another ghosthunter? Get thee behind me, Dennis Wheatley kind of thing? Nothing wrong with it, mind you. Bit macho, bit paternalistic, not my cup of cocoa, but someone’s got to do it. Is someone you?’
‘Yeah,’ I confirmed, when I’d figured out what the hell he was talking about. ‘Someone is me.’
‘Well, fine. And you scare up a bit of business by looking at the tea leaves. I get it. Sounded wacko at first. But then you start looking at the evidence and you think, whoa, fuck, that’s scary. The same patterns, unto the third and fourth generation and all that. And then he died, and I had to wonder.’
‘Wonder what?’ I asked, hoping against hope for a coherent sentence.
‘If maybe he got too close to the flame,’ he elaborated, pantomiming the flight of a moth with vague gestures. ‘You know, if he was chasing after this stuff, and he went to the source, someone might have taken it personally. That’s what I was scared of. That’s why I put the phone down when you called. I mean, you could have been anybody, as far as I was concerned. You could be one of the really cold geezers with the most to lose, yeah? And someone comes along, wants to buy something with your fingerprints on, what are you gonna think? Maybe you just take out a gun and bang. Maybe you even watch the message boards, listen to the wires. Like, who’s this guy going around picking up my leavings? What does he want? Bring his body down here. Most likely not, but hey. You get me?’
I nodded, but only for the sake of form. Either this guy was assuming I knew a hell of a lot more than I did or else he always talked like this – in which case I’d have to beat him to death with his own iPod.
We stopped in front of an anonymous Georgian edifice that had once been someone’s house and was now three sets of offices. I say three because there were three small plaques on the wall next to the door: Vitastar Films; Nexus Veterinary Pathologists; Deacon Lloyd Educational Publishing.
The door was unlocked, but it only opened into a tiny vestibule. The inner door was operated by a swipe-card lock, and Chesney had the card hanging on a chain at his belt. He swiped us through, putting two fingers up at the security camera mounted on the door frame.
‘Nobody there,’ he said dismissively – and it was true that the security desk in the hall was deserted. ‘There’s a guard comes on at nights, but he never checks the camera footage anyway. It’s just pour encourager les cretins. Most of this shit is. If I wanted to fake the swipe reader, I could do it with an old bus pass.’
We ascended the stairs, with Chesney in the lead. The first landing was Vitastar Pictures, but we kept on going. ‘Porn,’ said Chesney, who seemed to have taken on the role of tour guide now. ‘You get one girl and ten guys standing outside here every Monday morning. I think they put out a lot of bukkake titles.’
He pronounced the word ‘buck-cake’, which had the side effect of making it seem a lot more wholesome than it was. I thought of the Waltons. Then tried hard not to.
The second landing was Nexus Veterinary Pathologists. The door was open and Chesney walked inside. There was no receptionist’s desk as such: the room was big and open-plan, and it had a vaguely unpleasant chemical smell. A cluster of chairs in the near corner was a token gesture towards a waiting room: the rest of the space was taken up with glass-fronted storage cupboards, steel lockers and uniform olive-green filing cabinets. Against the wall off on my left there were three different-sized desks, like the bowls of porridge in the story of Goldilocks. The biggest had a brass nameplate that read JOHN J. MORETON, MSc, DAP.
A young Asian woman in a white medical coat was squatting on her haunches on the far side of the room, stacking bottles on the lower shelves of one of the cupboards. It was too far to read the labels on the bottles, but the HAZCHEM sign on the box she was taking them out of was clear enough. Right next to her was a closed door plated with dull grey metal and marked NO ADMITTANCE TO GENERAL PUBLIC.
She looked round as we came in, and she gave Chesney a severe frown.
‘Thanks, Vince,’ she said, in a flat Luton and Dunstable accent. ‘That’s half my bloody lunch hour out the window. Why’ve you got mud on your knees?’
‘Sorry, Smeet,’ said Chesney. ‘I got held up.’
