Dead Men's s Boots

I released his hand and he snatched it back, suspicious and faintly indignant.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Yeah. I did want to get a look at you first. What’s wrong with that, man? Calling me in the night. You could have been frigging anybody, seen? I’ve got to watch my back. I’m in a delicate position here.’

‘Are you?’ I asked politely. ‘Why is that then, Vincent?’

‘Vince.’

‘Question stands.’

‘Okay,’ he said again, hesitant, unhappy. ‘You’ve come for the items, right?’ He put the same sort of heavy, loaded stress on the word that the till assistant in a chemist’s would put on ‘something for the weekend’.

‘The items that John left with you?’ I hazarded. Chesney nodded, looking even glummer.

‘They’re one of the things I’ve come for,’ I lied.

‘Well, okay. Yeah. That’s what I thought. It’s just around the corner.’

The switch from plural to singular threw me. ‘What is?’ I demanded.

‘The place where I work. I can get you the stuff, right? It’s just around the corner. But you’ll have to wait here while I-’ He broke off, because he could see from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to buy it. ‘Well, if you come up with me,’ he snapped sullenly, ‘you follow my lead, yeah? I mean, back me up, whatever I say about you. This is gonna look bad enough anyway. I don’t want to lose my frigging job, seen?’

‘I’ll follow your lead,’ I promised. I stepped aside and let him walk past me, back onto the street. Then I followed him – not back towards Bridge Place, but further south. I was getting my breath back now, and Chesney was getting back some of the cocky cool I’d heard in his voice when he picked up the phone the first time.

get""-1em"" width=""2em"">‘So what are you?’ he asked me as we walked. ‘You said you worked with Gittings. Does that make you another ghosthunter? Get thee behind me, Dennis Wheatley kind of thing? Nothing wrong with it, mind you. Bit macho, bit paternalistic, not my cup of cocoa, but someone’s got to do it. Is someone you?’

‘Yeah,’ I confirmed, when I’d figured out what the hell he was talking about. ‘Someone is me.’

‘Well, fine. And you scare up a bit of business by looking at the tea leaves. I get it. Sounded wacko at first. But then you start looking at the evidence and you think, whoa, fuck, that’s scary. The same patterns, unto the third and fourth generation and all that. And then he died, and I had to wonder.’

‘Wonder what?’ I asked, hoping against hope for a coherent sentence.

‘If maybe he got too close to the flame,’ he elaborated, pantomiming the flight of a moth with vague gestures. ‘You know, if he was chasing after this stuff, and he went to the source, someone might have taken it personally. That’s what I was scared of. That’s why I put the phone down when you called. I mean, you could have been anybody, as far as I was concerned. You could be one of the really cold geezers with the most to lose, yeah? And someone comes along, wants to buy something with your fingerprints on, what are you gonna think? Maybe you just take out a gun and bang. Maybe you even watch the message boards, listen to the wires. Like, who’s this guy going around picking up my leavings? What does he want? Bring his body down here. Most likely not, but hey. You get me?’

I nodded, but only for the sake of form. Either this guy was assuming I knew a hell of a lot more than I did or else he always talked like this – in which case I’d have to beat him to death with his own iPod.

We stopped in front of an anonymous Georgian edifice that had once been someone’s house and was now three sets of offices. I say three because there were three small plaques on the wall next to the door: Vitastar Films; Nexus Veterinary Pathologists; Deacon Lloyd Educational Publishing.

The door was unlocked, but it only opened into a tiny vestibule. The inner door was operated by a swipe-card lock, and Chesney had the card hanging on a chain at his belt. He swiped us through, putting two fingers up at the security camera mounted on the door frame.

‘Nobody there,’ he said dismissively – and it was true that the security desk in the hall was deserted. ‘There’s a guard comes on at nights, but he never checks the camera footage anyway. It’s just pour encourager les cretins. Most of this shit is. If I wanted to fake the swipe reader, I could do it with an old bus pass.’

We ascended the stairs, with Chesney in the lead. The first landing was Vitastar Pictures, but we kept on going. ‘Porn,’ said Chesney, who seemed to have taken on the role of tour guide now. ‘You get one girl and ten guys standing outside here every Monday morning. I think they put out a lot of bukkake titles.’

He pronounced the word ‘buck-cake’, which had the side effect of making it seem a lot more wholesome than it was. I thought of the Waltons. Then tried hard not to.