Dead Men's s Boots

Which told me all I needed to know about his weird behaviour on the phone and his skittishness today. When he’d heard about John’s death he must have thought Christmas had come two months late.

‘Yeah, probably,’ I agreed. ‘I imagine there’s people out there who’d eat this stuff up.’

Chesney nodd {"">C imed eagerly. ‘Yeah, and I could shift it for you. John more or less promised me I could have the lot once he was done with it. He always said this was about the data, seen? Not about the items. He wasn’t a ghoul or a pervert or anything.

It was just something he was interested in – his own private Idaho, kind of thing. I never thought anyone would come round asking after this stuff.’

‘And the stuff is valuable because of who it used to belong to?’ I demanded, making sure I’d got the right end of this increasingly shitty stick.

Chesney looked blank for a moment. I don’t think it had occurred to him until then that I was flying blind, but it was a little too late to decide to be coy. ‘Well, yeah,’ he said.

‘Obviously. They’re – you know . . .’ He hesitated, presumably looking for a polite turn of phrase.

‘Death-row souvenirs,’ I finished. It was the words ‘ghoul’ and ‘pervert’ in the same sentence that had clinched it for me. Well, that and the fact that I’d just asked Nicky to find me something exactly like this: some banal object made magical and precious by the fact that it had once been in the hands of a killer. Big thrill. I’d been in the hands of killers so many times it wasn’t even funny, and nobody was looking to sell me on eBay.

Maybe that was a blessing, though: it’s probably best not to have too clear a picture of your market value.

Chesney looked a little sick, because he could see in my face that I’d never before in my life seen any of the stuff in his little bran tub. He was counting up the cost of lost opportunities. I would have sympathised, but time is money and right then I was all about the bottom line.

‘Yeah,’ he said, a little lugubriously.

‘The ace of spades was from a deck that Ronnie Kray used to play poker in his cell in Parkhurst. Some minor villain named Alan Stalky got him to sign it and then took it instead of his winnings. That’s worth a fortune. Les Latham fired the bullet in the bank job – it’s one of the few he missed with. George Cornell used the paperweight in a fight – broke some bloke’s head open with it – and the pen is the one that Tony Lambrianou signed his confession with.