Dead Men's Boots (24 page)

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.

I sat down next to him on the edge of the bench, because he didn’t bother to move up and make room for me. His gaze flicked
sideways to acknowledge me, then he went back to staring up through the leafless branches at the swag-bellied gray clouds.
He was wearing black jeans and a bright red T-shirt. It made his unnatural pallor look all the more unsettling by contrast,
which I guess was the point. Given the time of the year and the unkindness of the weather, it also flaunted the fact that
he didn’t have a circulatory system.

I tilted my head up, following his gaze. There was nothing to see up there except the black lattice of the branches against
the sky—the rib cage of a monster waiting to be reborn. “Isn’t Mother Nature wonderful?” I remarked.

Nicky snorted dryly. He does everything dryly, of course: no body fluids. “Castor,” he murmured, “the only mother around here
is you. Don’t try to small talk me, and don’t piss me off, because I’m not in the mood.”

“Fine. I won’t. I’d hate to spoil your mood, Nicky.”

“So you want something or not? I didn’t come all this way to hear your usual bullshit.”

“I offered to come to you,” I reminded him. “You saw me, raised, and I folded. And I’ve got to say, this is a whole new you.”

He looked at me again, for a second or two longer this time, and shrugged as he looked away again. “I’m having some work done
on my place,” he said simply.

That was intended to shut me up, and it worked. Ever since he died, Nicky has been keeping house in a derelict cinema in Walthamstow,
and it had been trashed not so long ago by a pack of crazed American satanists who knew about Nicky in the first place only
because of his association with me. He’d been able to claim a heap of money back on the insurance, and he’d told me he had
some big ideas about what to do with it, but he’d refused to be pinned down on the specifics.

The whole experience seemed to have changed him subtly—or maybe not so subtly. He’d been turning in to one of those life-forms
whose house is part of their bodies, like a snail or a tortoise. Now, apparently, he’d entered a different phase of his afterlife
cycle.

By way of changing the subject—and coming to the point—I handed him the key and the
A to Z,
which I’d been carrying around with me all day. He pocketed the key without a word, knowing that I wanted it matched to a
batch number and a location. Then he switched his attention to the book. He turned it over in his hand as though checking
it for bugs, then flipped it open at the first page and started to scan the list on the inside front cover.

“It belonged to John Gittings,” I said. “And you’re in the middle column. Any idea why?”

Nicky looked bored as he scanned the names. “John the Git was one of my regulars,” he said.

“You did data raids for him?”

“Occasionally.”

“Recently?”

“No.”

“But you did
see
him recently?”

“What are you, Castor, my father confessor? Yeah, I saw him.”

“In the line of work?”

“Yes. And before you ask, no, I won’t tell you what the work was. It was his business, now it’s mine. You’d be choked if you
heard I was advertising your wheelings and dealings to everyone else who waved a fifty under my nose.”

I nodded. He had me there. “Okay,” I said. “I respect your professional integrity. But could you look through the rest of
the shit in there and see if it makes any sense to you? John spent the last few weeks before he died writing out those names
again and again, so they must have meant something to him. Or maybe there’s a code that I’m not picking up. Either way, I’d
be grateful for a second opinion.”

Nicky flicked to the back of the book and looked over the list there. The final word,
SMASHNA,
glared up at us from the nest of ink swirls.

“Smashna,” I mused aloud. It didn’t sound like a real word. Maybe it was an acronym of some kind.

“It’s Russian,” said Nicky. “Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.” He closed the book and leaned slightly toward
me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter
chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. “What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?”

“Let’s leave that open for now,” I parried. “There’s something else I need, and it’s big.”

“Yeah?” Nicky’s offhand tone suggested there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him. “So what’s
that?”

“I was wondering if you could pick up something for me,” I said. “The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.”

“Go on.”

“Memorabilia.”

“Relating to?”

“A dead gangster. A killer from way back.”

Nicky’s head swiveled around fast, and he stared at me for a few moments in perplexed silence. It seemed like something of
an extreme reaction. Okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral
objections. Still, something was bothering him enough that he hadn’t been able to hide it.

“I thought we had a no-bullshit rule in place, Castor,” he said, his tone unreadable.

“You think this is bullshit, Nicky?”

“Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now—” He hesitated, shrugged, as though
I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.

“It’s not about John. It’s a different case.” I put out a hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually
touch him. He hates to be touched by the living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running.
And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons, it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal
space. “Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though
I didn’t know you had one until now.”

He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. “It may not be something you can help
me with, in any case. There was a gangster back in the sixties named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard
of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get ahold of her and sent her to the chair.”

“An
American
gangster,” Nicky said with careful emphasis.

“Yeah. Sorry, I thought I said that already. Anyway, you know the way these things work, probably better than I do. There’s
always a market for celebrity souvenirs. And it’s kind of like an iceberg—some of it’s above the water, most of it isn’t.”

“Sure,” Nicky said. He seemed mollified. Whatever I’d said to upset him, he’d either bounced back from it or filed it away
for later. I still couldn’t figure out what had gotten under his skin, but right then didn’t seem like the best time to ask.

“So,” I summed up, shielding my eyes as the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds, “you think you could lay your hands
on something?”

He nodded a few times, not in answer to the question but acknowledging that it was an interesting commission. “Funnily enough,”
he said, shooting me another narrow-eyed stare as if warning me off making any smart one-liners, “I’ve got some contacts in
that line of business.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.” He slid along the bench, out of the patch of sunlight. He might have reclaimed the day, but he was clearly going
to be selective about which parts of it he kept. “I’m not making any promises. Stuff like that doesn’t come up for sale too
often, and when it does, it tends to go for crazy prices. Supply and demand. There’s a whole lot of sickos out there, and
only so many dead serial killers. You might not want to pay the asking price.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have
this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.”

“Buy it, sell it on again,” Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession,
with a commission to be made twice over. “Yeah, maybe. Who’s this ‘we,’ by the way, and what do you want the little keepsake
for?”

I got up. “Call me if you get a bite,” I said. “Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the
better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.”

“Yeah, well, that’s life,” Nicky observed.

When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.

    
Eleven

S
OMETIMES SYNCHRONICITY IS YOUR FRIEND. EVERYTHING flows together, and the thing you’re looking for turns out to be in the
first place where your groping fingers come down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t
feeling like one.

I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café Bar, which, going by the postcode, was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t
know whom I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t
want to miss it. In the meantime, I called Jan Hunter from the middle of Trafalgar Square to tell her how my meeting with
Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet; I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for a second opinion. I
didn’t mention Kale, either, not at first. I was afraid of offering Jan any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that
whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder. So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying
a passenger, I asked why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s theory that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line
went very quiet for a moment.