Dead Men's s Boots

’ He looked at me, signalling that the punchline was coming and that he didn’t want to miss any detail of my reaction when I heard it. ‘It wasn’t smashna – sweet, cool, great, fabuloso. It was smashana – the Hindi word for a cremation ground.’

Obvious. So fucking obvious. Not the word, which I’d never heard before, but the pay-off. Not a cemetery at all: he tried the cemeteries and crossed them out one by one until he got to the truth. I smacked my forehead. It was a bad move, though, because it sent needles of pure agony through my bruised face and jarred neck.

‘Thus forearmed,’ Nicky said, exuding grim smugness, ‘I narrowed my search fields and got much better results. All but a few of the bad-ass dearly departed boys on Gittings’s list –’

‘– were cremated,’ I finished.

Nicky trumped my ace. ‘Were cremated in the same fucking place. Mount Grace. It’s a private crematorium in East London. But you already know that, don’t you, Fix? Because it’s where John the Git was relocated to when Carla decided to make light of grave matters.

Mount Grace. Yeah, it all fitted – at least, up to a point. ‘But then why would John . . . ?’ I demanded, then I trailed off into silence. That wasn’t the right question. We had at least two people verifiably risen from the dead. Les Lathwell’s fingerprints on that bullet suggested that he’d returned in his own flesh, because he’d still had his own fingers: but Myriam Kale had possessed someone else’s body, theoretically impossible though that was. Maybe John had been taken over too.

Or maybe I was being too subtle. Maybe John had finished his investigation by going native: switching horses in the middle of the River Styx. I could sort of see how that would work. If there was a gateway to immortality just off the Mile End Road, and if I knew exactly where it was, I might be tempted to stand in line and take my chances.

Because what Lathwell and his friends had, or seemed to have, was a lot better than the alternatives on offer. Ghosts could only drink the wine breath; zombies like Nicky had to stave off encroaching decay with fanatical care, or they’d quite literally fall to pieces; and loup-garous had all the disadvantages of trying to remain human while living in the skin of an animal, a battle which in the long run they all lost.