by Mike Carey
‘Mister Hunter.’ I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room towards us. The guard who’d come in with him moved off to one side but stayed close, keeping him in view, and the other guard who’d been waiting with us took up a position off to the other side, about the same distance away. Remand or not, they knew what Doug was up for – probably knew what Doc Maxwell’s diagnosis was, too – and they weren’t taking any chances.
Doug ignored the hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, of course, but maybe it was worth noting in this case. Whatever flavour of sexuality Doug generally favoured, he seemed to be capable of responding on some level to Juliet’s charms. I filed that fact away for future reference.
‘You know why we’re here?’ I asked him.
He nodded slowly, turning to look at me again with a slight widening of the eyes, as though he’d forgotten in the interim that I was there.
‘You’re here,’ he said simply.
His voice was different from what I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent at all, and it was so strangely uninflected that it was almost like a robot’s voice. Except that most robots these days use sampled sound from human voices, so they sound more animated and a whole lot warmer than Doug Hunter did.
Coldwood’s sexual-psychopath hypothesis made sense to me at that moment. Doug sounded like a man whose brain was currently operating only a minimal service during extensive refurbishments. But then again, how much of that was the man and how much was the drug?
‘Right. Exactly. We’re here to talk to you. Would you like to sit down? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far, which isn’t very much, and where we can go from here.’
He didn’t take up the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face to face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent. Juliet hadn’t got up from her seat, or spoken yet. She was watching Hunter intently, unblinkingly.
‘From here,’ Hunter echoed. For a second I thought he was so zoned out on the anti-psychotics that all I was going to get out of him would be echolalia, but then he shook his head very slightly, left and then right and then left again. ‘Never getting out of here,’ he commented, not in the tone of a lament but looking slightly mystified that I’d raised the issue at all. ‘Not now. Not after all that – everything. Everything else. Going to miss it. Only three days left, now. Till the dark of the moon. They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it. They won’t be happy.’
He frowned and shook his head in slow, sombre disapproval.
‘Well,’ I responded, as though everything he’d just said made perfect sense to me, ‘you knew what Jan hired me for. She doesn’t believe that you killed Barnard, and she thinks that your best bet at trial might be to try to establish that someone else was in that room along with the two of you. A dead someone else, which is why she came to me. But obviously I’d like to hear your version of what happened.’
‘My version.’ Hunter looked down at his hands momentarily, palms up, as though he was checking to see if they were clean. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, as if to himself. ‘Nothing.’
This was getting us nowhere fast. I sat down next to Juliet, hoping Hunter might follow my lead, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking up at the ceiling.
‘My version’s older than that,’ he murmured, so low I almost didn’t catch the words.
‘Was there someone else, Doug?’ I asked, trying again. ‘Did someone else come into the hotel room with you? Or afterwards? How did Barnard die?’
He lowered his head slowly, making eye contact with me almost accidentally at the bottom of that long, gradual arc.
‘The hammer,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what she used? I’m not sure any more, but that’s what I remember. His head – was very – I can ask her. If you like.’ ‘Then there was someone else?’ I demanded again. The eerie dissociation of his mood was in the air like something you could breathe in and catch. I had to fight the urge to push my chair back away from him, and to force myself to take normal breaths instead of sipping the tainted atmosphere as shallowly as I could.
Hunter shook his head. ‘Just me,’ he muttered. ‘Just me and her. Nobody else. Maybe a dead man. Maybe some people who were dead. Nobody else.’ A ponderous frown passed across his face like a ripple across muddy water. ‘I think he sucked me. My cock. But I can’t remember why now. That’s really disgusting.’
He sighed, long and deep, and sat down at last, opposite me. ‘I sprained my ankle,’ he said, sounding slightly wistful. ‘And they took me next door. To the church. If they’d had a first-aid kit – but it was all cash in hand, no tax, no pack drill. Nobody to keep the site up to code. Thought they might have some painkillers, or a surgical bandage. Stupid.’
There was a long silence, which I didn’t try to fill. I had a feeling that if I let him free-associate he might lead me to something important. But after a minute or two I realised that he’d retreated back into his own head and wasn’t coming out again without coaxing.
‘When was this, Doug?’ I asked. ‘When you were working at the site?’
He blinked – once, twice, three times. ‘They gave me – glass of water,’ he said. ‘Called an ambulance. Told me to wait. Too late by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.’
Hunter’s eyes seemed to clear abruptly and opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt: he stared at me suddenly with intense, unreadable emotion. I kept waiting for him to blink again but he didn’t.
‘You don’t know,’ he said, with aching bitterness in his voice.
‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more and more uneasy about how this was going. ‘I don’t. But I’m trying to find out. I’m an exorcist. Your wife hired me to try to find out whether there’s any possibility that Myriam Kale – the ghost of Myriam Kale – was involved in Alastair Barnard’s death. She believes that if we can find evidence Kale’s ghost was in the room at the time of the murder we might be able to raise a reasonable doubt about your guilt. Is that something you have an opinion on?’
I was assuming that most of this would wash over Hunter but to my surprise he responded with something coherent. His blue-eyed unsettling stare still locked on my face, but his eyes narrowed now, which I’ll admit was something of a relief.
