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. 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 . . .’