I started the car and pulled away, noticing that the priest followed us with his sad-eyed gaze as we drove by. I sympathised, up to a point: it couldn’t be an easy way to earn a living these days.
We eased our way out between the Breather pickets, collecting a fair share of abuse and ridicule along the way but no actual missiles or threats. Most of the people waving placards and chanting rhythmically were in their teens or early twenties. What did they know about death? They hadn’t even got that far with life yet.
The cemetery was all the way out in Waltham Abbey, and John and Carla lived – or rather Carla still lived and John didn’t any more – on Aldermans Hill just outside Southgate, in a flat over a dress shop. It was going to be a long haul, and the Vectra handled like a half-swamped raft. Joining the traffic, I remembered the half-bottle of Metaxa in my inside pocket, fished it out one-handed and passed it across to Carla. She took it without a word, unscrewed the top and downed a long swallow. It made her shudder: probably it made her eyes water, too, but there were plenty of other explanations available for why she rubbed the heel of her hand quickly across her face.
Looking in the rear-view mirror, I noticed that we’d picked up a tail. I swore under my breath. It was one of the vans that the Breathers had arrived in – a big high-sided delivery truck that someone must have borrowed from work, deep blue and with the words Bowyer’s Cleaning Services written in reverse script over the windscreen because a good idea is a good idea, even if the emergency services think of it first. I didn’t mention it to Carla: I just switched lanes whenever I could to make life harder for them. I was confident that I could lose them long before we got back into London.
‘So what was all that shit with the lawyer?’ I asked. It sounds tactless, put like that, but I’ve always found anger a good corrective to grief. Grief paralyses you, where a good head of hacked-off biliousness keeps you moving right along, although it’s not so great for making you look where you’re going.
Carla shook her head, as though she didn’t want to talk about it, and I was going to let it lie. But then she took a second pull on the brandy bottle and away she went.
‘John had always said he wanted to be buried at Waltham Abbey, next to his sister Hailey,’ she muttered. ‘Always. She was the only person he ever loved, apart from me. But he wasn’t himself, Fix. Not for months before he died. He wasn’t anyone I recognised.’
She sighed deeply and a little raggedly. ‘There’s a condition – EOA, it’s called. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. It got John’s dad when he was only forty-eight, and by the time he turned fifty he couldn’t even dress himself. John was convinced that Hailey was starting to get it just before she died, and he was always terrified he was going to go the same way. He tried to make me promise once that I’d give him pills, if it ever took him. If he ever got to the point where – you know, where there was nothing left of him. But I couldn’t, and I told him I couldn’t.
‘Anyway, just because it can run in families doesn’t mean it will. You don’t know, do you? There’s no point running halfway to meet trouble. But he’d have days when he couldn’t move, hardly, for brooding about it. I just tried to jolly him along when he was in one of those moods. Wait for him to pull out of it again, and then most times he’d say he was sorry he’d worried me and that’d be that.
‘But a couple of months before Christmas he went through a bad time. He had a job on – something that was going to pay really well, but it seemed to prey on his mind a lot.’
‘What sort of job?’ I asked, sounding a lot more casual than I felt. This was where my guilt was stemming from, in case you were wondering. I’d already heard a few hints about John’s last big earner, and I had good reason to feel uneasy about it.
‘He wouldn’t say. But he put a grand in my hand, some time back in November it was, and told me to bank it – and he said there’d be more later. Well, you know how it is, Fix. Most of the time, no offence, you just work for rent money, don’t you? Oh yeah, for young men it’s lovely. Two or three hundred quid for a couple of days’ work, you’re laughing. When you’re a bit older it gets to be different, and you never really have a chance to lay anything by. So I was over the moon for him, I really was. I said “What, is there a ghost in Buckingham Palace, or something? Can we say we’re by royal appointment, now?” And he laughed and said something about East End royalty, but he wouldn’t tell me what he meant.
‘I think the truth was, whatever this job was all about he didn’t know if he could handle it. He called those two on the Collective, Reggie, and that friend of his who never washes. But they wouldn’t work with him any more. They said he was too sloppy, and they wouldn’t trust him if things went bad on a job.’
She hesitated, as if she thought I might want to jump in at this point and defend John’s reputation, but I made no comment – because if Reggie had said that, Reggie was right. John had never been the most focused of men, and he’d got worse as he’d got older. Having him at your back was far from reassuring: generally it just gave you one more thing to worry about.
But I didn’t feel comfortable thinking those thoughts, because John hadn’t only called Reggie. He’d called me, too: three times in the space of a week. The messages were still there on my answerphone, because I never bother to wipe the tape. Three times I’d sat there and listened to him telling me that he might have some work to put my way, and three times I hadn’t even picked up because life’s too short and you tend to avoid things that might make it shorter still.
Then I got a call from Bourbon, the de facto godfather of London’s ghostbusters, with the news that John had kissed a loaded shotgun.
‘Did he say who he was working for?’ I asked, crashing the gears as we turned onto the M25 slip road. The blue van was still there in back of us, but I wasn’t worried: I hadn’t even begun to fight.
Carla shook her head. ‘I asked him. He didn’t want to talk about it. He just said it was big, and that when it was done he’d be in the history books. “One for the books,” he kept on saying. Something nobody’s ever done before.
‘And it changed him. He started to get really fretful, and really paranoid about forgetting things. He’d make himself little notes – lists of names, lists of places – and he’d hide them all around the house. I’d open the tea caddy and there’d be a bit of paper all folded up inside the lid. Just names. Then the next day he’d go around and collect them all up again. And burn them. And for the first time ever, I started to think he might have been right all along. You know, about the Alzheimer’s. I thought maybe the stress had brought it on or something.’
She rubbed her eyes again. ‘It was a terrible time, Fix. I didn’t know who to talk to about it. When Hailey was alive I’d have called her over and we’d have had it out with him, all together. But I couldn’t get near him. He started to fly off the handle whenever I even hinted that he was acting strangely. It got so I had to pretend everything was all right even when he was sneaking around like a spy in a film, picking up secret messages that he’d left for himself.
‘Then one night he got into bed and started to talk about death. Said he thought his time would be coming soon, and he’d changed his mind about what kind of send-off he wanted. “Forget about Waltham Abbey, Carla. You’ve got to cremate me.” Well, I didn’t know what to say. What about Hailey? What about the plot he’d already paid for, right next to her? It was the disease talking. It wasn’t him. So I did just what I did that time when he tried to make me promise to poison him. I kept shtum. I didn’t say a word. I wasn’t going to make a promise that I didn’t mean to keep.