Dead Men's s Boots

I had to suppress a physical tremor at the memory, half-disgust and half-fear. All at once an identity parade of cats filed before my inner eye: the stray that was hanging out at the Gittingses’ flat; the tom I almost trod on as I was walking home from the law offices in Stoke Newington; the feral moggy in Trafalgar Square when I was talking to Jan Hunter on the phone. I would have bet the farm that there was a cat lurking under the left-luggage lockers at Victoria, too: that it had heard my conversation with Chesney and somehow contrived to get there first. I’d sentenced him to death just by calling him.

Juliet raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. ‘If one were can make that transition – from monad to gestalt – then presumably others can too.’

‘Presumably. Most of them – ow! – most of them don’t, though. It would help to know, because if it is Scrub I can probably remember the tune I used to smack him down.’

‘I’m sorry if I’m hurting you,’ Susan said, looking up from her work. ‘But they’re nasty, ragged wounds. It would be really easy for them to get infected.’

I nodded. I’d been there and I wasn’t likely to forget. But at least my tetanus shots were up to date this time. ‘Go for it, Sue,’ I muttered, trying hard to dismiss the spectre of Larry Tallowhill from my thoughts.

As Susan moved from cleaning the wounds to dressing them, I told them both about what had happened at Nexus. Susan was pale by the time I’d finished, but Juliet seemed moved in a different way.

‘Moloch,’ she said. And she spat, very precisely, onto the floor. Without a word, Susan Book took a piece of toilet tissue and wiped up the mess.

‘Yeah. He told me he knew you. Asked me to pass on his best wishes – with a broad hint that he didn’t really mean it.’

‘He doesn’t,’ said Juliet, her teeth showing in a genteel snarl: she usually manages to rein herself in around Susan, who frightens easily, but clearly the mention of Moloch’s name had touched her at a level below the pretensions of civilisation. ‘I left my mark on him once, a long time ago. But it goes further than that. His kind and mine – we were old enemies, even before the great project.’

‘Before the what?’

Juliet seemed to remember herself. ‘Nothing,’ she said, a little too quickly. ‘I was remembering things that happened before you were born. Let’s just say that his kin are cats, and mine are dogs. Or vice versa. Where the succubi and incubi settle and build their houses, the shedim can’t live. He’d love to hurt me, if he thought he could. But what is he doing on Reth Adoma?’

‘You know,’ I groused, ‘if you keep doing this I’m going to ask for a simultaneous translation. What is he doing where?’

‘On Earth. Among the living. There’s nothing he can eat here. He’ll starve if he stays too long.’

‘He looked like he was halfway there already,’ I agreed. ‘At least – that’s how he looked when I first met him, a few days ago. Today he looked a fair bit sleeker. And he was strong enough to make this loup- garou run for cover.’

Juliet frowned, her eyes slightly unfocused as she followed a train of thought she didn’t bother to voice. To be honest, I didn’t want her to: it’s hard to think of Hell as a place, and even harder to think of her walking there. It has a whiff of bad Bible stories and undigested metaphors.

‘This is bigger than we thought,’ she said, looking at me again. ‘Something – something important, perhaps –  is at stake here. Something has brought him up through the gates, and made him stay long enough to weave a body for himself. I think . . . ’

The pause lengthened.

‘What?’ I prompted. ‘What do you think?’

She shrugged dismissively. ‘Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on – the one he kept saying was going to get him into the history books – had something to do with dead killers. And now we know that Kale was on his list.’

Juliet thought about this. ‘And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,’ she finished, voicing my own thoughts. ‘Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?’

‘None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.’

Juliet nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ she mused. ‘But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more questions than it answers.’

‘I meant it a joke,’ I said.

‘Then you should have smiled.’

‘I’ve finished,’ Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. ‘But you should probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.’

‘I will,’ I lied. ‘Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.’ Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind: life throws you some funny curves.

‘I saved you some ratatouille,’ Susan said, embarrassed. ‘You can eat it on a tray, if you like.’

Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of wind-blown trash. The room had changed a lot since I’d been there last. Then, it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana: now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung on white-painted walls. I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognise them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

‘So how’s work?’ I asked her. ‘Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.’ Susan had been the verger at a church in West London when she’d met Juliet, but had bailed out when they’d started living together and had gone back to her old career as a librarian. It was a principled decision, based more on the fact that she was in a same-sex relationship than on her shacking up with a demon. The modern Anglican church regards Hell as a state of mind and doesn’t officially believe in demons (unlike the Catholics, who hunt them with papally blessed flamethrowers), but it still has problems with church officers who are openly gay. As an atheist with issues, I have to say I love that shit.

Susan smiled, genuinely pleased to be asked. ‘No, I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘I’m enjoying it. It’s a little hard, sometimes, because I’m trying to do a lot of ambitious things on no money. But it’s lovely to be working with children. They’re so open-minded and spontaneous. And you’d be amazed how many children’s authors will do readings just for the fun of it. We had Antony Johnston in last week. He wrote the graphic-novel version of Stormbreaker. And he was wonderful. Very funny, and very – whatever the opposite of precious is. Very matter-of-fact about what he does. We got the biggest audience we’ve ever had.’

‘Stormbreaker being . . . ?’ I prompted, feeling a little lost.

‘It’s one of the best-selling children’s books of the last decade, Felix,’ Susan chided me schoolmarmishly.

‘Oh, that Stormbreaker,’ I bluffed.

‘They made a movie of it.’

‘Not a patch on the book.’

‘You don’t need to work,’ Juliet said to Susan, putting a broom handle through the spokes of my small talk.

There was an awkward pause.

‘I like to work, Jules,’ Susan said.

Juliet met that statement with a cold deadpan ‘Why?’

Susan didn’t seem very happy with the question: generally anything that looked like an argument looming in the distance made her run for cover, but this time she stood her ground. ‘Because it’s part of who I am. If I just made your meals and cleaned house for you, and warmed your bed, then – well, I’d be a very boring person. And then you’d want to see other people, and then you’d leave me. And then I’d kill myself.’

Juliet considered. ‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘I can see the logic. I’ve never been romantically infatuated with anyone before, so it’s difficult right now to see how my feelings for you could change. But there’s plenty of evidence from human relationships, so you’re probably right. Go on.’