Dead Men's s Boots

9

It’s probably not a great idea to kid Juliet about her diet, considering I once came close to being an item on it. And what I said about pretending that she needs to eat wasn’t even strictly accurate, because she can take a certain amount of nourishment and even pleasure from things that you and I would call food. It’s just that when you strip away all the niceties and get down to basics, the fuel that drives her best – the stuff she’s made to run on – is the flesh and blood and souls of sexually aroused men. Her jaw-droppingly good looks are an adaptive mechanism along the lines of the sweet liquid in the calyx of a pitcher plant that tempts bees and wasps in with its scent and then digests them when they fall into it.

Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any the less. Most of the time it’s hard not to feel that being devoured in the middle of coitus would be a price worth paying for Juliet’s undivided attention. But it’s no damn good. Men make her hungry in all the wrong ways: now she’s discovered a way to keep her sex life and her nutritional needs apart, and she says she’s sticking to it.

‘How’s Susan?’ I asked her, probing the wound – mine, obviously, not hers – as she cut her twelve-ounce steak into two pieces and filled her mouth with one of them. The drive had been rough going – Juliet drove with a focused aggression that made most road-rage incidents seem like brief, contemplative interludes, and she punished the sleek, over-powered sports car as though it had done her some terrible harm – but it didn’t seem to have dented her appetite at all. We’d driven more or less at random, it seemed to me, but always bearing west until finally we fetched up in the ragged borders of King’s Cross where we stopped at a bistro called something like Fontaine’s or Fontanelle’s or something equally euro-gastric. I’d gone for pasta; Juliet as usual was only interested in large slabs of animal flesh.

She swallowed once, without chewing, then dabbed her mouth fastidiously with her napkin. ‘Overworked,’ she said. ‘They’ve put her in charge of children’s events at the library, and they haven’t even given her a budget. She’s on the phone all day trying to find authors who’ll come in and read for free, and she spends every evening inventing competitions with prizes that she buys out of her own salary. I keep telling her to get out of it. I can make enough for both of us.’

‘Nobody wants to be a kept woman,’ I pointed out tactfully. ‘It causes all sorts of stresses in a relationship.’

‘So does being too tired for sex,’ Juliet growled.

‘So anyway,’ I went on, my cheerfulness sounding a little brittle. ‘Alastair Barnard. Claw hammers. Want to talk, or are you sticking to Gary Coldwood’s big red book of Metropolitan etiquette?’

She shrugged, spearing the other half of the steak. ‘I’m not interested in politics. Coldwood is a friend, but so are you. Don’t put me in a position where I have to choose, and we should be just fine.’

‘More than fair,’ I said. ‘Should I order you another one of those?’ It was a reckless offer. I still had the remains of Jan Hunter’s cash burning a hole in my jacket pocket, but given that she was currently my only client it would be a good idea to eke it out.

Juliet shook her head in any case. ‘I’m meant to be cutting down,’ she said. ‘Susan’s fully vegetarian now. She doesn’t like the smell of it on my breath.’

I boggled slightly. ‘So you’ll . . . what? Eat green salads?’

‘And oily fish. It doesn’t matter much to me, Castor. The kind of meat I really want to eat I’m abstaining from right now. I took the pledge eleven months and nine days ago, and I’m managing very well, all things considered.’

‘Still keeping count, though.’

She favoured the space where the steak had been with a very long, very serious stare. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘Still keeping count.’

‘What do you think happened to the hammer?’

She didn’t bat an eyelid at the change of subject, but then from my limited experience a demon’s brain is probably a bit like a hurricane in a box. The illusion of calm can only be maintained as long as you keep the lid nailed firmly down.

‘Hunter hid it somewhere, presumably.’ She ate a piece of the broccoli that had come with the steak: but the gesture lacked conviction in my opinion.

‘Somewhere in the hotel or somewhere out on the street?’

‘Why?’

‘I just want to know what you think.’

Juliet looked at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s not likely he could have taken it onto the street,’ she admitted. ‘Someone would have seen what he did with it, and it would have been recovered by now.’

I nodded. ‘And if it was anywhere in the hotel, the police would have turned it up inside of ten minutes.’

She put her fork down, giving up on the broccoli. ‘That’s an interesting point, Castor,’ she acknowledged. ‘However, it’s a point that holds equally well no matter who killed Barnard. So it doesn’t particularly point towards Douglas Hunter being innocent.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying that Hunter is innocent – just that there may be more to the story than Coldwood is seeing right now. I was hoping you might be able to fill me in on what you read in the hotel room. It might give me a better idea of whether or not I’m wasting my time.’