The girl looked from him to me, as if she expected either an introduction or an explanation. ‘Mister Farnsworth,’ Chesney said, after too long a pause. ‘He brought a poodle in last year, yeah? Before my time. And now there’s another one from the same litter who’s got the same kind of tumour, or it might be a different one, so he needs another copy of the report for his insurance claim because there’s a clause about genetic predisposition. I said I’d dig one out for him.’
Smeet nodded. She’d already lost interest – I think maybe at ‘Farnsworth’. Chesney had done a good job of making me sound too boring to live. She pointed at the box, which was still half full of bottles. ‘You can finish those off,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’m not even supposed to handle them until I get my B2 through.’
‘Yeah, no worries,’ said Chesney, throwing his jacket down on top of one of the filing cabinets. ‘You go ahead. Take a full hour if you want. Morpork won’t be back until four, will he? Not if he’s at one of those RSPCA thrashes.’
He went to one of the filing cabinets, opened the top drawer and started to rummage around without much conviction. His acting stank, and Smeet was taking her time getting ready – taking off the white coat and hanging it on a rack behind one of the desks, then putting various items from the desktop into her handbag.
‘Busy?’ I asked her, just to draw her attention away from Chesney.
‘Busy?’ she echoed. ‘Yes, we are. We’re working until ten o’clock most nights. Bird flu is our main money- spinner, at this point in time. Rabies is a niche market since the pet passport came along, but bird flu was a very timely replacement. It’s even outselling canine thrombocythemia. I’d say, on average, Vince gets to do the parrot sketch from Monty Python once every other day.’
Smeet was done with loading her handbag by now and she hit the high road without looking back, deftly snatching up a brown suede jacket from the same rack and putting it on as she headed for the door. Chesney listened to her footsteps, one hand raised for silence, as they receded down the stairs.
‘Bitch,’ he said with feeling, when the front door two floors below us slammed to. He shut the file drawer with unnecessary force, opened the bottom one instead and took a box from it with a certain amount of care. It was about the size of a shoebox, but it was made of wood and had a hinged lid. It was painted in green and gold to resemble an oversized Golden Virginia tobacco tin. ‘She’d report me in a minute, you know? I have to do everything on the sly. Come into my parlour, and I’ll give you the stuff. Happy to get rid of it, to be honest.’
Chesney opened the door that the general public couldn’t pass through and went inside. Following him, I found myself in a room that fitted my preconceptions of a pathology lab pretty much to the letter. There was a massive operating table in the centre, with a swivelling light array above it on a double-articulated metal arm. White tiles on the walls and floor; gleaming white porcelain sinks, inset into white work surfaces with kidney- shaped steel dishes stacked ready to hand. I’d always wondered why those dishes were so popular in medical circles, given that the only internal organ that’s kidney-shaped is the kidney. The chemical smell was a lot stronger here, bordering on the eye-watering, but Chesney didn’t seem to notice it.
He closed the door behind us, and then drew a bolt across. That struck me as overkill, given that we were alone in the place.
‘Okay,’ he said.
He set the wooden box down on the operating table, swinging the swivel-mounted light array out of the way with his left-hand. He flashed me a significant glance, but undercut it by opening his mouth again. ‘We are controlling transmission,’ he said, in a heavy cod-American accent. ‘Do not adjust your set.
Chesney was actually quoting the voice-over intro of
‘I’m not paranoid,’ Chesney assured me, as if he was anxious to dispel a specific rumour. ‘I just hid the stuff because I knew bloody well Smeet would blow the whistle on me if she found it. I’m not supposed to use the lab for private stuff, seen? It’s a hanging offence, and my boss doesn’t need much of an excuse right now.’
I looked through the weird stuff in the bags, turning up a few more surprises – a toy soldier that looked to be really old, the paint flaking off it to reveal bare metal underneath, and a Woodbine cigarette packet which had been signed like the playing card: the name in this case was Jimmy Rick, or maybe Pick, and it didn’t mean a thing to
