Dead Men's s Boots

But to bring up the obvious objection: do you think you can obtain something that was hers?’

You can use clichés on Juliet with a certain amount of impunity, because most of them aren’t clichés in the ninth circle of Hell. ‘No,’ I admitted, deadpan. ‘But I know a man who can.’

I’d agreed to meet Nicky Heath in St James’s Park – his idea, and coming from him it was a pretty weird one.

Nicky lives in an abandoned cinema out in Walthamstow, and he has as little to do with daylight as he can.

He’s not afraid of it, exactly, but he’s morbidly aware of his core temperature and he keeps it as low as he can. That means staying in the dark whenever it’s an option, using eco-friendly light bulbs because they produce less waste heat than the regular variety, spending a part of every day sitting in a big chest freezer with the lid down, and not getting too close to anyone who’s warm and breathing.

For Nicky, being dead is a lifestyle.

He’d been a hotshot data analyst when I first met him – selling the secret history of the future to greedy CEOs who were in awe of his ability to predict share prices based purely on the flow of information across digital exchanges.

He was an arrogant son of a bitch, too: he pissed people off outrageously just for the hell of it, showing them up with pointless displays of expertise whenever he could. After a friend introduced us at a party I used him a couple of times to chase down information I had sormise no legal right to access: I couldn’t pay him a tenth of what he was worth, but he got me the stuff anyway because it made an interesting change from what he did the rest of the time.

He died young, of a heart attack, which didn’t surprise anybody.

Then he came back, which kind of did.

There were already a lot of zombies around by this time, so it wasn’t the plain fact that Nicky clawed his way out of the grave that was unusual: it was how skilfully he rolled with the situation afterwards.

The dead still don’t have any legal rights, despite endless parliamentary debates and a few orphaned white papers. In theory, Nicky’s living brother and sister could have waltzed off with all his worldly goods and left him cooling in the gutter. But they didn’t, because he hid his money so successfully that – apart from a couple of grand in a current account – no lawyer was ever able to find a penny that was his.