Juliet tapped her incisors with the tip of one immaculate fingernail.

‘I think you are,’ she said. ‘Wasting your time, I mean. But yes, I can do that.’

‘Thanks. So when would be good for you?’

‘Now.’ She pushed the plate full of vegetables away with a decisive movement and stood. ‘Now would be good for me. That’s why I drove us here. The Paragon is just around the corner.’

The Paragon Hotel lived up – or maybe down – to all my expectations.

Like a lot of early-twentieth-century London architecture, it’s the type of building that was thrown up to take advantage of negative space: in other words, it fits into a gap between older buildings that somebody decided to exploit even though it had no rational shape. You can tell what you’re getting as soon as you round the bend of Battle Bridge Road and see the frontage ahead of you: a narrow slice of soot-blackened mulberry brick inelegantly slotted in between a stolid warehouse and a bigger hotel that was trying to look respectable – not an easy trick with the Paragon clinging to your leg like an amorous dog.

The interior managed to be both constricted and sprawling at the same time. The lobby went back a long way, but it was ludicrously narrow and it had a dog-leg, the front desk thrusting out into a high-ceilinged space no wider than a corridor, which seemed to flinch away from it in a nervy zigzag. Naive anthropomorphising, I know: but when you deal with the risen dead on a day-to-day basis you tend to see the life in almost everything. And the death, too, which is maybe the downside.

The clerk looked up from a computer monitor as we came in, his gaze flicking from Juliet to me and then back to her, and hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard. He could just have been hiding a solitaire game, but something about his studiously blank expression as we walked up to the desk made me suspect that whatever window he’d closed had been a little more incriminating than that. Then again, this was a whore hotel and the last time he’d seen Juliet she’d presumably been part of Detective Sergeant Coldwood’s travelling circus. He had good enough reason to be circumspect.

He ran a hand through his thinning, sand-brown hair – which I was seeing in a glorious three-sixty-degree perspective because of the huge mirror behind him. He seemed to have some kind of thyroid condition, or at any rate he had the bulging-eyed stare that sometimes goes with hyperthyroidism. His beaky nose and hair-trigger blink reminded me irresistibly of the dead comedian Marty Feldman. There was a long loose thread on the shoulder of his herringbone jacket which stuck out to the side as though he was on a fuse.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked us in a slightly nasal voice.

‘I’m with the police,’ Juliet said, which I guess was a white lie. ‘Investigating the Barnard case. You remember I came in about a week ago to read the room.’

The clerk nodded. Of course he remembered. You didn’t see Juliet and then just forget about it.

‘We need to go over it again,’ Juliet said. ‘I presume it’s still locked off?’

‘Oh yes,’ the clerk said, already reaching for the key. They were ranged behind him in pigeon-holes, each one with a thick wooden fob five or six inches long.

‘If you meet any of our other guests,’ the clerk said, handing the key over to Juliet with some diffidence, ‘I hope you’ll be discreet. It’s been very hard for us over the past few days, and we’ve cooperated in every way we could. We’d really like to start putting the whole thing behind us now.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Juliet. The clerk watched us unhappily as we walked on around the dog-leg to the stairs, his hand smoothing down his hair again.

There was no lift; but then the Paragon was only three storeys high, and the whole point of the place was to give people healthful aerobic exercise. We went up one flight and came out onto a corridor somewhat broader than the entrance hall. Thick pile carpet in shades of dark red created the right carnal ambience, but bare hospital-green plasterboard let the side down a little. The place was silent, and there was nobody else in sight.

Juliet already knew where room seventeen was, so she led the way. ‘Was that Merrill?’ I asked as I followed her, dredging up the name from Jan Hunter’s account. ‘The guy who called the police on the day of the murder?’

‘That was Merrill,’ Juliet confirmed. ‘But it wasn’t him who placed the call – it was the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta.’

‘Sorry, you’re right. I wouldn’t mind talking to him. I’ll have to ask if he’s here.’

Juliet stopped in front of a door that badly needed a paint job – or maybe a surgical scrubbing. Its dark brown surface had a smeared, rucked look to it as though the paint had been plastered on too thickly and had run as it dried. ‘I think they’re both here every day,’ she said. ‘They seem to run the place between them. The owner lives in Belgium somewhere and he only turns up on the quarter days to check the books.’

She turned the key in the lock and pushed. A sour, musty smell came out to meet us as the door opened, and I hesitated for just a moment to step inside, not sure how much of the physical evidence would have been left in situ.

