon. And Gary Coldwood had had his accident – you can take the ironic emphasis for granted – after I’d pointed him towards Todd’s office.

  Okay, so Ruthven, Todd and Clay were next on the itinerary. But right now I had to keep my mind on the job in hand.

  The Maltings wasn’t a house at all, I realised as I reached the front gates. It was a mansion, set way back from the street behind a thick barricade of mature yew trees. The gates were electronic, as I could see by the thick hydraulic arms mounted at waist height across each one. There was a bell push and a speaker grille, but I ignored them for the moment. There was plenty of more interesting stuff to look at.

  It had crossed my mind as I walked that I might be wasting my time: that I’d find the house silent and dark, everyone
safely tucked up in bed and sleeping the sleep of the more or less just. I needn’t have worried. Every light was ablaze, and figures crossed and recrossed the lawn beyond the yew hedge, calling out to each other as they went. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear the urgency in their tones.

  I rang the bell, waited, rang it again: nobody answered. The crisis in the house, or rather in the house’s grounds, hadn’t left anybody free to deal with casual after-midnight callers. What the hell has happened to the social niceties these days?

  Acting on the kind of impulse that has brought me up before unsympathetic magistrates more than once, I stowed my bags behind some bushes and shinnied up the gate. I’d already sized it up as an easy climb, and it didn’t offer any unpleasant surprises at the top where you sometimes find razor wire or bird lime: within the space of about seven seconds I was dropping down on the inside, on the margin of a flagstoned driveway that stretched off ahead of me to where it became a broad terrace in front of the distant, flamboyantly lit-up house.

  The people weaving around on the big lawn seemed to be engaged in some kind of nocturnal hunt-meet. Some of them were beating the bushes, or rather combing them as though they hoped to find some shy woodland creatures nestled among the roots: others were quartering the lawn itself, occasionally shining flashlights in each other’s faces and then shouting apologies.

  I walked into their midst, partly hoping to find Peter Covington and explain what the hell I was doing there, partly just curious about what it was they were looking for. Nobody accosted me, or seemed to notice me at all. Once the beam of a flashlight picked me out, but it swung away again as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he thought I was.

  ‘Sorry,’ came a muttered voice out of the darkness.

  ‘No problem,’ I answered.

  The grounds were even bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summer house and a splodge of darkness that was probably some kind of arbour out in the middle of the lawn. Vague silhouettes circled around all three.

  Three broad, shallow stone steps led up to the front door of the house, which was wide open. I walked inside and stood in the entrance hall at the foot of a flight of stairs that bifurcated at first-floor level, breaking away to left and right like an architectural cluster bomb.

  ‘Anybody home?’ I called. And then ‘Covington?’ No answer.

  Killing time, I looked at my surroundings in a ‘Who lives in a house like this?’ frame of mind. Someone with a shit-lot of money to spend, that was for sure. The hall was bigger than Ropey’s living room, and there was polished mahogany everywhere. Over my head hung a massive chandelier that was modern, asymmetrical and ugly as sin. Well, money can buy you love at the market price, but good taste you’ve got to be born with. I counted my blessings and almost got to one.

  A noise sounded from somewhere near at hand, once and then again: a muffled scuffling, like rats behind the skirting boards. I followed it to a cupboard under the stairs with a three-quarter-height door: the sort of place where in a suburban semi you might hide the Hoover and the dustpan. In this stately pile, it was probably the servants’ quarters.

  More scuffling. I opened the door and peered inside, for a moment seeing only a vertical stack of fuse boxes and some folding chairs. I smelled the acid reek of urine. Then I realised with a jolt that a pair of human eyes was peering out from behind the chairs: the cupboard was deeper than I thought and someone was sitting back there in the dark. An old man with a slightly dazed, more than slightly sleepy look to him.

  He didn’t seem too alarmed at being found. He just blinked and shielded his eyes as the light flooded into his bolt-hole.

  ‘Hide,’ he said. His voice was thin and high, with a faint vibrato that sounded a little plaintive.

  ‘Right,’ I agreed.

  Then the lined face opened up in a disconcerting grin that looked as though it belonged somewhere else entirely. ‘Hide and seek.’

  A shiver went through me, but it came from a memory – John Gittings’s last days as relayed to me by Carla – rather than from this harmless old man’s crazy little game, which at least gave the seemingly oversized staff something to do. ‘Maybe you should come out of there,’ I suggested, as non-threateningly as I could manage. ‘Do you want some help?’

  The old guy seemed to need a long time to think that through, but eventually he said ‘Ye-e-es,’ drawing the sound out into a querulous bleat.

  I moved the chairs and helped him to his feet, taking care not to make him move any faster than he was comfortable with. He was so frail he looked as though he might just break into pieces. He wore silk pyjamas that were a little too big for him; there was a broad, dark stain spreading outwards and downwards from the crotch, which explained the gents’-urinal smell.

