Dead Men's s Boots

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-and-white 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.

‘It’s not about trust.’ I put my hand on the curve of the projector’s lens turret and Nicky swatted it away. ‘It’s about not making me run round in circles when life’s short enough already. Was there some reason to keep me in the dark about John’s hobby? Was there anyone whose interests could have been harmed in any way at all by you levelling with me?’

‘Not my call,’ Nicky deadpanned, wiping the turret with his shirt cuff where my hand had touched it. ‘His widow, maybe? His kids? Fuck do I know? First do no harm, is my motto.’

‘Since when, Nicky?’

‘Since now.’

‘Right. Or maybe you had the same idea Chesney had. That if nobody got to find out about this shit you could have a garage sale in due course and pocket the profit.’

‘Chesney?’

‘Never mind.’

I’d been looking at the projector: I didn’t know enough about these things to tell if it was high-end or low-end, state-of-the-art or shoddy; I was just looking, like a prospective buyer in a second-hand car dealership. Now I looked at Nicky instead.

‘Sit down,’ I said.

‘I’m happy standing.’

‘No,’ I explained patiently. ‘This isn’t “Sit down and make yourself comfortable”. This is “Sit down, or I’ll have to sit you down and then you might break.”’ There was an office chair, on rollers, within the reach of my outstretched arm. I snagged it and rolled it across to him. It took him a moment or two to decide, but when I actually took a step towards him he sat down hurriedly.

‘This is bullshit, Castor,’ he said angrily. ‘And you wouldn’t pull it on someone who was still alive.’

I wheeled the chair back over to the changing table where I’d dumped John’s box. I opened the lid again, took out Vince Chesney’s disc and thrust it into his hands.

‘You’re going to look this over for me,’ I said.

‘Yeah? Why am I going to do that?’

‘Because I’m asking you. Nicely, so far.’

Nicky turned the disc over in his hands, examining it with a remote, bored expression. ‘You know Cesare 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?’

‘Like I’ll have to look the disc over for myself and get back to you. It’s way past time we named that price, Castor.’

‘So name it.’

‘Five hundred. Plus I get to keep what’s in the box.’

‘Jesus!’ I did my best to sound appalled. ‘You just told me one item in there is worth three grand, Nicky. Why the hell should I let you pocket the whole lot?’

He threw his arms in the air. ‘Because it’s no skin off you,’ he said.

‘The five hundred is. I’m not going to clear that myself. Carla isn’t paying me, and the Myriam Kale thing is pretty much on spec.’

‘Okay, say two hundred,’ he conceded magnanimously. ‘And the stuff in the box.’

‘Two hundred is fine. You sell off the stuff in the box and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with Carla Gittings.’

‘Agreed.’

‘But everything stays here until I tell you it’s okay to sell it. I still don’t know where we’re going with this. I’d hate to come back here looking for something in particular and find you’d already hocked it on eBay.’

‘Fair enough,’ Nicky said. ‘Better than fair. I’m on the case, Castor, in spite of the shit you just pulled. And just as a token of good faith, just so you know I’m on the level, I’ll tell you something for free.’

‘Yeah?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, Nicky?’

‘You were stiffed. There should be at least thirty or forty other things in the box.’

I blinked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Am I sure? I can give you the fucking inventory, if you want me to. It’s a lot of the choicest stuff that’s missing, too – lots of Kray memorabilia. Including a pair of high-heeled shoes that used to belong to Barbara Windsor which I bought from a priest in Flitwick, Bedfordshire. Long, surreal story. And that’s just the items I got for John: there’s a lot more that he bought through other people or picked up for himself.’

Son of a bitch. So that was why Vince Chesney had caved in so fast: he’d given me the bargain-basement stuff and kept the top-drawer items for himself.

‘I’ll get you the rest, too,’ I promised. ‘In the meantime, work through whatever the fuck is on that disc and give me a précis. Anything at all that you think looks interesting. I’m completely in the dark on this, Nicky. A single candle might be all I need.’

