Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  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 . . .’

  ‘Mind your feet, Doctor Webb,’ Paul rumbled, and then there was an agonised yelp from Webb that did my heart good. But they were out in the corridor now and picking up speed: my delaying tactics had foundered.

  ‘Okay, boyo, you just stay put,’ Kenneth growled, wagging his finger sternly in my face. But as he turned to follow the others I shouldered past him and got to the door first.

  We trotted along the corridor in a strange and unwieldy procession: Paul and the other nurse pushing the frame along after Doctor Webb, the ugliest drum majorette in history, flanked on one side by Jenna-Jane’s tame lawyer and on the other by me, with Kenneth bringing up the rear.

  When we got to the reception area they faltered to a stop, staring out through the double doors onto the small apron of the Stanger’s front drive. In theory, I knew, there should have been a van waiting there, its back doors open and a ramp in place, with a happy crew of psychiatric interns and burly removal men all ready to take Rafi aboard and whisk him away to his new life in Paddington.

  The van wasn’t there, though. Presumably it was still out on the road, or stranded at the Stanger’s gates: meanwhile the drive had been colonised by three or four hundred young men and women who were singing ‘You can’t kill the spirit’ with as much wild energy as if they knew what they were talking about. They were mostly in casual dress, but black T-shirts predominated and on a lot of them I could pick out the slogan DEATH IS NOT THE END.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ Paul muttered, under his breath.

  ‘What . . . ?’ Webb demanded, words seeming to fail him for a moment. ‘Who are all these people?’

  ‘Mostly the local chapter of the Breath of Life movement,’ I told him helpfully, relieved that they’d all made it on time. ‘I met some of them a couple of days ago. Really nice guys, once we’d got past the small talk and the mutual fear and loathing. They were fascinated when I told them what you and J-J were up to.’ I didn’t mention the frightener I’d had to put on Stephen Bass – threatening to tell his tutors and the police about his hobbies of vandalism, stalking and criminal damage – before I could get him to agree to this. That seemed to fall under the heading of a trade secret. ‘Oh, and I think those guys over there,’ I went on, ‘are from a national TV network. You see the letters on the side of the camera? They stand for Beaten, Buttfucked and Clueless, and they’re talking to you.’

  Webb shot me a look of horrified disbelief and opened his mouth to speak. But his words were lost to posterity, because at that moment the double doors of the Stanger swished open and Pen strode across the threshold, bang on cue.

  ‘Where’s my husband?’ she demanded, projecting beautifully for the cameras and standing dead centre between the doors so that they slid impotently backwards and forwards on their tracks, unable to close on her. ‘What have you done with my husband, you bastards? I want him back!’

  Webb blinked, his jaw dropping. He turned, at bay, to face Pen and took a step towards her, but then stopped as flashbulbs popped out on the drive – one, two, then a whole cluster all at once. The paparazzi were moving into position on either side of the doors so that they could enfilade anyone coming out from a variety of photogenic angles.

  ‘Miss Bruckner!’ Webb struggled with the polite form of words, forcing them out through clenched teeth. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Ditko aren’t married. You don’t even—’

  ‘He’s my common-law husband!’ Pen shouted. ‘We’re married in the sight of God! And I’m not letting you put him in a concentration camp!’

  Webb was struggling to make any sound at all now, his complexion getting darker and more alarming by the second. ‘The – the MOU in Padddington is not a – a—’

  ‘Oh, look what they’ve done to him!’ Pen wailed, pointing at the frame and Rafi’s glum, limp form hanging in the centre of it. ‘He’s not a criminal! He’s not a monster! Why are they torturing him?’

  ‘Rights for the dead, and the undead!’ Stephen Bass bellowed, from the front ranks of the Breathers. ‘Soul and flesh are friends! Soul and flesh will mend! Death is not the end!’ The chant was taken up by his undisciplined but enthusiastic cohorts. It didn’t mean a damn thing as far as I was aware, but it sounded great.

  ‘Your move,’ I murmured to Webb, in a lull between the twenty-first and twenty-second repetitions. ‘My advice would be to—’

  ‘I do not,’ Webb gurgled, swallowing hard several times, ‘want your advice, Castor. And this – this will not make a difference.’

  ‘Well, that’s not strictly true,’ I demurred, with a mild shrug. I caught Paul’s eye and he winked solemnly at me over Webb’s shoulder. ‘I think it’s going to make a difference of at least – let’s say – four or five days. Maybe a week. Depends how cold it gets at night and how much staying power these kids have got. They’re young and idealistic, so I’d be surprised if they didn’t make it at least up to the weekend. After that I’ll have to think of some other way to make your life a misery.’

