Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “Yes!”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, it’s fucking understood. Open the box, you frigging arsehole!”

  I took my weight off the lid, and he retrieved his hand, checking it for damage in a frigid, resentful silence. There wasn’t any. I’d been careful.

  “He started collecting around the end of October,” Nicky muttered sullenly. “And he was throwing money around like it had a use-by date on it. It wasn’t just me—he had a whole team of us working on commission, buying everything we could pick up.”

  “Anything that had belonged to a killer?”

  “Belonged to. Been used by. Been touched by. You see the bullet? One of my coolest finds. Les Lathwell loaded that into a gun that he carried to the Barclays bank massacre in sixty-nine. It was used in evidence when the case came to trial. That bumped the price up. It cost three grand, if I remember rightly.”

  “Cost you or cost John?” I asked, to keep things clear.

  “The dealer asked for two five,” Nicky conceded. “I took my cut. That was understood. Hey, I don’t normally do this stuff. It was a personal favor because John wanted to work through proxies.”

  “You’re a friend in need, Nicky.”

  “That’s the Samaritans, Castor. I work on margin.”

  “Tony Lambrianou. Ronnie Kray. George Cornell. Les Lathwell. Aaron Silver.” I counted off the names on my fingers. “They’re all there in John’s notebook. What else have they got in common, Nicky?”

  He grimaced as if he found the question hard to swallow. “We didn’t name a price yet,” he said.

  “Put it on the slate.”

  “Not what you said. You said I could name a—”

  I opened the box lid wide, and the hinges gave a creak that was surprisingly eloquent and persuasive.

  “They’re all from the East End,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender, or maybe just to keep them well away from the box. “That was the brief, right? Lambrianou and Lathwell were in the Kray gang. Cornell worked for Charlie Richardson and was murdered by the Krays. That leaves Aaron Silver as the odd one out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a couple of generations earlier. Prewar, even. He was a mad rat-bastard Jewish immigrant who came over from Poland and tried to get work as a tailor. But his needlework sucked, and he couldn’t get a start-up. So he had a brainwave one day and started going around all the other tailors, taking voluntary contributions for the Brick Lane Fire Service. You pay up front, they don’t burn your house down.”

  “It’s not exactly the Krays.”

  “You’re wrong. He was the ur-Krays. The Krays before the Krays, the great precursor. Protection was where he got his foot in the door. Pretty soon it was prostitution, gambling, the tail end of the opium business—you name it. Silver wasn’t his real name, by the way. He was born Aaron Berg, but he went by Aaron Silver so his family wouldn’t be ashamed. Nice boy. Loved his mother.”

  I nodded, turning over these dusty old facts in my mind. I’d been wondering ever since I met Chesney whether any of this might turn out to be connected in some way with Jan’s theory of a vengeful Myriam Kale wandering around London forty years after her death, but it seemed not. An American contract killer would still sit oddly with a bunch of East End gangsters. “You did your homework,” I said to Nicky.

  He looked at me and pulled his lower eyelid down with the tip of his middle finger—an unsettling gesture when a zombie does it, because the eye is desiccated, and it’s not that firm in its socket to start with. “Only way to avoid getting ripped off is to know your stuff,” Nicky told me. “John the Git was hungry for anything to do with those East End bad boys. Big premiums for stuff that hadn’t changed hands too many times since, and for stuff that they’d owned as kids.”

  That explained the lead soldier and the toy car. But it still didn’t give me even the beginning of a clue as to what John had been looking for. I only knew—with absolute certainty—that the Lombroso stuff was a smokescreen. John had dropped out of university without finishing his degree, just as I had, but while my discipline was English, his was biology. And what little I knew about Lombroso came from a late-night drunken conversation in which John had told me at length what an utter wanker Lombroso had been.

  “So what was he looking for?” I asked Nicky.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” There was a sneer lurking behind the words. Nicky pushed the box away and stood up.

