Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  ‘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. The Twilight Zone, yeah? That’s where this stuff belongs.’

  Chesney was actually quoting the voice-over intro of The Outer Limits, but this didn’t seem like the time to split hairs. He opened the box and started to unpack its contents. On top of the pile was a CD – marked CD+RW and scrawled over in black marker with the single word FINAL. Underneath that there were a dozen or more reseal-able plastic bags of the type that the police use for physical evidence. They held a slightly surreal variety of objects: I spotted a penknife; a Matchbox toy car; a big commemoration crown piece from some forgotten royal event; a playing card – ace of spades – that someone had signed illegibly; a fountain pen; a pair of pliers; a glass paperweight; a tie pin; and, unsettlingly in this innocuous company, a bullet.

  ‘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 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 – even 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.

  12

  Nicky was kind of surprised to see me again. And I was surprised, too, walking into the formerly empty shell of the old Gaumont to find a team of six men resurfacing walls and putting the seating back in. Nicky was supervising loudly and officiously, ignoring the plaster dust in the air because he didn’t have to breathe it. He turned and saw me, and threw out his hands as I approached as though I was going to frisk him.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘Castor, it’s only been four fucking hours. I didn’t even look at your stuff yet. I’ll call you when I’ve got any bones to toss to you, okay?’

  By way of answer I lifted the lid of the wooden box, which I still had tucked underneath my arm like Henry the Eighth’s head, and showed him its contents. He couldn’t blanch: zombies have a natural pallor that makes albinos look like dedicated sun-bed addicts. But he did look a little sick.

  ‘How about we go gnaw on a few together?’ I suggested.

  Nicky nodded slowly, and put out his hand to touch the box lid, pushing it down so that it covered the objects inside from view again. He turned to look over his shoulder at his little task force. ‘The rest of the stalls seats are over there, guys,’ he said, pointing. ‘If they’re not all in purple plush, do alternate purple and blue. Or make a star pattern, or something. But tasteful – I don’t want to end up with something that looks ongepotchket.’

  We went up to the projection booth, our footsteps echoing on bare concrete. This was Nicky’s inner sanctum, cluttered with whatever he was obsessing on at any given time and the rich and varied detritus of previous obsessions. It was generally pretty hard to move in there but today it looked worse than ever because he’d moved a lot of stuff up here from downstairs, out of the way of the builders. Once we were inside, Nicky closed a steel door like the door of a vault and turned to face me, looking stern and pissed off: I guess he’d decided that attack was the best form of defence.

  ‘I’ve got to maintain a professional relationship with those guys,’ he said, pointing down at the floor. ‘They’re working for me. And it’s kind of hard to get past their touchingly naive assumption that zombies are shambling retards who can be ripped off with total fucking impunity. So another time, Castor, you want to have something out with me you do it in private, okay? Entre fucking nous. Now, what’s this about? And for the record, before you start, you don’t have any beef with me. I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t talk to you about other people’s business.’

  I might have made a snappy comeback at this point – in fact, I’d normally have felt obliged to – but I was looking over Nicky’s shoulder, and I was momentarily distracted by the colossal 70mm projector that was sitting behind him, in a position previously occupied by his stinking hydroponics vats.

  ‘You’re reopening this place as a cinema?’ I asked, amazed.

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  ‘Is that a trick question, Nicky? How about because you hate people?’

  Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah, I do. The live ones are too warm and the dead ones are mostly falling apart and bleeding self-pity out of the joins. Fuck them all, is my motto.’

  ‘So opening a cinema – that’s facing your fears with a vengeance, wouldn’t you say?’

  Nicky looked peeved. ‘I didn’t say I was afraid of them, Castor. Just that I hate their guts. I also didn’t say that when this baby is up and running anyone else is getting in to see the show. It’s gonna be for an audience of one. Cinema Paradiso. Me and the dark and the black-andwhite dream machine.’

  I still couldn’t get my head around the idea – and I put the bollocking that I was about to give Nicky on the back burner while I tried. ‘What about making a small footprint?’ I demanded. ‘You’ll have to order prints of movies. Get on distribution databases. Deal with shipping companies.’ Staying inconspicuous had been Nicky’s highest priority from way back before he died: the world is a web, he said, and every time you touch one of the strands of the web you tell the spiders where you are. When he accessed the internet, he did it through a string of proxy servers as long as the great wall of China – and, like China, he treated information as though it was both a weapon and a shield. You couldn’t get a fix on Nicky: you couldn’t find him in any search. Even his electricity was hand-pumped from deep artesian wells rather than coming straight out of the national grid. He was the closest thing I’d ever met to an invisible man, and his paranoia was a thing of beautiful, terrible purity.

 
So this had to be, not the real Nicky, but some kind of lifelike – or rather deathlike – facsimile.

  ‘The small footprint is still a good working goal,’ Nicky said, almost off-handedly. ‘But think about it for a second, Castor. I kept a small footprint for years, and it didn’t stop this place being torn apart by Fanke and his fucking Satanists. I’m working on a different strategy now.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Which is my business. When it turns out to be yours, I’ll tell you about it.’

  ‘Okay.’ I gave up. The most likely diagnosis, as far as I could see, was that being winkled out of his shell by a crazed mob had made Nicky’s psychosis metastasise into a new form. And he was right. I’d find out about it somewhere down the line, so there was no point worrying at it now.

  I threw the box down on top of what looked like a baby’s changing table and strolled past Nicky into the room. He back-pedalled, keeping pace with me and staying in between me and his nice, shiny new projector. Evidently it was a look-don’t-touch kind of deal.

  ‘So let’s get down to business,’ I suggested. ‘I asked you what you were doing for John Gittings, and you came out with all that client-privilege palaver. Then I asked you to find me a curio that used to belong to a dead killer and you almost jumped out of your dry-cured skin. I noticed it at the time, but I didn’t know what it meant. Now I do. It was because John had been asking you to do the same thing on a bigger scale – death-row souvenirs by the bucketload – and you thought I might be playing some kind of mind-fuck on you. Trying to make you give yourself away.’

  Nicky spread his hands in a ‘there you have it’ gesture. ‘And I don’t know what in our previous relationship could have caused me to have so little trust in you,’ he said sardonically.