Dead Men's s Boots

I phrased it as a bluff, because my instinct was to give him as little room to manoeuvre as possible. ‘Did you get anything useful out of the Myriam Kale piece?’

Silence from the other end of the line, which stretched. I waited as long as I could bring myself to, but in the end I had to prompt him. ‘Well?’

‘I’m just checking,’ Chesney snapped back sullenly. ‘I gave you the disc, remember? All I’ve got here are the back-up files, and I didn’t index them all that- oh. Okay. Yeah, here it is. Just a fingerprint. The stain wasn’t blood, it was lipstick or something.

Carnauba wax, lanolin, petrolatum . . . yeah, it was just lipstick. The print’s pretty good, but then her print’s on record anyway. Why?’

I didn’t answer him. The implications of it blinded and deafened me for a moment or two. Pay dirt. It wasn’t just the fact that we now had the Kale artefact we needed to do a summoning. It was the link: the proof of what had been looking more and more likely ever since Doug Hunter let slip the word inscription when we dropped in on him at Pentonville.

John’s dead k‹ beillers and the born-again Myriam Kale. Not two things, but one. It was hard to imagine what unlikely chain of skulduggery or coincidence could tie a bunch of East End hard men from the 1960s and before to a dead American gangster’s moll surfacing for a last bite of the cherry in a King’s Cross hotel room. But some massive, subterranean chain of cause and effect was there, had to be there, just out of my line of sight. I felt like I’d been strolling along the banks of Loch Ness and I’d just glimpsed one coil of an otherwise hidden monster breaking the water in front of my startled eyes.

‘Castor? You still there?’ Chesney’s voice brought me out of my trance. ‘I said, why did you want to know?’

I checked my watch. Okay, it was going to be a tight squeeze. Tighter than tight: I’d turn up at Juliet’s late, and Sue Book would look at me with reproachful tears in her eyes and a burned casserole in her oven-gloved hands.

Then Juliet would rip out my intestines for making Susan cry.

‘Because I need it right now,’ I said. ‘Have it ready for me, okay? I’m at Victoria, so I should be with you inside of ten minutes.’

‘No!’ he protested. ‘I’m not on my own here. Smeet’s in the lab doing a dissection. This is a lousy time.’

‘Chesney, I don’t care. I’m coming over.’

‘Fuck! Okay, I’ll be waiting on the stairs. Outside the porno studio, yeah? On the first floor?’

‘Fine. See you there.