Dead Men's s Boots fc-3

by Mike Carey

  The Reflections Café Bar turned out to be on Wilton Road, directly opposite the front entrance to Victoria Station and offering a really top-notch view of the bus shelter.

  The name promised something eclectic and cosmopolitan. The reality was a narrow glass booth jutting out onto the pavement, containing a coffee machine, a fridge full of Carling Black Label, a counter top and six chairs. A teenaged girl in a maid’s uniform that looked as though it had to have been ordered from a fetish shop took my order for a double espresso with a nod and a smile, and I sat down. She was the only person in the place apart from a stocky, balding man in a drab-looking mid-brown suit, who had a film of sweat on his face as he worked through the Times sudoku – as though sudoku was an illicit thrill of some kind.

  I sat down well within his field of vision, but he didn’t react and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was five past twelve by this time, so there was a chance that my man had already been and gone. That seemed more likely when my coffee came and he still hadn’t showed. Taking a sip of the tepid liquid, I stared out of the window at the bus shelter across the street and idly scanned the faces of the people waiting for the number 73. None of them so much as glanced at the window of the café: none of them looked as though they were trying to pluck up the courage to step inside.

  The waitress was lost in the intricacies of cleaning out the coffee machine’s drip-tray. The bald guy was working on his puzzle. Nobody seemed to want to make contact with me. Probably time to chalk this one up to experience and walk away. Might as well finish my coffee first, though.

  And while I did that, I scanned the faces at the bus stop again. Most of them were new, but one of them had been there the whole time, while half a dozen buses came and went. He was a skinny guy in his late twenties or thereabouts, in an LL Cool J T-shirt, black jacket and jeans. His nose was the size and shape of a rudder, and made the rest of his face look like it had been arranged around it in a space that wasn’t quite wide enough. He had a sallow, unhealthy complexion, and the trailing wires of a pair of headphones dangling from his ears: his crisply ringleted head nodded gently, double four time, as he soaked up the vibrations of whatever was playing on his iPod. He still hadn’t looked at me: or if he had, I hadn’t caught him at it.

  The usual place. Maybe I’d jumped to conclusions. Maybe the late Mister Gittings had out-paranoided me yet again. Leave the matchbook, yeah, and the phone number: but don’t quite join the dots, because then everyone else will see the shape of what you’re making. Maybe the usual place was somewhere you could watch from the Reflections café.

  I finished my coffee, paid up at the counter and walked out onto the street. The guy at the bus stop moved off at the same time, still – as far as I could tell – without glancing in my direction. I followed him at a medium-fast stroll, crossing the street as he tacked away to the south, towards Bridge Place.

  We were in the maze of bus lanes and bollards in front of Victoria station now, and I thought he might veer off to the right and go inside. He didn’t, though, and he didn’t look behind him. He just kept ambling along, his head still bobbing slightly in time to his personal soundtrack. I kept pace with him, only ten feet behind now. I slid my hand inside my coat, found my mobile and took it out. Almost out of charge, I noticed: already showing empty, in fact, but there ought to be enough juice for this. Pressing the RECENT CALLS button I found the number I’d dialled the night before – the one John had written down on the matchbook cover – selected it and called it up.

  A second. Two. Then I heard the tinny, boppy, tooth-jangling strains of the Crazy Frog sound from right ahead of me.

  The skinny guy’s head jerked in a belated double take. His hand snaked into his jeans pocket to turn his phone off and he turned to look back at me, locking eyes with me for the first time. He must have had the phone set to vibrate, too: either that or there was no music on his headphones in the first place. Abruptly, without warning, he bolted.

  I sprinted after him, instinctively bearing right to cut him off if he headed for the station concourse: if he got inside there with even a few seconds’ lead on me, I’d never see him again.

  But he wasn’t trying for the station: he sprinted straight out across Bridge Place, almost getting sideswiped by a bus which cost me a second or two as I slowed to let it pass. Then he plunged into a side street.

