Dead Men's s Boots

The sequences of notes – if that was what they were – had been set down as mere vertical strokes of a felt-tip pen, with no indication of how long they should be sustained, and they ricocheted all over the scale without rhyme or reason. If they looked like anything, it was the way Woodstock speaks in the Peanuts cartoon. It sure as hell wasn’t music. And in among the thickets of vertical lines there were letters of the alphabet, asterisks and horizontal dashes.

It was going to be another code, I realised wearily. Another stupid secret message from John to himself, which when decoded would probably reveal the secret location of another secret message, and so on to the goddamn crack of doom.

My whisky arrived and I studied the sheets as I drank, trying to figure out if there was any way they could be laid on top of each other or read from an odd angle to yield actual words. It didn’t work: the letters that were present were all Ds, Ts and Ks, and they were sprinkled around the page seemingly at random. As far as I could tell, there was nothing there: which just meant that I was still missing too many jigsaw pieces to guess what the picture was.

Missing pieces. Yeah, there were a lot of those. The other death-row souvenirs, for starters: the ones that Chesney had swiped for himself after he h‹sel=""2eard about John’s death and before I scared the shit out of him by calling him up.

An idea dropped into my head out of nowhere. I was reaching for my phone when I realised that I hadn’t managed yet to recharge the goddamn battery. I delved into my pocket instead, fished out my remaining small change and sifted it for silver. Enough for a local phone call, surely: and this was very local.

I crossed to the payphones. It was stupidly late, but hadn’t Chesney’s colleague – Smeet – said that they worked until ten o’clock? There was a good chance that Chesney would still be at the lab. Good enough to be worth a try.

I dialled Chesney’s mobile number – the one from John’s matchbook. He picked up on the third ring.

‘This is Vince,’ he said brightly. ‘What’s up?’

‘Funny you should ask,’ I said.

‘Castor!’ Not so bright, suddenly.

‘Hi, Vince. Working late at the office?’

‘Yes.’ He sounded surly and defensive now. ‘So?’

‘So I was wondering when it would be convenient for me to come over and collect the rest of John’s stuff.’

‘What rest? I gave you all there is.’

‘Please, Vince.’ I did my best to sound world-weary and bored. ‘Don’t make me read you a fucking itemised list. For one thing, Barbara Windsor’s high heels would be on it, and I don’t want casual passers-by to think I’m some sort of pervert. I’m assuming you kept the stuff you thought was going to bring the highest prices. I’m also assuming – because I like you and I’d hate to see pieces of you twisted or broken off – that you’ve still got them. Now if both of those assumptions are correct, the next word you say should be “yes”.’

A long pause, during which I had to feed the phone the last meagre remnants of my small change. ‘Yes,’ Vince said finally, with flat, tired resignation.

‘Good. Thank you. Now here’s another question for you.’ I tried to keep my tone casual, but this was the big inspiration that had come to me just now as I sipped my whisky, and the real reason why I was calling Chesney now rather than tomorrow morning. I phrased it as a bluff, because my instinct was to give him as little room to manoeuvre as possible. ‘Did you get anything useful out of the Myriam Kale piece?’

Silence from the other end of the line, which stretched. I waited as long as I could bring myself to, but in the end I had to prompt him. ‘Well?’

‘I’m just checking,’ Chesney snapped back sullenly. ‘I gave you the disc, remember? All I’ve got here are the back-up files, and I didn’t index them all that- oh. Okay. Yeah, here it is. Just a fingerprint. The stain wasn’t blood, it was lipstick or something. Carnauba wax, lanolin, petrolatum . . . yeah, it was just lipstick. The print’s pretty good, but then her print’s on record anyway. Why?’

I didn’t answer him. The implications of it blinded and deafened me for a moment or two. Pay dirt. It wasn’t just the fact that we now had the Kale artefact we needed to do a summoning. It was the link: the proof of what had been looking more and more likely ever since Doug Hunter let slip the word inscription when we dropped in on him at Pentonville. John’s dead k‹ beillers and the born-again Myriam Kale. Not two things, but one. It was hard to imagine what unlikely chain of skulduggery or coincidence could tie a bunch of East End hard men from the 1960s and before to a dead American gangster’s moll surfacing for a last bite of the cherry in a King’s Cross hotel room.