Dead Men's s Boots

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.