Vicious Circle

Having my statement taken was very much adding insult to injury, but it was an invitation of the kind that’s hard to refuse. I went over the events of the evening while Constable MacKay wrote them down in laborious longhand, culminating in what Sheehan’s ghost had said to me when I interrogated him in my official capacity as ghostbuster general. Either MacKay was making up for his earlier lapse of professional sangfroid, or he was just very slow on the uptake: either way, he was so mind-meltingly leisurely and methodical in his questioning that bludgeoning him to death with his own notebook would probably have counted as justifiable homicide. He wrote slowly, too, requiring several repetitions of all but the shortest sentences. Overall, I reckoned he had the right stuff to be an officer.

Nothing wrong with his observational skills, though: After a while, he noticed that I was getting fidgety, and that there was an edge creeping into my tone when I was repeating myself for the third or fourth time on some minor detail like where I’d been standing when I said X or Y.

“Got somewhere else you need to be?” he asked aggressively.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That’s it exactly.”

“Oh, right. Hot, is she?” He favored me with the kind of pruriently suggestive leer that cops and squaddies get issued on day one along with their boots.

I really wasn’t in the mood. “It’s a he,” I said. “He’s a demonically possessed psychopath, and he tends to run a core temperature about eight degrees higher than the bog standard ninety-eight point four. So yeah, I think you could safely say he’s hot.”

MacKay put his notebook away, giving me a stare of truculent suspicion: he’d felt the breeze of something going over his head, and he didn’t like it. “Well I don’t think we need anything else from you right now,” he said sternly. “The sergeant will probably be in touch again later on, though, so you keep yourself available, yeah?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll contact him on the astral plane.”

“Eh?” The suspicion had turned to frank alarm.

“Skip it,” I muttered over my shoulder as I walked away. It wasn’t MacKay’s fault that my Saturday night was up the Swannee. That was down to nobody but me, which is never as much consolation as it ought to be.

The weekend is meant to be a time when you unwind from the stresses of the week that’s gone and recharge your batteries for the shit-storm to come. But not for me, not tonight. The place I was going on to now made this God-spurned dump look positively cozy.

Two

ICAN DRIVE, WHEN I HAVE TO, BUT I DON’T OWN A CAR. IN London, owning a car doesn’t seem to help all that much, unless you want somewhere to sit and soak up the sun while you’re lazing on the M25. So it was going to take a long haul on the underground to get me to where I was going—into town on one branch of the Northern Line, back out again on the other one.

It was the twilight zone between Saturday afternoon and Saturday night: the football crowds had already faded away like fairy gold, and it was too early yet for the clubbers and the theatergoers. I was able to sit for most of the way, even if the carriage did have a fugitive whiff of stale fat from someone’s illicitly consumed Big Mac.

The guy next to me was reading The Guardian, so I read it, too, in staccato glimpses over his shoulder as he turned the pages. The Tories were about to slice and dice their latest leader, which has always been my favorite blood sport; the home secretary was denying some spectacular abuse of office while refusing to relax an injunction that would have allowed the news media to describe exactly what it was; and the Post Mortem Rights Bill was about to come back to the Commons for what was expected to be an eventful third reading.

That wasn’t what they were calling it, of course. I think the actual title of the proposed act of parliament was the Redefinition of Legal Status Extraordinary Powers Act—but the tabloids had resorted to various forms of shorthand, and Post Mortem Rights was the one that had stuck. Personally, I tended to think of it as the Alive Until Proven Dead Act.

Basically the government was trying to pull the law up by its own bootstraps so that it could slip a fairly fundamental postscript into every major statute that had ever been written. It wasn’t a case of how the law worked, exactly: it was more a case of who it applied to. The aim was to give some measure of legal protection to the dead—and that’s where it got to be good clean fun of the kind that could keep a million lawyers happily engaged from now until Doomsday. Because there were more different kinds of dead and undead entity around these days than there were fish in the sea, or reality TV shows on channel 4. Where did you draw the line? Exactly how much of a physical manifestation did you need to count as a productive citizen?