Juliet just went on in, and as she swung the door wide I could see that the room was almost bare. There was a bed frame standing against one wall, taking up most of the available space. No mattress or covers, and no pillows: just two dark rectangular spaces in the divan that had once held drawers, and now looked like the empty eye sockets of a skull. On the pale beige carpet there were dark and very extensive stains: square windows had been let into some of these, the bare boards showing through where small, regular sections of carpet had been taken away by the police forensics team. There were similar stains, rich rust-brown in colour, down the near side and the bottom of the divan. Alastair Barnard might be gone, but ‘gone’ was a relative term.

The air reverberated soundlessly with his suffering and his fear – an emotional effluvium like the ghost of a bad headache.

‘So this is where it happened?’ I said, unnecessarily – as much to disturb those silent echoes as anything else.

Juliet nodded her head in the direction of the fouled divan. ‘X marks the spot,’ she said coolly.

‘When you read the room for Coldwood,’ I asked, looking around the chill, claustrophobic space, ‘was it like this? Or was the body still here?’

‘It was still here,’ Juliet said, in the same disinterested tone. ‘Nothing had been touched. He wanted me to read it while it was still fresh.’

‘So tell me what you saw.’

She looked at me for confirmation. ‘With which eyes, Castor?’

I waved an expansive hand. ‘All of them. What was physically there, in front of you, and anything else you saw.’

Juliet stared at the ground, thought for a few moments, then pointed to a spot almost at my feet – a point midway between the bed and the door. ‘Barnard was lying there when I came in,’ she said. ‘What was left of him. His body had been hurt – damaged – very extensively. I knew he was a man mainly by the smell. There was too little left of his head to tell what he’d looked like when he was alive.

‘But then when I looked backwards, into the past, I saw him clearly enough.’

The quality of her voice changed, making me look up from the carpet’s intricate organic geography and check her face. I’d caught an emphasis that seemed just a tiny bit off.

‘Was there something else that you couldn’t see?’ I demanded.

Juliet didn’t seem to hear. She was staring right through me at the door and I could tell that what she was seeing now was not me but the events of January the twenty-sixth. She was squinting into the middle distance, along a dimension that just wasn’t there for members of my particular species.

‘They walk in together,’ she said slowly. ‘Barnard is the older man, obviously – the one in the suit, his face all red from climbing the stairs. Hunter is the big, well-built one who moves like a fighter.’

‘He used to box when he was younger,’ I said.

‘Yes. He’s aware of where his weight is: he stands solid, four-square, as though someone is going to come at him and try to knock him down. He crosses to the bed, puts down a bag that he’s carrying – a long green canvas holdall that looks as though it’s used to carry tools – and then he turns to say something to Barnard. He grins as he speaks. One of the words is “now”. Barnard is nervous, but it’s the nervousness of arousal. He closes the door, fumbles with the lock for quite some time. He doesn’t want to be disturbed, obviously.

‘Hunter is already taking off his clothes. Barnard crosses to the bed, starts to undress too, but Hunter stops him. He pushes Barnard down onto his knees . . .’

‘I think we can take the next part as read,’ I said.

Juliet nodded. ‘They copulate,’ she confirmed. ‘For a long time. Hunter takes the dominant role; takes it very aggressively, and the violence is part of the sex. Barnard doesn’t mind. Not yet. He’s excited. Enjoying it very much. Then . . .’

Her voice tailed off. She was staring at the bed now, her eyes narrowed.

‘Then?’

‘Then it starts to hurt.’

She walked around the bed, her gaze still fixed on it, triangulating on the past with her exquisite, dark-adapted eyes.

‘What Hunter is doing now will leave marks. Barnard doesn’t want that. It makes him afraid, and it makes him indignant. He says something, tries to sit up. Hunter . . . hits him, hard, on the side of the head, and he falls down again. He’s dazed. His mouth is bleeding, not where the blow landed but where he bit his lip because of the force of the impact.

‘He tries again. Hunter straddles him, forces him down with his own weight. He’s hitting Barnard with his closed fists, and at the same time . . . he enters him again. He beats him and rapes him at the same time.’

I opened my mouth to speak; to ask Juliet to skip forward again, maybe, and spare me some of the gory details. But the details were what I needed to hear: there was no point being in this room at all if I didn’t take a good, long look at what had happened here. At the same time, though, Juliet’s words had sharpened my own responses to the place. I couldn’t see its history the way she could, but I could feel the emotional afterwash of the events with a terrible clarity now – and everything she said fell into place with a dull, heavy inevitability, anchoring the emotions and giving them form.