  I walked away from him before he could answer, passing Pen in the doorway. ‘You can take it from here?’ I murmured. ‘Keep things percolating? Make sure they don’t get Rafi out the door?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Pen snarled back. There was a dangerous gleam in her eye as she stared at the restraint frame. She wasn’t faking it: she was really angry.

  ‘Play it cool, though,’ I cautioned her, a little worried. ‘You’ve already got one assault charge pending. Be the victim, and let Webb be the monster.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Pen told me, a little curtly. ‘Where are you going, anyway?’

  ‘The United States. Alabama.’

  ‘Looking for a change of scene?’

  ‘I’m looking for a dead woman.’

  ‘Get Jenna-Jane Mulbridge to come down here. I’ll make you one.’

  I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but only for a moment: I didn’t want to lose it.

  I was hoping the crowd might part for me, but I’m no man’s Moses. I picked my way through the massed ranks of the Breathers, trying not to tread on any fingers or toes, trying not to meet anyone’s eyes. They were in a volatile mood, bless their rabid little hearts.

  The flight I’d booked was going out of Heathrow at a few minutes past noon. I checked in with just hand luggage at a little after six and went to wait for Juliet in the grotesquely named Tap and Spile bar.

  She was already there, waiting for me. So was Nicky, dressed in black from head to foot and wearing shades indoors like some vampire wannabe. He gave me a sardonic wave when he saw me. He had a full glass of red wine in front of
him, and Juliet had an empty one. She also had a UK passport in her hands. That was a relief: Nicky hadn’t been sure he could cobble something together at such short notice and have it pass muster.

  ‘Another?’ I asked Juliet, pointing at her empty glass.

  She shook her head. ‘It reminds me a little of blood,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a bad thing?’

  ‘I’m about to spend ten hours in a confined space with three hundred people, Castor. You tell me.’

  I let that one go and just ordered a whisky and water for myself. I took it over to the table and sat down in between them. Nicky nodded his head towards a folded sheet of paper which was sitting on the table.

  ‘Names and addresses,’ he said. ‘Juliet’s got one too, in case you get separated.’

  I unfolded the sheet. ‘Fair enough. Who’s on here?’

  He waved vaguely. ‘Anyone I could find who might remember Myriam Kale or have anything interesting to say about her,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you the address of the Seaforth farm – where she lived until she got married – but there’s no phone number I can find so my guess is nobody’s living there now. There’s a maternal uncle – Billy Myers. You’ve got his last address. And I called through to the local paper, the Brokenshire Picayune.’

  ‘The what?’ I winced at the first taste of the lousy blended Scotch.

  ‘Picayune. Means trivial or everyday. Great name for a newspaper, huh? “It doesn’t matter a tinker’s fuck, but you read it here first.” Anyway, the editor’s a guy named Gale Mallisham. I told him you were digging for information about Kale and might have some to trade.’

  ‘And he said –?’

  ‘“Fuck. Another one? Why won’t anyone let her lie in her fucking grave?”’

  ‘Well, thanks for priming the pump there, Nicky.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ He put his wineglass underneath his nose and inhaled deeply, eyes closed. Since he died, that’s Nicky’s most sensual pleasure: I let him spin it out as long as he wanted to. Juliet was following all this with a detached, almost bored look on her face, but I knew that she was taking everything in. You don’t get to be as old as she is by letting your attention wander.

  When Nicky put the glass down I shot him an expectant look. By way of answer he sat back in his chair and made himself comfortable.

  ‘The stuff in the box,’ I prompted.

  ‘Sure.’ He was still in no hurry. ‘I notice Johnny boy’s little gofer is dead.’

  ‘Meaning Vince Chesney?’ I frowned. ‘Yeah, he is. How’d you know?’

  Nicky looked smug. ‘Two and two, Castor,’ he said. ‘The little baggies that Gittings’s souvenirs were packed in had a name label printed on them – some animal-pathology outfit called Nexus. And this morning Nexus is all over the news on account of having lost one of its employees last night in an inexplicable bloodbath at their premises in Victoria. Some security guard got to join the choir invisible, too. No witnesses, no leads, at least when I hacked the PNC at four a.m. Juliet tells me you were there.’

  ‘Yeah. I was there.’ I glanced at Juliet, who shrugged. I hadn’t told her it was a big secret, but I’d still have liked the right of veto on telling Nicky about it.

  ‘It was a loup-garou, right?’

  ‘Right. Nicky, have you got something for me or not? Because twenty questions was never my game.’