‘Sure, sure.’ He herded me towards the door, anxious to be rid of me now that the deal was sealed. But when I was halfway down the stairs he called out to me. I stopped and he came down to meet me, fishing in the pocket of his jeans.

‘Here,’ he said. He handed me the key, which I’d forgotten I’d given to him. ‘I almost forgot. Left-luggage lockers, Victoria station.’

A hundred yards from where John Gittings and Vince Chesney had had their meets. Yeah, it figured. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome. I await your lavish apology.’

‘It’s coming,’ I said. ‘Sooner or later. This makes it sooner.’ I tucked the key away in one of the many hidden pockets of my coat. ‘What’s your first screening going to be, Nicky?’

‘That Friedkin movie.’ He snapped his fingers, pretending to consult his memory. ‘The one where the exorcist gets thrown through the window and bleeds out on the pavement. I’ll do it as a double bill with Day of the Dead. You know me. I love a happy ending.’

‘Call me,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘A single candle. Sure. Just don’t leave the gas on, Castor. Naked flames are dangerous things to have around. Hey, is your mobile turned off?’

‘No,’ I said, automatically, without checking. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m turning into your fucking answering service. That cop friend of yours called to say he might have something juicy for you in a day or so. And I do not appreciate you giving him my number.’

‘And?’

‘And Pen Bruckner rang three times since I got back from seeing you this morning. Wants to know where you are. She said you were due in court or something.’

From Walthamstow to Barnet isn’t that far as the crow flies. As the taxi crawls along the North Circular Road, though, it’s a fair way. Out of sheer desperation I offered the driver an extra twenty if he could cut some corners, and he peeled off onto some back streets where we seemed to go faster but cover less ground.

I was right about the phone: it was still turned on. But the battery, which is old and needs replacing, had run out of power, so the point was moot. Sometimes I can coax a minute or two longer out of it by ejecting it and then sliding it back into place, but not this time: it was definitively dead.

By the time I got to the courthouse it must have been almost four o’clock. I was hoping that the case might have started late, but as soon as I saw Pen sitting on the courtroom steps I knew it was beside the point to hurry now. I also knew from her face how the hearing had gone.

I sat down next to her. She didn’t look around, or seem to notice.

‘What happened?’ I demanded. She didn’t answer, so I asked again. ‘Pen, what happened?’

‘He said he’d looked at the composition of the panel,’ said Pen slowly, sounding almost as though she was reading the words from a badly printed sheet. ‘And it wasn’t right. They were supposed to make sure the panel were completely independent – no conflicts of interest or anything – and they hadn’t. So any decision the panel made wasn’t valid.’

I blinked. That sounded like good news as far as it went. ‘Then we’re—’

‘But he also said he’d thought about the power-of-attorney thing, and he’d changed his mind about it not being in his jurisdiction.’ She looked at me, her face strained and pale. ‘He said someone had to look out for Rafi, and it had to be someone who could be trusted to make decisions in his best interests. Someone who understood the medical background and knew what was at stake, and wasn’t going to act out of emotion or prejudice. Someone with an independent mind, and an expert grasp of the issues.’

I saw the punchline coming, but common sense rebelled at it. So did my stomach. ‘You’re not fucking telling me-?’ I protested.

Pen nodded.

‘He gave it to Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. She’s got power of attorney, now, and she’s already signed the consent forms. She brought them with her, Fix. She knew this was going down. Then Runcie let them convene the hearing right there because all the panel were present, and it was one, two, three, you’re done.’ She blinked away tears. ‘I thought he was trying to do what was right for Rafi, but he’s just railroaded us. That cow is going to take Rafi away to the MOU tomorrow and then she can do what she likes to him.’

‘Over my dead body,’ I promised.

But that was the kind of knee-jerk response you have to be wary of. It only took a few moments of sober reflection before I thought better of it.

‘Better yet,’ I amended, ‘over hers.’