‘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 realise 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 had 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 whether 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, now, 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 small 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 comes in at the kill, as it were, takes the hammer and uses it while Doug is . . . 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 suddenly, 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 backwards. ‘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 punchline. 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 marshalling yar karshinds 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 just 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 tantalisingly translucent fabric of her shirt. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, 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 only been living on Earth for 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 their neck probably has an entirely different meaning down there.

I lingered in the room for a few minutes more, searching it myself now 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, because he was putting some keys back in the pigeon-holes – including number seventeen, I noticed. I waited until he realised I was there and turned to face me.

‘Can I talk to Joseph Onugeta?’ I asked. ‘I just 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.

Merrill 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 for a moment or two in silence. ‘A man came in by himself,’ he admitted at last. ‘I was in the back room there, and I saw him walk straight past the desk. I thought maybe he was a cab driver and he’d come to pick someone up. But then he walked out again about ten minutes later and he 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 for a moment. ‘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 anything very much back. He wasn’t kidding about his mind going blank: I could probably have got more circumstantial detail out of a six-year-old. Then again, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with stress, and Merrill looked like the kind of man who stressed easy.

I left him 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. On the other hand, 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.

Before I went 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 Foyle’s couldn’t help me at all: I turned a copy up at last in one of the second-hand bookshops further down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American paperback and the badly glued pages had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knock-down 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 eighth 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, opened up the disintegrating paperback 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 had spent the early years of her life was ‘humble’ and her family’s poverty was ‘grinding’. She herself, though, was ‘fresh-faced’ and ‘comely’. Okay, she had a chickenpox scar over her left eye which 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 a hundred-per-cent-proof bombshell. She ‘left the family nest’ at age fifteen, given in marriage (legal from fourteen in Alabama) to Tucker Kale, a well-to-do feedstore owner from neighbouring 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 of 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, who Sumner described as a travelling 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 tyre 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.

Either way, she beat Poulson to death with thoroughness and enthusiasm, and stole his car. But before she left, she heated up the dashboard cigarette lighter and used it to burn the dead man on his cheek as though she were a rancher branding a steer. Every man she killed would be burned in a similar way, usually – once she took up smoking them – with the lit end of a Padre Gigli cheroot. She would come to be known in the Chicago underworld, in the last year or so before her death, as the Hot Tomato. This was partly a tribute to her physical charms, but it was also a wry reference to the fact that if you picked her up you were likely to get burned.

Arriving in Chicago Kale ditched Poulson’s car and hit the streets – literally. She worked as a hooker for a couple of years on the meat markets of South State Street, working briefly for a pimp named Lauder Capp before going solo (Capp is supposed to have sworn to cut her throat for her disloyalty). Then she met Jackie Cerone at the Red Feather club and took him up to a room in a hotel probably not much different from the Paragon for a night of passion which turned into a new job opportunity.

She knew who Cerone was. She’d seen his picture in the papers, and she made the connection. This man who was hiring her for the whole night was a big player in the Outfit, currently riding high after Sam Giancana had made his run for the border, leaving Battaglia (with Cerone as kingmaker) to pick up the pieces of the Chicago rackets.

Kale’s relationship with Cerone was the turning point in her life, according to Sumner. She impressed him with her get-up-and-go and her entrepreneurial spirit, and after two more pay dates he employed her in a different capacity, as the bait for a surviving Giancana lieutenant who was high up on his shit list.

There was a photo of her from around this time, and I had the vague feeling that I’d seen it before: a smeary black-and-white image taken in a crowded nightclub, it showed Kale dangling on Jackie Cerone’s arm, both of them mugging for the camera with bottles of champagne in their mitts. Kale’s mouth was open in a laugh that looked like it must have been loud and indelicate, but her eyes weren’t closed or crinkled with laugh lines: they were wide and staring. They looked to me like the eyes of a wild animal peering out at the world from behind the thickets of her own face, where she was either hiding or looking for prey. The only other figure in the picture, a blond man whose bodybuilder’s physique was encased in a double-breasted jacket that screamed ‘gangster’, was staring at her with a sort of covetous wonder.

Before long, Sumner assured his readers, this real-life femme fatale was undertaking hits on her own: Jackie provided the gun, and the training in how to use it. Over the next five years Kale became something of a celebrity in Mob circles, without ever coming to the attention of the police. She made at least nine hits (Sumner argued passionately for the higher and more headline-grabbing score of thirteen) and was paid sums of up to eighty thousand dollars a time. At one point, Phil Alderisio reputedly kept her on retainer.

