Dead Men's s Boots

It seemed like something of an extreme reaction: okay, maybe this sounded pretty sleazy, but I knew him well enough to be sure he didn’t have any moral objections. Still, something was bothering him sufficiently that he hadn’t been able to hide it.

‘I thought we had a “no bullshit” rule in place, Castor,’ he said, his tone unreadable.

‘You think this is bullshit, Nicky?’

‘Isn’t it? You give me Gittings’s book, you pump me about what I was doing for him, and now . . .’ He hesitated and shrugged, as though I ought to be able to join the dots for myself.

‘It’s not about John. It’s a different case.’ I reached towards him with my hand, palm out in a gesture of reassurance, but didn’t actually touch him. He hates to be touched by th s tos he living because their skin is a germ factory where the assembly lines are always running. And since he hates to hang out with other zombies for aesthetic reasons it’s been a while since anyone got inside his personal space. ‘Pull it back, Nicky. I swear, I’m not trying to get you to compromise your one last professional ethic, even though I didn’t know you had one until now.’

He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. ‘It may not be something you can help me with in any case. There was a gangster back in the 1960s named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get hold of her and sent her to the chair.’

‘An American gangster,’ Nicky said, with careful emphasis.

‘Yeah. Sorry, I thought I said that already. Anyway, you know the way these things work, probably better than I do. There’s always a market for celebrity souvenirs. And it’s kind of like an iceberg – some of it’s above the water, most of it isn’t.’

‘Sure,’ Nicky said. He seemed mollified now. Whatever I’d said to upset him, he’d either bounced back from it or else filed it away for later. I still couldn’t figure out what had got under his skin in that way, but right then didn’t seem like the best time to ask.

‘So,’ I summed up, shielding my eyes as the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds, ‘you think you could lay your hands on something?’

He nodded a few times, not in answer to the question but acknowledging that it was an interesting commission. ‘Funnily enough,’ he said, shooting me another narrow-eyed stare, as if warning me off making any smart one-liners, ‘I’ve got some contacts in that line of business.’

‘No kidding?’

‘No kidding.’ Nicky slid away along the bench, out of the patch of sunlight. He might have reclaimed the day, but he was clearly going to be selective about which parts of it he kept. ‘I’m not making any promises. Stuff like that doesn’t come up for sale too often, and when it does it tends to go for crazy prices. Supply and demand. There’s a whole lot of sickos out there, and only so many dead serial killers. You might not want to pay the asking price.’

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.’

‘Buy it, sell it on again,’ Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession, with commission to be made twice over. ‘Yeah, maybe. Who’s this “we”, by the way, and what do you want this little keepsake for?’

I got up. ‘Call me if you get a bite,’ I said. ‘Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s life,’ Nicky observed.

When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.

11

Sometimes synchronicity is your friend. Everything flows together, and the thing you’re looking for just turns out to be in the first place where your groping fingers vingcome down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t feeling like one.

I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café, which going by the postcode was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t know who I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t want to miss it. In the meantime though, I had some time to kill. So I strolled back up to Trafalgar Square, for the hell of it and the Harris hawks, and while I was walking I called Jan Hunter to tell her how my meeting with Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet: I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for the sake of getting a second opinion. I didn’t mention Kale, either: not at first. I was afraid of offering her any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder.