Dead Men's Boots (47 page)

The demon acknowledged the point with a curt nod. “Yes. Of course. I need you, Felix, to make me an entry point. With your
whistle, with your lovely little party trick, you can make a hole in their defenses—bind them and distract them and make them
stumble. They’ve held me at bay for more years than I care to count. There are a great many of them, as I said, and they’re
both old and strong. They’ve found ways to keep me from crossing that threshold, though I’ve tried a thousand times. Outside
the crematorium, they move in flesh, and in flesh, I can’t touch them. But pipe me in through the door, and you’ll see the
carnage a fox makes in a henhouse.”

Silence fell once more. The burning eyes held me in place while Moloch waited for my binding word.

“It all sounds great,” I said, tearing my own gaze away from his with an effort. The effort was largely wasted. Magnetically,
my head swiveled back around until the searchlight of his stare shone full on me again. It was like Juliet’s hypnotic fascination
but with no overlay of desire. It was naked coercion, the veils of seduction all stripped away. “But my music works on one
ghost at a time. What you’re asking me to do—it can’t be done. I can’t play two hundred tunes all at once.”

Moloch hawked and spat with great deliberation. “Then do whatever needs to be done,” he said. “Enlist yourself an army of
exorcists—or dredge your own courage up from whatever cloaca you keep it in. Invite the lady to come with us, if she’s still
taking your calls. The details I’ll leave to you. The offer is exactly as I’ve stated it. That we go to Mount Grace Crematorium,
you and I. Together. In fact, you and I and the lady, because the odds will be against us even with her. Without her, we won’t
prevail. You will go to avenge your friend’s death, which you’re beginning to suspect—correctly—was actually two
separate
deaths. I will go to feed. The lady— Well, she’ll go because you’ll ask her to. Because she’s trying to pretend to be human,
and in some way, that makes her vulnerable to you even though she could kill you with a single flexing of her cunt.

“Say that all this will happen, and it will happen. Or say no, and I’ll find somewhere else to eat. The meal you so kindly
laid on for me has given me enough strength to wait a few centuries longer.”

So this was it. The moment of truth. Maybe the demon was bluffing about going elsewhere. On the other hand, it was clear to
see that he’d changed from the walking skeleton I’d met outside Todd’s office. He probably could wait a little longer if he
had to. Okay, he’d be as safe to be around as sweaty gelignite. But too many people had died already, and I couldn’t see where
a better offer was going to come from.

“All right,” I said at last. “We’ll go in there. Together. We’ll wipe out the whole fucking nest of them.”

“You swear this?”

“I swear it.”

“On what do you swear it?”

“On myself, because I don’t believe in any bastard else.”

Moloch bowed with a faintly satirical emphasis. “Then it will be so,” he said. He turned to the window again and opened it
as far as it would go.

“Wait,” I said. “There’s something I need to do first. Before we tackle the ghosts. I want to go sweat the lawyer. Todd. He’s
in this up to his kishkas.”

“Is he?” Moloch still had his back turned to me, so I couldn’t see his face.

“Of course he is. He was the one working the angles to get John Gittings exhumed and trundled away to Mount Grace. He’s handling
the legal affairs of the Palance family, which means he’s conducting the whole show. That’s why you were hanging around outside
his office. Because he’s one of them—one of the killers whose scent you’ve been following. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Possibly,” Moloch said. “Again, you’ll do as you see fit. I saved your life, and I gave you information you couldn’t have
obtained by any other means. At the moment you’re heavily in my debt. So whatever you do on your own account, don’t include
me as a factor in your plans. All that’s between us is the bargain, as we’ve already agreed it. When you’re ready to make
the journey to Mount Grace, just say my name—out in the open air, with silence all around, and preferably in darkness. I’ll
hear you.”

I thought he was going to walk out the window into the night, but the night came to him instead. Blackness spilled into the
room like a solid wave, washing over Moloch and swallowing him up. An instant later, it cleared, and he was gone.

There was a soft thump as the skull fell onto the carpet and rolled a few inches before rocking back and settling on its apex.
The upside-down sockets stared vacantly at me, inviting me into the well within that used to be full to the brim with cat
thoughts and now was full of nothing.

Normal service had resumed.

Almost in the same instant, the TV set gave an unsettlingly organic shudder, and the screen lit up like an eye opening in
the dark corner of the room.

“—don’t even know where she came from,” a man’s voice said, sounding strained and almost tearful. The man on the screen was
burly, middle-aged, dressed in what I took at first to be a police uniform. He didn’t look prone to tears. “She walked right
past the guard post, and we all—three of us—we all ran out after her. I was just thinking how did she get in, because there’s
a wall. It’s twenty feet high, and then—there’s an overhang with razor wire. You can’t climb it. Nobody could climb it.”

The image switched abruptly to an external shot of one of the five wings of Pentonville, and I realized that he wasn’t a cop.
He was a prison guard.

“Nobody else had any clearer explanations to give,” said a news presenter’s voice in public-solemnity mode, “for how a prisoner
on remand for murder was able to walk out of one of London’s highest-security prisons, in what was evidently a highly planned
and meticulously executed raid. The mystery woman entered here—”

I shook my head to clear it, which turned out to be a mistake. The various dull aches in my neck and in the muscles of my
face connected up into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia extravaganza. On the screen, successive still photos of Pentonville
were overlaid with computer graphics mapping a route through a gate, now hanging off its hinges, over an inner wall of impressive
height and down through an interior space punctuated with inspection posts and barred, locked doors. The voice was still talking,
but I was momentarily distracted by the pretty pictures.

