Dead Men's s Boots

16

The Birmingham in Alabama took its name and inspiration from the one back in England, but as soon as we walked out of the terminal into the heavy, humid, soupy, sledgehammer air I knew that comparison was going to turn out to be fanciful.

Nicky had taken care of car hire with his usual near-mystical thoroughness, so that all I had to do at the Hertz desk was wave my passport. We found our car, a trim little Chevrolet Cobalt in a fetching red livery, parked only a hundred yards or so from the airport entrance. For most of those hundred yards, though, Juliet was leaning her weight on my arm and walking like a frail octogenarian. I felt a little light-headed myself: it was mid-afternoon here, the hot air thick and heavy with the day’s freight of sweat and tears.

Inside the car, Juliet slumped back in the passenger seat with her eyes closed.

‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said, her voice faint. ‘I started to feel better as soon as I was back on the ground. But – it’s taking me a while to get my strength back.’

‘You think it’s something to do with flying, then?’ I asked.

She nodded slowly. ‘It must be. It’s not something I’d heard of before. But then, your species only left the ground very recently. Perhaps – I’m the first of the powers to try it out.’

‘What about demons with big leathery bat wings?’

Juliet smiled one of the least convincing smiles I’ve ever seen. ‘They fly low,’ she muttered.

‘You want to find a motel and lie down for a while?’

That got a faint rise out of her, at least. ‘What a great idea. And you’d watch over me while I slept?’

‘Like a mother hen.’

‘Just drive, Castor. I’ll be fine.’

Brokenshire is south-west of Birmingham, out towards Tuscaloosa. We found our way out of a maze of crisscrossing sliproads onto Interstate 59, and headed down through the heart of the city. The skyline of Birmingham’s financial district floated off my left shoulder on a haze of dawn mist, the inaccessible towers of a distant Camelot: nearer at hand we drove past derelict factories with eyeless windows and weeds growing taller than man-height across the endless deserted aprons of their parking lots. Most cities have at least two faces: I was seeing both the Magic City and the ashes from which it periodically gets to be reborn. I was aware that neither was the truth, but they were all the truth I was going to find out this time.

South of Birmingham was Bessemer, but I wasn’t really aware of where the one ended and the other began. After a couple of hours’ driving, with Juliet awake but silent and unmoving beside me, we turned off the interstate and then off the state highway onto the back roads, rapidly exchanging cityscape for something a lot more rural and homespun. The houses we were passing now were made of wood, with big front porches. Some of them were pretty grand, the porches extending to two storeys with burnished banister rails gleaming in the slanted morning sun: others were cramped bungalows whose porches seemed to serve the same function as garages do in England, piled up with all the detritus of living that never gets either used or thrown away. In a yard, a huge black dog tethered to a post barked at us and ran around in crazy circles as we passed. A man who looked like the male half of Grant Wood’s American Gothic couple stood with a pair of secateurs in his hands and – although he had a lot more self-possession than the dog – he too kept us in sight until he faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror.

Tiny townships alternated with vast stretches of open farmland and the occasional patch of forest. There was a lot less traffic on the roads here, so I was able to give the Cobalt her head. I was also able to positively identify the car that was following us. I’d been nearly certain it was there back when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham: certainly someone way back behind us had been zigging when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic in the city and the need to keep my eyes on the road in an unfamiliar car had meant that I never got a decent look at it. Now I could see that it was a big dark grey van with an ugly matt-black bull-bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.

It kept pace with us as we drove on south and west. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to: there was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turn-offs were five miles apart.

Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now-defunct copper mine. Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure, Brokenshire just looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion. On the map a small creek runs through it, but there was no sign of it as we drove in towards the town square past post-war houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminium siding. I guess at some point in the town’s history the creek got covered over. Probably just as well: if we’d had to drive across running water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state there was probably no way she could have done it.

We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of Gone With the Wind, and got out to look around. The car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had turned its whole window display over to books about great American gangsters, with a – presumably secondhand – copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography as its centrepiece. It was the same edition as mine: maybe there’d only ever been the one. Beside it was a reproduced photo: the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.

A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of local history, which turned out to be ninety per cent Kale to ten per cent prizewinning pigs. No insights there, either, though: just the familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.

‘I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?’ I said to Juliet.

‘Do you mean hard information, Castor,’ she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, ‘or hard alcohol?’

‘Neither.’ I headed for the door. ‘It was just sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the Picayune are on the next block. And since we’re expected . . .’

