Dead Men's s Boots

‘Something – something important, perhaps – is at stake here. Something has brought him up through the gates, and made him stay long enough to weave a body for himself. I think . . . ’

The pause lengthened.

‘What?’ I prompted. ‘What do you think?’

She shrugged dismissively. ‘Nothing. So you think Kale might have been involved somehow in John Gittings’s death?’

‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Not directly, obviously. He killed himself. But the big case he was working on – the one he kept saying was going to get him into the history books – had something to do with dead killers.

And now we know that Kale was on his list.’

Juliet thought about this. ‘And the problem with Kale is that she isn’t dead enough,’ she finished, voicing my own thoughts. ‘Are there any urban legends about the great East End gangsters coming back from the grave?’

‘None that I’ve heard. Maybe it’s a foreign-exchange kind of thing. Kale does London and the Krays do Chicago.’

Juliet nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ she mused.

‘But it goes against everything we know about the dead. And it raises far more questions than it answers.’

‘I meant it a“16;oess a joke,’ I said.

‘Then you should have smiled.’

‘I’ve finished,’ Susan said, standing up and inspecting her handiwork with profound and obvious misgivings. ‘But you should probably go to a hospital as soon as you can, Felix, and let a doctor take a look at you.’

‘I will,’ I lied. ‘Thanks, Sue. You’re an angel of mercy.’ Living with a sex demon, I added in my mind: life throws you some funny curves.

‘I saved you some ratatouille,’ Susan said, embarrassed. ‘You can eat it on a tray, if you like.’

Downstairs in the living room, I ate and drank and began to feel less like a piece of wind-blown trash. The room had changed a lot since I’d been there last. Then, it had still been full of Susan’s late mother’s ornaments and antimacassars and framed samplers like a mock-up of a room in a museum of Victoriana: now it was kind of minimalist, with red Chinese calligraphy hung on white-painted walls.

I knew enough about Juliet’s tastes to recognise them here, and I wondered how Susan felt about the changed ambience. She seemed comfortable enough.

‘So how’s work?’ I asked her. ‘Juliet said you’re kind of snowed under.’ Susan had been the verger at a church in West London when she’d met Juliet, but had bailed out when they’d started living together and had gone back to her old career as a librarian.