Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

An even nicer surprise was waiting for me when I got up to the flat. Someone had painted across the door in thick, still-dripping black paint the words EXORCIST EQUALS DISEASED EQUALS DECEASED. I stared at it in dead silence for about half a minute, considering my options. It wasn’t my front door, of course, it was Ropey’s: but still, I was living behind it, and it was my arse he’d want to kick when he saw this. But was it worth getting my head used as a baseball? On balance, still probably not. I’d wait until the odds were more in my favour, and then I’d put these little fuck-ups through some changes.

The first thing I did when I got inside was to call Carla and tell her Todd’s idea about the wake. She was iffy at first, but she talked herself into it: I said I’d call him and tell him it was a goer.

A pregnant pause at the other end of the line, punctuated in the middle by a muffled sob.

‘Fix?’

‘Yeah?’

‘Could you – could you come over and be here, with me? When they bring John’s body back?’

I thought about that one for all of two seconds. ‘I’d love to, Carla,’ I lied, ‘but I can’t. I’ve got too much work on. I’ll have my mobile with me, though. If the geist – I mean, if John gets overexcited, call me and I’ll come over and play him to sleep again.’

I hung up before she could find another angle to come in at me from. A second call to Todd’s office got me the answerphone and I left a message there. That ought to have let me off the twin hooks of guilt and duty and feeling a little better.

It didn’t, though. I wandered from room to room, irritable and unsettled, wanting to pick a fight that I could win but not able to think of one right then. The wind was still high, and the noise it made as it broke on the northeast corner of the block was like a howl of pain, sampled and playeI wled andd back through some aeolian synthesiser: it made me think about the late John Gittings, prowling invisibly around his own living room like a trapped animal. Worse still, the couple next door were in the throes of noisy passion, which meant that they’d be swearing and throwing things at each other some time within the next hour.

I felt the call of the wild. So I put my coat back on and went down to the Lord Nelson. Let the Breathers follow me in if they wanted to. If they did, they were going out through the fucking window.

Okay, ‘the call of the wild’ is a relative term, because this is Wood Green we’re talking about: but you’ve got to love a pub that’s painted like a fire engine, even if the beer is shit; and the alternative was Yates’s Wine Lodge, which for someone born in Liverpool arouses deep atavistic impulses of fear and suspicion.

It wasn’t a football night, so the place was quiet. Quiet felt like what my nerves needed right then. A bunch of students were playing pool for pints over in the corner, and Mike Skinner was talking about his love life on the jukebox. I waited at the bar while Paul put a new barrel on, then when he came over I nodded towards the IPA pump.

‘Usual,’ I said.

‘Someone wants to meet you, Fix,’ he said as he pulled the pint.

‘What sort of someone?’

‘Woman.’

‘Young? Old? Nun? Policewoman?’

‘See for yourself.’

As Paul handed me the pint he nodded his head, barely perceptibly, off to my right. I handed him a fiver, took a sip on the beer and then, casually, took a glance in that direction.

There was a woman sitting by herself at a table off to one side of the door, dressed in a smart cutaway jacket over shirt and slacks, the whole outfit built around a motif of rust-red and black. Something about her look reminded me of Carla: the intangible suggestion of widow’s weeds, which was odd and unsettling because she couldn’t have been more than thirty. Dark brown hair in a tightly curled perm: bronzed eyelids and metallic highlights on her lips. She was staring at the wall, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t seeing it. The gin and tonic in front of her hadn’t been touched.

I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted: and maybe I just jumped at the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table, gave her a nod as she turned to stare at me.

‘Paul said you were asking after me,’ I said.

She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. ‘Felix Castor?’

‘That’s me.’

‘I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.’ She put out a hand and I shook it. ‘I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re good. I’d like to hire you.’

‘Okay if I sit down?’ I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at: given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it might be kind of a loaded question.

I took a seat opposite Janine Hunter and she swivelled round to face me.

‘So what’s the problem?’ I asked – the standard opening phrase for doctors, mechanics and ghostbreakers.

‘My husband,’ she said, and then seemed to hesitate. ‘He’s . . .’

The pause went on: whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over it. I tried to help.

‘Passed on?’ I suggested.

She looked surprised. ‘No! He’s on remand, at Pentonville.’ Another leaden pause. ‘For sexual assault and murder.’

‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

‘And he didn’t do it, Mister Castor. Doug looks really tough, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s – I’ve got to find the real killer. I want her to tell everybody what she did. So they’ll let Doug go.’

I noted the female pronoun in passing. This was getting stranger by the second: it was also veering gracefully away from what I think of my core competencies.

‘I’m an exorcist, Mrs Hunter,’ I reminded her, as gently as I could manage. ‘I could only find this killer for you if she happened to be—’

And before I could get the word out, Jan Hunter cut across me with the inevitable punchline. ‘She is, Mister Castor. She’s dead. She’s been dead for forty years.’

I stared at Jan Hunter for a moment, letting the idea grow on me.

‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘Provisionally, I mean. Okay with provisos. You’d better tell me the whole story. Then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I can do for you.’

By way of answer, Jan rummaged in her handbag and came up with a photo, which she handed to me. It showed a man – the same age as Jan or maybe a couple of years older – with a suede-head haircut and slightly over-large ears, looking to camera with a goofy grin while holding up two dead fish on a hook. The background was a river bank; the props, a canvas chair and a keepnet. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a wedding ring, and that was all I could tell you about him from memory. It wasn’t a face that left a deep impression.

‘Doug,’ I said.

‘Look at that face,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘Can you imagine him hurting anyone? Let alone killing—’

‘He did for those two fish,’ I said, trying to inject a little reality back into the proceedings. She gave me a wounded look and I shrugged an apology. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened?’

She looked down at the photo, drawing in a long, ragged breath. It was mind over matter: I saw her shovelling the emotions back inside and locking them down. When she looked at me again, she was almost clinically calm.

‘Just the facts, ma’am?’ she said, presumably being Dan Ackroyd rather than Jack Webb.

‘To start with.’

So she told them to me. And they were as nasty a set as I’d ever come across.