Dead Men's s Boots

But you said yourself that the situation is more complicated than that. She hasn’t driven him out: she’s merely cohabiting. As you said, they’re sharing that body. Sometimes he spoke as Hunter, sometimes as Kale. It probably wouldn’t take you very much effort to cut her loose.’

The casual, brutal observation took me by surprise. ‘Exorcise her? Yeah, I could do that. But I’d have to get in close to Hunter and stay there for a good long while, until I got a strong enough sense of Kale to be able to play her out. He’s not going to let me do that, is he?’

‘Or she isn’t.’

I grimaced and carried on walking again. Juliet’s footsteps don’t make any sound unless she wants them to, so I had to look out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was still with me.

We walked along in silence for a while, and then I threw her own question back at her.

‘What are you planning to do? I suppose you’re good now, right? You fingered Hunter for Gary Coldwood, and now we know that Hunter did it. Or at least Hunter’s body did it. And if Kale is still in residence, then you got the right man. Woman. Whatever.’ Something that had occurred to me briefly while Hunter had been talking came back to niggle at me again. What about the missing hammer? My hypothesis that someone had taken it to shield the real killer looked pretty sick if the real killer was the one that all the rest of the evidence already pointed at. You might just as well steal a pillow off the bed or a towel out of the bathroom. Unless-

‘I think we need to know more,’ Juliet said bluntly, sending the fugitive thought skittering.

‘About Hunter?’ I demanded. ‘Or about Kale?’

‘About both, probably. Coldwood hired me to tell him what happened in room seventeen of the Paragon. I thought I’d done that, but now I’ll have to go back and tell him that I was wrong. That he’s brought in a dead murderer as well as a living one. When I do that, I want to be able to answer any questions that he might have.’

‘And is that all?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, it isn’t. You don’t catch ghosts like you catch a cold, Castor. If Kale is insid s Ka hee Hunter, there’s an explanation for how she got there, and we ought to know what that is. We need to know. Because it changes the nature of the game, for all of us. All the ghostbreakers. Everyone who binds the dead and the undead for a living.’

I was relieved that Juliet was still along for the ride, because giving up wasn’t an option I had right now. Apart from anything else, it meant I’d have to look over my shoulder every time I got into a goddamn lift. And Hunter – or the thing speaking through Hunter’s mouth – had used that word. Inscription. The same word that had cropped up in the fragment of notepaper inside John Gittings’s pocket watch: and, probably less significantly, in my dream.

‘We can backtrack Hunter’s movements,’ I suggested. ‘See if we can figure out where and when he picked up his passenger.’

‘By talking to his wife?’

‘To start with, yeah. And there’s something else we can do. Something a little bit more radical – but it’ll take some time to set up.’

‘Go on.’

‘We can raise the ghost of Myriam Kale.’

Juliet looked at me and laughed – a liquid, musical sound. ‘Raise? You don’t think she might already have ideas above her station?’

‘I mean pull as opposed to push,’ I snapped, her cold amusement stinging me probably more than it was meant to. ‘It’s another way of getting to the same place. If we can find something that belonged to her when she was alive – something she’s got a strong enough link to – then we don’t need to get close to Hunter. We can call her from a distance. Bring her out from inside him and make her come and talk to us. Two birds with one stone: we set Hunter free and we get a chance to get the story out of Kale’s own mouth.’

‘Well, that’s going to the source,’ Juliet observed dryly. ‘I like it. But to bring up the obvious objection: do you think you can obtain something that was hers?’

You can use clichés on Juliet with a certain amount of impunity, because most of them aren’t clichés in the ninth circle of Hell. ‘No,’ I admitted, deadpan. ‘But I know a man who can.’

I’d agreed to meet Nicky Heath in St James’s Park – his idea, and coming from him it was a pretty weird one.

Nicky lives in an abandoned cinema out in Walthamstow, and he has as little to do with daylight as he can. He’s not afraid of it, exactly, but he’s morbidly aware of his core temperature and he keeps it as low as he can. That means staying in the dark whenever it’s an option, using eco-friendly light bulbs because they produce less waste heat than the regular variety, spending a part of every day sitting in a big chest freezer with the lid down, and not getting too close to anyone who’s warm and breathing.