In fact it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-storey brownstone building that bore the Picayune’s masthead in German black-letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a pre-teen Mark Twain as a copy boy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish: that turned out to be because they had an office cat, lean and tabby, and I flinched in spite of myself – recent memories sparking inside my head – as it uncurled itself from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom. It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offence, then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yawling cry. Juliet mewed back and the cat turned its tail and fled.

‘You talk to cats?’ I asked her.

‘Only when they talk to me,’ she answered shortly.

She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets were stuffed to bursting, too. The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.

They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavy-set black guy in his shirt sleeves, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. His face as he raised his head to look at us was as rucked up as a bulldog’s. ‘What can I do for you people?’ he snapped, as if he didn’t much want to know but was working from a script he had to follow. He had much less of an accent than the guy in the museum. I wondered whether that was because he’d come here from somewhere else and hadn’t quite blended into the local dialect, or if it was a relic of a college education in another state.

‘My name’s Castor,’ I said, ‘and this is Juliet Salazar. I think Nicky Heath contacted you and asked if it would be okay for us to pay you a call.’

He frowned, trying to place the name. ‘Nicky Heath?’ Then it came to him and his face sort of unfolded, some of the seams disappearing as his eyebrows went up and back. ‘Oh, wait. Dead man with a dot co dot uk suffix?’

‘Yeah, that’d be him.’

He got to his feet and thrust out a hand. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Gale Mallisham. Pleased to meet you. A lot of people walk in here in the mistaken belief that their lives qualify as news. I find that it’s a mistake to let such people get a running start.’

I took the hand and shook it, and I got the usual instant telegraphic flash of information about his mood – which was calm and only mildly curious. I got my fingers crushed, too, because he had a fierce grip.

He gestured us to sit down, realised there was only one chair on our side of the desk and went off to steal one from the other, empty desk. ‘The dead man said you were in a position to offer me a quid pro quo. He was deliberately vague about what you were offering, though.’

‘Well,’ I said, cautiously, ‘he probably told you that we’re chasing information about Myriam Kale. And yeah, we’ve got some to trade. Recent information, if you take my drift. Something that might make a story.’

Gale Mallisham wheeled the other chair back across to us, and Juliet took it with a smile and a nod. He caught the smile full in the face and didn’t stagger, so it was clear that Juliet wasn’t back to anything like full proof yet – but his stare stayed on her as he walked back around to his own side of the desk. Even without her lethally addictive pheromones, Juliet is beautiful enough to make people walk into furniture and not feel the pain.

‘Something that might make a story,’ he repeated, swivelling his gaze back to me. ‘And would that be a Paul Sumner story, by any chance?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meet me halfway, Mister Castor. I won’t be coy with you if you’re direct and honest with me.’

I sighed and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘it’s that kind of story. Kale reaching out from beyond the grave to claim another victim.’

Mallisham sat back, resting his hands on his stomach with the fingers intertwined and steepled. ‘We don’t cover stories of that type,’ he said. ‘Not as a rule, anyway. You’ve got an uphill struggle, now, but I’m still listening.’

I told him in stripped-down form about the murder of Alastair Barnard, and then about the events of the past few days – touching not just on the testimony of Joseph Onugeta but also on John Gittings’s weird collection of gangster memorabilia and what Nicky had sieved out of it. He listened in complete silence, except when he wanted a detail repeated or clarified. About halfway through, he found an A5 notebook and a pencil in the clutter on his desk: he looked at me for permission, waving the pencil in the air, and I nodded, not breaking stride. After that he scribbled notes while I talked.

When I’d finished, he set the pencil down and massaged his wrist. ‘Shorthand hurts more and more as I get older,’ he grunted. He looked at what he’d written, reading it over silently with his lips moving slightly as though he was reciting the words to himself under his breath. ‘Quite a story,’ he said when he’d finished. His tone was dry.

‘It’s only half a story,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for the other half.’

‘To stop this man Hunter from going to jail.’

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at having to define my stake in this. ‘I think Doug Hunter’s going to jail whatever we do,’ I said scrupulously. ‘Even if we turn up evidence that Myriam Kale was in that hotel room – in the spirit or in the flesh – there’s a better than even chance that the judge will kick it out of court. And it’s nearly certain that it was Hunter’s hand on the hammer, whoever was in the driving seat at the time.’

‘Then why is this worth crossing the Atlantic for?’

‘Because if there’s a connection between Myriam Kale and the East End gangsters who my dead friend John was researching, then she’s the odd man out. And the odd man out is sometimes the best way to crack the puzzle.’

