Dead Men's s Boots

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 { 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.