Dead Men's s Boots

’

Any slight temptation I felt towards sympathy was quelled by the extravagance of his self-pity. Arseholes who play stalker when they should be writing term papers can’t really complain when their world turns upside down. All I wanted to do was to make absolutely sure these idiots weren’t the ones who’d just tried to kill me: then I’d be only too happy to leave them to mourn their various losses in privacy.

I tossed Bass’s wallet down on the road to get his attention. ‘Why were you staking me out in the first place?’ I demanded.

‘Oh yeah, like you don’t know,’ Bass sneered, raising his head to glare at me accusingly. ‘We know all about you, and what you’ve got planned.’

‘What I’ve got planned?’ I echoed, interested in spite of myself. ‘What’s that, exactly?’

‘Mass exorcisms across London,’ the other guy said from behind me in a strained, trembly voice. ‘Spiritual cleansing – getting rid of all the dead in one go. You’re the big wheel, aren’t you? Felix Castor.’

‘Is this a joke?’ I was starting to feel like I’d stepped into a parallel universe – one where Frank Spencer was God, and lifts only went down. ‘I’m Castor, yes, but I’m nobody’s wheel – big, small or indifferent. Who’s been feeding you this garbage?’

‘The lieutenant-’ the other guy said, but Bass cut him off with a brusque gesture.

‘We had a meeting,’ he said. ‘You don’t know it, but the Breath of Life have been keeping tabs on you for ages. We had an operative at that funeral, watching you from undercover. She’s from Ke&#hav our underground task force. And afterwards she made contact with us and told us to keep you under surveillance. And that’s what we’ve done. Wherever you go, we’ll be with you. Whoever you see, we’ll see them too, and we’ll take all their details down and circulate them to everyone in the movement. You’re ours, Castor, whenever we want to take you.’

A secret operative? A Breather working undercover among the London ghostbreakers? I tried that on for size: then I turned it upside down and discovered that if fitted a lot better that way. Dana McClennan. Dana McClennan stopping to talk to the pickets as she walked away from John Gittings’s funeral. ‘You see that man over there? Well, he’s not a man at all. He’s the big bad wolf.’

‘You fucking berk,’ I said sternly. ‘This secret operative – this sweet, blonde, sexy, plausible secret operative, who let you in on the big secret and made you feel so important – her name is Dana McClennan, and she’s not even in your sodding organisation. She was just using you to bust my balls.’

Bass gave me a pitying look. ‘You can’t trick me into giving away the names of our people. Your sort are finished, Castor. You just don’t know it yet.’

I walked towards him and he flinched. But I wasn’t interested in fighting any more. I carried on past him, grabbed the handle of the fire extinguisher and jerked it free from the remains of the windshield, which fell like rice at a wedding onto the van’s front seats. Bass gave an anguished wail. I hefted the extinguisher onto my shoulder and turned to face him and his blue-balled friend.

‘Stephen Bass,’ I said. ‘UCL, wasn’t it? I don’t know which faculty, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. If I so much as see your sodding face again, I’ll come round to your hall of residence with some friends of mine, and we’ll whistle your soul right out of your body. You’ll be like a zombie, only with less personality.’

Bass almost swallowed his tongue.

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he scoffed, with less conviction than Bart Simpson saying ‘It was like that when I got here.’

‘Try me,’ I suggested. ‘Listen, you’ve been sitting out here watching the building all this time. Did you see someone go in?’

Bass hesitated, torn between wanting to play it cool in the face of my threats and not wanting to piss off a man who now knew more or less where he lived.

‘There was a big fat man,’ he said.

‘And did you see him come out again?’

‘What?’ Evidently Bass had worn himself out on the starter for ten.

‘Did he come out again?’ I repeated more slowly. ‘Did you see him come back out onto the street?’

‘No.’

Interesting. Very.

‘Okay, thanks for your time,’ I said, dropping the fire extinguisher at Bass’s feet and making him jump. ‘If you do feel a burning desire to talk to the police, I’m about to call them. All you have to do is wait right there. They’ll be along presently.’

I heard the doors of the van slam behind me as I went back into the block, and the engine start before I reached the stairs.

I went back up to the flat and dialled 999. The police rolled around an hour or so later: a rapid-response Krap1em unit, obviously. Performing for an appreciative audience of my neighbours, they checked the lift mechanism and took my statement.