Dead Men's Boots (42 page)

By the time I landed at Heathrow, I was thinking straight again, so the first thing I did was to get to a phone and make the
call I should have made from the States. It didn’t do me a lot of good, though—at Pentonville, the highest I could get up
the chain of command was the night duty officer, and something in his tone told me that he wasn’t taking me seriously.

“A woman?” he kept on repeating every time I let him get a word in edgeways.

“No,” I repeated with the brittle, strained patience you keep in reserve until you need it to deal with morons and Jehovah’s
Witnesses. “She looks like a woman. But she’s actually a demon. A succubus.”

“A demon. Right.” I was getting the same strained patience bouncing right back at me, and I wasn’t enjoying it much. “And
who’s she coming to visit again?”

“Doug Hunter. Only if she comes, it won’t be to visit him. It’ll be to break him out.”

“Well, thanks for that little tip-off, sir. I’m sure we’ll keep a lookout for her.”

“You’ll need to put up some wards,” I said, persisting without much hope. “On the tops of the walls, as well as on the doors,
because she doesn’t have to use a door. And it’s probably a good idea to have a priest handy if you’ve got one on staff. He
can draw a line in holy water around the cell block, or bless the—”

“We’ll keep a lookout for her,” the duty officer repeated, and hung up.

I swore bitterly at the innocent phone receiver in my hand.

“Have a good trip, Castor?”

I turned in time to have a heavy briefcase shoved brusquely into my arms and into my stomach. Winded, I stared into the cold,
hard glare of Nicky Heath. I took hold of the briefcase as he let go of it. Nicky examined my swollen, discolored face with
something like satisfaction. He had a rolled-up newspaper in his hand, and he used it to point at my bruised cheek.

“No,” he said. “I can see you had a bad one. Great! I’m really happy the suffering is being spread around. Where’s the lap
dancer from hell?”

“Flying under her own steam. Why? You got something for us, Nicky?”

The glare shot up the emotional register toward the hysterical. “Yeah, Castor, and what I got is a fucking news flash. You
did it to me again, you bastard. Pulled me into your stupid grandstanding shit so people are knocking on
my
door because they want to cut pieces out of
you
. So this is the parting of the fucking ways. I just came over here to sign off on the job and tell you not to fucking bother
to write.”

I stared at him in numb perplexity. I was running on empty, and I didn’t want to have to work out the translation for myself.
“Someone tried to lean on you?” I asked.

“Someone tried to torch me. That someone is now dog meat. But they know where I live, so presumably, someone is gonna send
someone else to finish the fucking job.”

There was something surreal about the scene. Nicky was keeping his voice level and conversational so that people wouldn’t
look around and try to tune in to the conversation, but his teeth were bared in a snarl, and his pale, waxen face looked like
the mask of an angry ghost in a Noh play.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s starting to look as though the opposition is a bit better organized than I was expecting. I’m sorry.
I’m really sorry.”

“Yeah?” Nicky smiled grimly. “Well save some of that sorry for when you hear the rest of the story, Castor. Get us a cab.
I’ll ride back into town with you and tell you what I got. After that, you’re on your lonesome fucking own.”

I raided a cashpoint machine, scraping the bottom of the hollow barrel that was my bank account. It was getting on for midnight,
but there were a few taxis in the rank, and one of them crawled toward us as we came out from the terminal onto the pickup
bay. Nicky looked at the driver, eyes narrowed, and his hand thumped into my chest as I stepped forward. “Not that one.”

“What? Why?”

The taxi driver, a burly guy with way too much hair on his arms, was looking at us expectantly. “Roll on, motherfucker,” Nicky
told him.

The cabbie’s face went blank with surprise and then livid. “Why, you fucking piece of—” He started to open his door, but a
middle-aged couple came out of the terminal behind us, walked right past us, and got into the cab. The door closed again,
and the cab rolled away, the driver shooting us a look of frustrated venom.

