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"DEAD MEN’S

BOOTS

By Mike Carey

The Devil You Know

Vicious Circle

Dead Men’s Boots

Look out for

Thicker Than Water

DEAD MEN’S

BOOTS

Mike Carey

Hachette Digital

www.littlebrown.co.uk

Published by Hachette Digital 2008

Copyright © Mike Carey 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than

those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious

and any resemblance to real persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any

form or by any means, without the prior

permission in writing of the publisher, nor be

otherwise circulated in any form of binding or

cover other than that in which it is published and

without a similar condition including this

condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7481 0863 3

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

Hachette Digital

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette Livre UK Company

To my brother, Dave, with much love.

Are you right there, our kid?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jock for my first lesson in musical notation for drums. If I got it wrong, it’s not his fault. Thanks to Ade and Joel for raising my awareness of the weirder and more arcane bits of London, a process which is ongoing.

Thanks to Gabriella Nemeth and Nick Austin for proofing and copy-editing this sprawling monster, and to Meg, Darren and George for their unfailing support.

1

I don’t do funerals all that often, and when I do I prefer to be either falling-down drunk or dosed up on some herbal fuzz-bomb like salvinorin to the point where I start to lose feeling from the feet on up, like a kind of rising damp of the central nervous system. Today I was as sober as a judge, and that was only the start of it.

The cemetery was freezing cold – cold enough to chill me even through the Russian army greatcoat I was wearing (I never fought, but poor bloody infantry is a state of mind). The sun was still locked up for winter, a gusty east wind was stropping itself sharp on my face, and guilt was working its slow way through my mind like a weighted cheese-wire through a block of ice.

Ashes to ashes, the priest said, or at least that was what it boiled down to.