but this was worse, somehow. I’d pushed Gary into the line of fire and then I’d ducked.
‘So now I’m interested,’ Nicky was saying. ‘Hey, pal, you want to turn that radio up? It’s not reaching us in the back here. So now I’m looking for patterns. The first one I find is that Coldwood wasn’t the only stubborn stain that got wiped out on this pass.’
‘There was someone else in the car with him?’
‘Nope. But there were some other cops dying that night and they were friends of his. A detective constable and a forensics guy named Marchioness. What kind of a name is that for a guy to wear? One of them jumped out of a window, the other was pushed in front of a train. Busy night for the reaper, last night was. Unsociable hours, the whole fucking deal. He should talk to his union.’
I turned to Nicky to tell him to get to the fucking point, but the dry black pebbles of his eyes met my stare with implacable calm.
‘One more and then I’m done. You ever hear of a guy named Stuart Langley?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He’s a ghostbreaker. Works out of Docklands.’ I suddenly remembered the story that Lou Beddows had told me on the day of John’s funeral: the late-night call, the ambush, and the beating.
‘He was working with John,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know, Castor. J the G was going all around the houses looking for a partner to work his big case with him, so sure, maybe Stu Langley said yes. It might help to explain this other weird coincidence.’
‘What other-?’
‘The mother and daughter. In the car that hit Coldwood. Elspeth Langley, and little Niamh Langley. Does it strike you that there’s a pattern emerging here? I know I tend to see patterns where there aren’t any: that’s what paranoia is all about, right? But in any case I trust I’ve set the scene for the big fucking revelations I’m about to lay on you?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, the tightness coiling in my throat now. ‘You’ve set the scene.’
‘Right. Well, you asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the sleeve notes in John-boy’s
It wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘We’re kind of past that,’ I reminded him curtly. ‘The latest thing I asked you to do was to find out where the bodies were buried.’
Nicky nodded, a little impatiently. ‘Yeah, and I put the feelers out. Nothing, at first. A lot of nothing, because I put out a lot of feelers. So I went back to square one.’
‘The lists in John’s notebook.’
‘Exactly. But this time I applied some fuzzy logic. Because it seemed to me that the key word was gonna be the one at the very end. After all, that’s where Gittings finished up. If he was trying to solve a puzzle, then there’s a good chance that last word was the answer: the output for all that fucking crazy input.’
I thought back to the lists in the
‘The last word was
‘Yeah,’ said Nicky. ‘Except it wasn’t. John couldn’t spell worth a flying fuck in English, and this wasn’t English. So I fed it through some online translators, and I found the word he was really looking for.’ He looked at me, signalling that the punchline was coming and that he didn’t want to miss any detail of my reaction when I heard it. ‘It wasn’t
Obvious. So fucking obvious. Not the word, which I’d never heard before, but the pay-off. Not a cemetery at all: he tried the cemeteries and crossed them out one by one until he got to the truth. I smacked my forehead. It was a bad move, though, because it sent needles of pure agony through my bruised face and jarred neck.
‘Thus forearmed,’ Nicky said, exuding grim smugness, ‘I narrowed my search fields and got much better results. All but a few of the bad-ass dearly departed boys on Gittings’s list –’
‘– were cremated,’ I finished.
Nicky trumped my ace. ‘Were cremated in the same fucking place. Mount Grace. It’s a private crematorium in East London. But you already know that, don’t you, Fix? Because it’s where John the Git was relocated to when Carla decided to make light of grave matters.’
Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fitted – at least, up to a point. ‘But then why would John . . . ?’ I demanded, then I trailed off into silence. That wasn’t the right question. We had at least two people verifiably risen from the dead. Les Lathwell’s fingerprints on that bullet suggested that he’d returned in his own flesh, because he’d still had his own fingers: but Myriam Kale had possessed someone else’s body, theoretically impossible though that was. Maybe John had been taken over too. Maybe the weird things he’d done in the last weeks of his life had just been preparing the ground so that his suicide, when it came, would be taken at face value.
Or maybe I was being too subtle. Maybe John had finished his investigation by going native: switching horses in the middle of the River Styx. I could sort of see how that would work. If there was a gateway to immortality just off the Mile End Road, and if I knew exactly where it was, I might be tempted to stand in line and take my chances.
Because what Lathwell and his friends had, or seemed to have, was a lot better than the alternatives on offer. Ghosts could only drink the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally fall to pieces; and
To come back as yourself – in living, human flesh – that was a sweet deal. And to come back again and again (because Les Lathwell’s fingerprints were the same as Aaron Silver’s) – well, that was the cherry on top of the sempiternal trifle.
Either way, Mount Grace was the link. That was where the killers went. That was where John had gone after he’d engaged Todd to change his will. And I was willing to bet a rupee against a roll-over lottery win that that was where Myriam Kale had been taken, after Ruth gave up her sister’s mortal remains to Mister Bergson, the charming killer with the bleach-blond hair.
‘Thanks, Nicky,’ I said. ‘I owe you.’
‘Yeah,’ he confirmed. ‘You do. More than you can pay. That briefcase is full of the Git’s bits and pieces. There’s no way I’m gonna try and sell them now: I’m going underground, and they’re too fucking easy to track. So you keep them to remember me by.’
‘Going underground?’ I tried to read his expression. ‘Do you mean that literally, or-?’
‘Ask me no questions, Castor, I’ll tell you no fucking lies.’
I looked out of the window. I had the sense of clocks ticking and events accelerating past me, out of control. I’d vaguely assumed that we’d be taking the North Circular and I could jump out at Wood Green on the way through to Nicky’s gaff in Walthamstow, but the cabbie had taken the M25 and we were coming down on the A10 now, through Enfield and Ponders End. A memory stirred in my mind.
I looked at my watch. It was very late, but what the hell. If nobody was home I could always come back another time. It felt like more than coincidence that I was passing this close right after Nicky had dropped that bombshell on me. Then again, that’s how all the best coincidences feel. First things first, though. Too much unfinished business was pressing on me: if I could shunt some of it off, I’d travel lighter.
‘Can you get a message through to someone for me?’ I asked Nicky. ‘On your way to wherever it is you’re going?’
‘Maybe,’ he allowed warily. ‘Who’s the someone?’
‘The governor of Pentonville.’
He gave a sardonic laugh. ‘Fine. What do you want me to say? That you love him after all?’
‘That a demon from Hell is probably going to walk through his front door some time in the next twenty-four hours, looking to let a serial killer back out onto the street. A guy in the remand block. Douglas Hunter.’
Nicky stared at me.
‘A demon from Hell?’
‘Yeah. Wearing human flesh. Answering to the description of a wet dream.’
‘Juliet?’
‘Obviously.’
‘You’re rolling over on Juliet?’
