‘Always. She was the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone I recognised.’
She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. ‘There’s a condition – EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. It got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried to make me promise once that I’d give him pills, if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where – you know, where there was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.
‘Anyway, just because it
‘But a couple of months before Christmas he went through a bad time. He had a job on – something that was going to pay really well, but it seemed to prey on his mind a lot.’
‘What sort of job?’ I asked, sounding a lot more casual than I felt. This was where my guilt was stemming from, in case you were wondering. I’d already heard a few hints about John’s last big earner, and I had good reason to feel uneasy about it.
‘He wouldn’t say. But he put a grand in my hand, some time back in November it was, and told me to bank it – and he said there’d be more later. Well, you know how it is, Fix. Most of the time, no offence, you just work for rent money, don’t you? Oh yeah, for young men it’s lovely. Two or three hundred quid for a couple of days’ work, you’re laughing. When you’re a bit older it gets to be different, and you never really have a chance to lay anything by. So I was over the moon for him, I really was. I said “What, is there a ghost in Buckingham Palace, or something? Can we say we’re by royal appointment, now?” And he laughed and said something about East End royalty, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant.
‘I think the truth was, whatever this job was all about he didn’t know if he could handle it. He called those two on the Collective, Reggie, and that friend of his who never washes. But they wouldn’t work with him any more. They said he was too sloppy, and they wouldn’t trust him if things went bad on a job.’
She hesitated, as if she thought I might want to jump in at this point and defend John’s reputation, but I made no comment – because if Reggie had said that, Reggie was right. John had never been the most focused of men, and he’d got worse as he’d got older. Having him at your back was far from reassuring: generally it just gave you one more thing to worry about.
But I didn’t feel comfortable thinking those thoughts, because John hadn’t only called Reggie. He’d called me, too: three times in the space of a week. The messages were still there on my answerphone, because I never bother to wipe the tape. Three times I’d sat there and listened to him telling me that he might have some work to put my way, and three times I hadn’t even picked up because life’s too short and you tend to avoid things that might make it shorter still.
Then I got a call from Bourbon, the de facto godfather of London’s ghostbusters, with the news that John had kissed a loaded shotgun.
‘Did he say who he was working for?’ I asked, crashing the gears as we turned onto the M25 slip road. The blue van was still there in back of us, but I wasn’t worried: I hadn’t even begun to fight.
Carla shook her head. ‘I asked him. He didn’t want to talk about it. He just said it was big, and that when it was done he’d be in the history books. “One for the books,” he kept on saying. Something nobody’s ever done before.
‘And it changed him. He started to get really fretful, and really paranoid about forgetting things. He’d make himself little notes – lists of names, lists of places – and he’d hide them all around the house. I’d open the tea caddy and there’d be a bit of paper all folded up inside the lid. Just names. Then the next day he’d go around and collect them all up again. And burn them. And for the first time ever, I started to think he might have been right all along. You know, about the Alzheimer’s. I thought maybe the stress had brought it on or something.’
She rubbed her eyes again. ‘It was a terrible time, Fix. I didn’t know who to talk to about it. When Hailey was alive I’d have called her over and we’d have had it out with him, all together. But I couldn’t get near him. He started to fly off the handle whenever I even hinted that he was acting strangely. It got so I had to pretend everything was all right even when he was sneaking around like a spy in a film, picking up secret messages that he’d left for himself.
‘Then one night he got into bed and started to talk about death. Said he thought his time would be coming soon, and he’d changed his mind about what kind of send-off he wanted. “Forget about Waltham Abbey, Carla. You’ve got to cremate me.” Well, I didn’t know what to say. What about Hailey? What about the plot he’d already paid for, right next to her? It was the disease talking. It wasn’t him. So I did just what I did that time when he tried to make me promise to poison him. I kept shtum. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to make a promise that I didn’t mean to keep.
‘And then, after he . . .’ Carla saw the word looming, swerved away from stved awa it, ‘after he did it . . . I got this letter, from a solicitor. Mr Maynard Todd, from some company with three names and one of the names is him. He said John had come to him before he died and written a new will. Still left all his money to me, but he wanted to make sure he’d be burned instead of buried. Even picked out some place over in the East End – Grace- something. He’d put it all down in black and white. And he’d written a bit at the end about how he’d had to go to a stranger because he couldn’t trust his own wife to do right by him.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing,’ Carla said, with bitter satisfaction. ‘I ignored it. I thought fuck it, let the bastard sue me. I’ll do what my John wanted when he was still in his right mind. So I went ahead with the funeral, even though this Maynard Todd said he was going to stop me, and I moved the time from three o’clock back to half past one so as he’d miss it and get there too late. Which he did.’ Her voice had been getting thicker, and now she burst into shuddering sobs. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more, Fix. I don’t care what they do to John’s body. I just want him to be at peace. Oh God, let him find some peace!’
There wasn’t anything I could say to that, so I didn’t try. I just concentrated on making life hideous for the driver of the blue van. The League against Cruel Sports wouldn’t approve, but if you know you’re being tailed there are all sorts of subtle torments and indignities you can inflict on the guy who’s chasing you. By the time we’d reached the Stag Hill turn-off I’d shaken him loose and relieved some of my own tensions in the process.
I drove on in silence, turning off the motorway and coaxing the uncooperative car through the congested streets of Cockfosters and Southgate. Meanwhile Carla went through three handkerchiefs and most of what was left in the bottle.
When I pulled up at Aldermans Hill she was more than half drunk. I parked in front of the costume shop, which was closed for Sunday, leaving the car on a double yellow line because it seemed more important right then to get her back onto her home turf and more or less settled.
The flat was on the first floor, up an external flight of steps with a dog-leg. On the door frame there were a good half-dozen wards against the dead, ranging from a sprig of silver birch bound with white thread to a crudely drawn magic circle with the word
Carla fumbled with her keys, and I noticed that her hands were trembling. I was quite keen to get out of there now that I’d done my civic duty: I’m fuck-all use as a shoulder to cry on.
‘I’m sure he is,’ I said clumsily – and belatedly. ‘At peace, I mean. John was a good man, Carla. He didn’t have any enemies in this world. You know I don’t believe in Heaven, but if anyone deserved—’
I stopped because she was looking at me with the sort of expression you give to dangerous madmen.
‘No,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s not in Heaven, Fix, or anywhere else. He’s here. He’s still here.’
She turned the key and shoved the door open, but she made no move to go in. I stepped past her into the small hallway. I was aware of a slightly musty, unused smell as though nobody had been there in a few days.
Three steps took me on into the living room, and I stopped dead, if you’ll pardon the expression, taking in a scene of devastation and ruin. Most of the furniture was overturned. The television lay in the corner like a poleaxed drunk, staring blindly up at the ceiling: three deep dents scarred the screen, a fish-scale pattern of fracture marks spreading out from each one. Broken glass crunched under my feet.
And then a framed photo of John and Carla smiling, arm in arm, leaped up from the broken-legged dresser and shot through the air, spinning like a shuriken, to explode against the wall just inches from my head.