‘I think that’d be a good one,’ he said, ‘if anyone could do it. Not in the room, though. Not when he was lying there. If you’d seen what it was like when she was working on him, you wouldn’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. She’s not a ghost. She’s never been a ghost.’
‘What is she, then?’ I asked, fighting the urge to push my chair back and get some distance from that tortured, unblinking gaze.
To my surprise, Hunter laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. ‘She says she’s the one thing they never wanted to happen. Because it’s not a game for her. It’s not a job. She can’t stop. They want to make her stop but they don’t know how. And she doesn’t know either. So she works and works and works at it, one man at a time, and – she used a hammer. I’m pretty sure it was one of mine. But there aren’t enough hammers in the whole damn world for—’
He frowned suddenly, and it was like a light going off behind his face. ‘An exorcist?’ he demanded, and I realised that he was echoing what I’d said a minute or so before.
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m an exorcist.’
Hunter shook his head in pained wonder.
‘Won’t work,’ he said, sounding angry and impatient. ‘If it was that easy, they’d all have gone years ago. But they won’t like it, all the same. If I were you, and believe me I’d sooner be the shit on your shoe, I’d be running now. I’d be taking a train to somewhere a long way away and changing my name to – to fucking Smith or something. You idiot. What do you think you can do? You can’t do anything.’
‘I’m still going to try,’ I
said, for the sake of saying something.
‘Jan sent you, didn’t she?’ Hunter demanded, his voice modulating weirdly so that the wrong words were emphasised and the sounds fought against the sense. ‘She can’t help me now. You – just leave. Just get out of here. And you tell her – tell her to forget about him. He didn’t ask any of you to get involved in –’ he hesitated, blinking rapidly now ‘– in my life, or in what’s happening to me. In fact, I’m telling you not to. You don’t have the right.’ The guards stepped in closer, alert to the change in Hunter’s tone, but he didn’t make any move towards me. He seemed to be in pain as well as angry.
‘I’m sorry about Jan,’ Hunter said, and the catch in his voice as he spoke her name made me pretty sure he meant it. ‘Really, really sorry. I know – how much she’s got to be missing me. But he’s not coming back. Not after what I did. I can’t help that now. I can’t even make the inscription. She should find somebody else. She needs to.’
The word ‘inscription’ jolted me out of my seat, but Hunter was up again too before I could get a word out. He kicked the chair away with his heel, muscles working in his broad neck as he ground his teeth together. ‘He’s not coming back,’ he repeated. ‘I’m going to sort this out for myself and I’m going to go my own way. Don’t try to save me. She killed a man. She doesn’t deserve to be saved, and she doesn’t want to be.’
I opened my mouth to speak, but Juliet stood up very abruptly, stepped around the table and came up very close to Hunter, her face only an inch or so from his, her eyes and his locked in a point-blank staring contest. He froze for a moment, then a shiver went through him. I had a worm’s-eye view, from directly underneath, so I saw his fist clench. The guards saw it too and they all moved at the same time, but I was closer so I got there first. I caught the fist two-handed as it came up and back, using Hunter’s own momentum to pull him off balance so that he lurched and had to shift his weight to keep from falling. He tried to yank his hand away from me but only succeeded in pulling me to my feet: I kept my two-handed grip as long as I could, until finally the guards got hold of Hunter by his shoulders and forearms and hauled him backwards out of my reach: even then I followed for a couple of steps, letting go at the last moment as the guards half-marched, half-carried him back through the doors and out of the room.
‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted at me. ‘Don’t come near me! I’m not doing this any more! I’ve had enough! Just let me go! Just let me-!’
The doors slammed to with a terminal click, drowning out the rest of his words.
I sat down again, very abruptly, feeling a little like a puppet with its strings cut. Juliet stared down at me with measured curiosity.
‘You felt it,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.
I nodded, but when she opened her mouth to speak again I raised my hand in a stop gesture.
‘Outside,’ I parried. ‘Not here.’ The truth was that I didn’t want to put it into words. I didn’t want to look at it yet, although I realised as I sat there and finished my cold coffee that it was impossible to look away from. Juliet waited in silence, making no attempt to hide her impatience.
A guard – one of the two who’d entered with Hunter – came in at last through the prisoners’ door and let us out through the visitors’ one.
‘Is he all right?’ I asked.
‘Not really, sir, no,’ the guard grunted. ‘He’s quieter, though. And Doctor Maxwell will come along in a little while and give him another shot.’
Yeah, I thought. I just bet he will.
We threaded our way through the door and gates and screens, reclaimed our effects at the front desk and escaped back out into the big wide world, where the chains are mostly metaphorical and easier to cope with.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Juliet asked as we walked towards the Tube station in a chill, soul-sapping drizzle.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, hedging. ‘If Hunter is losing his mind, a lot of this becomes academic. Even if he ducks a murder rap, he’s going into a secure mental unit and he’s not coming out for a long time.’
‘Is he losing his mind?’ Juliet countered.
‘I’m just talking about how he’ll come across to a jury,’ I said. ‘Nobody hearing him talk is going to believe his picnic is fully catered.’
