He became an expert on butyric decay, dry decay, and decomposition. And then he went to war against them, with a single-mindedness he’d never applied to anything when he was alive. He stopped eating and drinking, something a lot of zombies like to keep doing for reasons of nostalgia and emotional reassurance: when you’re dead, your alimentary system can’t process food, so it just rots in your stomach and creates another vector for infection. By contrast he began to take a whole pharmacopoeia of virulent poisons, mostly by injection. He pickled his flesh, not in formaldehyde but in embalming compounds that he brewed up for himself from recipes he found online, and steeped his body’s cells in a cocktail of inorganic compounds so potent that at one point he started to sweat contact poisons.
There was more to it than that, I knew. He hooked up with Imelda Probert, more generally known as the Ice-Maker – a faith healer who offered a bespoke deal to the living dead – and now visits her a couple of times a month for a mystical/religious tune-up. He learned meditation techniques, and claims to be able to visit different parts of his body on a cellular level, repairing damage with the cement of self-belief. And, like I said earlier, he stays out of the sun in case he spoils.
But today he was sitting out in the open on a bench on the Pall Mall side of the park, his arms spread across the back of the bench and his crossed legs sticking out in front of him, looking relaxed and expansive. Okay, there was still a heavy overcast and a chill wind, but even so it was shocking to see Nicky out in full daylight.
I sat down next to him, on the edge of the bench because he didn’t bother to move up and make room for me. His gaze flicked sideways to acknowledge me, then he went back to staring up through the leafless branches at the grey, swag-bellied clouds. He was wearing black jeans and a bright red T-shirt. It made his unnatural pallor look all the more unsettling by contrast, which I guess was the point. Given the time of the year, and the unkindness of the weather, it also flaunted the fact that he didn’t have a circulatory system.
I tilted my head upwards, following his gaze. There was nothing to see up there except the black lattice of the branches against the sky – the ribcage of a monster waiting to be reborn. ‘Isn’t Mother Nature wonderful?’ I remarked.
Nicky snorted dryly. He does everything dryly, of course: no body fluids. ‘Castor,’ he murmured, ‘the only mother around here is you. Don’t try to small-talk me, and don’t piss me off, because I’m not in the mood.’
‘Fine. I won’t. I’d hate to spoil your mood, Nicky.’
‘So you want something or not? I didn’t come out all this way to hear your usual bullshit.’
‘Well, I offered to come to you,’ I reminded him. ‘You saw me, raised, and I folded. And I’ve got to say, this is a whole new you.’
He looked at me again, for a second or two longer this time, and shrugged as he looked away again. ‘I’m having some work done on my place,’ he said simply.
That was intended to shut me up, and it worked. Nicky’s been keeping house, ever since he died, in that derelict cinema in Walthamstow: and it had been trashed not so long ago by a pack of crazed American Satanists who only knew about Nicky in the first place because of his association with me. He’d been able to claim a heap of money back on the insurance, and he’d told me he had some big ideas about what to do with it, but he’d refused to be pinned down on the specifics.
The whole experience seemed to have changed him subtly – or maybe not so subtly. He’d been turning into one of those life forms whose house is part of their bodies, like a snail or a tortoise: now, apparently, he’d entered a different phase of his afterlife cycle.
By way of changing the subject – and coming to the point – I handed him the key and the A to Z, which I’d been carrying around with me all day. He pocketed the key without a word – he didn’t need to ask to know that I wanted it matched up with a batch and if possible, a rough location. Then he switched his attention to the book. He turned it over in his hand as though he was checking it for bugs, then flipped it open at the first page and started to scan the list on the inside front cover.
‘It belonged to John Gittings,’ I said. ‘And you’re in the middle column. Any idea why?’
Nicky looked bored as he scanned the names.
‘John the Git was one of my regulars,’ he said.
‘You did data-raids for him?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Recently?’
‘No.’
‘But you did see him recently?’
‘What are you, Castor, my father confessor? Yeah, I saw him.’
‘In the line of work?’
‘Yes. And before you ask, no, I won’t tell you what the work was. It was his business, now it’s mine. You’d be choked if you heard I was advertising your wheelings and dealings to everyone else who waved a fifty under my nose.’
I nodded. He had me there.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I respect your professional integrity. But could you look through the rest of the shit in there and see if it makes any sense to you? John spent the last few weeks before he died writing out those names again and again, so they must have meant something to him. Or maybe there’s a code there that I’m not picking up. Either way, I’d be grateful for a second opinion.’
Nicky flicked to the back of the book and looked over the list there. The final word, SMASHNA, glared up at us from the heart of the nest of ink-swirls.
‘Smashna,’ I mused aloud. It didn’t sound like a real word. Maybe it was an acronym of some kind.
‘It’s Russian,’ said Nicky. ‘Russian slang. It means great, cool, wonderful.’ He closed the book, and leaned slightly towards me so that he could slide it into his jeans pocket. I caught a strong whiff of aftershave, riding over a harsher but fainter chemical smell that I couldn’t have pinned a name on even if I’d wanted to. ‘What did you have in mind by way of remuneration?’
‘Let’s leave that open for now,’ I parried. ‘There’s something else I need, and it’s big.’
‘Yeah?’ Nicky’s offhand tone suggested that there weren’t many jobs in the whole wide world that counted as big for him. ‘So what’s that?’
‘I was wondering if you could pick something up for me,’ I said. ‘The kind of something that doesn’t change hands too often.’
‘Go on.’
‘Memorabilia.’
‘Relating to . . . ?’
‘A dead gangster. A killer, from way back.’
Nicky’s head swivelled round fast and he stared at me for a few moments in dead, perplexed silence. It seemed like something of an extreme reaction: okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections. Still, something was bothering him sufficiently that he hadn’t been able to hide it.
‘I thought we had a “no bullshit” rule in place, Castor,’ he said, his tone unreadable.
‘You think this is bullshit, Nicky?’
‘Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now . . .’ He hesitated and shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.
‘It’s not about John. It’s a different case.’ I reached towards him with my hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually touch him. He hates to be touched by the living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running. And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal space. ‘Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though I didn’t know you had one until now.’