Dead Men's s Boots

I took it on the chin, but it wasn’t great news. If Gabe’s daughter was in the same line of business as me now, and if she was operating in London, then we were going to keep running across each other’s trails whether we liked it or not. Not a happy prospect. I watched Gabe’s daughter down to the gates: saw her stop, her two escorts walking on without her, and exchange words with the Breathers on picket duty. Someone ought to have a word with her about that: it’s not a great idea to encourage the lunatic fringe.

‘How’s the music going?’ I asked, in a ham-fisted effort to raise the mood. Louise played bass in a band that had had many more names than gigs. I had a vague feeling that their current nom de sound- stage was something vaguely punk, like All-Star Wank, but it would be something different tomorrow.

‘It’s good,’ Louise said. ‘It’s going good. We’ve got a new manager. He reckons he can get us in at the Spitz.’

Larry Tallowhill came up alongside Louise at this point and slid an arm around her waist. ‘Felix Castor,’ he said, with mock sternness. ‘Leave my fucking woman alone.’

‘Can I help it if I’m irresistible?’ I asked. ‘How are the new drugs working?’

Larry shrugged expansively. ‘They’re great,’ he said. ‘I’ll live until something else kills me. Can’t ask for more than that.’

Larry was always amazingly upbeat about his condition, which was the result of the sort of arbitrary bad luck that would fill most people with rage or despair to the slopping-over-the-top, foaming-at-the-mouth point. He’d contracted HIV from a bite he got when he was trying to subdue a loup-garou – you might call it a werewolf, except that the animal component here was something leaner and longer-limbed and altogether stranger than that word suggests. It wasn’t even a paying job: he just saw this monster chasing a bunch of kids across a Sainsbury’s car park, and stepped in without even thinking about it. The thing was looking to feed, but it turned its attention to Larry as soon as it realised he was a threat, and like I said it was sleek and fast and very, very mean. Larry took the damage, finished the job with one arm hanging off in strips, then walked a mile and a half to the hospital to get himself patched up. They did a great job: stabilised him, took the severed finger he’d brought with him and sewed it back on, stopped him from bleeding to death or getting tetanus, and eventually restored ninety-five per cent of nervous function. About ten or eleven months later he got the bad news.

For an exorcist, it all falls under the heading of occupational hazard: there aren’t very many of us who get to die of old age.

I changed the subject, which sooner or later was going to bring us around to the even more painful issue of how John Gittings had died – locked in the bathroom with the business end of a shotgun in his mouth. I’m not squeamish, but I’d been shying away from that particular image all afternoon.

‘Business good?’ I asked, falling back once more on the old conversational staples.

‘It’s great,’ Larry said. ‘Best it’s ever been.’

‘Three bloody jobs all at once yesterday,’ Louise confirmed. ‘He’s fast.’ She nodded at Larry. ‘You know how fast he is, but even he can’t do three in a day. They get in the way of each other. The second’s harder than the first, and the third’s impossible. So I did the middle one, and of course that was the one that turned out to be an absolute bastard. Old woman – very tough. Fought back, and I lost my lunch all over the client’s carpet.’

‘Your breakfast,’ Larry corrected. ‘It was only eleven o’clock.’

‘My brunch. And this bloke – company director or something, lives in Regent Quarter – he says “I hope you’re going to clean that up before you go.” And I would have done, too, but not after he said that. I hit him with the standard terms and conditions and walked out. Now he’s saying he won’t pay, but he sodding will. One way or another he will.’

As changes of subject go, it hadn’t got us very far away from death. But that’s exorcists’ shop talk for you.

After a few more pleasantries Lou and Larry strolled away arm in arm, and I walked back over to the grave to say my goodbyes. Carla was now standing in deep conversation with the priest. Maybe a little too deep for comfort: at any rate, she took the opportunity as I walked up to extricate herself, thank him and disengage.

