Dead Men's s Boots

It would have sounded a bit graceless to say that I was more worried about Reggie and Greg picking up an assault charge than I was about Todd’s well-being.

The stairwell went up and up, and I lost count of how many turns we took before we got to Todd’s office. It was surprisingly small, but then the courts had been the lower end of Victorian working-class housing: they meted out space as though space was gold. Todd indicated a chair as he walked around to the far side of the desk and pulled open the blinds, which looked onto the court’s central light well and so didn’t make much difference to the grey luminescence filtering into the room: this looked like the kind of place where you’d need the desk lamp on at noon on Midsummer’s Day.

As he sat down, Todd flicked open a green hanginaid green g file that was already on his desk. It contained a thick wodge of papers. I took the chair opposite him.

‘John Gittings,’ he said again, flicking through the documents on top of the file with quick, practised hands.

‘Have you?’ I asked, for form’s sake.

Todd nodded. ‘About Mrs Gittings’s feelings on the matter, I mean,’ he clarified. ‘I’m going to go ahead and get the exhumation order, like I said. Have John disinterred and taken to Mount Grace for cremation. I don’t have any choice about that.’

‘I’m sure.’

He must have caught the sardonic edge in my tone, because he gave me a slightly injured stare.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘You think I enjoyed turning up at the funeral looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, terrorising widows, breaking up the show? I didn’t.

I didn’t answer right away: I was only here to check the dates. But since he’d given me the opening, it seemed churlish not to at least poke a stick into it.

‘Carla thinks that John was suffering from some kind of dementia.’

Todd looked pained. ‘Mrs Gittings has that luxury. I don’t.

‘There’s something else you should know about,’ I said. ‘Mrs Gittings is being haunted by her husband’s ghost.’

I left it out there, looked at his face. Like I said, the law takes a while to catch up with how the world turns, and a lot of people with a rational mindset somehow manage never to see anything that might challenge their basic assumptions.