Dead Men's s Boots

The eerie dissociation of his mood was in the air like something you could breathe in and catch. I had to fight the urge to push my chair back away from him, and to force myself to take normal breaths instead of sipping the tainted atmosphere as shallowly as I could.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Just me,’ he muttered. ‘Just me and her. Nobody else. Maybe a dead man. Maybe some people who were dead. Nobody else.’ A ponderous frown passed across his face like a ripple across muddy water. ‘I think he sucked me. My cock. But I can’t remember why now. That’s really disgusting.’

He sighed, long and deep, and sat down at last, opposite me. ‘I sprained my ankle,’ he said, sounding slightly wistful. ‘And they took me next door. To the church. If they’d had a first-aid kit – but it was all cash in hand, no tax, no pack drill. Nobody to keep the site up to code. Thought they might have some painkillers, or a surgical bandage. Stupid.’

There was a long silence, which I didn’t try to fill. I had a feeling that if I let him free-associate he might lead me to something important. But after a minute or two I realised that he’d retreated back into his own head and wasn’t coming out again without coaxing.

‘When was this, Doug?’ I asked. ‘When you were working at the site?’

He blinked – once, twice, three times. ‘They gave me – glass of water,’ he said. ‘Called an ambulance. Told me to wait. Too late by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.’

Hunter’s eyes seemed to clear abruptly and opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt: he stared at me suddenly with intense, unreadable emotion. I kept waiting for him to blink again but he didn’t.

‘You don’t know,’ he said, with aching bitterness in his voice.

‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more and more uneasy about how this was going. ‘I don’t. But I’m trying to find out. I’m an exorcist. Your wife hired me to try to find out whether there’s any possibility that Myriam Kale – the ghost of Myriam Kale R sKaltry11; was involved in Alastair Barnard’s death. She believes that if we can find evidence Kale’s ghost was in the room at the time of the murder we might be able to raise a reasonable doubt about your guilt. Is that something you have an opinion on?’

I was assuming that most of this would wash over Hunter but to my surprise he responded with something coherent. His blue-eyed unsettling stare still locked on my face, but his eyes narrowed now, which I’ll admit was something of a relief.

‘I think that’d be a good one,’ he said, ‘if anyone could do it. Not in the room, though. Not when he was lying there. If you’d seen what it was like when she was working on him, you wouldn’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. She’s not a ghost. She’s never been a ghost.’

‘What is she, then?’ I asked, fighting the urge to push my chair back and get some distance from that tortured, unblinking gaze.

To my surprise, Hunter laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. ‘She says she’s the one thing they never wanted to happen. Because it’s not a game for her. It’s not a job. She can’t stop. They want to make her stop but they don’t know how. And she doesn’t know either. So she works and works and works at it, one man at a time, and – she used a hammer. I’m pretty sure it was one of mine. But there aren’t enough hammers in the whole damn world for—’

He frowned suddenly, and it was like a light going off behind his face. ‘An exorcist?’ he demanded, and I realised that he was echoing what I’d said a minute or so before.

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m an exorcist.’

Hunter shook his head in pained wonder.

‘Won’t work,’ he said, sounding angry and impatient. ‘If it was that easy, they’d all have gone years ago. But they won’t like it, all the same. If I were you, and believe me I’d sooner be the shit on your shoe, I’d be running now. I’d be taking a train to somewhere a long way away and changing my name to – to fucking Smith or something. You idiot. What do you think you can do? You can’t do anything.’

‘I’m still going to try,’ I said, for the sake of saying something.

‘Jan sent you, didn’t she?’ Hunter demanded, his voice modulating weirdly so that the wrong words were emphasised and the sounds fought against the sense. ‘She can’t help me now. You – just leave. Just get out of here. And you tell her – tell her to forget about him. He didn’t ask any of you to get involved in –’ he hesitated, blinking rapidly now ‘– in my life, or in what’s happening to me. In fact, I’m telling you not to. You don’t have the right.’ The guards stepped in closer, alert to the change in Hunter’s tone, but he didn’t make any move towards me. He seemed to be in pain as well as angry.