Dead Men's s Boots

The second landing was Nexus Veterinary Pathologists. The door was open and Chesney walked inside. There was no receptionist’s desk as such: the room was big and open-plan, and it had a vaguely unpleasant chemical smell. A cluster of chairs in the near corner was a token gesture towards a waiting room: the rest of the space was taken up { waellwith glass-fronted storage cupboards, steel lockers and uniform olive-green filing cabinets. Against the wall off on my left there were three different-sized desks, like the bowls of porridge in the story of Goldilocks. The biggest had a brass nameplate that read JOHN J. MORETON, MSc, DAP.

A young Asian woman in a white medical coat was squatting on her haunches on the far side of the room, stacking bottles on the lower shelves of one of the cupboards. It was too far to read the labels on the bottles, but the HAZCHEM sign on the box she was taking them out of was clear enough. Right next to her was a closed door plated with dull grey metal and marked NO ADMITTANCE TO GENERAL PUBLIC.

She looked round as we came in, and she gave Chesney a severe frown.

‘Thanks, Vince,’ she said, in a flat Luton and Dunstable accent. ‘That’s half my bloody lunch hour out the window. Why’ve you got mud on your knees?’

‘Sorry, Smeet,’ said Chesney. ‘I got held up.’

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 Go {n oze lden 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.