  I said, “He had some animal pathologist running tests on these things. Checking them for fingerprints; for blood and DNA in the few cases where that was possible; probably for a lot of other things, too.”

  “Then I guess he was looking for correlations. For patterns in the data.”

  “Like?”

  “Like I’ll have to look over the disk myself and get back to you. It’s way past time we named that price, Castor.”

  “So name it.”

  “Five hundred. Plus I get to keep what’s in the box.”

  “Jesus!” I did my best to sound appalled. “You just told me one item in there is worth three grand, Nicky. Why the hell should I let you pocket the whole lot?”

  He threw his arms in the air. “Because it’s no skin off you,” he said.

  “The five hundred is. I’m not going to clear that myself. Carla isn’t paying me, and the Myriam Kale thing is pretty much on spec.”

  “Okay, say two hundred,” he conceded magnanimously. “And the stuff in the box.”

  “Two hundred is fine. You sell off the stuff in the box and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with Carla Gittings.”

  “Agreed.”

  “But everything stays here until I tell you it’s okay to sell it. I still don’t know where we’re going with this. I’d hate to come back here looking for something in particular and find you’ve already hocked it on eBay.”

  “Fair enough,” Nicky said. “Better than fair. I’m on the case, Castor, in spite of the shit you just pulled. And as a token of good faith, so you know I’m on the level, I’ll tell you something for free.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s that, Nicky?”

  “You were stiffed. There should be at least thirty or forty other things in the box.”

  I blinked. “You’re sure?”

  “Am I sure? I can give you the fucking inventory if you want me to. It’s a lot of the choicest stuff that’s missing, too—lots of Kray memorabilia. Including a pair of leather bondage pants that I bought from a priest in Flitwick, Bedfordshire. Long, sordid story. And that’s only the items I got for John. There’s a lot more that he bought through other people or picked up himself.”

  Son of a bitch. So that was why Vince Chesney had caved so fast. He’d given me the bargain-basement stuff and kept the top drawer for himself.

  “I’ll get you the rest, too,” I promised. “In the meantime, work through whatever the fuck is on that disk and give me a précis. Anything at all you think looks interesting. I’m completely in the dark on this, Nicky. A single candle might be all I need.”

  “Sure, sure.” He herded me toward the door, anxious to be rid of me now that the deal was sealed. But when I was halfway down the stairs, he called out to me. I stopped, and he came down to meet me, fishing in the pocket of his jeans. “Here,” he said. He handed me the key, which I’d forgotten I’d given to him. “I almost forgot. Left luggage lockers, Victoria Station.”

  A hundred yards from where John and Vince Chesney had had their meets. Yeah, it figured. “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. I await your lavish apology.”

  “It’s coming,” I said. “Sooner or later. This makes it sooner.” I tucked the key away in one of the many hidden pockets of my coat. “What’s your first screening going to be, Nicky?”

  “That Friedkin movie.” He snapped his fingers, pretending to consult his memory. “The one where the exorcist gets thrown through the window and bleeds out on the pavement. I’ll do it as a double bill with Day of the Dea
d. You know me. I love a happy ending.”

  “Call me,” I said.

  He nodded. “A single candle. Sure. Just don’t leave the gas on, Castor. Naked flames are dangerous things to have around. Hey, is your mobile turned off?”

  “No,” I said, knee-jerk, without checking. “Why?”

  “Because I’m turning into your fucking answering service. That cop friend of yours called to say he might have something juicy for you in a day or so. And I do not appreciate you giving him my number.”

  “And?”

  “And Pen Bruckner rang three times since I got back from seeing you this morning. Wants to know where you are. She said you were due in court or something.”

  From Walthamstow to Barnet isn’t that far as the crow flies. As the taxi crawls along the North Circular Road, though, it’s a fair way. Out of sheer desperation, I offered the driver an extra twenty if he could cut some corners, and he peeled off onto some backstreets where we seemed to go faster but covered less ground.

