Dead Men's s Boots

But that was just his cover story, and I’m hoping you might have some idea what it was covering. See, I know this isn’t really about your Hippocratic oath, Nicky. It’s about protecting the bottom line. And part of that is you not giving away for free any information that I might be persuaded to pay for later. So you want paying, fine, you come up with a starting price and then we’ll haggle. But time is fucking money and right now I’m hypersensitive to people who waste any of mine – because someone tried to kill me the other night by dropping me down a lift shaft.

So this is personal and it’s at the top of my things-to-do list. Is that understood?’

‘Yes!’

‘Yes what?’

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

I took my weight off the lid and Nicky 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?’

‘You see the cigarette packet? One of my coolest finds. Jimmy Pick tortured supergrass Deggy Wheaton with the lit end of a fag from that very packet, after he fingered Les Lathwell for the Barclays Bank massacre. It’s a piece of history.’ 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 favour, because John wanted to work through proxies.’

‘You’re a friend in need, Nicky.’

‘That’s the Samaritans, Castor. I work on margins.’

‘Tony Lambrianou. Ronnie Kray. George Cornell. Les Lathwell. Aaron Silver.’ I counted the names off 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 which was surprisingly eloquent and persuasive.

‘They’re all from the East End,’ Nicky 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.