me.
‘And these were all John’s things?’ I asked, making sure that I had this right.
‘Yeah.’ Chesney nodded. He was looking at me very closely, trying to read my reactions. ‘Worth a bob or two,’ he observed, slightly wistfully.
Which told me all I needed to know about his weird behaviour on the phone and his skittishness today. When he’d heard about John’s death he must have thought Christmas had come two months late.
‘Yeah, probably,’ I agreed. ‘I imagine there’s people out there who’d eat this stuff up.’
Chesney nodded eagerly. ‘Yeah, and I could shift it for you. John more or less promised me I could have the lot once he was done with it. He always said this was about the data, seen? Not about the items. He wasn’t a ghoul or a pervert or anything. It was just something he was interested in – his own private Idaho, kind of thing. I never thought anyone would come round asking after this stuff.’
‘And the stuff is valuable because of who it used to belong to?’ I demanded, making sure I’d got the right end of this increasingly shitty stick.
Chesney looked blank for a moment. I don’t think it had occurred to him until then that I was flying blind, but it was a little too late to decide to be coy. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said. ‘Obviously. They’re – you know . . .’ He hesitated, presumably looking for a polite turn of phrase.
‘Death-row souvenirs,’ I finished. It was the words ‘ghoul’ and ‘pervert’ in the same sentence that had clinched it for me. Well, that and the fact that I’d just asked Nicky to find me something exactly like this: some banal object made magical and precious by the fact that it had once been in the hands of a killer. Big thrill. I’d been in the hands of killers so many times it wasn’t even funny, and nobody was looking to sell me on eBay. Maybe that was a blessing, though: it’s probably best not to have too clear a picture of your market value.
Chesney looked a little sick, because he could see in my face that I’d never before in my life seen any of the stuff in his little bran tub. He was counting up the cost of lost opportunities. I would have sympathised, but time is money and right then I was all about the bottom line.
‘Yeah,’ he said, a little lugubriously. ‘The ace of spades was from a deck that Ronnie Kray used to play poker in his cell in Parkhurst. Some minor villain named Alan Stalky got him to sign it and then took it instead of his winnings. That’s worth a fortune. Les Latham fired the bullet in the bank job – it’s one of the few he missed with. George Cornell used the paperweight in a fight – broke some bloke’s head open with it – and the pen is the one that Tony Lambrianou signed his confession with. It’s still got his blood on it, allegedly because the police beat the living shit out of him before they let him sign. The crown piece belonged to Aaron Silver . . .’
He carried on talking through the contents of the baggies one by one, but I was only half-listening now because the names he’d already mentioned had made something groan on the dangerously overstacked shelves of my memory. Cornell. Lambrianou. Lathwell. Silver. Every single one of those names turned up in the lists in John Gittings’s notebook. If Kray had been there too, I’d have made the connection. It occurred to me to wonder where the hell John had been getting the money from. If these things were as valuable as Chesney said they were, they ought to have been way out of the reach of someone living on an exorcist’s earnings.
‘So what?’ I said, wrenching my attention back to the present. ‘John was picking this stuff up on the fan-boy circuit?’
‘He had a dealer. A zombie guy.’
Yeah, of course he did. Nicky, you cagey bugger, I thought, you and I are going to have some very harsh words. ‘Right. And he was passing it all on to you so that you could . . . ?’ My mouth had outrun my brain, but Chesney had mentioned data; and the fact that we were in a pathology lab – if it was one where most of the corpses on the slab were named Fido – was a big clue. ‘You ran tests on them,’ I finished ungrammatically. ‘What kind of tests, Vince?’
‘The whole works,’ Chesney said, with a touch of professional pride. He tried to take the box back from me, but it was a try that expected to fail and I made sure it did by putting my full weight down on my right hand – the one that was resting on the box lid. He straightened up again and pretended not to notice. ‘Fingerprinting. A fuck of a lot of that. Haemato-crit, when he could get something with a bloodstain on it. And DNA. I can do DNA. Okay, I’m working with puppies right now, but that’s just for the work experience. I trained in human pathology and I’m gonna do real forensic work as soon as I’m out of this shithole. John’s nineteenth-century time-warp “criminals are gorillas” thing may have been piped shite, but from where I was standing it was good practice.’
‘And good pocket money,’ I guessed.
Chesney bridled. ‘Hey, look, he came to me. I was doing him a—’
‘A favour. Absolutely. Why do you keep talking about criminal physiognomy, Vince? Is that what John said this was about? Recapitulation theory? I can’t see that kite getting very far off the ground.’
‘Me neither.’ Chesney was still stiffly on his dignity: I’d hurt him where his professional ethics pinched the tightest. ‘But the customer’s always right, and John had this thing, you know?’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘A Cesare Lombroso reductionist taxonomic criminal anthropology kind of thing.’
‘Go on.’
He glanced towards the box with longing, bereaved eyes. ‘He was making up a big database,’ he said. ‘Criminals, yeah? Killers, especially. He wanted to measure them every way they could be measured. And I did the tests and passed all the stuff on to him, and that was that. I didn’t have to clap hands and believe in fairies.’
‘Fairies in this case being –?’
‘Oh Christ, you know the song. The idea that there’s a criminal type. That by pooling data from a thousand people who’ve already done bad things you’ll be able to predict the next rapist or serial killer before they cut loose. It’s not just bullshit, it’s the bullshit that the century before last left out for the binmen.’
I tapped the box. ‘Sounds pretty thin,’ I agreed. ‘The disc in here, that’s all the data you put together for John before he died?’
Chesney nodded, but by now he just wanted rid of me. A nod wasn’t enough.
‘All of it?’ I pursued. ‘All the test results, for all the “items”?’
‘It’s all there.’ He was indignant, seeing his little nest egg about to waltz out through the door and knowing there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
I straightened up. ‘Well, thanks for your help, Vince,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything on the disc that a layman can’t get his head around, would you rather I called you here or someplace else?’
‘Don’t call me at all,’ Chesney said, in something of a sulk now. ‘I don’t owe you anything, man. I didn’t even need to give you the disc. That’s my intellectual property.’
‘True,’ I conceded. ‘But let me put it another way. If there’s a fine point of interpretation and I want a little steer, should I come to you or to your boss?’
‘Fuck!’ Chesney waved his arms wildly. ‘I wish I’d never got involved with any of this crap. It’s not like the money was any good.’
I cut him a small amount of slack, because it’s generally easier to lead a horse to water than to hold it under for the time it takes to drown it. ‘There could be some more money on the table at some point,’ I said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Well, you can call me on my mobile,’ he said, very slightly mollified. ‘The number you got from John, yeah? I’ll get back to you when no one’s listening over my shoulder.’
‘Okay.’ I hefted the box. ‘Thanks for your help, Vince. John’s smiling down on you from Heaven, if that’s any help.’
I made my own way out, leaving him cursing me under his breath.
Smeet was coming back up the stairs as I went down. She eyed the box curiously. ‘Dead dog,’ I said, and kept on going.
John’s own private Idaho, Chesney had said. Yeah, maybe it was, but I could have wished he hadn’t reminded me of that song: the B52s warbling about the awful surprise in the bottomless pool tied in too neatly with the dream I’d had the night before last.
I felt like I was following the trail that had led John to that final encounter with the business end of his own shotgun. And I wondered for the first time where the gun had come from.
Another souvenir, maybe.