  He gave me a languid grin, stubbornly determined not to pick up the pace. ‘I know your game, Castor. It’s blind man’s bluff.’ I opened my mouth to curse him out and he raised a hand, forestalling me. ‘Okay, don’t start on me. I’m just in an expansive mood, that’s all. I like days when I throw out the questions and the answers bounce right back.’

  ‘So you’re saying –?’

  ‘I went through the stuff on the disc and I cross-checked it myself in a couple of places. It was mostly bullshit – your man measured everything he could touch a ruler to, whether it mattered or not – but if you want a smoking pistol then I think you got one.’

  ‘Go on.’ I could tell by the lingering smile that Nicky had a bombshell to drop, or thought he did. He reached into his pocket and handed me one of the small evidence bags. I remembered the object inside the bag pretty well, because it stood out from the mostly innocuous stuff in Chesney’s little treasure chest like a dildo in a nun’s boot-locker.

  ‘The bullet,’ I said, resigning myself to the role of straight man.

  ‘Bullet casing, actually. It’s from a 10mm auto round, and according to your now deceased doggy pathologist it was fired from a Smith & Wesson 1076. Got a lovely clear print on it, too – Les Lathwell’s. You know, the East End gangster? The one they called the Krays’ heir apparent?’

  ‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I’m a little hazy on social history. I know the name, but—’

  ‘Kind of an entrepreneur in the violence and intimidation line. He went to America to learn from the greats: came home and built his own little mafia on the Mile End Road. You should read about this stuff: it’s inspirational. Anyway, I went online and did some rooting around – that’s why I hacked the Police National Computer – and the print checks out A1 at Lloyds. I’m no expert, but I think the ballistics do, too. And that’s where things get interesting.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  ‘Lathwell died in 1979. The 10mm round didn’t even get introduced until 1983 – in a Swedish hand-pistol that kicked like an unlimbered cannon and broke people’s arms if they weren’t expecting it. It didn’t get popular – and I use that word in heavy quotes – until the FBI picked it up in 1988. In other words, Lathwell couldn’t have fired that round, or loaded it into a gun, because he died before the gun ever came off the assembly line. So there’s your Rod Serling moment. Enjoy.’

  Nicky indulged in another deep snort of the wine breath, drawing it out for maximum dramatic impact. He got the timing just about right, because I was struggling to fit that spiky fact into what I already knew – which was only possible at all because I knew jack shit. Looked at from one angle, though, it made a queasy kind of sense.

  ‘You think Lathwell rose in the flesh, then?’ Juliet asked, voicing my thoughts. ‘As a zombie?’

  Nicky put his glass down, basking in our undivided attention. ‘Could be. Or maybe someone just flayed his fingertips and wore them for a joke. There are a couple of other titbits like that in the notes on the disc. Anachronisms, I mean. My favourite is a letter from Tony Lambrianou to his brother Chris. You know the hearse that carried Lambrianou’s body had a message from Chris, in the middle of a wreath the size of Canary Wharf? It said “See you on the other side.” Well, this letter is dated about six months later, and it’s exactly three words long: “I made it.” Sick joke or mystical revelation? You decide.’

  He leaned forward, suddenly more animated. ‘Okay, that’s what’s on the disc, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service. You get this because I’m obsessive and because I’m dead: in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t ever need to sleep if he’s got something on his mind. Look at this – and look at this.’

  I was expecting him to give me some more of the little evidence bags, but instead he held out two badly photostatted fingerprint charts – copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and smears.

  Juliet looked over my shoulder: her pattern-recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine. ‘They’re the same,’ she said. ‘Or almost the same. The differences are very few, and very small. Is that the point?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the point. You want the punchline? The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is different by about three ridges and one friction artefact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-grandad of all East End psychopaths. There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys. Only they’re not.
They’re the same guy twice.’

  I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right: this was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book – in fact, it was a whole roomful of smoking machine rifles. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

  Who wants to get you, John?

  The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

  ‘They’re coming back,’ I summarised. ‘All the East End bad boys. All the biggest bastards.’

  ‘But how are they coming back?’ Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them. ‘Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time: become more like the flesh they inhabit. In the long term the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal: diluted to the point where it’s really just not there any more. As for the revenants – the zombies – their bodies seldom last more than a year, or two at most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them together.’

  The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky and saw him staring at her, grimly deadpan. ‘I’m sorry if that was tactless,’ she added. ‘I’m talking in general terms.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Nicky tightly. ‘I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?’

  Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow. ‘No, obviously you’re subject to the same—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up. Please.’ Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl: he’d drawn in a large breath just beforehand for exactly that purpose. ‘I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just – don’t talk, okay. Don’t talk about things you know fuck-all about.’