by Mike Carey
Nothing seemed to happen at first, but then from my point of view, nothing was going to. Hopefully the perspective from where Coldwood was standing was starting to look a bit different. Just before I hit the second chorus there was a gasp from one of the forensics officers over by the desk. Good. Then another one cried out aloud, and pointed, and I knew the plangent little tune had done the trick.
What they were pointing at was a man who was standing on nothing very much, in the exact center of the well that the trapdoor had covered. Hed always been there, perfectly visible to me from the moment Id walked in, but Coldwoods boys had been walking past him and through him without so much as a premonitory shudder and a muttered Hail Mary, so Id felt safe in assuming that I was the only one who could see him.
But the music had changed all that. This tuneat this time, in this place, played in this tempo, and all the rest of itwas for me a description of the ghost. Its a knack Ive got: not just to see the dead, but to perceive them with a sense thats nine-tenths hearing, one-tenth something I can only describe as else. I can catch the essence of a ghost in music, and once Ive caught it there are other things I can do with it. One of them, which Id discovered fairly recently and spectacularly, was to make other people see it, too.
So now the music was bringing this dead man inside the perceptual orbit of Coldwood and his copperswhich meant that they were seeing Sheehans ghost materialize out of that proverbially popular substance, thin air. The plods gaped, and the men in white coats visibly bridled and tensed as they saw this piece of superstition and unreason made manifest before their eyes. Coldwood has a more pragmatic cast of mind: he walked right up close to the ghost and began his examination. It stared at him with mournful, frightened eyes.
Lesley Sheehan clearly hadnt been dead for very long, and he hadnt had time yet to get used to the idea. Hed come here because this was a place he had strong associations toor possibly hed just stayed here because this was where hed diedbut in either case, now that hed materialized that seemed to be the upper limit of his capabilities for the time being. He couldnt reinsert himself into life because his phantasmal body couldnt lift or move or touch any physical objects, and wouldnt even reliably do what his phantasmal mind told it to. Some ghosts got trapped into reenacting their deaths for the whole of eternity; others just stood, as Sheehan was doing now, looking lost and frighteneddefeated and broken down by the no-longer-avoidable fact of their own mortality. He was aware of us, on some level, and his eyes followed Coldwood as the sergeant squatted down on his haunches to get a better look at some detail that had caught his eye. But it was as if he were frozen to the spot: he couldnt form the decision or the desire to move from where he was.
Coldwood pointed to the ligature around Sheehans bare forearm. He was shooting up, he said, sounding disgruntled. Stupid bastards gone and jolted himself over. Why didnt he do it on his own fucking time?
That was what I thought, too, I agreed. But if you take a look at the back view youll probably want to amend that diagnosis.
Coldwood favored me with another expressive look, but he got up and strolled around the pathetic figure, where he stared with some surprise at the back of Sheehans heador to be more accurate, at the place where it had been. It mostly wasnt there anymore. The shade of Lesley Sheehan lost interest in the sergeant as soon as he passed out of sight: he lifted his hands and stared at them for a moment, then frowned and looked around as if he were trying to remember where his car keys were.
Youre the expert, I said, but Im guessing a bullet wound from a gun pressed against his temple just in front of the ear, angled a little backwards. If he was shot from behind, presumably most of his face would be an exit wound.
It wasnt a gun, muttered Coldwood. It was one of those captive-bolt efforts they use to kill cows. He pointed. The whole of the left side of the head has caved in, and most of the bone has stayed in the wound. You dont get that pattern of damage with a high-velocityHey, if you chuck up in here Im having you on an effing charge!
The last words werent addressed to me, but to the uniformed copper whod been looking a little peaky earlier. From where he was standing, the poor sod had an intimate perspective on some of Sheehans most private partsthe ones that had formerly been inside his skull. It didnt seem to be agreeing with him much at all. At a curt nod from Coldwood he ran for the door.
Coldwood turned his attention back to me. Wheres the body? he asked. The real, physical body? Where can we find him?
I dont have a bastard clue, I answered truthfully. I can ask him, if you like. But you might as well ask him yourself. He can see you. He could see you even when you couldnt see him.
But youre the expert, he echoed me, with deft sarcasm.
Being an exorcist isnt quite the same as being a detective, I shot back, deadpan. I dont have a badge I can wave at himand its really difficult to kick the shit out of a man whos already dead. But Ill give it a go, if you leave me alone with him. Im not doing it in front of your mob.
Coldwood chewed that one over for a long moment. Okay, he said, but he thrust a warning finger under my nose. Touch the evidence and Ill gut you, Castor. Understand me?
I dont need drugs, I said. I can get high on death.
