Dead Men's Boots (2 page)

Carla gave a short cry of pain, as if the words had physically wounded her. Then Reggie Tang—an unlikely Galahad—stepped in
between her and the lawyer, fixing him with a look full of violent promise.

“Can I see your invitation, mate?” he demanded. At the same time I saw Reggie’s deceptively scrawny-looking friend Greg Lockyear
moving in behind Todd, looking to Reggie for his cue. I couldn’t believe they were planning to lay some hurt on a lawyer in
front of fifty witnesses, but the grim set of Reggie’s face was impossible to misread. Like most of us, he knew John from
way back, and like most of us, he’d teamed up with him a fair few times when there was nothing better on offer. That tended
to be how it worked, and I guessed that maybe, like me, he was feeling some belated pangs of guilt that he’d only ever seen
John as a last resort. So maybe beating up a man in a sharp suit seemed like an easy way to burn off some of the bad karma.

Stepping forward as much to my own surprise as anyone else’s, I put a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. He turned his glare on me,
surprised and indignant to be interrupted when he was still warming up.

“Behave yourself, Reggie,” I said. “You’re doing no one a favor starting a fight here, least of all Carla.”

We held each other’s eyes for a moment longer, and I was half convinced he was going to take a swing at me. I took a step
to the left to keep Greg Lockyear in view, because that way, at least, I wouldn’t be fighting on two fronts; but the moment
passed, and Reggie turned away with a disgusted shrug.

“Frigging parasites,” he said. “Have it your way, Fix. But if he doesn’t get the fuck out of here, I’m gonna put something
through his face.”

I gave Todd a look that asked him what he was waiting for. “Mrs. Gittings will be in touch,” I said.

“I’m sure,” he agreed. “But I really need to proceed with—”

“You need to pick your time. She’ll be in touch. Leave it until then, eh?”

Todd looked at the grim faces ringing him and probably did some calculations. He glanced around for Carla, but she’d stepped
back into the supportive crowd and was being comforted by Cath and Therese. “I’m prepared to wait a day or so,” he said, “out
of respect. A day or so—no longer.”

“Good plan,” I agreed.

With a wry nod to me, Todd turned on his heel. He took the path back to the gate a lot more slowly and stayed in sight for
the better part of a minute, further dampening the already tense mood.

We broke up by inches and ounces, swapping halfhearted conversation at the turning circle by the car park because nobody wanted
to seem in an indecent hurry to escape. I said hello to Louise, whom I hadn’t seen in a year or more, and we played the “ain’t
it awful” game, trading stories about the Breathers.

“They’re running ambushes now,” Louise said in her lugubrious Tyneside drawl, igniting a cigarette with a gold lighter shaped
like a tiny revolver. “Picking us off. Can you believe it? Stu Langley got a call in the early hours of the morning. Some
woman saying she’d just moved into a new house and there was a ghost in the bloody downstairs lavvy. He told her he’d come
the next morning, but she started crying and pleading. Laying it on thicker and thicker, she was, and Stu’s too polite to
hang up on her. So in the end he got dressed and went out there. I’d have told her to hold it in or piss out the window.

“Anyway, he gets to this place out in Gypsy Hill somewhere, and look at that. There’s a house with a for-sale sign up, exactly
where she said it would be, and the front door’s open. So he went on in, like a bloody idiot. Didn’t stop to ask himself why
there were no lights on, or why the sign still said for sale if this whinging old biddy had already moved in.

“There were four of them, with baseball bats. They laid into him so hard they put him in a coma. He lasted for a week, and
then they turned the machine off. I’m telling you, Fix, they won’t be happy until they’ve killed us all.”

“Won’t do them much good if they do,” I observed, shaking my head as she offered me a drag on the cigarette. “Exorcism is
in the human genome now. Probably always was, only it didn’t show itself until there was something there to use it on. Killing
us doesn’t make the problem go away.”

She blew smoke out of her nose, hard. “No, but beating the shit out of a few of us gives the rest of us something to think
about.”

Another knot of mourners walked past us, heading for their cars. One of them was the acid-blond girl, walking alongside two
guys I didn’t know, and she gave me another killing look as she passed.

“Any idea who that is?” I asked Louise, rolling my eyes to indicate who I meant without being too obvious about it.

“Which one?”

“The girl.”