“Nicky,” I said, “if you’re going to pick fights with guys who are bigger than me, could you give me at least a couple of
seconds’ warning?”

“First cab could be a plant,” Nicky said. “Second, too.” He was already walking past the next cab in line as he spoke, and
now he pulled open the door of the third.

“You’ve got to go from the front of the—” the driver began.

“Just drive,” Nicky snapped. “I’m not paying you to fucking talk at me.”

Nicky scooched over, and I climbed in beside him, putting the briefcase at my feet. This driver was—fortunately—older and
less solidly built than the first. His balding head, his wispy hair clinging in loose tufts around his ears, and his bulbous
nose made him look like a moonlighting circus clown. He turned a solemn gaze on Nicky, then on me, weighed dignity against
discretion, and went for the easy option. We pulled away while the cabbie in front leaned on his horn in futile protest.

“Where to?” our driver demanded.

“Walthamstow,” Nicky said. “Top end of Hoe Street. And turn your radio on.”

The driver leaned forward. Tinny country-and-western music filled the cab.

“Louder,” Nicky said. “All the way up.”

I’d gotten to know Nicky’s moods pretty well over the years, so the paranoia came as no surprise. His coming out to meet me,
in spite of the fact that he saw me as the source of his troubles, was more revealing. Something heavy would have been needed
to counterbalance his spectacularly overdeveloped survival instincts. The only thing I knew that was heavy enough was his
spectacularly overdeveloped ego. He wanted—really wanted—to tell me what he’d found.

“So go ahead,” I invited him as plunky guitar noises echoed around our ears.

“Make your day?”

“If you think you can, Nicky, yeah. Make my day. It’s going to be a pretty tall order, though.”

“How’s this for starters?” He threw the newspaper in my lap.
The Sun
. With the pressure of his hands removed, it started to unroll. I smoothed it out and read the headline.
PREMIER MANAGER IN BUNGS SCANDAL
. Okay, that was the sports page. I flipped it over.
TWO DIE IN M
1
INFERNO.

And a photo—an old photo, too flattering by about thirty pounds—of Gary Coldwood.

“Oh Jesus!” I muttered.

“Guy was a friend of yours, wasn’t he, Castor? And it seems like only yesterday he was promising you ‘something juicy.’ I’m
assuming that was work-related rather than some freaky outcrop of your love life. Then he jumps the barrier on the M1 northbound
at one in the morning and hits a car coming the other way. Hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour collision. Boom. Smoking spark plugs
come down half a mile away. Two people in the other car, mother and ten-year-old daughter, both dead. Coldwood hauled out
of the wreckage with both legs broken, stinking of booze. Funny how things work out.”

I couldn’t answer. I was still staring at the photo. Coldwood was wearing an expression I’d seen on his face at least a hundred
times: a tough-guy cockiness that he’d copied from John Woo movies and never managed to get more than half right. He really
wanted to be the scourge of evildoers. If he could have gotten away with wearing a cape and mask to work, he would have done
it.

Nicky was still talking. “I checked this stuff out afterward, you understand. After I got broken into in the middle of the
fucking night. Two guys, both carrying guns with no serial numbers on them. No ID, no pack drill. Deadfall trap got one of
them, and the other died when I routed the mains power through the lock he was trying to pick to get in to me. Coincidence?
I asked myself. Old friends getting nostalgic? My fucking batshit family coming in for another pass? But no. After five minutes
on the Internet, I turn up this Coldwood thing, and then I know it’s you.”

“Nicky—” I didn’t even know what I was going to say. There was a tight, wound-up sensation in my chest that felt like it was
climbing upward. This was my fault. John Gittings and Vince Chesney counted as negligent homicide, but this was worse somehow.
I’d pushed Gary into the line of fire, and then I’d ducked.

“So now I’m interested,” Nicky was saying. “Hey, pal, you want to turn that radio up? It’s not reaching us in the back here.
So now I’m looking for patterns. The first one I find is that Coldwood wasn’t the only stubborn stain that got wiped out on
this pass.”