  I was right about the phone; it was still turned on. But the battery, which was old and needed replacing, had run out of power, so the point was moot. Sometimes I could coax a minute or two longer out of it by ejecting it and then sliding it back into place, but not this time. It was definitively dead.

  By the time I got to the courthouse, it must have been almost four o’clock. I was hoping that the case might have started late, but as soon as I saw Pen sitting on the courtroom steps, I knew it was beside the point to hurry now. I also knew from her face how the hearing had gone.

  I sat down next to her. She didn’t look around or seem to notice.

  “What happened?” I demanded. She didn’t answer, so I asked again. “Pen, what happened?”

  “He said he’d looked at the composition of the panel,” said Pen slowly, sounding almost as though she were reading the words from a badly printed sheet. “And it wasn’t right. They were supposed to make sure the panel was completely independent—no conflicts of interest or anything—and they hadn’t. So any decision the panel made wasn’t valid.”

  I blinked. That sounded like good news, as far as it went. “Then we’re—”

  “But he also said he’d thought about the power-of-attorney thing, and he’d changed his mind about it not being in his jurisdiction.” She looked at me, her face strained and pale. “He said someone had to look out for Rafi, and it had to be someone who could be trusted to make decisions in his best interests. Someone who understood the medical background and knew what was at stake and wasn’t going to act out of emotion or prejudice. Someone with an independent mind and an expert grasp of the issues.”

  I saw what was coming, but common sense rebelled at it. So did my stomach. “You’re not fucking telling me—” I protested.

  Pen nodded. “He gave it to Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. She’s got power of attorney now, and she’s already signed the consent forms. She brought them with her, Fix. She knew this was going down. Then Runcie let them convene the hearing right there because all the panel members were present, and it was one, two, three, you’re done.” She blinked away tears. “I thought he was trying to do what was right for Rafi, but he’s just railroaded us. That cow is going to take Rafi away to the MOU tomorrow, and then she can do what she likes to him.”

  “Over my dead body,” I promised.

  But that was the kind of knee-jerk response you have to be wary of. It took only a few moments of sober reflection before I thought better of it.

  “Better yet,” I amended, “over hers.”

  Thirteen

  I WAS STARING DOWN THE BARREL OF ANOTHER LONG night, and I knew it. I had the ultimate ordeal of dinner with Juliet and the lovely Mrs. Juliet to look forward to. But first I was going to get some errands run.

  I got to the Paragon at about six, which, according to the desk clerk, Merrill, was when Joseph Onugeta’s shift began. Merrill was sitting at the desk reading the Evening Standard when I walked in. He gestured with his thumb backward over his shoulder. “He’s in the cupboard,” he said, and went back to his paper.

  The cupboard turned out to be a room on the ground floor—the same size as the bedrooms, or at least the one I’d seen—lined with shelves and stacked with boxes of cleaning materials. Joseph Onugeta was changing into his work overalls when I knocked and entered. I’d been seeing Onugeta as an East African name, but his skin was the rich near-violet black of the Orissa Dalits. He had a frizz of ash-gray hair, so tightly curled that it almost looked sheer, that came down to a widow’s peak above intense brown-black eyes with heavy lids. His mouth was set in the dour line of someone who’s seen a lot of shit and expects to see a lot more. Then again, I have that effect on a lot of people.

  I introduced myself and told him what I was there for—that I was interested in what he’d seen and heard on the day of the murder. He listened with gloomy indifference, his mouth tugging down at the corners as though it made him very sad to have to listen to me.

  “I told the police already,” he pointed out.

  “I know that,” I agreed. “I’m just checking the details. Especially this thing about you hearing a woman’s voice from the room…”

  At the word “woman,” the man’s whole demeanor changed. A tremor went through him. He seemed to still it with some difficulty, clenching his hands into tight fists.

  “Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked. “You didn’t see her go into the room?”

  Silently, he shook his head.

  “Can you remember anything she said?”