Louise expelled breath in a forced sigh, made a weary face. “Dana McClennan.”

“McClennan?” Something inside me lurched and settled at an odd angle. “Any relation to the late, great Gabriel McClennan?”

“Daughter,” said Louise. “And she’s following on in the family tradition, Fix. Bigger arsehole than he was, if anything. When
she found out Larry was HIV-positive, she backed off at a hundred miles an hour. You’d think he’d tried to give her a Frenchie
or something. Or maybe she thinks you can catch it by talking about it, like my mum.”

I didn’t answer. The mention of Gabe McClennan’s name had triggered a whole lot of very unpleasant memories, most of them
dating from the night when I’d killed him. Okay, it was kind of by proxy: Actually, I just made it really easy for someone
else to kill him. It wasn’t like he left me much choice, either, since he was out for my blood; and the wolf I threw him to
was one he’d brought to the party himself, so you could say what goes around comes around. Lots of great arguments to mix
and match. None of them made me feel any better about it, though, and there was no way I’d ever be able to explain it to the
wife and kid he’d left behind.

“So what’s she doing here?” I asked.

“She came with Bourbon. I think he put the word out at the Oriflamme that John was going into the ground today—said he’d lay
on cars for any exorcists who wanted to come along.”

“She’s a ghostbreaker?”

Louise shrugged. “That’s what she’s calling herself, yes. Following in her father’s footsteps. I don’t know if she’s any good
or not.”

I took it on the chin, but it wasn’t great news. If Gabe’s daughter was in the same line of business as me now, and if she
was operating in London, then we were going to keep running across each other’s trail whether we liked it or not. Not a happy
prospect. I watched Gabe’s daughter down to the gates—saw her stop, her two escorts walking on without her, and exchange words
with the Breathers on picket duty. Someone ought to have a word with her about that: It wasn’t a great idea to encourage the
lunatic fringe.

“How’s the music going?” I asked in a ham-fisted effort to raise the mood. Louise played bass in a band that had had many
more names than gigs. I had a vague feeling that their current nom de soundstage was something vaguely punk, like All-Star
Wank, but it would be something different tomorrow.

“It’s good,” Louise said. “It’s going good. We’ve got a new manager. He reckons he can get us in at the Spitz.”

Larry Tallowhill came up alongside Louise at this point and slid an arm around her waist. “Felix Castor,” he said with mock
sternness. “Leave my fucking woman alone.”

“Can I help it if I’m irresistible?” I asked. “How are the new drugs working?”

Larry shrugged expansively. “They’re great,” he said. “I’ll live until something else kills me. Can’t ask for more than that.”

Larry was always amazingly upbeat about his condition, which was the result of the sort of arbitrary bad luck that would fill
most people with rage or despair to the slopping-over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth point. He’d contracted HIV from a bite
he got when he was trying to subdue a loup-garou—you might call it a werewolf, except that the animal component here was something
leaner and longer-limbed and altogether stranger than that word suggests. It wasn’t even a paying job; he just saw this monster
chasing a bunch of kids across a Sainsbury’s car park, and stepped in without even thinking about it. The thing was looking
to feed, but it turned its attention to Larry as soon as it realized he was a threat, and like I said, it was sleek and fast
and very, very mean. Larry took the damage, finished the job with one arm hanging off in strips, then walked a mile and a
half to the hospital to get himself patched up. They did a great job: stabilized him, took the severed finger he’d brought
with him and sewed it back on, stopped him from bleeding to death or getting tetanus, and eventually restored 95 percent of
nervous function. About ten or eleven months later, he got the bad news.

For an exorcist, it all falls under the heading of occupational hazard. There aren’t very many of us who get to die of old
age.

I changed the subject, which sooner or later was going to bring us around to the even more painful issue of how John Gittings
had died—locked in the bathroom with the business end of a shotgun in his mouth. I’m not squeamish, but I’d been shying away
from that particular image all afternoon.

“Business good?” I asked, falling back once more on the old conversational staples.

“It’s great,” Larry said. “Best it’s ever been.”

“Three bloody jobs all at once yesterday,” Louise confirmed. “He’s fast.” She nodded at Larry. “You know how fast he is, but
even he can’t do three in a day. They get in the way of each other. The second’s harder than the first, and the third’s impossible.
So I did the middle one, and of course, that was the one that turned out to be an absolute bastard. Old woman—very tough.
Fought back, and I lost my lunch all over the client’s carpet.”