Mallisham was staring at me thoughtfully. Perhaps he’d heard the slight hesitation in my voice when I described John Gittings as a friend. Perhaps he was wondering how much of this was made-to-measure bullshit to prise his lips and his files open. But when he spoke it was only to summarise again.

‘You’ve got a lot of dead men – dead bad men – turning up alive again,’ he said. ‘Or at least you got one or two, could be, and your friend was prodding a whole lot more with a stick to see if they moved. That right? But they’re all from your side of the water. Myriam would be the only woman, and the only American.’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘So it’s about your friend, and his . . . unfinished business.’ Mallisham took off his glasses and stroked the pinch-marks on the bridge of his nose. ‘Would I be right in saying that finishing the business would make it more likely he’d lie down and stay down, instead of distressing his nearest and dearest?’

‘Yes,’ I said again. I thought about Carla, and realised that I hadn’t called her before I left. I didn’t even know whether John’s violently unhappy spirit had surfaced again since the cremation. I had to admit to myself that there were other factors operating here besides altruism. One of them was that when someone tries to kill me to keep me from finishing a job, it touches a stubborn streak in me that goes fairly deep.

‘Okay.’ Mallisham put his glasses on again, squinting and grimacing them into position. ‘I’m going to buy that. One out of two of you’s got an honest face, and these days that counts as better than average.’

‘One out of two of us?’ Juliet queried blandly.

Mallisham gave her a hard look. ‘Well, you’re a long way away from being what you look to be, missy,’ he said to her. ‘I’m not sure whether you’re dead or just something that never got born in the first place, but that body that looks so good on you – it isn’t really you, is it?’

There was a long silence. I didn’t rush in to fill it: this was Juliet’s question and I figured she’d field it by herself.

‘No,’ she murmured at last, looking down demurely into her lap. ‘It’s not me. It’s not even a body.’

‘Just something you ran up for the occasion, eh?’ Mallisham’s eyebrows flashed. ‘Well, in a way that makes me feel a little better. You’re, what, her kore aperigrapta? Succubus, maybe?’

Juliet’s gaze jerked back up to meet his. She blinked. ‘You want to guess my lineage?’ she invited, with an edge to her tone. I hadn’t understood the ancient Greek, but it was clear that something in what Mallisham had said had hit home.

He laughed and shook his head. ‘No, no. I’m not of a mind to play twenty questions with you. I used to do a little exorcism on the side, in my early days, is all: that’s how I knew what you were. I gave it up a long time ago, on account of how journalism was what I really wanted to do. My daddy said God had put a sword in my hand for the smiting of the ungodly, but there’s lots of different ways of doing that.’ He shook his head again, a little ruefully this time. ‘Well, well. Succubus. But not hunting.’

‘No. Not hunting.’

‘Passing for human.’

Juliet shrugged.

‘You’re the second I’ve met who’s taken that course.’ Mallisham stared at Juliet with intense, unashamed curiosity. ‘I wonder – I hope this doesn’t give offence – I wonder if I’d have had a chance against you, in a straight draw.’

‘You’re not seeing me at my best,’ Juliet said, with a cold smile.

Mallisham smiled disarmingly back. ‘That’s hard to believe. Anyway, Myriam Kale. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?’

I took over again. ‘Any gaps in the official story,’ I said. ‘I mean, if you know of any link she had to England – any factor that might help to explain her turning up in London, alive or dead – then that would be gravy. But really we just want to get more of a handle on her, as a person rather than a legend.’

‘That’s a laudable goal,’ Mallisham mused. ‘Not all that easy, though, after forty years of disinformation. You’ve presumably read Sumner’s . . . well, some call it a book.’

‘Inside Myriam Kale? Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve read it.’

‘Then your best move now would be to forget it,’ Mallisham rumbled, making a sour face. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that man made a career out of telling the kind of lies that would have turned Pinocchio’s nose into a goddamned national monument. To listen to him, you’d think Myriam Kale was two-parts nymphomaniac to one part mob assassin.’

‘And that’s not an accurate summary?’ I hazarded.

The balding man snorted in a mixture of amusement and indignation. ‘No, sir,’ he said curtly, ‘it is not. It takes no account of what made her the way she was, and it ignores the way she killed – the reason why she killed. Paul Sumner blithely assumes that most of the murders attributed to Myriam Kale were bought and paid for, purely because the men concerned were known or thought to be mobsters. But after she was picked up by Jackie Cerone, most of the men she met were mobsters. It’s a skewed sample.’

‘If not money,’ Juliet asked, ‘then what?’