With a muttered profanity, Coldwood signaled to his team to withdraw. It was nice and quiet after theyd gone, and I decided to let the new mood settle in for a minute or two before I tackled Mr. Sheehan. I slipped my whistle into the purpose-built pocket Id sewn into the lining of my coatI go for a Russian army greatcoat because it hides a multitude of sinsand in another pocket nearby found a silver hip flask that was full of extremely rough Greek brandy. I took a swig, and it expanded inside me like a fire inside a derelict building. Its not good. Really not good at all. But at moments like this it bridges a gap and keeps me moving.
With a second mouthful swilling around my gums, I took another look at the calendars. Just the usual lad mag soft porn: Abbie whatshername, Suzie something else. But Sheehans tastes ran to material that was less vanilla, Coldwood had said. Well, hed given up the pleasures of the flesh now, that was for damn sure. After doing this job for a decade or so, I still dont know much about the afterlifebut Im willing to lay long odds that the dead dont get their end away very much.
There was no point in putting it off anymore: Sheehans memory was probably as truncated as what was left of his head, so he must have forgotten Coldwoods merry marching band by now. I pocketed the flask again and walked over to where the ghost was standinghis feet a few inches above the brown paper bags, roughly where the floor had been. Like therapy, death reveals your deepest instincts: he was guarding his stash.
So, I said to him, conversationally. Youre dead, then. Hows that working out?
His eyes flicked over me, lingered, wandered off again. He was having a hard time staying focused, which perhaps wasnt all that surprising.
Must have been a shock, I offered. One moment youre walking along, not a care in the world. The next some guy gets a headlock on you, drags you into an alley and ker-chunk: youve got daylight hitting your eyes from the back.
Sheehan frowned, made a formless gesture with his right hand. His lips moved.
Takes a while even to realize whats happened to you, I went on, commiserating. You think, well that was bad but here I am, thank God. And then the hours go by, and the doubts start to set in. Why am I still just standing here? How did I get here in the first place? What do I do next?
And the truth is, mate, you dont get to do anything. Not now. Doing things is a luxury that the living have. The deadwell, mostly they just get to watch.
Sheehans eyes widened. I didnt know if that was my words getting past his guard or just the dim stirrings of memory in whatever he was using now for a mind. His hands twitched aga
in, and this time when he spoke I could hear a dry whisper, like wind through grass.
Poorpoor
Self-pity is something you often get from the dead, and its not like you can really blame them for it. It doesnt look like any of the options are all that attractive; even heaven, if you take the majority view, is a state of oneness with God and perpetual praise of his goodness, which must wear pretty thin after the first few hours, let alone the rest of eternity. On the other hand, this guy was a pusher and a porn merchant and fuck alone knew what else: I wasnt wasting any sympathy, because you never know when youre going to run out.
Yeah, I said. Its very much a crock of shit. Some bastard really stiffed you, Sheehan. Its almost worth believing in hell so you can have the comfort of imagining him roasting in it.
Poorpoorpoor
You said that. I agreed.
Pauley! The name was barely audible, but Ive got good ears and I was listening on all frequencies.
Pauley. I turned my back on him: best to distract him as little as possible now, because his attention deficit was probably only going to get worse. Pauley topped you, did he? Well thats friends for you. Did it hurt, or was it all over too quick for you to notice?
A long silence; then a hoarse, almost voiceless whisper. H-h-hurt. Hurt me.
Was this over at your place, then? I asked, my tone so relentlessly neutral I must have sounded bored to death with the whole subject. Knock on the door, bang, youre dead, kind of thing? Or were you out on the town?
There was a very long silence. I let it stretch. It sounded like the kind of silence that might have a payoff at the end of it. Bronze, Sheehan whispered. Bronze. He made a sound like a moan stretched thin and hung up to curea moan with no bass to it, because the dead tend to have trouble hitting the low notes. Buried.
The silence after that final exhalation was different. When I turned around, I knew what Id see: Sheehan was gone. Exhausted by the effort of speech, his physical manifestation had faded into random motes in the air: not matter, nor energy, nor anything that anyone had managed to trap or measure. Hed be back, given that he had nowhere else to go, but it wouldnt be soon.
I went to the door and stepped outside onto the narrow ribbon of asphalt that separated the warehouse from the street. The only cars parked there were Coldwoods tax-deductible Primera and three regular black-and-whites. Coldwood was off to one side by himself, talking on his cellphone. The plods and the backroom boys were in two separate cliques, responding atavistically to each others pheromones. There was a brisk wind coming down from the north, but at least it wasnt raining anymore. The sun was setting behind the brutalist high-rises of Colindeep Lane, and a huge mass of gun-gray cloud was pouring across the sky behind it like water down a drain.