  I took a step backward, and then another, bending my head as I passed under the lintel. The old man shuffled out after me, not needing to bend his own head because of his diminutive size and stooped shoulders.

  As I was closing the cupboard door I heard footsteps from behind me and turned my head with difficulty – because the old man was still holding tight onto my arm – to see who was coming. One of the search parties had come in out of the cold: at its head was a familiar face topped by a familiar shock of snow-white hair.

  ‘Door was open, Mister Covington,’ I said. ‘So I let myself in. Hope you don’t mind.’

  He stared at me, then at the old man leaning against my arm, then back at me. ‘The door was open,’ he agreed, ‘but as I recall the gate was locked. It still is. Do I know you? Your face is vaguely familiar.’

  ‘Felix Castor. We met at Mount Grace,’ I said. ‘On Wednesday, when John Gittings was cremated.’ By this time, two of the searchers – a man in an immaculate white shirt and grey suit trousers and a woman who was self-evidently a nurse – had gently and painstakingly prised the old man’s fingers loose from my forearm and were leading him away, the woman murmuring reassuringly into his ear about getting cleaned up and having a nice cup of tea. I watched him out of sight, then turned back to Covington.

  Covington nodded slowly, his expression still wary. ‘All right. Yes. I remember you. But what are you doing here now?’

  ‘I was hoping to talk to Mister Palance,’ I said, and saw the punchline looming a full second before it came.

  ‘Well,’ Covington said, nodding towards the door that the old man had disappeared through, ‘it looks as though you’ve already introduced yourself.’

  ‘Mister Palance – Lionel – had a stroke about ten years ago,’ Covington said, walking ahead of me along a corridor you could drive a truck down: it would have ruined the Persian carpet, though, and probably knocked one or two of the enormous Tiffany lamps off their wrought-iron brackets.

  ‘A bad one?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ Covington shook his head. His expression – what I could see of it – was closed, impossible to read. ‘Not a bad one. Not really. He was able to walk afterwards, and his speech was back to normal after three months. But it came on the back of a lot of other problems. Most of them, I have to say, psychological. A nervous breakdown at the age of fifty-two, which he never fully recovered from, and occasional bouts of dementia since.

  ‘He’d had a very happy – almost blessed – life up until then, but it all came apart very quickly. That was when he first hired me to look after the day-to-day workings of the estate.’

  ‘Before the breakdown?’ I asked. ‘Or after?’

  The blond man looked over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrowing very slightly. ‘Before,’ he said. ‘A year or so before, I suppose. I was still relatively new when all that stuff happened. Why do you ask?’

  I didn’t even know myself. ‘Just wondering about the legal situation,’ I said glibly, remembering John Gittings’s Alzheimer’s and the doubts it might have cast on his changed will. ‘If he took you on when he wasn’t in his right mind . . .’

  Covington shrugged. ‘There’s a trust,’ he said. ‘They�
��re the real decision-makers as far as Lionel’s investments are concerned. I’m just an administrator. And a sort of personal assistant. I deal with the running of the house, sort and answer the mail, liaise with the medical staff here. That sort of thing. The trustees manage the investment portfolio and pay me my salary.’

  ‘Who looks after the crematorium?’ I asked.

  Covington held open an oak-panelled door, and I walked through into what was evidently one of the family rooms. I smelled the smell of understated luxury: leather and fresh-cut flowers and old, old wood. A sixty-inch TV stood against one wall of the room and tried in vain to dominate it. The carpet underneath my shoes swallowed the sound of my footsteps. The curtains had a pattern of fleur-de-lis, and you could have played a game of five-a-side football on the black leather settee. There was a bar, too: the full deal, with wall-mounted optics and a gleaming chrome soda syphon.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’ Covington asked, derailing the conversation. ‘Whisky? Brandy?’

  ‘Whisky. Thanks.’

  ‘Straight, or on the rocks?’

  ‘Straight.’

  He went behind the bar and fixed the drinks, moving unhurriedly and with practised ease, as though serving in a pub was where his real strengths lay rather than managing an estate. The whisky was Springbank Local Barley, 1966, which didn’t surprise me in the least but did make my heart quicken just a little. Covington poured two generous measures and passed one across the bar-top to me on a folded serviette. I took it up and swirled it in the glass, the rich aroma rising so that I breathed it in like an olfactory French kiss.

  ‘The crematorium,’ I said again.

  ‘Yes.’ Covington took a sip of his own drink, held it on his tongue for a second or two and then swallowed. ‘Why do you want to know, Mister Castor?’

  Truth as far as it goes: the Galactic Girl Guides’ ever-serviceable motto.