Dead Men's s Boots

‘Okay, that’s what’s on the disc, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service. You get this because I’m obsessive and because I’m dead: in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t ever need to sleep if he’s got something on his mind. Look at this – and look at this.’

I was expecting him to give me some more of the little evidence bags, but instead he held out two badly photostatted fingerprint charts – copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and smears.

Juliet looked over my shoulder: her pattern-recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine. ‘They’re the same,’ she said. ‘Or almost the same. The differences are very few, and very small. Is that the point?’

‘Yeah, that’s the point. You want the punchline? The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is different by about three ridges and one friction artefact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-grandad of all East E›d oellnd psychopaths. There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys. Only they’re not. They’re the same guy twice.’

I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right: this was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book – in fact, it was a whole roomful of smoking machine rifles. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

Who wants to get you, John?

The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

‘They’re coming back,’ I summarised. ‘All the East End bad boys. All the biggest bastards.’

‘But how are they coming back?’ Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them. ‘Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time: become more like the flesh they inhabit. In the long term the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal: diluted to the point where it’s really just not there any more. As for the revenants – the zombies – their bodies seldom last more than a year, or two at most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them together.’

The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky and saw him staring at her, grimly deadpan. ‘I’m sorry if that was tactless,’ she added. ‘I’m talking in general terms.’

‘Sure,’ said Nicky tightly. ‘I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?’

Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow. ‘No, obviously you’re subject to the same—’

‘Shut the fuck up. Please.’ Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl: he’d drawn in a large breath just beforehand for exactly that purpose. ‘I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just – don’t talk, okay. Don’t talk about things you know fuck-all about.’

The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions, and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them. Tactfully, though, she made no reply.

I tried to pull the conversation back onto less controversial topics. ‘They’ve still got their own fingerprints,’ I said, answering Juliet’s question. ‘So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—’

‘1908,’ Nicky supplied, sullenly.

‘1908. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the 1960s and 1970s, his body would have to have been spectacularly well embalmed.’

Juliet shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work in any case,’ she pointed out. ‘This other man – Les Lathwell – he had friends? Family?’

‘Two brothers, both dead,’ said Nicky. ‘A sister, who’s still alive.’

‘And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?’

Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. ‘Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.’

‘Then how – and wh›11;en – did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?’

It was a more than reasonable question. Something was niggling at me – something that felt as though it might be part of the answer – but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.

‘Not plastic surgery,’ Nicky said. ‘They could do it now – fingerprints and all – but in the 1960s the technology wasn’t that advanced. Except on Mission Impossible. You know, that guy with all the masks.’

‘Flesh is plastic enough in any case,’ Juliet said, and I almost had it.

But then Nicky spoke again and I lost whatever connection my subconscious was trying to make.