Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘I’m here to speak to Mister Todd,’ I said to her as she pulled her attention away from the exhibition of mechanical midwifery. ‘I called earlier. Felix Castor.’

She ran her finger down the very full columns of a double-width appointment book. ‘Felix Castor,’ she confirmed. ‘Yes. Please take a seat.’

There were several, so I took the one furthest away from Mister Fix-It, picked up yesterday’s Times and started to flick through it as the receptionist called upstairs. I glanced across at the fat man once, out of the corner of my eye: he was still on his knees and he was still looking at me, although when I caught him at it he dropped his gaze to the ground with a slight grimace and went back to the job in hand.

‘Any luck, Leonard?’ the receptionist asked.

The man shook his head glumly. ‘There’s no jam,’ he said, in a higher voice than I would have expected – a voice that had a slight fluting quality to it, as though the big man had swallowed that weird little device that gives Mister Punch his voice. ‘I think it’s one of the rollers, come off its bracket.’ He leaned forward and reached into the machine – with both arms, this time. It shifted on its base and creaked ominously.

‘Mister Castor.’ I looked up. Todd was just coming down the stairs, hand outstretched. He had a different suit on – mid-blue instead of grey, and with a subtle dog-tooth. Maybe he had one for every day of the week. I stood, and we shook.

Shaking hands is always a little jump into the unknown for me. The same morbid sensitivity that makes me good at sensing the presence of the dead sometimes allows me to pick up superficial psychic impressions through skin-to-skin contact. Nothing this time, though, or at least nothing revealing: Maynard Todd exuded only a cool aura of self-possession as immaculate as his tailoring.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. Then he looked past me, and his expression shifted into a slightly perplexed frown. ‘Uh – Leonard, are you sure you know what you’re doing there?’

‘Yes,’ Leonard grunted tersely.

I could see Todd thinking about taking the discussion a stage further, and I could see him giving up on the idea. He turned to the receptionist instead. ‘Carol,’ he said, ‘call the service number.’

‘Yes, Mister Todd.’

‘I can fix it,’ said Leonard, not looking round.

‘Come on upstairs,’ Todd said to me, ignoring Leonard’s answer. ‘You want some tea or coffee?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, and followed him back up the wide staircase. When we turned around the elbow of the stairs Leonard was still on his knees, intent on his veterinary duties.

‘John Gittings,’ Todd said, glancing back down at me as we walked. ‘That’s what you called about, right?’

‘Right,’ I agreed.

‘And I saw you at the funeral.’

‘Right again.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I thought so. You were the one who stepped in when the natives were getting restless. Thanks for that.’

I didn’t answer. It would have sounded a bit graceless to say that I was more worried about Reggie and Greg picking up an assault charge than I was about Todd’s well-being.

The stairwell went up and up, and I lost count of how many turns we took before we got to Todd’s office. It was surprisingly small, but then the courts had been the lower end of Victorian working-class housing: they meted out space as though space was gold. Todd indicated a chair as he walked around to the far side of the desk and pulled open the blinds, which looked onto the court’s central light well and so didn’t make much difference to the grey luminescence filtering into the room: this looked like the kind of place where you’d need the desk lamp on at noon on Midsummer’s Day.

As he sat down, Todd flicked open a green hanging file that was already on his desk. It contained a thick wodge of papers. I took the chair opposite him.

‘John Gittings,’ he said again, flicking through the documents on top of the file with quick, practised hands. ‘I’ve been thinking about this one.’

‘Have you?’ I asked, for form’s sake.

Todd nodded. ‘About Mrs Gittings’s feelings on the matter, I mean,’ he clarified. ‘I’m going to go ahead and get the exhumation order, like I said. Have John disinterred and taken to Mount Grace for cremation. I don’t have any choice about that.’

‘I’m sure.’

He must have caught the sardonic edge in my tone, because he gave me a slightly injured stare.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘You think I enjoyed turning up at the funeral looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, terrorising widows, breaking up the show? I didn’t. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. But my client’s wishes were absolutely specific.’

I didn’t answer right away: I was only here to check the dates. But since he’d given me the opening, it seemed churlish not to at least poke a stick into it.

‘Carla thinks that John was suffering from some kind of dementia.’

Todd looked pained. ‘Mrs Gittings has that luxury. I don’t. Not unless she can prove it in court. I have to assume that John meant what he said, and I have to act on it.’

‘There’s something else you should know about,’ I said. ‘Mrs Gittings is being haunted by her husband’s ghost.’

I left it out there, looked at his face. Like I said, the law takes a while to catch up with how the world turns, and a lot of people with a rational mindset somehow manage never to see anything that might challenge their basic assumptions. For all I knew, Todd was one of them: a Vestal, to use Pen’s word. Someone who’d never seen a ghost or any of the other manifestations of the risen dead, and couldn’t quite bring himself to make the conceptual leap in advance of the evidence.

But he surprised me. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, and he looked as though he meant it.

‘It gets worse. Whether or not John was in his right mind when he died, he’s pretty much out of it now. The ghost is restless. Violent. It’s become—’

‘Geist,’ Todd finished, and I nodded, impressed that he knew the technical term. He blew out his cheek. ‘Damn,’ he said simply, and then for a long time he stared at the floor, his thumb running absently along the edge of his desk. ‘Well, that – yes, that’s distressing. She must be very distraught. To see someone you loved – still love, I suppose . . .’

There was a long silence, at the end of which Todd looked at me and nodded as though I’d been pressing an argument. ‘I want this to give her as little stress as possible,’ he said. ‘Especially after what you’ve said. So what I’m proposing is a wake.’

I thought I must have misheard him. ‘A wake?’ I echoed him. ‘You mean a party?’

Todd shook his head brusquely. ‘No, not a party. Just a night when the coffin goes back to the house: when Mrs Gittings can sit with it, and John’s spirit can become a little bit more reconciled to . . . his violent end. Do you think that would be a good idea?’

I mulled it over, and I had to admit – to myself, at least – that it did. It might or might not provide closure for Carla, but it ought to do John’s ghost a power of good to see that his last request was being carried out to the letter. In theory, it ought to stop the haunting. You didn’t need an exorcism if you gave the dead what they wanted.

What I said, though, was, ‘It doesn’t really matter what I think. I’ll talk it over with Carla. See what she says.’

Todd pushed the papers back into the file, closed it and stood up, very abruptly. ‘You do that,’ he said. ‘If there’s a way of making this happen that spares her feelings, then that’s the way we’ll take. Thanks for coming in, Mister Castor. I’m glad you told me all this.’