Dead Men's s Boots

I think they were designed by Inigo Jones. In fact, that’s why the Palances acquired the site in the first place: the buildings and the grounds are very fine, and there’d been some talk of bulldozing them and building houses there. Michael Palance, who’s dead now, tried to get the building adopted by the National Trust, which was fairly new in those days, and when that failed he bought it himself.’

Carla walked in at this point, looking more than a little stunning in her widow’s weeds. She clearly wasn’t all that happy to see Maynard Todd in her living room, but almost at the same moment there was a knock at the door – the four pall-bearers reporting for duty. They hefted the coffin and we got under way immediately, avoiding any need for an unpleasant scene. A few of the neighbours watched from behind lightly twitching curtains as John went off to the next instalment of his eternal reward. Carla walked regally down the steps and into the hearse, not sparing any of them so much as a glance.

Since all three of us rode together in the hearse, conversation was sparse and strained. That left me plenty of time to mull over the change in John’s will, and to chase my thoughts around in decreasing circles until I was sick of them. Cremation. Why had it mattered to John so much that he had drawn up a new will, and gone to a new law firm to make sure that his instructions were followed – no matter how much distress it might cause to Carla?

Nicky Heath, who as a zombie takes a lively (sic) interest in stuff like this, told me once that in early civilisations cremation was kind of cn wie a patriarchal thing. ‘You could think of the smoke as a ghost phallus if you wanted to,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s last stand, kind of thing. Or if that strikes you as a little off-colour, you could go for the official symbolism. You’re seeing the soul ascend to heaven to sit at God’s right hand. Matriarchies didn’t go for that whole heaven argument so much – they favoured burial because it was going back to the womb of Mother Earth. Closing the big circle. You can’t get born again until you put yourself back.’ Needless to say, Nicky sides with the mothers on this one. Anyone who comes near him with a can of kerosene is likely to return to Mother Earth in a lot of separate pieces.

But John was a ghostbreaker through and through: there’re very few of us who have any time for religion. When you spend your life dealing with the crude mechanics of life and death, you tend to find the elegant theories less than compelling. So maybe Carla was right: maybe John’s mind had started to go, and maybe that explained both his aberrant behaviour in the last few weeks of his life and his scary transformation after death.

Or maybe there was something else going on – although it was hard to imagine what sort of something that could be if it required him to burn his body after he died as though his body contained a secret message of some kind. For just a moment, an idea stirred in the fuzzy depths of my mind, but it submerged again before I could reach for it.

Todd brought me out of my thoughts by leaning forward to tell the driver to hang a left: the unexpected sound made Carla tense, showing how strained the silence in the car had become even as it broke it. As though the ice had been broken, too, Todd turned to Carla and offered her an affable smile.

‘I haven’t made any specifications about the service, Mrs Gittings,’ he said, ‘but I believe there will be a clergyman on hand. If you want any kind of a prayer spoken over the casket, or a hymn . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished, no doubt realising as he said it how pathetic the three of us would sound striking up a chorus of ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer’.

‘I just want it to be over,’ Carla said, in a low, curt tone that left no room for further conversational pleasantries.

Our route took us through a part of London that’s one of my favourites. Mile End is steeped in tragic and tragicomic history in the same way that, say, a pickled pig’s trotter is steeped in vinegar. This was where the first of Hitler’s flying bombs rained down; where the spectacularly cocked-up launch of HMS Albion killed dozens of local kids who’d taken the day off school to see it glide off the slipway; where the resurrection men plied their trade and where Bishop and Williams murdered the Italian Boy. The rising of the dead is a fairly recent thing: but in Mile End the ghosts have soaked into the stone.

We drove on through Stepney to Bow Common, and just after Mile End Station we turned off the main drag, skirted the shapely backside of St Clement’s and turned in through the gates of the Mount Grace crematorium.