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.
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.’