Dead Men's s Boots

As for the revenants – the zombies – their bodies seldom last more than a year, or two at most. And the loss of function is progressive. Inevitable. When they begin to fall apart, there’s nothing that can keep them together.’

The silence after she finished speaking was somewhat tense. She looked at Nicky and saw him staring at her, grimly deadpan. ‘I’m sorry if that was tactless,’ she added. ‘I’m talking in general terms.’

‘Sure,’ said Nicky tightly. ‘I appreciate that. Present company excepted, right?’

Juliet raised an exquisite eyebrow.

‘No, obviously you’re subject to the same—’

‘Shut the fuck up. Please.’ Nicky’s voice was an intense snarl: he’d drawn in a large breath just beforehand for exactly that purpose. ‘I’m giving you information here, not asking for a prognosis. You just – don’t talk, okay. Don’t talk about things you know fuck-all about.’

The tough-guy tone rang hollow. The two subjects with which Juliet was intimately familiar were sex and death: their declensions, and conjugations, and the inflexible metaphysics that governed them.

Tactfully, though, she made no reply.

I tried to pull the conversation back onto less controversial topics. ‘They’ve still got their own fingerprints,’ I said, answering Juliet’s question. ‘So somehow it’s got to be their own flesh. If Les Lathwell was Aaron Silver, that means he was born well before the end of the nineteenth century. Died—’

‘1908,’ Nicky supplied, sullenly.

‘1908. So if he was still leaving fingerprints in the 1960s and 1970s, his body would have to have been spectacularly well embalmed.

’

Juliet shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work in any case,’ she pointed out. ‘This other man – Les Lathwell – he had friends? Family?’

‘Two brothers, both dead,’ said Nicky. ‘A sister, who’s still alive.’

‘And there’s documentary evidence of his growing up?’

Nicky nodded slowly, seeing where she was going. ‘Sure. Lots of it. School photos. Home movies. All that kind of shit.’

‘Then how – and wh›11;en – did Aaron Silver insinuate himself into Lathwell’s place?’

It was a more than reasonable question.

Something was niggling at me – something that felt as though it might be part of the answer – but I couldn’t tease it out into the light.

‘Not plastic surgery,’ Nicky said. ‘They could do it now – fingerprints and all – but in the 1960s the technology wasn’t that advanced. Except on Mission Impossible. You know, that guy with all the masks.