Mike Carey: Dead Men's s Boots

This johnny-come-lately looked pretty striking in other ways, too. His mid-brown hair was back-combed into an Errol Flynn-style college cut, and he had the Hollywood face to go with it – hard to get without plastic surgery or sterling silver genes. He looked to be about thirty, but there was something in his face that read as either premature experience or some kind of innate calm and seriousness. He was old for his age, but he wore it pretty well.

And he had a folded sheet of paper in his hand which he was holding up like Neville Chamberlain for our appreciation. That plus the sharp suit made it less likely that he was what I’d taken him to be at first: one of the Breath of Life guys trying to disrupt proceedings with a paint bomb or a noise-maker.

He slowed down as he got in among us and I noticed as he passed me that he wasn’t breathing hard, despite the run. I wondered if he worked out in Italian linen, too.

‘Mrs Gittings,’ he said, offering the paper to Carla. ‘This is a warrant executed this morning by Judge Tilney at Hendon magistrates’ court. Will you please read it?’

Carla smacked the paper out of the man’s hand so that he had to flail briefly to catch it again before it fell into the grave.

‘Go away, Mister Todd,’ she said coldly. ‘You’ve got no business being here. No business at all.’

‘I have to disagree,’ Italian-suit-guy said, politely enough, unfolding the paper and showing it to Carla. ‘You know what my business is, Mrs Gittings, and you know why I couldn’t just allow this to happen. What you’re doing here is illegal. This warrant forbids you from burying the mortal remains of the late Jonathan Gittings, and it requires you to appear at—’

He ran out of steam very abruptly. He was looking into the grave, and he clearly registered the fact that it was already occupied and half-full of earth. There was maybe a second when he seemed false-footed: all dressed up, writ in hand, and nowhere to go. Then he refolded his warrant and tucked it away in his breast pocket with a decisive motion, his expression sombre.

‘Obviously I’m already too late,’ he said. ‘I was under the impression that this service was scheduled to start at three o’clock. I’m sure that was what I was told when I called the funeral parlour this morning. Perhaps there was a last-minute cancellation?’ Carla flushed red, opened her mouth to speak, but Todd raised his hands in surrender. ‘I’m not going to try to interrupt a funeral that’s already in progress – and I apologise for disturbing the solemnity of the occasion. If I’d been in time to stop the burial, it was my legal duty to do so. Now . . . I’ll retire and consider the other avenues that are available to me. We’ll talk again, Mrs Gittings. And you can expect an exhumation order in the fullness of time.’

Carla gave a short cry of pain, as if the words had physically wounded her. Then Reggie Tang – an unlikely Galahad – stepped in between her and the lawyer, fixing him with a look full of violent promise.

‘Can I see your invitation, mate?’ he demanded. At the same time I saw Reggie’s deceptively scrawny-looking friend Greg Lockyear moving in behind Todd, looking to Reggie for his cue. I couldn’t believe that they were planning to lay some hurt on a lawyer in front of fifty witnesses, but the grim set of Reggie’s face was impossible to misread. Like most of us he knew John from way back, and like most of us he’d teamed up with him a fair few times when there was nothing better on offer. That tended to be how it worked, and I guessed that maybe, like me, he was feeling some belated pangs of guilt that he’d only ever seen John as a last resort. So maybe beating up a man in a sharp suit seemed like an easy way to burn off some of the bad karma.

Stepping forward as much to my own surprise as anyone else’s, I put a hand on Reggie’s shoulder. He turned his glare on me, surprised and indignant to be interrupted when he was still warming up.

‘Behave yourself, Reggie,’ I said. ‘You’re doing no one a favour by starting a fight here, least of all Carla.’

We held each other’s stares for a moment longer, and I was half-convinced he was going to take a swing at me. I took a step to the left to keep Greg Lockyear in view, because that way at least I wouldn’t be fighting on two fronts. But the moment passed, and Reggie turned away with a disgusted shrug.

‘Frigging parasites,’ he said. ‘Have it your way, Fix. But if he doesn’t get the fuck out of here I’m gonna put something through his face.’

I gave Todd a look that asked him what he was waiting for. ‘Mrs Gittings will be in touch,’ I said.

‘I’m sure,’ he agreed. ‘But I really need to proceed with—’

‘You need to pick your time. She’ll be in touch. Leave it until then, eh?’

Todd looked at the grim faces ringing him, and probably did some calculations. He glanced around for Carla, but she’d stepped back into the supportive crowd and was being comforted by Cath and Therese. ‘I’m prepared to wait a day or so,’ he said, ‘out of respect. A day or so – no longer.’

‘Good plan,’ I agreed.

With a wry nod to me, Todd turned on his heel. He took the path back to the gate a lot more slowly this time and stayed in sight for the better part of a minute, further dampening the already tense and sombre mood.

We broke up by inches and ounces, swapping halfhearted conversation at the turning circle by the car park because nobody wanted to seem to be in an indecent hurry to escape. I said hello to Louise, who I hadn’t seen in a year or more, and we played the ‘ain’t it awful’ game, trading stories about the Breathers.

‘They’re running ambushes now,’ Louise said in her lugubrious Tyneside drawl, igniting a cigarette with a gold lighter shaped like a tiny revolver. ‘Picking us off. Can you believe it? Stu Langley got a call in the early hours of the morning. Some woman saying she’d just moved into a new house and there was a ghost in the bloody downstairs lavvy. He told her he’d come the next morning, but she started crying and pleading. Laying it on thicker and thicker, she was, and Stu’s too polite to hang up on her. So in the end he got dressed and went out there. I’d have told her to hold it in or piss out of the window.

‘Anyway, he gets to this place, out in Gypsy Hill somewhere, and look at that. There’s a house with a FOR SALE sign up, exactly where she said it would be, and the front door’s open. So he went on in, like a bloody idiot. Didn’t stop to ask himself why there were no lights on, or why the sign still said FOR SALE if this whingeing old biddy had already moved in.

‘There were four of them, with baseball bats. They laid into him so hard they put him in a coma. He lasted for a week and then they turned the machine off. I’m telling you, Fix, they won’t be happy until they’ve killed us all.’

‘Won’t do them much good if they do,’ I observed, shaking my head as Louise offered me a drag on the cigarette. ‘Exorcism is in the human genome now. Probably always was, only it didn’t show itself until there was something there to use it on. Killing us doesn’t make the problem go away.’

She blew smoke out of her nose, hard. ‘No, but beating the shit out of a few of us gives the rest of us something to think about.’

Another knot of mourners walked on past us, heading for their cars. One of them was the acid-blonde girl, walking alongside two guys I didn’t know, and she gave me another killing look as she passed.

‘Any idea who that is?’ I asked Louise, rolling my eyes to indicate who I meant without being too obvious about it.

‘Which one?’

‘The girl.’

Louise expelled breath in a forced sigh and made a weary face.