Dead Men's s Boots

You know the hearse that carried Lambrianou’s body had a message from Chris, in the middle of a wreath the size of Canary Wharf? It said “See you on the other side.” Well, this letter is dated about six months later, and it’s exactly three words long: “I made it.” Sick joke or mystical revelation? You decide.’

He leaned forward, suddenly more animated. ‘Okay, that’s what’s on the disc, so that’s what your dead pal Chesney told your dead pal Johnny G. But I’ll give you something else for free, and this is part of the Nicky Heath service.

You get this because I’m obsessive and because I’m dead: in other words, because I’m a stubborn bastard who doesn’t ever need to sleep if he’s got something on his mind. Look at this – and look at this.’

I was expecting him to give me some more of the little evidence bags, but instead he held out two badly photostatted fingerprint charts – copies of copies of copies. I scanned them as carefully as I could, trying to compare them through the smudges and smears.

Juliet looked over my shoulder: her pattern-recognition skills were evidently a lot faster than mine.

‘They’re the same,’ she said. ‘Or almost the same. The differences are very few, and very small. Is that the point?’

‘Yeah, that’s the point. You want the punchline? The one on the right is Les Lathwell again. The one on the left, which is different by about three ridges and one friction artefact, is Aaron Silver, who was the great-grandad of all East E›d oellnd psychopaths. There’s about eighty years between them, and they’re meant to be two different guys.

Only they’re not. They’re the same guy twice.’

I gave a long, low whistle. Nicky was right: this was a smoking pistol in anyone’s book – in fact, it was a whole roomful of smoking machine rifles. Something that John had said when I met him in that bad dream came back into my mind.

Who wants to get you, John?

The same ones as before. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

‘They’re coming back,’ I summarised. ‘All the East End bad boys.

All the biggest bastards.’

‘But how are they coming back?’ Juliet demanded, dragging me back to the incontrovertible facts and rubbing my nose in them. ‘Ghosts can possess animals, but they pay the price. They lose their own humanity a little at a time: become more like the flesh they inhabit. In the long term the human consciousness becomes completely submerged in the animal: diluted to the point where it’s really just not there any more.