“Your breakfast,” Larry corrected. “It was only eleven o’clock.”

“My brunch. And this bloke—company director or something, lives in Regent Quarter—he says, ‘I hope you’re going to clean that
up before you go.’ And I would have done, too, but not after he said that. I hit him with the standard terms and conditions
and walked out. Now he’s saying he won’t pay, but he sodding will. One way or another, he will.”

As changes of subject go, it hadn’t gotten us very far away from death. But that’s exorcists’ shoptalk for you.

After a few more pleasantries, Lou and Larry strolled away arm in arm, and I walked back over to the grave to say my goodbyes.
Carla was now standing in deep conversation with the priest—maybe a little too deep for comfort. At any rate, she took the
opportunity as I walked up to extricate herself, thank him, and disengage.

“I’m heading out,” I said. “Take care of yourself, Carla. I’ll be in touch, okay?” But she was holding something out to me,
and the something turned out to be her car keys.

“Fix,” she said apologetically, “could you drive me home? I really don’t feel up to it. And there’s something I want to ask
you about.”

I hesitated. They say misery loves company, but I’m the kind of misery who usually doesn’t. On the other hand, I’d missed
Bourbon’s charabanc, and I needed a lift back into town. Maybe a half-second too late to look generous, I nodded and took
the keys. “Thanks again, Father,” Carla called over her shoulder. I glanced back. The priest was watching us as we walked
away, the expression on his face slightly troubled.

“He asked me if I had any doubts,” Carla said, catching the movement as I looked around. “Any bits of doctrine I wanted to
talk over with him. Then, before I could get a word in, he was pumping me for clues.”

“Men of the cloth are the worst,” I agreed. “They don’t approve, but they have to look. It’s the same principle as the
News of the World
.” That was slightly unfair, but it’s something you come across a lot. People assume that we’re sitting on a big secret: We
have to be, because how could we do what we do without knowing how it’s done? But it’s not like that at all. Would you ask
Steve Davis for an explanation of Brownian motion, or Torvill and Dean how ice crystals form? We’ve got a skill set, not the
big book of answers.

Carla’s car was the only one left in the car park: a big, roomy old Vectra GLS in a dark gray that showed off the splatter
stains of old bird shit to good effect. I let Carla in—no central locking—and walked around to the driver’s side, taking an
appraising look at her in the process. She was calmer now that it was all over, but she looked a little tired and a little
old. That wasn’t surprising: Having someone you love commit suicide has to be one of the nastiest low blows life can throw
at you. In other respects, she was still very much the woman I’d known back in the early nineties, before she’d ever met John—when
she was a brassy, loud blonde I’d met at a poker session and almost gone to bed with, except that my fear of intimacy and
her preference for older men had kicked in at about the same time and turned a promising fumble into an awkward conversation
about micro-limit hold ’em. There’s a line in a Yeats poem where he asks whether your imagination lingers longest on a woman
you won or a woman you lost. While you’re puzzling over that one, you can maybe give him an estimate on how long a piece of
string is. If things had worked out differently, Carla and me could have gotten a whole Mrs. Robinson thing going, although
even in those days, I was less of a Benjamin Braddock and more of a Ratso Rizzo.

I started the car and pulled away, noticing that the priest followed us with his sad eyes as we drove by. I sympathized up
to a point. It couldn’t be an easy way to earn a living these days.

We eased our way out between the pickets, collecting a fair share of abuse and ridicule along the way but no actual missiles
or threats. Most of the people waving placards and chanting rhythmically were in their teens or early twenties. What did they
know about death? They hadn’t even gotten all that far with life yet.

The cemetery was all the way out in Waltham Abbey, and John and Carla lived—or rather, Carla still lived and John didn’t anymore—on
Aldermans Hill just outside of Southgate, in a flat over a dress shop. It was going to be a long haul, and the Vectra handled
like a half-swamped raft. Turning in to the traffic, I remembered the half-bottle of metaxa in my inside pocket, fished it
out one-handed, and passed it across to Carla. She took it without a word, unscrewed the lid, and downed a long swallow. It
made her shudder; probably it made her eyes water, too, but there were plenty of other explanations available for why she
rubbed the heel of her hand quickly across her face.