Dead Men's s Boots

Its head rolled free from its shoulders, sprouted legs and fled away, miraculously transformed into a huge black tom cat. Cats clawed their way free from its huge shoulders, its splayed legs, its broken back, and they scattered in all directions. Once again I felt the shiver of déjà vu.

The skeletal man caught some of the cats as they ran and twisted them in his hands with malicious glee until they broke and bled. He held them over his head so that the blood rained down into his mouth. He was still laughing, his head tilted back in manic joy. Most of the cats got away, but half a dozen or so ended their lives in pieces in those slender-fingered, impossibly strong hands.

And suddenly it was over. The man tossed the last dead animal to the ground, staring down at it with something like regret, and bared long brown teeth in a skull-like grimace.

It was the tramp: or rather, it was the man I’d met as a tramp outside Maynard Todd’s office and then in a somewhat more respectable guise at the Mount Grace crematorium. He didn’t look like a tramp now. His coat was shiny black leather and his thin face was austere and patrician, dominated by a rudder nose and a fleshy, pouting mouth that made him look like an out-of-work Shakespearean actor. His clothes and his flesh hung in tatters here and there where the loup-garou’s blows had landed, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

‘Fuck!’ I exclaimed weakly.

He glanced around at me as though only then remembering that I was there.

‘We’ll talk,’ he said, his voice the same dry, agonising rasp I’d heard when I’d first encountered him: when he sang his crazy song about heaven and hell. ‘But not yet. Not until you know what I’m talking about. I don’t like wasting my time.’

‘Wh- Who-?’ I slurred inarticulately, trying to sit up and not getting very far. A lance of white-hot pain went through my back from shoulder to coccyx, stopping me in my tracks: shit, my spine could even be broken.

‘A friend,’ the thin man said, with a leering snigger that robbed the word of any warm connotations it might otherwise have had. ‘Because fate makes our friends, doesn’t it, Castor? And I’m certainly your enemy’s enemy.’

He walked across to me and looked down at me with a cold and clinical interest.

‘You’ve got some of it,’ he murmured. ‘You must have, because you’re not a fool. And only a fool would refuse to see the obvious because it happens to be impossible. But you have to go to the source. Otherwise they’ll kill you before you’re in a position to kill them.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Sequence. Cadence. Rhythm,’ he said. ‘Let’s get this rig“;s efoht. My name is Moloch, and you may pass on my best wishes – with an ironic inflection – to Baphomet’s sister.’

‘To-?’

‘Your ally. The lady. We have . . . history.’

He stepped over me and back out into the dark, and I was in no position to stop him.

In fact it was all I could do to crawl to my feet – back not broken after all, just agonisingly bruised – and limp off out of there before the sirens started to sound in the distance. I cast a longing look back up the stairs to where the rest of Chesney’s notes and trinkets might still be lying, no doubt with his own blood added to the patina of ancient violence that made them so collectable. No good to me now: no good at all, because even if they were still there – even if they weren’t what the loup-garou had been sent here to fetch, and I was nearly sure they were – I couldn’t afford to hang around long enough to find them. Even with Gary Coldwood’s grudging patronage, this was one crime scene I wasn’t going to be reading for the Met if I could possibly help it.

Susan Book’s doorbell played the first four bars of ‘Jerusalem’: for some reason that made me laugh, even though laughing hurt right then.

Juliet opened the door, and stood there for a moment staring at me in silence, taking in all the details – the bruising on my face, the split lip and the blood on my shirt. She nodded slowly, as if acknowledging that I probably had a valid excuse. All the same . . .

‘You’re an hour and a half late, Castor,’ she said sternly.

‘I know,’ I answered. ‘And I’m sorry. I got held up.’

‘At gunpoint?’

‘At clawpoint. Can I come in before I fall down?’

She considered for a moment longer.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All right. But we ate without you.’

She held the door open for me and I lurched in out of the night. Susan Book bustled out of the kitchen wearing a Portmeirion apron – passion flower, it said and showed – and opened her mouth to speak, but then changed her mind and shut it again. She just stared at me instead, blinking a few times as if to clear her vision.

‘I’m really sorry, Sue,’ I said. ‘I hope I didn’t spoil your evening. I was on my way here when something came up.