Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘Driscoll thought it was funny. He’d worn a lot of bodies by that time, but he’d never tried wearing a kid. So he stayed there for a few months. Made quite a joke out of it, turning up for the monthly inscription with a – with a sharp tailored suit, and looking at me out of my own son’s . . . Do you mind? I need some fresh air.’

Covington took aim with the bottle and hurled it against the picture window. The bottle shattered: the window fractured across, but stayed whole. Frustrated, he crossed to the bar, picked up a heavy glass ashtray and slung it like a discus. That did the job: it went pinwheeling through the window, which shattered spectacularly, and impacted on the stone flags outside in a fountain of shards that winked and sparkled briefly in the glare of one of the security lights. As though it hadn’t happened, Covington turned to me again. His eyes were dry but his cheeks were flushed and a terrible strain twisted his mouth, making his handsome face a thing you wanted to look away from.

‘So anyway, that started a whole craze. Driscoll talked it up so much, everyone had to try. Between his second and tenth birthdays, I’d estimate that Lionel had forty or fifty different passengers. And I let it happen. I stood by, and I . . . did nothing. Didn’t think about it. Didn’t care. Told myself I didn’t care, anyway. Life is cheap, and the rest is – sentiment. Which is even cheaper.

‘At ten Lionel was left to himself for a while. They lost interest. But it was too late by then. The cognitive centres in the brain – I don’t know. I’ve heard it explained in four or five different ways. At the crucial points in his brain development, he’d been . . . asleep. A prisoner in his own body, bludgeoned into eight years of unconsciousness. He was never going to be normal now. It turned out that you couldn’t just put those years back.’

Covington took a deep, ragged breath. ‘So we had a hard choice,’ he said. ‘Lionel was still the legal possessor of a lot of land – a big chunk of our assets. He was a ward of court, in my legal custody, but there’d be problems if I just administered his property as though it was mine. That would look like malfeasance: it was exactly what we wanted to avoid.

‘We took the low road instead. Carried on possessing Lionel, carried on using him as our puppet – working on a strictly enforced rota, because the novelty had worn off by this stage and nobody was very keen to go through puberty again. We kept the whole routine up until he came of age. After that, he was as viable a suit to wear as anybody else, and it didn’t matter so much. The job was done.

‘But so was the damage. Now that it was too late, I could see – could really see, for the first time – what a monstrous thing we were doing. How big an obscenity we were.

‘I couldn’t save Lionel. I’d even been part of what had been done to him. What I could do was decide that there wouldn’t be any more Lionels. That the operation would finally be shut down. And when they lost interest in him – when he got too old, and they let him go at last – I brought him here. I’ve tried to make him comfortable, at least: I was trying for happy, but most of the time comfortable is what we can manage. He doesn’t remember much, but he has nightmares, and he’s always confused. Always a little bit panicky, as though he’s forgotten something important and something awful is about to happen and it’ll be his fault.

‘So you see, it wasn’t Myriam. They all think it was, and maybe for them that was the real crisis. For me – the camel’s back was already well and truly fucked. Whatever they let me do for Myriam, or tried to stop me from doing, I was done. I was all done.’

Covington looked at me bleakly. ‘Another drink?’

‘No.’

‘No. Not for me, either, I guess. I can see the way you’re looking at me, Castor. I would have killed you for that once.’

‘It’s your party, Aaron. It’s been your party all along.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, it has. What time is it?’

‘About five-thirty.’

‘The next shift of nurses comes in at six. I need to make sure they all clock in: if someone doesn’t make it, I have to call the service. After that, I’m yours. We’ll go to where Myriam is. We’ll sort this.’

‘Fine.’ I pulled myself wearily to my feet. Covington could have saved his effort: breaking the window hadn’t done anything to clear the air in here. I crossed to the bar, found the hammer wrapped in bubble plastic behind it and hefted it onto my shoulder. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car. Come on out whenever you’re ready.’

Retracing my steps through the maze, I came back out onto the driveway and climbed into the car. The form-fitted leather was way too comfortable and I dozed off into uneasy dreams. John Gittings was in them: so was Gary Coldwood. When a hand on my shoulder – the one that Todd had stabbed me in earlier that evening – woke me back into the world, cold sweat slicked my body from head to foot.

It was Covington, and he was already in the passenger seat.

‘Nice car,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Did it belong to the dead woman in the back seat?’

‘Demon,’ I corrected him. ‘Yeah, it’s hers. And the rumours of her death are usually exaggerated.’

‘Whenever you’re ready, Castor.’

I turned the key in the ignition. I didn’t think I’d ever be ready. But even in the cold, damp, misty pre-dawn after a night of bloodletting and pain, you can always rely on Italian engineering. The Maserati started first time, and I eased her out through the gates.

Sue Book greeted the sight of her fallen lover with a wail of anguish: then she wrested Juliet’s body out of my hands and took her away from me into another room – even Sue could carry Juliet’s negligible bulk without strain – and kicked the door shut behind her. I took that to mean that if we wanted tea and biscuits we’d have to rustle them up for ourselves.

But Covington was hungry for something else entirely, and he wasn’t in the mood for delayed gratification. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded, looking peremptorily around the small hall. ‘Is she here?’

‘Up the stairs,’ I said, and he was taking them three at a time almost before the word was out of my mouth. I didn’t follow straight away. The energy Juliet had lent me had all drained away now and the events of the last few hours were taking their inevitable toll. I felt like a piece of wind-blown crud that had fetched up out of the night at the foot of these stairs and couldn’t be expected to go any further. Wind-blown crud doesn’t defy gravity: it knows its place.

But eventually I summoned the will-power from somewhere and started to climb. From the bedroom facing me I heard Covington’s murmured voice, and then a crazed laugh from Doug Hunter’s throat.

I hesitated on the top step, not sure whether this was a private party or not. Covington’s ‘We’ll sort this’ gave me no clue at all as to what he had planned – or even who the ‘we’ referred to.

Leaning my back against the wall, I enjoyed the momentary sensation of weightlessness that comes with having carried something very heavy for a long time and finally been allowed to set it down. Tomorrow there was more still to come, but tomorrow was another day – technically, anyway, even though it was probably less than half an hour to sunup.

The weightlessness passed, but I still felt curiously detached from my own emotions. The guilt that had bitten into me when I’d heard about Gary Coldwood’s car accident was mercifully dulled, but there was no sense of triumph or satisfaction in having dealt with his attackers. If anything, Covington’s account had left me feeling as though there was mourning still to be done: but I couldn’t make a start on it just yet.