Dead Men's s Boots

The casual, brutal observation took me by surprise. ‘Exorcise her? Yeah, I could do that. But I’d have to get in close to Hunter and stay there for a good long while, until I got a strong enough sense of Kale to be able to play her out. He’s not going to let me do that, is he?’

‘Or she isn’t.’

I grimaced and carried on walking again. Juliet’s footsteps don’t make any sound unless she wants them to, so I had to look out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was still with me.

We walked along in silence for a while, and then I threw her own question back at her.

‘What are you planning to do? I suppose you’re good now, right? You fingered Hunter for Gary Coldwood, and now we know that Hunter did it. Or at least Hunter’s body did it. And if Kale is still in residence, then you got the right man. Woman. Whatever.’ Something that had occurred to me briefly while Hunter had been talking came back to niggle at me again. What about the missing hammer? My hypothesis that someone had taken it to shield the real killer looked pretty sick if the real killer was the one that all the rest of the evidence already pointed at. You might just as well steal a pillow off the bed or a towel out of the bathroom. Unless-

‘I think we need to know more,’ Juliet said bluntly, sending the fugitive thought skittering.

‘About Hunter?’ I demanded. ‘Or about Kale?’

‘About both, probably. Coldwood hired me to tell him what happened in room seventeen of the Paragon. I thought I’d done that, but now I’ll have to go back and tell him that I was wrong. That he’s brought in a dead murderer as well as a living one. When I do that, I want to be able to answer any questions that he might have.’

‘And is that all?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, it isn’t. You don’t catch ghosts like you catch a cold, Castor. If Kale is inside Hunter, there’s an explanation for how she got there, and we ought to know what that is. We need to know. Because it changes the nature of the game, for all of us. All the ghostbreakers. Everyone who binds the dead and the undead for a living.’

I was relieved that Juliet was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option I had right now. Apart from anything else, it meant I’d have to look over my shoulder every time I got into a goddamn lift. And Hunter – or the thing speaking through Hunter’s mouth – had used that word. Inscription. The same word that had cropped up in the fragment of notepaper inside John Gittings’s pocket watch: and, probably less significantly, in my dream.

‘We can backtrack Hunter’s movements,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can figure out where and when he picked up his passenger.’

‘By talking to his wife?’

‘To start with, yeah. And there’s something else we can do. Something a little bit more radical – but it’ll take some time to set up.’

‘Go on.’

‘We can raise the ghost of Myriam Kale.’

Juliet looked at me and laughed – a liquid, musical sound. ‘Raise? You don’t think she might already have ideas above her station?’

‘I mean pull as opposed to push,’ I snapped, her cold amusement stinging me probably more than it was meant to. ‘It’s another way of getting to the same place. If we can find something that belonged to her when she was alive – something she’s got a strong enough link to – then we don’t need to get close to Hunter. We can call her from a distance. Bring her out from inside him and make her come and talk to us. Two birds with one stone: we set Hunter free and we get a chance to get the story out of Kale’s own mouth.’

‘Well, that’s going to the source,’ Juliet observed dryly. ‘I like it. But to bring up the obvious objection: do you think you can obtain something that was hers?’

You can use clichés on Juliet with a certain amount of impunity, because most of them aren’t clichés in the ninth circle of Hell. ‘No,’ I admitted, deadpan. ‘But I know a man who can.’

I’d agreed to meet Nicky Heath in St James’s Park – his idea, and coming from him it was a pretty weird one.

Nicky lives in an abandoned cinema out in Walthamstow, and he has as little to do with daylight as he can. He’s not afraid of it, exactly, but he’s morbidly aware of his core temperature and he keeps it as low as he can. That means staying in the dark whenever it’s an option, using eco-friendly light bulbs because they produce less waste heat than the regular variety, spending a part of every day sitting in a big chest freezer with the lid down, and not getting too close to anyone who’s warm and breathing.

For Nicky, being dead is a lifestyle.

He’d been a hotshot data analyst when I first met him – selling the secret history of the future to greedy CEOs who were in awe of his ability to predict share prices based purely on the flow of information across digital exchanges. He was an arrogant son of a bitch, too: he pissed people off outrageously just for the hell of it, showing them up with pointless displays of expertise whenever he could. After a friend introduced us at a party I used him a couple of times to chase down information I had sormise no legal right to access: I couldn’t pay him a tenth of what he was worth, but he got me the stuff anyway because it made an interesting change from what he did the rest of the time.

He died young, of a heart attack, which didn’t surprise anybody.

Then he came back, which kind of did.

There were already a lot of zombies around by this time, so it wasn’t the plain fact that Nicky clawed his way out of the grave that was unusual: it was how skilfully he rolled with the situation afterwards.

The dead still don’t have any legal rights, despite endless parliamentary debates and a few orphaned white papers. In theory, Nicky’s living brother and sister could have waltzed off with all his worldly goods and left him cooling in the gutter. But they didn’t, because he hid his money so successfully that – apart from a couple of grand in a current account – no lawyer was ever able to find a penny that was his. And while they were hunting, he was setting up a maze of blind trusts and offshore shelf companies that would give him full control over how the money was used without it ever legally, incontestably, belonging to him.

Then he brought his data-rat brain to bear on the question of survival. Zombies enjoy a whole lot of advantages over ghosts: having bodies, they can interact with the world in most of the same ways that the living can – touch and taste and smell and all the rest of it. But the downside is that the body they’re anchored to is basically a slab of rotting meat. They’ve set sail in a sinking ship, and for most of them it’s a short voyage: even though it’s probably raw will rather than nerve impulses that makes their limbs move, decay and decomposition gradually reduce the body to a state where it can’t hold itself together any more. The inhabiting spirit may still carry on clinging to the increasingly rancid carcass, or it may give up the unequal struggle and strike off on its own, but either way, at that point the ship is aground: you can’t make disarticulated legs move, or see through eyes that have closed up like dead flowers.

Nicky was very keen not to reach that stage, and he realised that the key to long-term survival was to learn as much as he could about his own internal workings. He picked up a stack of biology textbooks and read through the parts on human anatomy, supplementing what he learned by posting queries on medical message boards and talking to real doctors – mostly dead ones – at remorseless length.

He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance: when you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it just rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection. By contrast he began to take a whole pharmacopoeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up for himself from recipes he found online, and steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.

There was more to it than that, I knew. He hooked up with Imelda Probert, more generally known as the Ice-Maker – a faith healer who offered a bespoke deal to the living dead – and now visits her a couple of times a month for a mystical/religious tune-up. He learned meditation techniques, and claims to be able to visit different parts of his body on a cellular level, repairing damage with the cement of self-belief. And, like I said earlier, he stays out of the sun in case he spoils.

But today he was sitting out in the open on a bench on the Pall Mall side of the park, his arms spread across