Dead Men's Boots (20 page)

“He twists Barnard’s right arm behind his back—up and back, as far as it will go. He’s leaning on it with his full weight.
He’s still riding him at this point. And then…”

There was a long silence. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. “… And then he gets the hammer out
of the bag and smashes Barnard’s skull in,” I finished. But there was something in Juliet’s expression that I couldn’t read.
I waited, resisting the urge to throw another question at her.

She was still staring into the past with minute, almost furious attention. “I don’t see that,” she said at last.

“You don’t see—”

“The end of the torture. The hammer coming down. The moment of death. Something moves across the room. Something very big.
It’s been there all the time, but it’s been standing very still. I only see it when it moves.”

“What sort of something?” The words sounded banal, but I needed to ask because I had no referent for what she was describing.
An elephant that had been disguised as a standard lamp? A battleship making an awkward right turn out of the bathroom?

“I don’t know,” Juliet admitted reluctantly. “Not something solid—not something that’s physically there. A darkness. A darkness
without a body of its own. I don’t know whether they brought it in with them or it was waiting for them. But it doesn’t seem
to do anything to interrupt what’s happening. It hovers for a few minutes, almost filling the room. I can see through it,
but it’s a little like seeing through thick fog. The two men are still there. They’re still on the bed, moving together, with
Hunter on top. Then they separate, come together again.

“It gets even darker. Even harder to see. When the shadow passes, Hunter is gone. Barnard is lying there”—she pointed—“on
the floor, not on the bed. There’s nothing left of his head but a bloody smear.”

“And the hammer?”

“There.” She pointed again to a place just under the window. A smaller cluster of old bloodstains marked the spot she was
indicating, although it was some distance away from the bed, in the opposite direction to the one in which Barnard had crawled
in his last pathetic attempt to escape from this brutal, arbitrary death.

Silence fell between us. Juliet glanced from bed to window to door, measuring distances and angles with the abstract curiosity
of a professional.

“What happens to the hammer after that?” I pursued. “Can you carry on watching it?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s the intensity of the emotions here that lets me see into the past. With Barnard dead and Hunter
gone, that intensity fades very quickly. Fades to black, you could say.”

I thought over what she’d said. “So it’s possible,” I summed up, “that someone else was present in the room when all this
was happening? It’s possible that someone else came in at the kill, as it were, took the hammer, and used it while Doug was…
doing his thing.”

Juliet looked at me for a long time before shaking her head. “No. I don’t think so.”

“But this shadow—”

“I told you, it’s not like a physical thing. It’s more like an accident of the terrain.”

“I don’t get your drift, Juliet.”

She frowned impatiently. “I’m trying to describe invisible things, Castor. Most of this is metaphor.”

“Are you absolutely sure there was no one else here?” I persisted doggedly. “You said yourself that something blocked your…
perceptions. Something got in your way, whether it was solid or not, and if we stick with the metaphor, you were seeing through
a glass, darkly. Anything could have happened behind that fog.”

“If there was someone else there, I’d sense them on some level,” said Juliet coldly.

“And you don’t?” This was coming to the crunch. I stood facing her, held her blacker-than-black gaze without flinching. It
wasn’t easy: It was like standing up in a stiff wind that sucks you in instead of blowing you backward. “You don’t sense anything
else at all? Anything that makes you doubt for a fraction of a second that Coldwood’s got his hand on the right collar? Barnard
and Hunter were meant to be in here alone, but that cleaner, Onugeta, heard a woman’s voice when he walked past the door.
Three voices, he said: two men and a woman. Was he wrong, or was there a woman here? Is there any emotional trace in the room
that you can’t explain by two men coming in here to fuck each other’s brains out?”

Thinking about Alastair Barnard’s shattered skull, I wanted to drag those words back and scrub them clean with Dettol as soon
as I’d said them, but Juliet didn’t bother delivering the hideous punch line. She didn’t say no, either.

“There’ve been many women in this room,” she said slowly. “Many and many, and most of them were sad. Most of them resented
what was done to them here, or hated the men who were doing it to them. Perhaps that’s all the shadow was—the stain left by
their unhappiness.”

My gaze broke first: I’m only human, after all. But it was Juliet who was being evasive here, and I didn’t have to say anything
else. I just waited for her to fill in the blanks, staring out of the window at the King’s Cross marshaling yards while my
pulse came down again.

“There is something else,” she admitted at last. “A residue that’s very strong and very noticeable. Perhaps it
is
a woman. The physical scents are of the two men, but perhaps yes. A woman’s feelings. Angry, negative feelings. Disgust,
and fear, and defiance—all feeding into anger.”

“Was it here already?” I asked. “Or did it come in with Hunter and Barnard? Was it following them? Does it leave with them?
Was one of them being haunted by this…residue?”

I glanced at Juliet as I delivered the last word. She shrugged eloquently, her breasts shifting under the tantalizingly translucent
fabric of her shirt. “I don’t know,” she said with visible reluctance.

I couldn’t resist pressing my advantage. “I want to go and visit Doug Hunter in jail,” I said, “and get his take on what happened.
Will you come with me?”

Juliet looked blank. “Why?”

“Well, have you ever met him?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t you like to meet him if your testimony is going to send him down for twenty or thirty years?”

“No.”

I was amazed and a little exasperated. “What, you’re not the slightest bit curious?”

“Not the slightest bit,” Juliet confirmed equably. “However, I will admit one thing. The possibility that I might have made
a mistake in this does trouble me. I take my reputation very seriously.”

“So is that a yes? You’ll come with me?”

After a fractional pause, Juliet nodded. “Yes. Very well. Not today, though. Today I have other things to do.”