Mallisham stroked the bridge of his nose again, this time leaving his glasses in situ. ‘Well,’ he said, studying the clutter on his desk, ‘I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s just that if you look at how the story starts, you come to different conclusions. Or maybe you just hold off from conclusions. Are you going to take notes, Mister Castor?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

‘Or a recording?’

‘No.’

‘Good. I’d like it best if all this stayed off the record. Use the information, by all means, but don’t use my words. And if by any chance you’ve lied to me and you belong to my own and Mister Sumner’s profession, I’ll deny any words you put into my mouth and collaterally sue your ass into a sling.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Okay.’ He settled down in his chair, as if he was hunkering down for what he knew was going to be a long haul. ‘First off, you ought to know that Myriam Seaforth – as she was then – was almost certainly abused by her father and one or more of her brothers. I can’t prove it, but it’s the damn truth all the same. It happened to her sister Ruth, and it happened to her. ’Course, all the Seaforth men are dead now, so there’s nobody left to give me the lie anyway, but people around here take reputation pretty seriously. None of this is ever going to make the front page of the Picayune. Nor yet the Sunday supplement.’

‘How can you be so sure she was abused?’ Juliet threw in. There was a stillness about her now – an intensity of attention that was almost intimidating. She’s got this thing about battered women: a kind of razor-edged sentimentality.

‘How can I be sure?’ Mallisham echoed her. ‘Well, let’s say I know people at the county hospital over in Sprott, and I know people in the sheriff’s office. Myriam was brought in for stitches once, in a place where she didn’t ought to have got torn, and Ruth said something at school another time about something a twelve-year-old girl doesn’t have any right to know. A lot of people got a piece of information and never tried to find out more. I’m a newsman, first and foremost. I collect up those pieces, looking for stories. But some stories I know better than to tell.’

‘You mean,’ Juliet said, with dangerous calm, ‘that you knew these girls were being hurt, and you did nothing to stop it.’

‘No,’ Mallisham said, neither angry nor defensive. ‘I knew later on – after they were all grown up – that someone had hurt them back when they were small. Don’t be so quick to judge, missy. I wouldn’t have sat by if blowing the whistle would have done any good. But like I said, the Seaforth line’s dead now. Lucas Seaforth died thirty years back, and the brothers all perished in various accidents and drunken brawls, so Myriam’s generation is the last there ever was.’

‘Ruth never married?’ I asked.

Mallisham pursed his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She still lives out there, on the farm. The only Seaforth left. And she’s seventy years old, so she’s left it a little late to think about starting a family. But then, when you look at the kind of marriage Myriam made, you can understand her feeling a mite chary about getting spliced herself.

‘Tucker Kale was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that. There’s some people who say he bought Myriam off of Lucas Seaforth, cash down. I doubt it was that simple, but Lucas was a farmer and Kale ran the feed store, so I’d guess there was more of commerce than of love about the whole thing. I knew the man pretty well – my house is only half a mile from where the feed store used to be – and speaking personally, I wouldn’t have given him a kitten if my cat dropped a litter of ten. It’s certain that he beat Myriam, and he liked to show her up in front of people, too. He was the kind of polymorphous sadist who can take his recreation intellectually as well as physically.

‘So he was another brick in the wall, so to speak. But Myriam was damaged when he got her. Her own family had already given her more hurt than anyone should ever have to take.’

He spoke with a weary finality that made me ashamed my own interest in Myriam Kale was so tangential. ‘How long were they married?’ I asked, conscious of Juliet’s scary stillness on my left-hand side.

‘Seven years, give or take.’

‘And then he was killed in a car crash.’

Mallisham shrugged. ‘If you like.’

‘If I like?’

‘Well, I told you a person’s good name was kind of an issue around here.’ He got up, pushed his chair back and went across to one of the bookcases, where he started scanning the box files with his face thrust right up close to them, holding his glasses up out of the way of his eyes as he squinted at the writing on their spines. ‘That’s what they said at the time. And sure enough, the man was found dead in his car, which was kind of a wreck, But it was kind of a wreck when he bought it, and when he drove round town in it. I didn’t ask any questions because at the time there didn’t seem any reason to doubt that things happened that way. But a long time later, after Myriam became such a celebrity and all, I took a look at that autopsy report myself. Got it here somewhere, I’m reasonably sure.’

Mallisham tapped one of the boxes, then a second, as if touching them helped him to remember what was in them. But it was a completely different box he hauled out, from the next shelf down. He brought it over to the desk and opened it up.