Another talking head popped up, this one wearing a suit and batting for the home office. He denied allegations that staff
cuts had played a part in these events. “There were plenty of guards on the scene. Three at the first guard post and three
more in D wing itself. Two of them were very seriously assaulted—hospitalized. The rest seem to have been exposed to some
sort of drug—a nerve gas or a hallucinogen—and are unable to give a clear account of what happened.”

Cut away to some handheld footage of another uniformed guard sitting on the steps of an ambulance with a blanket over his
shoulders. He was staring at nothing as cameras flashed all around him.

“She just looked at me,” he said. “She just—and then—I was—I don’t know. I don’t know. I was so—” He hid his face in his hands,
either trying to evade that remembered gaze or to relive it.

Cut to a still image of Doug Hunter, an archive shot of him walking into court, presumably on the day of his remand hearing.
His face impassive, closed, giving nothing away.

“This is the man who walked out of the front gate of Pentonville this evening, leaving the prison and the system it represents
in chaos—”

I’d found the remote by this time. Next I found the off switch. Moloch had made his point: Juliet was home, the fumets had
hit the windmill, and if time had ever been on my side, then it sure as hell wasn’t anymore.

I limped through into the bathroom, so overwhelmed with tiredness that I felt like my body was a puppet with some of the strings
cut. I splashed cold water in my face, stripping one layer off the exhaustion and revealing a lot more layers underneath.

Try to forget about Juliet, at least for now. What she’d done, terrible though it was, was no surprise—and it was a big silver
lining that she’d managed to do it without killing anyone. How long that would last was another question altogether. If she
just let Myriam Kale walk away in Doug Hunter’s body after the jailbreak, then it was only a matter of time before Kale met
some guy who pushed all the wrong buttons for her. Then there’d be another Alastair Barnard lying in a hotel room somewhere
for the maid to find when she came to change the sheets.

I couldn’t do anything about that. I probably shouldn’t even try; it would be like aiming the fire extinguisher at the flames,
instead of at the base of the fire. Because Myriam Kale was a symptom of something bigger and older and a lot more terrifying.

Why had I agreed? Why had I decided to dance with the devil? I’d known Asmodeus long enough to know what kind of moves demons
favor and where I was likely to end up after the dance was done. But I didn’t have any choice. Even if Juliet hadn’t left
me in the lurch, Moloch was right about the kind of help we needed: a specialist adapted to the terrain and the situation
by whatever passed in hell for Darwinian pressures. The forces of supernature.

That left at least one question unanswered. How in the name of Christ and all his bloody saints was I going to hold up my
end of the bargain? John Gittings had tried, and he seemed to have an informer on the inside—someone who was writing him briefing
notes and giving him tips on strategy.
Take backup, take lots of backup, because youre certain to need it
. Exactly what Covington had advised me to do—and exactly what John had been calling me to arrange. Me and maybe Stu Langley,
too. But I didn’t pick up, Stu Langley got himself a fatal concussion, and John had to go in alone.

I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror, water pouring down my battered face and dripping onto my bloody, rumpled shirt.
I was looking for cracks in the famous Castor facade, but I saw someone else’s face staring back at me: John’s face from my
dream on the night before the cremation. What had he said to me? That he was supposed to give me something. And when I told
him I’d already found the letter inside the pocket watch, he’d shaken his head as though that didn’t matter at all.

Not the letter. The score. The final score, after the whistle blew.

The whistle?

Or the drums. I forget. It’s like a skeleton, Fix. The skeleton of a song.

Maybe I had some backup already. Maybe John could pitch in for me in the way I’d refused to do for him.

Feeling slightly light-headed, I went back into the living room and rummaged around under the sofa cushions—my favored location
for all flat valuables—until I found the sheet music I’d taken from the left-luggage locker at Victoria. I took it over to
the table, laid it down, and smoothed out the worst of the creases.

The skeleton of a song. I hadn’t even bothered to try to work out what that meant. Begging to differ from Sigmund, I’d never
believed that dreams were the royal road to anywhere very much. But John was a drummer, and drummers are different from normal
people. The skeleton of a song—not what was left when the substance of the song had rotted away, but the framework, the scaffolding,
on which the rest of the song could be built.

That might be how a drummer felt about rhythm.

The notations on the sheet music were as opaque to me now as they had been when I first saw them: vertical flecks of ink densely
but, as far as I could see, randomly spaced across the lines of the stave and the width of the page. Occasionally, a few marks
interspersed that might have been letters or symbols: a vertical line with a horizontal slash near the top that could be a
T or a plus sign; another that looked like a crude asterisk. Nothing to indicate how any of it fitted together or how it could
be translated into sound.

Part of the problem was that I could never be arsed with reading sheet music even when I was trying to learn my own instrument.
I picked out tunes in a rough and ready way, already listening more to whatever was going on in my head than anything else.
So I didn’t have much to compare this gibberish to.

If I was going to have a hope in hell of deciphering it, I’d need an expert.

I picked up the phone and dialed from memory. Got some irate old man out of bed because I was one step away from falling over
and my thread-stripped brain had transposed two digits.

Tried again.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice, fuzzy with sleep.

“Louise?” I said.

The same voice, a little sharper. “Yeah. Who’s this?”

“Felix Castor.”

“Fix. Fuck your mother, look at the goddamn time. Are you on something?”

“What’s the name of your band, Lou?”

“My band?” she echoed with pained incomprehension.

“You still play, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So what’s the name of—”

“The Janitors of Anarchy. Fix, you didn’t call me up in the middle of the night to ask—”

“No,” I interrupted her, “I didn’t. I just want to meet the drummer.”

    
Twenty-one