Dead Men's s Boots

We stared at each other: I didn’t enjoy that as much as I usually do.

‘All right,’ I admitted, feeling eerily detached from myself so that I heard my own words as I spoke them. ‘Kale is in there with him. He’s possessed.’

Juliet nodded brusquely. ‘Of course he is.’

‘Although we both know that’s not possible,’ I added, feeling the need to wave a feeble flag on behalf of common sense.

‘It’s possible for my kind. It’s easy for my kind.’

‘Yeah, but not for human ghosts,’ I pointed out. ‘You know what the loup-garous are, Juliet, and why they are.

And the zombies, come to that. If human ghosts could possess living human bodies, they wouldn’t cling to their own dead flesh or take up residence in fully furnished vermin. A demon versus a human soul, that’s one thing. But soul against soul is different: the home team always wins. There isn’t a single example on record of – this. Of a dead soul driving out a living one.’

Juliet ladled a lot of sardonic emphasis into her next words. ‘I’m sorry, Castor.

You’re the expert. But you said yourself that the situation is more complicated than that. She hasn’t driven him out: she’s merely cohabiting. As you said, they’re sharing that body. Sometimes he spoke as Hunter, sometimes as Kale. It probably wouldn’t take you very much effort to cut her loose.’

The casual, brutal observation took me by surprise. ‘Exorcise her? Yeah, I could do that. But I’d have to get in close to Hunter and stay there for a good long while, until I got a strong enough sense of Kale to be able to play her out.

He’s not going to let me do that, is he?’

‘Or she isn’t.’

I grimaced and carried on walking again. Juliet’s footsteps don’t make any sound unless she wants them to, so I had to look out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was still with me.

We walked along in silence for a while, and then I threw her own question back at her.

‘What are you planning to do? I suppose you’re good now, right? You fingered Hunter for Gary Coldwood, and now we know that Hunter did it.

Or at least Hunter’s body did it. And if Kale is still in residence, then you got the right man. Woman. Whatever.’ Something that had occurred to me briefly while Hunter had been talking came back to niggle at me again. What about the missing hammer? My hypothesis that someone had taken it to shield the real killer looked pretty sick if the real killer was the one that all the rest of the evidence already pointed at.