Juliet stopped, so I had to stop too. We stared at each other: I didn’t enjoy that as much as I usually do.
‘All right,’ I admitted, feeling eerily detached from myself so that I heard my own words as I spoke them. ‘Kale is in there with him. He’s possessed.’
Juliet nodded brusquely. ‘Of course he is.’
‘Although we both know that’s not possible,’ I added, feeling the need to wave a feeble flag on behalf of common sense.
‘It’s possible for my kind. It’s easy for my kind.’
‘Yeah, but not for human ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘You know what the loup-garous are, Juliet, and why they are. And the zombies, come to that. If human ghosts could possess living human bodies, they wouldn’t cling to their own dead flesh or take up residence in fully furnished vermin. A demon versus a human soul, that’s one thing. But soul against soul is different: the home team always wins. There isn’t a single example on record of – this. Of a dead soul driving out a living one.’
Juliet ladled a lot of sardonic emphasis into her next words. ‘I’m sorry, Castor. You’re the expert. But you said yourself that the situation is more complicated than that. She hasn’t driven him out: she’s merely cohabiting. As you said, they’re sharing that body. Sometimes he spoke as Hunter, sometimes as Kale. It probably wouldn’t take you very much effort to cut her loose.’
The casual, brutal observation took me by surprise. ‘Exorcise her? Yeah, I could do that. But I’d have to get in close to Hunter and stay there for a good long while, until I got a strong enough sense of Kale to be able to play her out. He’s not going to let me do that, is he?’
‘Or she isn’t.’
I grimaced and carried on walking again. Juliet’s footsteps don’t make any sound unless she wants them to, so I had to look out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was still with me.
We walked along in silence for a while, and then I threw her own question back at her.
‘What are you planning to do? I suppose you’re good now, right? You fingered Hunter for Gary Coldwood, and now we know that Hunter did it. Or at least Hunter’s body did it. And if Kale is still in residence, then you got the right man. Woman. Whatever.’ Something that had occurred to me briefly while Hunter had been talking came back to niggle at me again. What about the missing hammer? My hypothesis that someone had taken it to shield the real killer looked pretty sick if the real killer was the one that all the rest of the evidence already pointed at. You might just as well steal a pillow off the bed or a towel out of the bathroom. Unless-
‘I think we need to know more,’ Juliet said bluntly, sending the fugitive thought skittering.
‘About Hunter?’ I demanded. ‘Or about Kale?’
‘About both, probably. Coldwood hired me to tell him what happened in room seventeen of the Paragon. I thought I’d done that, but now I’ll have to go back and tell him that I was wrong. That he’s brought in a dead murderer as well as a living one. When I do that, I want to be able to answer any questions that he might have.’
‘And is that all?’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, it isn’t. You don’t catch ghosts like you catch a cold, Castor. If Kale is inside Hunter, there’s an explanation for how she got there, and we ought to know what that is. We need to know. Because it changes the nature of the game, for all of us. All the ghostbreakers. Everyone who binds the dead and the undead for a living.’
I was relieved that Juliet was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option I had right now. Apart from anything else, it meant I’d have to look over my shoulder every time I got into a goddamn lift. And Hunter – or the thing speaking through Hunter’s mouth – had used
that word. Inscription. The same word that had cropped up in the fragment of notepaper inside John Gittings’s pocket watch: and, probably less significantly, in my dream.
‘We can backtrack Hunter’s movements,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can figure out where and when he picked up his passenger.’
‘By talking to his wife?’
‘To start with, yeah. And there’s something else we can do. Something a little bit more radical – but it’ll take some time to set up.’
‘Go on.’
‘We can raise the ghost of Myriam Kale.’
Juliet looked at me and laughed – a liquid, musical sound. ‘Raise? You don’t think she might already have ideas above her station?’
‘I mean pull as opposed to push,’ I snapped, her cold amusement stinging me probably more than it was meant to. ‘It’s another way of getting to the same place. If we can find something that belonged to her when she was alive – something she’s got a strong enough link to – then we don’t need to get close to Hunter. We can call her from a distance. Bring her out from inside him and make her come and talk to us. Two birds with one stone: we set Hunter free and we get a chance to get the story out of Kale’s own mouth.’
‘Well, that’s going to the source,’ Juliet observed dryly. ‘I like it. But to bring up the obvious objection: do you think you can obtain something that was hers?’
You can use clichés on Juliet with a certain amount of impunity, because most of them aren’t clichés in the ninth circle of Hell. ‘No,’ I admitted, deadpan. ‘But I know a man who can.’
I’d agreed to meet Nicky Heath in St James’s Park – his idea, and coming from him it was a pretty weird one.
Nicky lives in an abandoned cinema out in Walthamstow, and he has as little to do with daylight as he can. He’s not afraid of it, exactly, but he’s morbidly aware of his core temperature and he keeps it as low as he can. That means staying in the dark whenever it’s an option, using eco-friendly light bulbs because they produce less waste heat than the regular variety, spending a part of every day sitting in a big chest freezer with the lid down, and not getting too close to anyone who’s warm and breathing.
