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 that 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 realized 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.”
His eyes seemed to clear abruptly, and he stared at me with intense, unreadable emotion. His eyes were opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt. I kept waiting for him to blink, but he didn’t.
“You don’t know,” he said with aching bitterness.
“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 if we can find evidence that 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 him, but to my surprise, he responded with something coherent. His blue eyes were still locked on my face, but they 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, and it was like a light going off behind his face. “An exorcist?” he demanded, and I understood 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 emphasized 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—“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 closer, alert to the change in Hunter’s tone, but he didn’t make any move toward me. He seemed to be in pain as well as angry.
“I’m sorry about Jan,” Hunter said, and the catch 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. She should find somebody else. She needs to.”
He stood up, kicked the chair away with his heel. “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 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, 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 succeeded only 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 the shoulders and forearms and hauled him backward 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 anymore! I’ve had enough! Just let me go! Just let me—”
The doors slammed with a terminal click, drowning out the rest of his words.
I sat down again, 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, I raised my hand in a stop sign. “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 knew 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 come in with Hunter—came in through the prisoners’ door and let us out through the visitors’ one.
“Is he all right?” I asked.
“Not really, sir, no,” the guard said. “He’s quieter, though. And Dr. 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 out 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 toward the tube station in a chill, soul-sapping drizzle.
“I don’t know,” I hedged. “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 pos
sessed.”
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 was 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 whom all the rest of the evidence already pointed at. You might 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 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 she was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option for me. 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 have 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 has as little to do with daylight as he can. He isn’t 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 lightbulbs 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.
For Nicky, being dead was a lifestyle.
When I first met him, he’d been a hot-shot data analyst, selling the secret history of the future to greedy CEOs who were in awe of his ability to predict share prices based purely on the flow of information across digital exchanges. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, too: He pissed people off outrageously for the hell of it, showing them up with pointless displays of expertise whenever he could. After a friend introduced us at a party, I used Nicky a couple of times to chase down information I had no legal right to access. I couldn’t pay him a tenth of what he was worth, but he got me the stuff anyway because it made an interesting change from what he did the rest of the time.
He died young, of a heart attack, which didn’t surprise anybody.
Then he came back, which kind of did.
There were already a lot of zombies around, so it wasn’t the plain fact that Nicky clawed his way out of the grave that was unusual; it was how skillfully he rolled with the situation afterward.
The dead still don’t have any legal rights, despite endless parliamentary debates and a few orphaned white papers. In theory, Nicky’s living brother and sister could have waltzed off with all his worldly goods and left him cooling in the gutter. But they didn’t, because he hid his money so successfully that—apart from a couple of grand in a current account—no lawyer was ever able to find a penny that was his. And while they were hunting, he was setting up a maze of blind trusts and offshore-shelf companies that would give him full control over how the money was used without it ever legally, incontestably, belonging to him.
Then he brought his data-rat brain to bear on the question of survival. Zombies enjoy a whole lot of advantages over ghosts. Having bodies, they can interact with the world in most of the same ways that the living can—touch and taste and smell and all the rest of it. But the downside is that the body they’re anchored to is basically a slab of rotting meat. They’ve set sail in a sinking ship, and for most of them, it’s a short voyage. Even though it’s probably raw will rather than nerve impulses that makes their limbs move, decay and decomposition gradually reduce the body to a state where it can’t hold itself together anymore. The inhabiting spirit may still carry on clinging to the increasingly rancid carcass, or it may give up the unequal struggle and strike off on its own, but either way, the ship is aground at that point. You can’t make disarticulated legs move, or see through eyes that have closed up like dead flowers.
Nicky was very keen not to
reach that stage, and he realized that the key to long-term survival was to learn as much as he could about his own internal workings. He picked up a stack of biology textbooks and read through the parts on human anatomy, supplementing what he learned by posting queries on medical message boards and talking to real doctors—mostly dead ones—at remorseless length.
He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance. When you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection. By contrast, Nicky began to take a whole pharmacopeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up from recipes he found online, and he steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.
There was more to it than that, I knew. He hooked up with Imelda Probert, more generally known as the Ice-Maker—a faith healer who offers a bespoke deal to the living dead—and now he visits her a couple of times a month for a mystical/religious tune-up. He learned meditation techniques and claims to be able to visit different parts of his body on a cellular level, repairing damage with the cement of self-belief. And, like I said earlier, he stays out of the sun in case he spoils.
But today he was sitting out in the open on a bench on the Pall Mall side of the park, his arms spread across the back of the bench and his crossed legs sticking out in front of him, looking relaxed and expansive. Okay, there was a heavy overcast and a chill wind, but even so, it was shocking to see Nicky out in full daylight.
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