Dead Men's s Boots

tell, there was nothing there: which just meant that I was still missing too many jigsaw pieces to guess what the picture was.

Missing pieces. Yeah, there were a lot of those. The other death-row souvenirs, for starters: the ones that Chesney had swiped for himself after he heard about John’s death and before I scared the shit out of him by calling him up.

An idea dropped into my head out of nowhere. I was reaching for my phone when I realised that I hadn’t managed yet to recharge the goddamn battery. I delved into my pocket instead, fished out my remaining small change and sifted it for silver. Enough for a local phone call, surely: and this was very local.

I crossed to the payphones. It was stupidly late, but hadn’t Chesney’s colleague – Smeet – said that they worked until ten o’clock? There was a good chance that Chesney would still be at the lab. Good enough to be worth a try.

I dialled Chesney’s mobile number – the one from John’s matchbook. He picked up on the third ring.

‘This is Vince,’ he said brightly. ‘What’s up?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ I said.

‘Castor!’ Not so bright, suddenly.

‘Hi, Vince. Working late at the office?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded surly and defensive now. ‘So?’

‘So I was wondering when it would be convenient for me to come over and collect the rest of John’s stuff.’

‘What rest? I gave you all there is.’

‘Please, Vince.’ I did my best to sound world-weary and bored. ‘Don’t make me read you a fucking itemised list. For one thing, Barbara Windsor’s high heels would be on it, and I don’t want casual passers-by to think I’m some sort of pervert. I’m assuming you kept the stuff you thought was going to bring the highest prices. I’m also assuming – because I like you and I’d hate to see pieces of you twisted or broken off – that you’ve still got them. Now if both of those assumptions are correct, the next word you say should be “yes”.’

A long pause, during which I had to feed the phone the last meagre remnants of my small change. ‘Yes,’ Vince said finally, with flat, tired resignation.

‘Good. Thank you. Now here’s another question for you.’ I tried to keep my tone casual, but this was the big inspiration that had come to me just now as I sipped my whisky, and the real reason why I was calling Chesney now rather than tomorrow morning. I phrased it as a bluff, because my instinct was to give him as little room to manoeuvre as possible. ‘Did you get anything useful out of the Myriam Kale piece?’

Silence from the other end of the line, which stretched. I waited as long as I could bring myself to, but in the end I had to prompt him. ‘Well?’

‘I’m just checking,’ Chesney snapped back sullenly. ‘I gave you the disc, remember? All I’ve got here are the back-up files, and I didn’t index them all that- oh. Okay. Yeah, here it is. Just a fingerprint. The stain wasn’t blood, it was lipstick or something. Carnauba wax, lanolin, petrolatum . . . yeah, it was just lipstick. The print’s pretty good, but then her print’s on record anyway. Why?’

I didn’t answer him. The implications of it blinded and deafened me for a moment or two. Pay dirt. It wasn’t just the fact that we now had the Kale artefact we needed to do a summoning. It was the link: the proof of what had been looking more and more likely ever since Doug Hunter let slip the word inscription when we dropped in on him at Pentonville. John’s dead killers and the born- again Myriam Kale. Not two things, but one. It was hard to imagine what unlikely chain of skulduggery or coincidence could tie a bunch of East End hard men from the 1960s and before to a dead American gangster’s moll surfacing for a last bite of the cherry in a King’s Cross hotel room. But some massive, subterranean chain of cause and effect was there, had to be there, just out of my line of sight. I felt like I’d been strolling along the banks of Loch Ness and I’d just glimpsed one coil of an otherwise hidden monster breaking the water in front of my startled eyes.

‘Castor? You still there?’ Chesney’s voice brought me out of my trance. ‘I said, why did you want to know?’

I checked my watch. Okay, it was going to be a tight squeeze. Tighter than tight: I’d turn up at Juliet’s late, and Sue Book would look at me with reproachful tears in her eyes and a burned casserole in her oven-gloved hands. Then Juliet would rip out my intestines for making Susan cry.

‘Because I need it right now,’ I said. ‘Have it ready for me, okay? I’m at Victoria, so I should be with you inside of ten minutes.’

‘No!’ he protested. ‘I’m not on my own here. Smeet’s in the lab doing a dissection. This is a lousy time.’

‘Chesney, I don’t care. I’m coming over.’

‘Fuck! Okay, I’ll be waiting on the stairs. Outside the porno studio, yeah? On the first floor?’

‘Fine. See you there.’

I hung up and headed for the exit. Belatedly I realised that I should have called Juliet too, and told her I was going to be late. But I could do that on the return arc – and at least then I could tell her, with my hand on my heart, that I was on my way. And maybe the trophy I’d be bringing back with me would take the edge off her demonic strop.

I left the station and crossed the road, looking behind me by force of habit. No tails – and no sense of a tail: no premonitory prickling at the back of my neck or the back of my mind. If something dead had been sticking close to me over the past few days, it was gone now.

I turned into the small cul-de-sac where Nexus Veterinary Pathologists had set up their shingle: I could see from the other end of the street that their door was standing open, presumably because Vince had already come downstairs and left it ajar for me.

But hadn’t he said that there was a security guard on at night? The bare foyer beyond the door was brightly lit and it seemed to be deserted.

I was a little wary as I approached the door and stepped inside. I’m prolific with threats but I didn’t want to get Vince disciplined or sacked if there was nothing to be gained by it.

The security post was empty, but the monitor behind the counter was switched on, showing a stretch of empty stairwell. Perhaps the guard was on his rounds.

Or perhaps not. As I came forward past the security post, heading for the stairs, I caught a glimpse of something dark behind the counter, close to the ground. It was a slicked mass of hair, the top of a man’s head. I stopped and leaned over the counter, looking down.

The guard was lying on the floor, his back propped against the rear wall of his narrow domain. It was hard to see his face because his head was bowed forward onto his chest: but the sheer amount of blood dribbling down onto his torso and spreading across the floor around him suggested that there might not be that much face left to see in any case.

Still dribbling. Still spreading.

This had only just happened.

The urge to run away from danger is one of the hallmarks of sanity, and I like to think I’m as sane as the next man – although in London that’s probably not saying very much. There were two reasons why I sprinted up the stairs rather than back out into the street: one was the conviction – maybe unreasonable – that whoever had done this was the same whoever who’d tried to drop me down a lift shaft; the other was that I wanted answers, and sticking my head into the lion’s mouth seemed to be the only way I was going to get them.

The thought that Vince and Smeet might still be alive up there occurred to me as I hit the first landing, so I can’t say it was part of the initial impetus that launched me. Maybe it kept me moving as I took the next flight, running towards the door of the vet’s office, which was not only open but off its hinges.

I slowed on the threshold as a wave of stink hit me – hot, sharp animal pheremones, so pungent they thickened the air. A loup-garou: it had to be. Nothing natural smells like that. I reached inside my coat for my tin whistle, turning slowly as I advanced into the room to minimise the chances of an attack from behind. But whatever it was, this thing would probably be quick and ruthless: the guard downstairs had died at his post, and seemed just to have fallen where he stood, with no sign of struggle or flight.

There were plenty of signs of struggle up here, though. The lab had been trashed with spectacular thoroughness and violence: desks and cabinets upended and thrown around the room, splintered shelves sagging and bleeding books and files onto the floor. Broken glass crunched under my feet as I circled.