  I was almost thirty feet behind him now, and by the time I got to the corner of the street he was already out of sight. I kept running anyway, scanning the street on both sides to see if there were any clues as to where he might have gone. Only one turn-off, on the left. I took that, and was just in time to see him vanish around another corner away up ahead of me.

  Maybe I don’t exercise as much as I should. I know health experts recommend half an hour a day: I did half an hour back in 1999 and then sort of fell behind, what with all that excitement about the new millennium and all. I was already feeling winded when I reached the next corner, while the guy I was chasing seemed to be accelerating if anything.

  I got a lucky break, though, when a door opened ahead of him and a woman came out into the street leading two children by the hand. They turned towards us, forming a pavement-wide barrier and giving him the choice between trampling them underfoot or making a wide detour. He skidded to a halt, almost slamming into the startled woman, then swerved across the street, past a skip full of someone’s defunct living-room furniture and into an alley.

  I took the hypotenuse and won back enough time to snatch the base unit of a standard lamp from the skip as I passed it. Aerodynamically it was piss-poor, but this was no time to be picky. Putting on a last desperate spurt of speed, I held it out beside me like a vaulter’s pole: but then I flung it like a javelin.

  It didn’t have the balance of a javelin, and the heavy end dipped at once towards the ground as it flew. Another couple of feet and it would just have hit the pavement and spun away, end over end. But I was riding my luck and it stayed with me: the shaft went squarely between the guy’s pounding feet and he tripped, smacking down heavily on the stone slabs.

  He was winded, but he managed to scramble up again and limp forward another couple of steps. By that time, though, I was on him. I knocked him down again with a shoulder charge: then I jumped on top of him, planting one knee into the small of his back to pin him to the ground. He squirmed and tried to get up, but I had the advantage of weight and position.

  ‘What the fuck!’ he spluttered. ‘Let go of me! Are you frigging insane?’

  ‘We haven’t met,’ I panted, my pulse pounding and my breath coming in ragged hiccups. ‘Well, except on the phone. But I’m hoping we can be friends. I’m Castor. Who are you?’

  ‘I’m gonna scream,’ the guy snarled, still struggling. His head snaked around to glare at me, his nose looking like a raptor’s beak. ‘You think you can do this in broad daylight? Out on the street?’

  ‘I think,’ I said, still breathless, ‘that you wanted to take – a look at me without – committing yourself. And for some reason you got cold feet. I told you, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just a friend of John’s.’

  ‘Then let me up!’

  I did. He looked to be in even worse shape to run again than I was, but in any case I could see now that the alley was a dead end: there was nowhere for him to run to. I stood up and stepped back, letting him climb slowly to his feet.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him again. ‘And tell me the goddamn truth. I was in a bad mood when I got here and it’s not getting any better.’

  He rubbed his knee, favouring me with a sneering grin. ‘Yeah, I’m not surprised,’ he sniggered. ‘Sitting there in the café, like you’re waiting for a blind date. Should’ve worn a white carnation in your- Chesney,’ he added hastily, as I took a step towards him. ‘Vincent. Vincent Chesney.’ He threw up his hands to protect himself.

  I grabbed the right one, much to his surprise, and shook it hard. It probably looked absurdly formal given the fact that I’d just chased h
im down like a dog chases a hare, but I didn’t give a damn. I was here to collect information, and one way was as good as another.

  Sometimes the impressions I pick up from skin contact are fleeting and ambiguous: other times they’re so sharp and immediate it’s like a movie with five-point surround sound. Vincent Chesney didn’t have any psychic barriers to speak of, and his emotions just arrived in my head unmediated, with almost painful clarity.

  The grin was just bravado: underneath it, he was afraid. Afraid of me, mostly, but not just of what I might do to physically damage him. There was something else in the back of his mind: something else at stake.

  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.

  ‘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.

  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 with 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 Golden 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.