‘I’m heading out,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself, Carla. I’ll be in touch, okay?’ But she was holding something out to me, and the something turned out to be her car keys.

‘Fix,’ she said apologetically, ‘could you drive me home? I really don’t feel up to it. And there’s something I want to ask you about.’

I hesitated. They say misery loves company but I’m the kind of misery who usually doesn’t. On the other hand, I’d missed Bourbon’s charabanc and I needed a lift back into town. Maybe a half-second too late to look generous, I nodded and took the keys. ‘Thanks again, father,’ Carla called over her shoulder. I glanced back. The priest was watching us as we walked away, the expression on his face slightly troubled.

‘He asked me if I had any doubts,’ Carla said, catching the movement as I looked around. ‘Any bits of doctrine I wanted to talk over with him. Then, before I could get a word in, he was pumping me for clues.’

‘Men of the cloth are the worst,’ I agreed. ‘They don’t approve, but they have to look. It’s the same principle as the News of the World.’ That was slightly unfair, but it’s something you come across a lot. People assume that we’re sitting on a big secret: we have to be, because how could we do what we do without knowing how it’s done? But it’s not like that at all. Would you ask Steve Davis for an explanation of Brownian motion, or Torvill and Dean how ice crystals form? We’ve got a skill set, not the big book of answers.

Carla’s car was the only one left in the car park: a big, roomy old Vectra GLS in a dark grey that showed the splatter-stains of old birdshit off to good effect. I let Carla in – no central locking – and walked around to the driver side, taking an appraising look at her in the process. She was calmer now that it was all over, but she looked a little tired and a little old. That wasn’t surprising: having someone you love commit suicide has to be one of the nastiest low blows life can throw at you. In other respects, she was still very much the woman I’d known back in the early 1990s, before she’d ever met John – when she was a brassy, loud blonde I’d met at a poker session and almost gone to bed with, except that my fear of intimacy and her preference for older men had kicked in at about the same time and turned a promising fumble into an awkward conversation about micro-limit hold ’em. There’s a line in a Yeats poem somewhere where he asks whether your imagination lingers longest on a woman you won or a woman you lost: while you’re puzzling over that one, you can maybe give him an estimate on how long a piece of string is. If things had worked out differently, Carla and me could have got a whole Mrs Robinson thing going, although even in those days I was less of a Benjamin Braddock, more of a Ratso Rizzo.

I started the car and pulled away, noticing that the priest followed us with his sad-eyed gaze as we drove by. I sympathised, up to a point: it couldn’t be an easy way to earn a living these days.

We eased our way out between the Breather pickets, collecting a fair share of abuse and ridicule along the way but no actual missiles or threats. Most of the people waving placards and chanting rhythmically were in their teens or early twenties. What did they know about death? They hadn’t even got that far with life yet.

The cemetery was all the way out in Waltham Abbey, and John and Carla lived – or rather Carla still lived and John didn’t any more – on Aldermans Hill just outside Southgate, in a flat over a dress shop. It was going to be a long haul, and the Vectra handled like a half-swamped raft. Joining the traffic, I remembered the half-bottle of Metaxa in my inside pocket, fished it out one-handed and passed it across to Carla. She took it without a word, unscrewed the top and downed a long swallow. It made her shudder: probably it made her eyes water, too, but there were plenty of other explanations available for why she rubbed the heel of her hand quickly across her face.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, I noticed that we’d picked up a tail. I swore under my breath. It was one of the vans that the Breathers had arrived in – a big high-sided delivery truck that someone must have borrowed from work, deep blue and with the words Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse script over the windscreen because a good idea is a good idea, even if the emergency services think of it first. I didn’t mention it to Carla: I just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident that I could lose them long before we got back into London.

‘So what was all that shit with the lawyer?’ I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good corrective to grief. Grief paralyses you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.

Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie. But then she took a second pull on the brandy bottle and away she went.

‘John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister Hailey,’ she muttered.