Dead Men's s Boots

me to wait. Too late by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.’

Hunter’s eyes seemed to clear abruptly and opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt: he stared at me suddenly with intense, unreadable emotion. I kept waiting for him to blink again but he didn’t.

‘You don’t know,’ he said, with aching bitterness in his voice.

‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more and more uneasy about how this was going. ‘I don’t. But I’m trying to find out. I’m an exorcist. Your wife hired me to try to find out whether there’s any possibility that Myriam Kale – the ghost of Myriam Kale – was involved in Alastair Barnard’s death. She believes that if we can find evidence Kale’s ghost was in the room at the time of the murder we might be able to raise a reasonable doubt about your guilt. Is that something you have an opinion on?’

I was assuming that most of this would wash over Hunter but to my surprise he responded with something coherent. His blue-eyed unsettling stare still locked on my face, but his eyes narrowed now, which I’ll admit was something of a relief.

‘I think that’d be a good one,’ he said, ‘if anyone could do it. Not in the room, though. Not when he was lying there. If you’d seen what it was like when she was working on him, you wouldn’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. She’s not a ghost. She’s never been a ghost.’

‘What is she, then?’ I asked, fighting the urge to push my chair back and get some distance from that tortured, unblinking gaze.

To my surprise, Hunter laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. ‘She says she’s the one thing they never wanted to happen. Because it’s not a game for her. It’s not a job. She can’t stop. They want to make her stop but they don’t know how. And she doesn’t know either. So she works and works and works at it, one man at a time, and – she used a hammer. I’m pretty sure it was one of mine. But there aren’t enough hammers in the whole damn world for—’

He frowned suddenly, and it was like a light going off behind his face. ‘An exorcist?’ he demanded, and I realised that he was echoing what I’d said a minute or so before.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m an exorcist.’

Hunter shook his head in pained wonder.

‘Won’t work,’ he said, sounding angry and impatient. ‘If it was that easy, they’d all have gone years ago. But they won’t like it, all the same. If I were you, and believe me I’d sooner be the shit on your shoe, I’d be running now. I’d be taking a train to somewhere a long way away and changing my name to – to fucking Smith or something. You idiot. What do you think you can do? You can’t do anything.’

‘I’m still going to try,’ I said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Jan sent you, didn’t she?’ Hunter demanded, his voice modulating weirdly so that the wrong words were emphasised and the sounds fought against the sense. ‘She can’t help me now. You – just leave. Just get out of here. And you tell her – tell her to forget about him. He didn’t ask any of you to get involved in –’ he hesitated, blinking rapidly now ‘– in my life, or in what’s happening to me. In fact, I’m telling you not to. You don’t have the right.’ The guards stepped in closer, alert to the change in Hunter’s tone, but he didn’t make any move towards me. He seemed to be in pain as well as angry.

‘I’m sorry about Jan,’ Hunter said, and the catch in his voice as he spoke her name made me pretty sure he meant it. ‘Really, really sorry. I know – how much she’s got to be missing me. But he’s not coming back. Not after what I did. I can’t help that now. I can’t even make the inscription. She should find somebody else. She needs to.’

The word ‘inscription’ jolted me out of my seat, but Hunter was up again too before I could get a word out. He kicked the chair away with his heel, muscles working in his broad neck as he ground his teeth together. ‘He’s not coming back,’ he repeated. ‘I’m going to sort this out for myself and I’m going to go my own way. Don’t try to save me. She killed a man. She doesn’t deserve to be saved, and she doesn’t want to be.’

I opened my mouth to speak, but Juliet stood up very abruptly, stepped around the table and came up very close to Hunter, her face only an inch or so from his, her eyes and his locked in a point-blank staring contest. He froze for a moment, then a shiver went through him. I had a worm’s-eye view, from directly underneath, so I saw his fist clench. The guards saw it too and they all moved at the same time, but I was closer so I got there first. I caught the fist two-handed as it came up and back, using Hunter’s own momentum to pull him off balance so that he lurched and had to shift his weight to keep from falling. He tried to yank his hand away from me but only succeeded in pulling me to my feet: I kept my two-handed grip as long as I could, until finally the guards got hold of Hunter by his shoulders and forearms and hauled him backwards out of my reach: even then I followed for a couple of steps, letting go at the last moment as the guards half-marched, half-carried him back through the doors and out of the room.

‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted at me. ‘Don’t come near me! I’m not doing this any more! I’ve had enough! Just let me go! Just let me-!’

The doors slammed to with a terminal click, drowning out the rest of his words.

I sat down again, very abruptly, feeling a little like a puppet with its strings cut. Juliet stared down at me with measured curiosity.

‘You felt it,’ she said. It wasn’t a question.

I nodded, but when she opened her mouth to speak again I raised my hand in a stop gesture.

‘Outside,’ I parried. ‘Not here.’ The truth was that I didn’t want to put it into words. I didn’t want to look at it yet, although I realised as I sat there and finished my cold coffee that it was impossible to look away from. Juliet waited in silence, making no attempt to hide her impatience.

A guard – one of the two who’d entered with Hunter – came in at last through the prisoners’ door and let us out through the visitors’ one.

‘Is he all right?’ I asked.

‘Not really, sir, no,’ the guard grunted. ‘He’s quieter, though. And Doctor Maxwell will come along in a little while and give him another shot.’

Yeah, I thought. I just bet he will.

We threaded our way through the door and gates and screens, reclaimed our effects at the front desk and escaped back out into the big wide world, where the chains are mostly metaphorical and easier to cope with.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Juliet asked as we walked towards the Tube station in a chill, soul-sapping drizzle.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, hedging. ‘If Hunter is losing his mind, a lot of this becomes academic. Even if he ducks a murder rap, he’s going into a secure mental unit and he’s not coming out for a long time.’

‘Is he losing his mind?’ Juliet countered.

‘I’m just talking about how he’ll come across to a jury,’ I said. ‘Nobody hearing him talk is going to believe his picnic is fully catered.’

Juliet stopped, so I had to stop too. We stared at each other: I didn’t enjoy that as much as I usually do.

‘All right,’ I admitted, feeling eerily detached from myself so that I heard my own words as I spoke them. ‘Kale is in there with him. He’s possessed.’

Juliet nodded brusquely. ‘Of course he is.’

‘Although we both know that’s not possible,’ I added, feeling the need to wave a feeble flag on behalf of common sense.

‘It’s possible for my kind. It’s easy for my kind.’

‘Yeah, but not for human ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘You know what the loup-garous are, Juliet, and why they are. And the zombies, come to that. If human ghosts could possess living human bodies, they wouldn’t cling to their own dead flesh or take up residence in fully furnished vermin. A demon versus a human soul, that’s one thing. But soul against soul is different: the home team always wins. There isn’t a single example on record of – this. Of a dead soul driving out a living one.’

Juliet ladled a lot of sardonic emphasis into her next words. ‘I’m sorry, Castor. You’re the expert. But you said yourself that the situation is more complicated than that. She hasn’t driven him out: she’s merely cohabiting. As you said, they’re sharing that body. Sometimes he spoke as Hunter, sometimes as Kale. It probably wouldn’t take you very much effort to cut her loose.’