“I’ll need to arrange it with Jan Hunter, in any case,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

“Fine. If I’m not home, leave a message with Sue.”

She turned and walked out of the room without another word. In a human woman, it would have seemed spectacularly abrupt, but
with fiends from the pit, you have to make allowances. After all, Juliet had been living on earth only a little over a year,
and you have to assume that in hell, a lot of the normal conversational rules don’t operate in quite the same way. For example,
tearing someone’s head off and spitting down his or her neck probably has an entirely different meaning down there.

I lingered in the room for a few minutes more, searching it myself with my eyes tight shut. But the susurrus of fright and
cruelty was everywhere; it was like trying to echolocate in the midst of a ticker-tape parade. I gave up, let myself out,
and closed the door again. The lock had an automatic catch, and Juliet had taken the key with her when she left, so that was
it as far as examining the crime scene went. There was no way I could get back in.

The desk clerk, Merrill, had his back to me as I approached the desk again. He was putting some keys back in the pigeonholes—including
number 17, I noticed. I waited until he realized I was there and turned to face me.

“Can I talk to Joseph Onugeta?” I asked. “I wanted to check a couple of details in the statement he gave.”

“He’s not in today,” Merrill said.

“I thought he was in every day.”

“He called in sick.”

“Well, is it okay if I come by and talk to him tomorrow?”

“It’s okay with me, yes. His shift starts at six.”

I chanced my arm. “Did a woman check in here on her own on the day of the murder?” I asked.

He looked surprised. For a moment I thought I’d insulted his professional standards. “We cater to couples,” he said shortly.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “I know that. I was just wondering if—”

“There wasn’t any woman in that room. I don’t care what Joseph says he heard.”

I felt the weight of words not yet spoken. “But—” I prompted.

Merrill stared at me in silence. “A
man
came in by himself,” he said at last. “I was in the back room there, and I saw him walk straight past the desk. I thought
maybe he was a cabdriver and he’d come to pick someone up. But then he walked out about ten minutes later and was still by
himself, so if he was a driver, he came to the wrong place.”

“When was this?” I asked. “Before Barnard and Hunter arrived, or after?”

“I think after,” he said. “But it must have been before we went up and opened the room, because after that, we had the police
here, and they closed the place down for the whole of the rest of the day.”

“What did this guy look like?”

Merrill thought. “Pretty old,” he said. “That’s all I remember. I didn’t get to see him up close.”

I threw a few more questions at him, but he wasn’t throwing very much back. He wasn’t kidding about his mind going blank.
I probably could have gotten more circumstantial details out of a six-year-old. Then again, everyone’s got his own way of
dealing with stress, and Merrill looked like the kind of man who stressed easy.

I left my number and asked him to call if anything else occurred to him. To make that slightly less unlikely, I slipped him
a couple of tenners. Doing that made it very clear, if he needed the confirmation, that whatever connection I had with Juliet,
I sure as hell wasn’t a cop. I guessed that was probably a plus rather than a minus for a man who worked in the hinterlands
of the sex industry. And I doubted there were any lands from London to silken Samarkand that were much more hinter than the
Paragon Hotel.

On the way back to Wood Green, I stopped off at Charing Cross Road and kicked around a few of the bookshops there until I
found Paul Sumner’s biography of Myriam Seaforth Kale. It was out of print, so Borders and Foyles couldn’t help me at all.
I turned up a copy at last in one of the secondhand bookshops farther down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American
paperback, and the badly glued interior signatures had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knockdown price of seven
pounds fifty.

No blue van staking out the entrance to Ropey’s block. On the downside, the two lifts that hadn’t been used recently for murder
attempts both seemed to have broken down in the course of the day. I slogged my way up to the fourth floor, closed the door
on the world, and put some soothing music on the stereo—I think it was Rudra’s
Primordial
this time, described in the sleeve notes as “seminal Vedic thrash metal.” Then I lay back on the bed, cracked the book open,
and immersed myself in the last death throes of the American mobs.

Sumner wrote in a spare, almost bald style, using adjectives only when they were already clichés and therefore guaranteed
not to convey any actual information. The Alabama farm where Kale—then just plain Myriam Seaforth—had been born and spent
the early years of her life was “humble,” and her family’s poverty was “grinding.” She herself was “fresh-faced” and “comely.”
Okay, she had a chickenpox scar over her left eye that some people thought was disfiguring, but she was still a statuesque
redhead, very tall and very full-figured. Most accounts seemed to agree that she was 100 percent bombshell. She “left the
family nest” at age fifteen, given in marriage (legal from fourteen in Alabama) to Tucker Kale, a well-to-do feed store owner
from neighboring Ryland.

The next seven years of her life were very sparsely documented, and Sumner got through them in a couple of pages. Tucker Kale
died in a car crash when Myriam was twenty-two, and she headed north to try out a different kind of life in the big city,
pausing only to say a last, fond farewell to her family.

The big city in question was Chicago, which was almost seven hundred miles away—a long way to go even with money in your pocket
and a place to stay at the other end. Myriam Kale didn’t have either of those things. She just packed a suitcase one day and
jumped into the wild blue yonder, hitching all the way up Interstate 65 with no idea where she was going or what she’d do
when she got there.

Along the way, it was pretty well documented now, she met up with a man named Luke Poulson, whom Sumner described as a traveling
salesman, and one of two things happened. Either, as Kale herself would later tell some of her Mob friends, Poulson tried
to rape her and earned himself a short, eventful, and terminal encounter with a tire iron, or else Kale lured him to his death
with an offer of sex, intending all along to kill and rob him as soon as they were out on the open road.