Dead Men's s Boots

Moloch had wounded her on a level deeper than flesh, and so there was only so much that flesh could do to mend it. She refused to talk about the details and when I kept pressing anyway, prurient bastard that I am, she handed me an invitation in a dinky, girly little envelope with a silver border. I stopped when I got to the line that read CEREMONY OF CIVIL UNION. I’m still hoping that the names, when I get to them, will be those of two people I don’t know from Eve.

Gary Coldwood recovered too: he endured six months’ suspension from duty, but he was reinstated in his original rank when the evidence of a fit-up piled up so high it was in danger of toppling over and hurting someone: the engine block of his car had been tampered with, and likewise the brakes.

There were rope burns on his hands and his upper lip had been split wide open by whoever had force-fed him the booze: they even found some broken glass from a Bacardi bottle in his upper palate. He used his half-year of enforced leisure to finish his forensics course, and you can’t have a conversation with him now without coagulation, post-mortem artefacts or stellate wound patterns getting a mention. But he’s got the limp, and he’s got the scar, and there’s an unspoken something in the air now whenever we meet. He doesn’t expect me to apologise: it wouldn’t help if I did. Maybe we’ll just meet less and less often until either the something or the friendship goes away.

Jan Hunter came and found me at my office in Harlesden one bleak Tuesday afternoon shelving dangerously into evening.

She tried to pay me the rest of the money we’d agreed when she hired me. I kept my hands in my pockets.

‘I do read the papers, Jan,’ I said. ‘Doug got off on the murder charge because they finally decided to allow that hammer in as evidence. But he still got three years for the jailbreak. You don’t owe me a thing.’

‘You know exactly what I owe you, Mister Castor,’ she insisted. ‘Whoever did the crime, it’s my husband who’s going to serve that sentence and it’s my husband who’ll come out – next year, if he keeps his nose clean – to find me waiting for him.

If it wasn’t for you, I might never have seen him again.’

I knew that was a lie, but it was a hard one to explain. Alone, without the Mount Grace trust to carry out the monthly reinscription, Myriam Kale would have found herself expelled from Doug’s body sooner or later anyway.