Dead Men's s Boots

Busy night for the reaper, last night was. Unsociable hours, the whole fucking deal. He should talk to his union.’

I turned to Nicky to tell him to get to the fucking point, but the dry black pebbles of his eyes met my stare with implacable calm.

‘One more and then I’m done. You ever hear of a guy named Stuart Langley?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘He’s a ghostbreaker. Works out of Docklands.’ I suddenly remembered the story that Lou Beddows had told me on the day of John’s funeral: the late-night call, the ambush, and the beating.

‘He was working with John,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t he?’

‘I don’t know, Castor. J the G was going all around the houses looking for a partner to work his big case with him, so sure, maybe Stu Langley said yes. It might help to explain this other weird coincidence.’

‘What other-?’

‘The mother and daughter. In the car that hit Coldwood. Elspeth Langley, and little Niamh Langley. Does it strike you that there’s a pattern emerging here? I know I tend to see patterns where there aren’t any: that’s what paranoia is all about, right? But in any case I trust I’ve set the scene for the big fucking revelations I’m about to lay on you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, the tightness coiling in my throat now.

‘Right. Well, you asked me to try to squeeze some sense out of the sleeve notes in John-boy’s A to Z . . .’

It wasn’t what I was expecting. ‘We’re kind of past that,’ I reminded him curtly. ‘The latest thing I asked you to do was to find out where the bodies were buried.

Nicky nodded, a little impatiently. ‘Yeah, and I put the feelers out. Nothing, at first. A lot of nothing, because I put out a lot of feelers. So I went back to square one.’

‘The lists in John’s notebook.’

‘Exactly. But this time I applied some fuzzy logic. Because it seemed to me that the key word was gonna be the one at the very end. After all, that’s where Gittings finished up. If he was trying to solve a puzzle, then there’s a good chance that last word was the answer: the output for all that fucking crazy input.

I thought back to the lists in the A to Z: the pages and pages of clotted scribble, annotated and underlined almost to critical mass.

‘The last word was smashna,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ said Nicky. ‘Except it wasn’t. John couldn’t spell worth a flying fuck in English, and this wasn’t English. So I fed it through some online translators, and I found the word he was really looking for.