Dead Men's s Boots

I didn’t mention it to Carla: I just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident that I could lose them long before we got back into London.

‘So what was all that shit with the lawyer?’ I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good corrective to grief. Grief paralyses you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.

Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie.

But then she took a second pull on the brandy bottle and away she went.

‘John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister Hailey,’ she muttered. ‘Always. She was the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone I recognised.’

She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. ‘There’s a condition – EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s.

It got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried to make me promise once that I’d give him pills, if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where – you know, where there was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.

‘Anyway, just because it can run in families doesn’t mean it will.

You don’t know, do you? There’s no point running halfway to meet trouble. But he’d have days when he couldn’t move, hardly, for brooding about it. I just tried to jolly him along when he was in one of those moods. Wait for him to pull out of it again, and then most times he’d say he was sorry he’d worried me and that’d be that.

‘But a couple of months before Christmas he went through a bad time. He had a job on – something that was going to pay really well, but it seemed to prey on his mind a lot.

’"

"‘What sort of job?’ I asked, sounding a lot more casual than I felt. This was where my guilt was stemming from, in case you were wondering. I’d already heard a few hints about John’s last big earner, and I had good reason to feel uneasy about it.

‘He wouldn’t say. But he put a grand in my hand, some time back in November it was, and told me to bank it – and he said there’d be more later. Well, you know how it is, Fix.