Dead Men's s Boots

Cause of death in both cases was blunt-instrument trauma, and the weapons were never recovered. Sumner offered no explanation at all as to why Kale should have chosen the British Isles as the site of her post-mortem adventures: he just presented the facts, humbly and pruriently, for our consideration.

For a change of pace, I dug out the bag of bits and pieces that Carla had retrieved from behind John’s desk drawer. I flipped through the pages of the A to Z again, this time with my own oversized hardcover London street guide beside me on the bed, and got slightly more out of it this time.

The list of place names – Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St Andrew’s Old, St Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield and the rest – turned out to be a list of London cemeteries. A pretty exhaustive list, too, I was guessing, because it ran to well over a hundred sites. Most had either been struck through with a single strike of the pen or had a large cross next to them on the line where they appeared. Whatever John had been looking for, it looked like he’d had really exacting standards.

At the bottom of the page, set off from the list by a couple of inches of glaringly empty space, was a single word: SMASHNA. It wasn’t crossed out, but John had circled it again and again in red ink. He’d then added three question marks in green. It was a powerful graphic statement: it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.

The other lists – the ones that consisted of people’s names – were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still just names: some friends, some the opposite of friends, most just strangers.

That left the key and the matchbook. I picked up the matchbook and looked at that number again, and this time, maybe because I was coming to it in a code-breaking frame of mind, the truth hit me at once.

The final digits were 76970. That could be a phone number after all – if the phone was a mobile and the number had been written backwards.

I keyed the number into my mobile and it rang. I had a brief sense of something like vertigo: a peek down the sheer vertical colonnades of a mind under terrible stress.