“There was someone else in the car with him?”

“Nope. But there were some other cops dying that night, and they were friends of his. A detective constable and a forensics
guy named Marchioness. What kind of a name is that for a guy to wear? One of them jumped out of a window, the other was pushed
in front of a train. Busy night for the Reaper, last night was. Unsociable hours, the whole fucking deal. He should talk to
his union.”

I turned to Nicky to tell him to get to the fucking point, but the dry black pebbles of his eyes met my stare with implacable
calm.

“One more and then I’m done. You ever hear of a guy named Stuart Langley?”

“Of course,” I said. “He’s a ghostbreaker. Works out of Docklands.” I suddenly remembered the story that Lou Beddows had told
me on the day of John’s funeral: the late-night call, the ambush, and the beating.
He lasted for a week, and then they turned the machine off…
“He was working with John,” I said. “Wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know, Castor. J the G was going all around the houses looking for a partner to work his big case with him, so sure,
maybe Stu Langley said yes. It might help to explain this other weird coincidence.”

“What other—”

“The mother and daughter. In the car that hit Coldwood. Elspeth Langley and little Niamh Langley. Does it strike you that
there’s a pattern emerging here? I know I tend to see patterns where there aren’t any: That’s what paranoia is all about,
right? But I trust I’ve set the scene for the big fucking revelations I’m about to lay on you?”

“Yeah,” I said, the tightness coiling in my throat now. “You’ve set the scene.”

“Right. You asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the notes in John-boy’s
A to Z
…”

It wasn’t what I was expecting. “We’re kind of past that,” I reminded him curtly. “The latest thing I asked you to do was
to find out where the bodies were buried.”

Nicky nodded a little impatiently. “Yeah, and I put the feelers out. Nothing at first. A lot of nothing, because I put out
a lot of feelers. So I went back to square one.”

“The lists in John’s book.”

“Exactly. But this time I applied some fuzzy logic. Because it seemed to me that the key word was gonna be the one at the
very end. After all, that’s where Gittings finished up. If he was trying to solve a puzzle, then there’s a good chance that
last word was the answer: the output for all that fucking crazy input.”

I thought back to the lists in the
A to Z
. The pages and pages of clotted scribble, annotated and underlined almost to critical mass. “The last word was
smashna
,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Nicky. “Except it wasn’t. John couldn’t spell worth a flying fuck in English, and this wasn’t English. So I fed
it through some online translators, and I found the word he was really looking for.” He looked at me, signaling that the punch
line was coming and he didn’t want to miss any detail of my reaction when I heard it. “It wasn’t
smashna
—sweet, cool, great, fabuloso. It was
smashana
—the Hindi word for a cremation ground.”

Obvious. So fucking obvious. Not the word, which I’d never heard before, but the payoff. Not a cemetery at all. John had tried
the cemeteries and crossed them out one by one until he got to the truth. I smacked my forehead. It was a bad move, though,
because it sent needles of pure agony through my bruised face and jarred neck.

“Thus forearmed,” Nicky said, exuding grim smugness, “I narrowed my search fields and got much better results. All but a few
of the badass dearly departed boys on Gittings’s list—”

“—were cremated,” I finished.

Nicky trumped my ace. “Were cremated in the same fucking place. Mount Grace. It’s a private crematorium in East London. But
you already know that, don’t you, Fix? Because it’s where John the Git was relocated when Carla decided to make light of grave
matters.”

Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fit, at least up to a point. “But then why would John…” I started, then I trailed off into silence.
That wasn’t the right question. We had at least two people verifiably risen from the dead. Les Lathwell’s fingerprints on
that bullet suggested that he’d returned in his own flesh, because he’d still had his own fingers, but Myriam Kale had possessed
someone else’s body, theoretically impossible though that was. Maybe John had been taken over, too. Maybe the weird things
he’d done in the last weeks of his life had just been preparing the ground so that his suicide, when it came, would be taken
at face value.