Lombroso?’ I asked him.
‘Sure. I golf with him.’
‘Nineteenth-century anthropologist.’
‘Yeah.’ Nicky nodded. ‘That’s the guy. Starting to smell pretty fierce now. And his elbow gives on the backswing.’
‘He came up with this idea about criminal physiognomy,’ I said. ‘He called it recapitulation, and it made him the poster boy for the early eugenics movement.’
He dumped the disc back in the box. ‘Eugenics? That was Annie Lennox and Dave—’
Moving quickly, I slammed the box lid down on Nicky’s hand, trapping it. He yelled, but not in pain: his nerves were closed for business, so pain wasn’t a feature of the landscape for him any more. But that had made him obsessively careful about organic damage, since he knew he didn’t have the advantage of the early-warning system that the living take so much for granted. He also didn’t have self-repair: no white corpuscles, no platelets, no cell division. So where anyone still warm would have tried to snatch their hand back out of the box, Nicky froze up stiller than a startled possum.
‘Castor, enough with this stupid fucking schoolboy shit!’ he shouted. Shouting meant inflating his lungs fully and emptying them again – again, not easy for a dead man – and that meant a few moments of total silence after he was done.
I went on as though I hadn’t been interrupted.
‘Recapitulation,’ I said. ‘It’s a bankrupt concept, but it seemed sexy enough until Darwin drove a stampede of finches and Galapagos turtles through it.’
‘What the fuck are you-?’
‘The idea, Nicky, is this.’ I leaned a little more weight on the box lid, and his free hand clenched as though he was considering punching me: but that’s a good way to break a knuckle, so I knew he wouldn’t. ‘Babies in the womb, so the story goes, run through all the previous stages of evolution before finally reaching full human form. It’s like Mother Nature has to scroll down through every template in the book before she can get to the human one, because that’s the one that’s most fully evolved. It’s bullshit, like I said, but are you with me so far?’
‘Let go of my fucking hand, Castor!’
‘But Lombroso thought there were glitches in the program. Sometimes babies get stuck on one of the more primitive forms, he said, and instead of being born fully human they’re born with ape-like features that really belong much earlier on in the series.
‘See, he’d taken a good look around, and he’d noticed how many hardened criminals have thick, heavy brow ridges like orang-utans, or abnormally long fingers like gorillas, and he had this light-bulb moment. Criminals are the way they are because they’re throwbacks to our non-human ancestry. And once you know that, you can spot them up front and run intercept. You don’t even have to wait for them to commit a crime.’
I nodded towards the box. ‘That’s what John said he was doing with this stuff, if anyone asked. But that was just his cover story, and I’m hoping you might have some idea what it was covering. See, I know this isn’t really about your Hippocratic oath, Nicky. It’s about protecting the bottom line. And part of that is you not giving away for free any information that I might be persuaded to pay for later. So you want paying, fine, you come up with a starting price and then we’ll haggle. But time is fucking money and right now I’m hypersensitive to people who waste any of mine – because someone tried to kill me the other night by dropping me down a lift shaft. So this is personal and it’s at the top of my things-to-do list. Is that understood?’
‘Yes!’
‘Yes what?’
‘Yes, it’s fucking understood. Open the box, you frigging arsehole!’
I took my weight off the lid and Nicky retrieved his hand, checking it for damage in a frigid, resentful silence. There wasn’t any: I’d been careful.
‘He started collecting around the end of October,’ Nicky muttered sullenly. ‘And he was throwing money around like it had a use-by date on it. It wasn’t just me – he had a whole team of us working on commission, buying everything we could pick up.’
‘Anything that had belonged to a killer?’
‘You see the cigarette packet? One of my coolest finds. Jimmy Pick tortured supergrass Deggy Wheaton with the lit end of a fag from that very packet, after he fingered Les Lathwell for the Barclays Bank massacre. It’s a piece of history.’ Cost three grand, if I remember rightly.’
‘Cost you, or cost John?’ I asked, to keep things clear.
‘The dealer asked for two-five,’ Nicky conceded. ‘I took my cut. That was understood. Hey, I don’t normally do this stuff. It was a personal favour, because John wanted to work through proxies.’
‘You’re a friend in need, Nicky.’
‘That’s the Samaritans, Castor. I work on margins.’
‘Tony Lambrianou. Ronnie Kray. George Cornell. Les Lathwell. Aaron Silver.’ I counted the names off on my fingers. ‘They’re all there in John’s notebook. What else have they got in common, Nicky?’
He grimaced, as if he found the question hard to swallow. ‘We didn’t name a price yet,’ he said.
‘Put it on the slate.’
‘Not what you said. You said I could name a—’
I opened the box lid wide, and the hinges gave a creak which was surprisingly eloquent and persuasive.
‘They’re all from the East End,’ Nicky said, holding up his hands in surrender – or maybe just to keep them well away from the box. ‘That was the brief, right? Lambrianou and Lathwell were in the Kray gang. Cornell worked for Charlie Richardson and was murdered by the Krays. That leaves Aaron Silver as the odd one out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s a couple of generations earlier. Pre-war, even. He was a mad rat-bastard Jewish immigrant who came over from Poland and tried to get work as a tailor. But his needlework sucked and he couldn’t get a start-up. So he has a brainwave one day and he starts going round all the other tailors, taking voluntary contributions for the Brick Lane Fire Service. You pay up front, they don’t burn your house down.’
‘It’s not exactly the Krays.’
‘You’re wrong. He was the ur-Krays. The Krays before the Krays, the great precursor. Protection was just where he got his foot in the door. Pretty soon it was prostitution, gambling, the tail end of the opium business – you name it. Silver wasn’t his real name, by the way. He was born Aaron Berg, but he went by Aaron Silver so that his family wouldn’t be shamed. Nice boy. Loved his mother.’
I nodded, turning these dusty old facts over in my mind. I’d been wondering ever since I met Chesney whether any of this might turn out to be connected in some way with Jan’s theory of a vengeful Myriam Kale wandering around London forty years after her death, but it seemed not. An American contract killer would still sit oddly with a bunch of East End gangsters.
‘You did your homework,’ I said to Nicky.
He looked at me, pulled his lower eyelid down with the tip of his middle finger – an unsettling gesture when a zombie does it, because the eye is desiccated and it’s not that firm in its socket to start with. ‘Only way to avoid getting ripped off is to know your stuff,’ Nicky told me. ‘John the Git was hungry for anything to do with those East End bad boys. Big premiums for stuff that hadn’t changed hands too many times since, and for stuff that they’d owned as kids.’
That explained the lead soldier and the toy car. But it still didn’t give me even the beginning of a clue as to what John had been looking for. I only knew – with absolute certainty – that the Lombroso stuff was a smokescreen. John had dropped out of university without finishing his degree, just as I had – but while my discipline was English, his was biology. And what little I knew about Lombroso came from a late-night drunken conversation in which John had told me at length what an utter wanker Lombroso had been.
‘So what was he looking for?’ I asked Nicky.
‘Why don’t you tell me?’ There was a sneer lurking behind the words. Nicky pushed the box away and stood up.
‘He had some animal pathologist running tests on these things. Checking them for fingerprints; for blood and DNA in the few cases where that was possible; probably for a lot of other things too.’
‘Then I guess he was looking for correlations. For patterns in the data.’
‘Like?’