The cigarette-burn motif, meanwhile, had become a tabloid legend, and incorruptible police chief Art Bilek made a public commitment to bring in ‘the Mob killer who signs his work in this odious manner’. In 1968 he caught up with her in yet another hotel room, on the top floor of the Salisbury: the trappings this time were opulent rather than sleazy, and Kale was a guest of Tony Accardo, but neither the exclusive surroundings nor the distinguished patronage saved her when Bilek’s men surrounded the building and moved in to arrest her.

She added another man to her score as the cops broke the doors of the suite down and burst in on her. She was stark naked, according to the papers – fresh out of the bath, manicured and smelling of Madame Rochas, she shot the first man to walk through the door, twenty-two-year-old constable Dermot Callister, in the face, killing him instantly. She herself was shot seven times within the next few seconds (the bullets were later removed, counted, inventoried, stolen and sold for souvenirs) but still managed to wound three more officers before being taken alive. And her will to live must have been truly extraordinary, Sumner pointed out, because one of those bullets hit her liver and another collapsed her left lung. It was a miracle she survived long enough to go to court; long enough to spend three years on death row; long enough to die, at last, at a time and place of the state’s choosing.

That was the rough outline of the story Sumner told, but he embellished it along the way with some fairly elaborate reconstructions of Kale’s sexual encounters with the made men of the Chicago mob scene. I wondered what his sources were for some of the more circumstantial accounts: maybe Kale kept a journal or something. ‘Dear diary, you’ll never guess with which widely feared psychotic gang-lord I had a knee-trembler in the lift at Nordstrom’s today – or what he likes to be tickled with.’

I was only skimming, but even so my attention was starting to wander long before I got to the end. It’s not that I’m prudish, or even morally fibrous, but pornography that’s written as a list of sexual positions and uses the word ‘turgid’ as though it was punctuation gets old fairly quickly.

I skipped to the last chapter, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits – the ones she was meant to have carried out from beyond the grave. In 1980 a guy who lived on George Street in Edinburgh was murdered in his own bathroom. Forensic evidence suggested that he’d been murdered immediately after sex, and his cheek and temple were scarred by post-mortem cigarette burns.

In 1993, ditto: some middle-aged sales rep in Newcastle left work on a Friday night, announcing his intention to ‘get laid, get wrecked and get to bed early’. He was found the next day in the laundry room of a hotel on Callerton Lane, stuffed into one of the baskets. Again, his face had been burned, and again there was evidence that he’d been engaging in coitus before meeting his violent death.

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. Who had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful? Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia is a survival trait as well as a clinical condition: it hadn’t been that for John, but it looked as though he’d done all he could to keep what he was working on from falling into the wrong hands. Or any hands at all.

The ring tone sounded three times, then someone pick kn stheed up.

‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, brisk and cheerful. ‘What’s the score?’

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of John Gittings . . .’

There was a muttered ‘Fuck!’ and then the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the phone at the other end rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time: just an expectant silence.

‘I really am a friend of John’s,’ I said, trying to sound calm and reassuring and radiantly trustworthy. ‘My name is Felix Castor. I worked with John on a couple of jobs, a little while back. His widow, Carla, gave me some of his things, and your number was in there. I called because I’m trying to find out what he was working on before he died.’

That was enough to be going on with, I thought. I waited for the line to go dead again. Instead, the same male voice said, ‘Why?’ Not so cheerful now – tense, with an underlying tone of challenge.

Actually, I had to admit that that was a pretty good question. ‘Because he seemed to think it was something really important,’ I said, slowly because I was picking my words with care in case any of them turned out to be loaded. ‘But he didn’t tell anybody what it was all about. I’m thinking that maybe finishing the job for him might make him rest easier. Because right now he’s not resting easy at all.’

There was a long, strained silence.

‘Not tonight,’ the man said at last. ‘Tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. The usual place.’

He hung up before I could ask the obvious question, and this time when I dialled again the phone just rang until I got a voicemail service. I tried twice more, with the same results. For some reason – maybe creeping paranoia – I didn’t want to leave a message. But in any case, I thought I knew where the usual place had to be: there was presumably a reason why John had written this number down on the matchbook from the Reflections Café Bar – and fortunately he’d left the postcode showing when he tore off the cover. That plus the yellow pages ought to be enough to get me there. The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.

I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.