Managing death

'Can't say I'm pleased to meet you.'

Solstice's laugh is warm and deep. 'No one ever is under these situations.' He looks over at Alex. 'That's all for now, Sergeant.'

'Yes, Sergeant,' I say. 'It's time for the grown-ups to talk.'

Alex nods, gives me a little (and very ironic) salute and gets out of there.

Solstice shuts the door behind him. The smile slips a little. 'Now, to get the shit out of the way before it stinks up the room, if you have any problems you call me. I know he's your friend, but this isn't Alex's specialty.' Solstice hands me a card with his name and number on it, and a symbol of three dots making an equilateral triangle. It reminds me of the brace symbol we use to block Stirrers. 'My group runs these investigations.'

'You're the Closers?'

Solstice blinks at that. I'm happy to wrong-foot him a little. 'Yeah, it's our job to close doors that shouldn't have been opened in the first place.'

'A bit poetic, isn't it?'

Solstice grimaces. 'I didn't come up with the name. Our job is to work with organisations like yours, off the public record, of course.'

'Well, off the record, what do you really think you're doing?'

'Fixing your fuck-ups.'

'That's good to know,' I say. 'Puts everything into context.'

'All right. So where did it happen? Scene of the crime and all that.'

'You're looking at it,' I say, waving at the room. Solstice lifts an eyebrow.

'I'm sorry, but the window's self-healing. The body's missing, too. It went back to wherever it came from. It was a professional hit, but it didn't work out too well for the professionals.'

'At least no one was hurt.'

'Much,' I say.

He looks at me.

'No one was hurt much,' I say.

'What's wrong with you?' Solstice asks. 'You look fine to me.'

'Yeah, now I do.'

'Stop your complaining.'

I frown at him.

'Oh, sorry. Stop your complaining, sir.' Solstice walks around my desk and stares at 'The Triumph of Death'. It was Mr D's particular obsession: death at war with life, a vast wave of skeletons breaking over the world. Mr D said he found it soothing. I don't know about that, but it is something. 'Isn't this a bit much?'

'Look, I didn't buy it.' (Actually, I don't think Mr D bought it, either.) 'But you have to admit it's funny in this context.'

Solstice peers at all the mayhem on the panel. 'If you say so.' He walks to the window and pushes his face against the glass. 'So the body fell…? Where am I looking?'

'That's Hell,' I say, pouring myself a glass of rum. 'You're looking into Hell.'

Solstice blinks. 'Remarkable. It's not exactly what I was expecting.'

'It never is.' I offer him a drink.

He shakes his head. 'On duty, and all that.' He goes back to peering out the window.

He jabs a thumb down. 'So the body struck the ground and it disappeared?'

'Yeah, someone cut the rope a few moments after I'd knocked him out.'

Solstice looks at me. 'You knocked him out?'

'I got lucky.'

'Very lucky.' He scrawls something in his notebook. 'So someone cut the rope. Are you sure you weren't that someone?'

'Very sure. I wanted to know what he was doing. Why he was there, and how.'

'Couldn't you have just asked his ghost? Maybe killing him was an easier, safer way of getting the information you required.'

I shook my head. 'It doesn't work like that, not as neatly anyway. I pomped the soul, and the body returned to wherever it was when it entered Hell.'

'You didn't think to ask the spirit any questions?'

'Oh, I tried, but with a death that violent, the soul just usually blazes through. I didn't get much more than rage and anger at being betrayed, I guess, and then I was losing consciousness myself.'

I hobble over to the window beside Solstice. Stare down. 'What I want to know is how a living person ended up out there.'

'Is it really that odd? I mean, I'm here right now, aren't I?'

'It's remarkable, all right,' I say. 'In here you're not really in Hell, just a point that juts into Hell, and even that involves quite a bit of power. Two worlds are mixing here, and it's not a very good mix. A lot of people have trouble with this room; they get all sorts of migraines, dizzy spells. It's why we do our job interviews here. If you can't cope with the energies in this room, you really shouldn't become a Pomp. You're handling it very well, Detective.'

Solstice rubs the bridge of his nose. 'Hm. I do have a bit of a headache, but that could be just the condition I suffer from.'

'What's that?'

'Hypochondria.'

Yeah, funny guy. I point down at the footpath. 'Down there. To get down there with the possibility of returning involves serious pain. The Underworld doesn't like life, just afterlife. Its barriers are permeable, but not without incredible effort, arcane knowledge, and a lot of blood.'

'Blood?'

'Yeah, you need to die and not die. It's about as easy as it sounds, believe me.'

Solstice's pen gets to work again in his notebook. He has a swift, neat writing style – a dot-the-'i's-cross-the-'t's sort of thing. 'Well, he didn't stay living for long.' Solstice scratches the bridge of his nose. 'But then that seems to be something that happens to people who spend any time with you, doesn't it?'

'What are you implying?'

Solstice grins. 'Nothing at all.'

'I honestly don't know how you're going to uncover anything,' I say. 'There's no body that we could find. Who knows where it is? Number Four is healing itself, and we've never used closed circuit TV here.'

'You leave that to me,' Solstice says. 'There's a body somewhere. And there will be a gun.'

'I don't know about that – oh, sorry, Detective, just a condition I suffer from.'

'Yeah, and that is?' he asks.

'Pessimism.'

'I like you already,' Solstice says, patting me on the back. His rolled-up shirt sleeve slips back to reveal a rather large tattoo.

I get a good look at it before Solstice pulls down his sleeve in what must be an automatic gesture. I'm not sure how they regard tatts in the force.

'You'd make a good Pomp,' I say, nodding at his arm.

'What? Oh, yeah.' Seeing no point in hiding it, he grins a little crookedly and pulls up his sleeve to reveal more. A dragon extends all the way along his forearm, the tail disappearing under the fabric. Its scales are a luminous green, narrow red eyes stare at me, and a tiny puff of smoke curls from its nostrils.

'Nice work isn't it?' Solstice says. 'Guy who did it won a lot of awards.'

'Yeah. Your own design?'

Solstice dips his head. 'A little bit Tolkien, a little bit Chinese. I call it Smauget.'

I'm not about to compare tatts. Wal isn't quite as fierce, and his creation was less considered, more alcohol-fuelled.

Solstice peers at his phone. 'No bloody signal.'

Closers certainly don't have access to a phone network as good as ours.

Solstice reaches over to the black phone in the middle of my messy desk. 'Mind if I make a call?'

'Not with that, you won't.' I lift up the tattered end of the phone cord, bits of rusty wire jutting out.

'What is it then, a paperweight?'

'Internal line,' I say with a lame grin. I'm not about to tell him it's a direct line to my old boss, Mr D. The fewer people who know, or even suspect, that he's still about, the better.

Solstice nods his head and glances at his watch. 'I'm going to have to leave. Believe it or not we have more than one case.'

'You Closers,' I say, 'you're a big department?'

'Big enough.'

'Why haven't I heard of you until today?'

'You've never needed to.' He glances at his card on my desk. 'You call me if anything happens.'

'I will.'