  Another jerk of the head that I took to be a negative, but before I could throw another question at him Onugeta was speaking in a tense, urgent monotone. “ ‘I hate you,’ ” he muttered. “ ‘I fucking hate all of you. If I could kill every rat bastard of you, one after another after another, I’d do it.’ ” It took me a second to realize that he wasn’t talking to me but quoting from memory. “ ‘I want it to fucking hurt you so bad, so bad. I want to see in your eyes how much it hurts. And when you’re dead, I wish I could bring you back and make it hurt some more.’ ”

  He fell silent, turned his back on me, and took down a pair of marigold gloves from one of the shelves. “Like that. On and on like that. And the one man, he was saying, ‘You don’t mean that, you don’t mean that.’ Scared. Really scared. And then the other man said, ‘Make her stop.’”

  I had to be careful with the next question—careful not to let it sound like an accusation. “You didn’t think of going into the room?” I asked.

  Joseph shot me a bitter look. “I hear worse than that every day,” he said. “Much worse. I-love-you-I-hate-you-I’ll-fuck-you. Everyone says that here. Or thinks it. I kept on walking. None of my business. All I do is empty the wastebins. There’s nightmares enough for anyone right there.

  “But then when we turned the key and looked into that room…” He was staring at nothing, and his face was set hard, the gloves dangling forgotten in his hand. “It wasn’t any kind of love that did that,” he muttered. “Love can turn into a lot of things, but—there wasn’t a square inch of him that hadn’t been—” He gave up on that sentence, shaking his head rapidly like a dog trying to get itself dry. “It takes a lot of hate to do that. To keep on hating someone after he’s already dead.”

  He discovered the gloves in his hand, put them on, and wriggled his fingers into them one at a time with repetitive, robotic care. His eyes were hooded, his mouth twisted slightly as if he were in pain. I got a glimpse of the truth, then, about what had made him too sick to come into work. He was talking about a sickness of the soul.

  “Joseph,” I said, although I wanted to stop and get the hell out into the fresh air. “You didn’t see her? You never got a glimpse of her, going into the room or coming out?” It was a question I’d already asked, but given his state of mind, it was worth one more throw of the dice. Since he couldn’t get away from these memories, maybe if I kept hovering around the edges of them, some kind of enlightenment, some kind of clue, w
ould come to me.

  “I’ll know her if I see her,” Joseph said, tapping his gloved finger against his right temple. “I dreamed about her that night. Dream about her most nights. My daddy had the sight, and I got it, too, whether I want it or not.

  “She’s not a woman, though. Not a real woman. It sounds stupid, but I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway. She’s got a devil face. Long red hair. Tall as a man, strong as a man. And a circle here, over her eye, like a crater. Like a little bomb hit her and left a crater. Or like someone shot her and the bullet bounced off.”

  The hairs rose on the nape of my neck as he talked. He was describing Myriam Kale; he’d even gotten the chickenpox scar. But the look on his face told me that carrying on with this line of questioning was going to lead to some ugly eruption that I probably couldn’t handle.

  “Joseph,” I said, switching tack, “your boss, Merrill, said something to me that didn’t get a mention in the police evidence. He said another man came into the Paragon a little later than Barnard and Hunter. An old man. By himself. Does that ring any bells with you?”

  “Yeah.” Joseph nodded. “I bumped into him in the corridor. I was coming out of a room with an armload of sheets and stuff. Next thing I know, I’m going backward instead of forward. I hit him and bounced off.” He picked up a plastic bucket and hung two J-cloths over the side of it. “He wasn’t an old man, though. I don’t know where Mr. Merrill got that idea from. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was solid. Very strong. And he walked like—you know—like a big strong guy walks. All swaggering. That wasn’t any old man.”

  Something stirred in my mind as he said that, but I didn’t try to drag the thought up into the light. Not yet. It would come in its own good time if I didn’t reach for it. I thanked Joseph for his time and offered him a twenty from my dwindling stash. He took it without even looking at it. Where he was living right now, money couldn’t bring much solace.