Dead Men's s Boots

Not much to go on, at first glance: not much to indicate what John had meant when he said that this was one for the books. Unless geographical gazetteers were the books he had in mind.

Further examination, though, showed that he’d used the A to Z as a notebook, too. The inside front and back covers and the blank spaces on the title and copyright pages were filled with densely written lists. They seemed to be lists of names, and the ones at the front of the book included a lot of people that I actually knew – my own name was there, along with Juliet’s, Carla’s, Bourbon Bryant’s, Reggie Tang’s.

Some of them had been ticked off, others not: some had been ticked, the ticks crossed through, and then ticked again.

Other names, set off in a different column, were new to me, or stirred faint echoes in my mind that I couldn’t turn into meanings right then. Silver. Cornell. Moulson. Lathwell. Richardson. Lambrianou. Hart.

The list inside the back cover seemed to be of places rather than people: Abney Park, Eas [bne

I flicked backwards and forwards between the various lists, my eye drawn automatically to the parts that were easiest to read, avoiding other stretches where the density of the crossing-out and rewriting made individual words hard to decipher.

Eventually my sight started to swim and I gave it up.

I turned my attention to the key, on its makeshift boot-lace keyring – and I looked at it with a certain degree of professional interest because breaking and entering has been a hobby of mine at various points in my life.

It was small, hollow-barrelled, with the number 167 etched into the diamond-shaped bow-end. It was a Lycett, the very distinctive product of that Midlands locksmithing firm, though it didn’t bear the maker’s name. That was interesting: Lycett did a great many job lots in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly for factories and offices, but very few of them were in London. A man with a lot of time on his hands and a prurient curiosity could probably find the lock that this key fitted. But what would be the point if it turned out to yield only a few more scribbled, near-illegible palimpsests like the ones I’d just looked at?

I put the three items back in the eviscerated bag one by one, thinking that there must be some easier way of solving the John Gittings conundrum. The matchbook cover, I noticed now, had a string of figures written on the back in red biro. A credit-card number? No, only eleven digits, where a credit card would have sixteen.