Dead Men's s Boots

DEAD MEN’S

BOOTS

By Mike Carey

The Devil You Know

Vicious Circle

Dead Men’s Boots

Look out for

Thicker Than Water

DEAD MEN’S

BOOTS

Mike Carey

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright © Mike Carey 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than

those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

form or by any means, without the prior

permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

cover other than that in which it is published and

without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7481 0863 3

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Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

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Hachette Digital

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Little, Brown Book Group

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London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

To my brother, Dave, with much love. Are you right there, our kid?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jock for my first lesson in musical notation for drums. If I got it wrong, it’s not his fault. Thanks to Ade and Joel for raising my awareness of the weirder and more arcane bits of London, a process which is ongoing. Thanks to Gabriella Nemeth and Nick Austin for proofing and copy-editing this sprawling monster, and to Meg, Darren and George for their unfailing support.

1

I don’t do funerals all that often, and when I do I prefer to be either falling-down drunk or dosed up on some herbal fuzz-bomb like salvinorin to the point where I start to lose feeling from the feet on up, like a kind of rising damp of the central nervous system. Today I was as sober as a judge, and that was only the start of it. The cemetery was freezing cold – cold enough to chill me even through the Russian army greatcoat I was wearing (I never fought, but poor bloody infantry is a state of mind). The sun was still locked up for winter, a gusty east wind was stropping itself sharp on my face, and guilt was working its slow way through my mind like a weighted cheese-wire through a block of ice.

Ashes to ashes, the priest said, or at least that was what it boiled down to. His hair and his skin were ash-pale in the February cold. The pall-bearers stepped forward just as th

Rest in peace, John Gittings. The mortal part of you, anyway: for the rest, it was going to be a case of wait and see. Maybe that was why John’s widow Carla looked so strained and tense as she stood directly opposite me in her funereal finery. Her outfit incorporated a brooch made from a sweep of midnight-dark feathers, and staring at it made me momentarily imagine that I was looking down from a great height, the black of her dress becoming the black of an asphalted highway, the remains of a dead bird lying there like road kill.

The priest started up again, the wind stealing his voice away and distributing it piecemeal among us so that everyone got just a beggar’s share of the wisdom and consolation. Sunk in my own thoughts, which were fixed on mortality and resurrection to the exclusion of redemption, I looked around at the other mourners. It was a who’s who of the London exorcist community. Reggie Tang, Therese O’Driscoll and Greg Lockyear were there, representing the Thames Collective; Bourbon Bryant and his hatchet-faced new wife, Cath; Larry Tallowhill and Louise Beddows, Larry looking like a walking corpse himself with the white of his cheekbones showing through his skin like a flame through a paper lantern; Bill Schofield, known for reasons both complicated and obscene as Jonah; Ade Underwood, Sita Lovejoy, Michelle Mooney, all up from the beautiful South (Elephant and Castle, or thereabouts) and among the also-rans a very striking, very young woman with shoulder length white-blonde hair, who kept staring at me all the way through the service. There was something both familiar and unsettling about her face, but I couldn’t place it. That uncertainty did nothing to improve my mood, and nor did the absence of the one London exorcist I’d been hoping to see at this shindig: but then, Juliet Salazar never did hold with cheap sentiment: in fact she probably didn’t have any to sell even at the market price.