Coldwood finished his conversation, put his phone away, and came over to me. Anything? he asked, in a tone that expected so little it couldnt possibly be disappointed.
He fingered Pauley, I said. Coldwoods eyebrows shot up his forehead. At least, I think he did. And when I asked him where he died he said bronze. Then buried.
Brondesbury, Coldwood translated. Brondesbury Auto Parts. Christ, thatd be a bloody kiss on the cheek from God. If the bodys still there He was already heading for his car at a fast stroll, dialing as he went. The uniformed coppers turned to follow him with their eyes, awaiting orders with a sort of stolid urgency unique to the boys in blue, but Coldwood was talking on the phone again. The bodywork place, he was snapping. The one in Brondesbury Park. Get over there now. Yeah. Yes, get a warrant. But dont wait. Get the place surrounded and dont let any bugger in or out!
I take it this is good news, I said to Coldwoods back as he hauled the car door open. Sliding into the drivers seat he spared me a micro-second glance. That shop is in Pauleys name, he said, with a nasty smile. Weve already got probable cause. If we can get a search warrant, and if the bodys still there, we can raid all of his other gaffs and really get some action going. His gaze snapped from me to a uniformed constable whod just stepped up behind methe one whod had to run outside to be sick. MacKay, take Castors statement and fax it on to DC Tennant at Luke Street. The car window was already sliding closed as he said it, making any reply redundant. Then Coldwood was out onto the road and gone, trailing a whiff of tortured rubber.
Having my statement taken was very much adding insult to injury, but it was an invitation of the kind thats hard to refuse. I went over the events of the evening while Constable MacKay wrote them down in laborious longhand, culminating in what Sheehans ghost had said to me when I interrogated him in my official capacity as ghostbuster general. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sangfroid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckoned he had the right stuff to be an officer.
Nothing wrong with his observational skills, though: After a while, he noticed that I was getting fidgety, and that there was an edge creeping into my tone when I was repeating myself for the third or fourth time on some minor detail like where Id been standing when I said X or Y.
Got somewhere else you need to be? he asked aggressively.
Yeah, I agreed. Thats it exactly.
Oh, right. Hot, is she? He favored me with the kind of pruriently suggestive leer that cops and squaddies get issued on day one along with their boots.
I really wasnt in the mood. Its a he, I said. Hes a demonically possessed psychopath, and he tends to run a core temperature about eight degrees higher than the bog standard ninety-eight point four. So yeah, I think you could safely say hes hot.
MacKay put his notebook away, giving me a stare of truculent suspicion: hed felt the breeze of something going over his head, and he didnt like it. Well I dont think we need anything else from you right now, he said sternly. The sergeant will probably be in touch again later on, though, so you keep yourself available, yeah?
Its all right, I said. Ill contact him on the astral plane.
Eh? The suspicion had turned to frank alarm.
Skip it, I muttered over my shoulder as I walked away. It wasnt MacKays fault that my Saturday night was up the Swannee. That was down to nobody but me, which is never as much consolation as it ought to be.
The weekend is meant to be a time when you unwind from the stresses of the week thats gone and recharge your batteries for the shit-storm to come. But not for me, not tonight. The place I was going on to now made this God-spurned dump look positively cozy.
Two
ICAN DRIVE, WHEN I HAVE TO, BUT I DONT OWN A CAR. IN London, owning a car doesnt seem to help all that much, unless you want somewhere to sit and soak up the sun while youre lazing on the M25. So it was going to take a long haul on the underground to get me to where I was goinginto town on one branch of the Northern Line, back out again on the other one.
It was the twilight zone between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night: the football crowds had already faded away like fairy gold, and it was too early yet for the clubbers and the theatergoers. I was able to sit for most of the way, even if the carriage did have a fugitive whiff of stale fat from someones illicitly consumed Big Mac.
The guy next to me was reading The Guardian, so I read it, too, in staccato glimpses over his shoulder as he turned the pages. The Tories were about to slice and dice their latest leader, which has always been my favorite blood sport; the home secretary was denying some spectacular abuse of office while refusing to relax an injunction that would have allowed the news media to describe exactly what it was; and the Post Mortem Rights Bill was about to come back to
the Commons for what was expected to be an eventful third reading.
That wasnt what they were calling it, of course. I think the actual title of the proposed act of parliament was the Redefinition of Legal Status Extraordinary Powers Actbut the tabloids had resorted to various forms of shorthand, and Post Mortem Rights was the one that had stuck. Personally, I tended to think of it as the Alive Until Proven Dead Act.