‘Now if old Tucker got drunk and drove himself into a ditch, which is what the police said he did, then some of those injuries he took to the head require a little explaining. Looks to me like he must have backed up and taken a good few runs at that ditch until he go it right, because his head sure was dented in a lot of different places.’ He held up a very old foolscap sheet, on the kind of glossy paper the earliest photocopiers used. ‘Yeah, here it is. You can look at it if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t take a copy. This one is traceable to me, and like I said, I’m not going on the record with any of this.’

‘Just summarise for us,’ Juliet suggested.

Mallisham nodded. ‘Well, there were also the injuries to his rectum. They didn’t even get a mention when the county coroner sat and gave his verdict, but they’re all down here in black and white. Tucker Kale was anally raped after he died.’

‘Raped?’ I echoed. Images of Alastair Barnard, whose dead body I’d fortunately never had to see, inconsiderately flashed before my eyes anyway as if they had a right to be there.

‘Artifically raped,’ Mallisham amended. ‘I wouldn’t normally be talking about this in front of a lady, but you’re . . . what you are, so I guess it’s nothing new to you. I guess nothing that one body can do to another body is news to you.

‘Something had been put inside him. With a lot of force. And it was something made of wood because there was a wood splinter that they found. Handle of a hammer? Fence post? I don’t know, but I’d lay odds that whatever Myriam used to kill him she put to this other use afterwards.

‘But what clinches it for me is the burn mark on Tucker’s forehead.’

‘Myriam’s signature,’ I muttered, but Mallisham waved that away.

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s part of what became her modus operandi, but I think this was the first time she’d ever killed a man. And she didn’t do it in cold blood: it wasn’t planned or practised, I’m willing to lay long odds. It wasn’t something she had any kind of a choice about, it was something that came up from inside her and had to let itself out. It was the reasoned crisis of her soul, as some poet on your side of the water put it.

‘So I wasn’t thinking of it as evidence that Myriam was the one who killed old Tucker Kale. I’ve known that ever since I covered this story back in the 1960s – for this newspaper, where I’d started as a cub reporter seven weeks previously. But it took me a while of being out in the world and watching people at their worst to see what it was that Myriam was doing.’

Mallisham shrugged massively. ‘Maybe this is fanciful,’ he said. ‘But I think she was making a point, to herself. For her own satisfaction. She’d been sexually abused by a lot of men. I think she enjoyed being on the other side of that particular transaction. The anal rape is part of that. And the burning is part of it too. She burned him with a cigarette. She smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on his forehead. Does that suggest anything to you?’

I would have got it, but Juliet, to whom the rituals of sex are second nature, got it first. ‘The cigarette afterwards,’ she said, and Mallisham nodded, holding out his hands as if he was surrendering the entirety of his argument into her hands.

‘The cigarette afterwards. Yes. It was all symbolic, in my opinion. And what it was symbolic of was sex. Bad sex. The kind where you don’t respect the other person, you just use them for what you want and then get up and walk away.’

There was a silence as we mulled this over. It was Mallisham who eventually broke it.

‘It seems pretty clear to me,’ he observed in a brisker tone, slotting the sheet of paper back into the box and closing up the lid again, ‘that Luke Poulson – the man that Myriam met and murdered on the interstate – was her second victim, not her first. The pattern was already established when she killed her husband. And she followed it in every kill she made thereafter.’

‘Jesus,’ I said involuntarily, and then, ‘Sorry, Juliet.’ She hates it when people use that kind of language.

‘Jesus is not part of this equation, Mister Castor.’

‘No, I suppose not. But you’re saying that Myriam Kale was driven to kill because of her background and her childhood experiences. That after she went to Chicago she became a serial killer – like Aileen Wuornos – rather than a Mob enforcer? Or is the whole Chicago thing just part of the legend, too?’

‘No, that part is true,’ Mallisham confirmed. ‘She did go to Chicago, and she did work as a prostitute for a couple of years. I think she killed one or two of her customers, but they’re not part of the official tally and there’s no way of knowing now. I’m just going on Chicago coroners’ court records documenting corpses with post-mortem burns.

‘But I believe Aileen Wuornos is a valid comparison. Myriam Kale wasn’t a mobster: she was a psychotic who killed because she had to. Because her mind was so damaged from the hurt that had been heaped on her, hurting was all she knew. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Cerone ever paid her to carry out a hit. In my humble opinion, she killed hoodlums because she mixed with hoodlums. And, in one or two cases, she killed people who Sumner assumes were hoodlums because Kale killed them. Kind of a circular argument, but there you go. The plain fact is, she killed most of the men she slept with. Only the women she took to bed got away clean.’

‘She was bisexual?’ Juliet asked.

Mallisham looked almost comically shocked. ‘Good lord, no. She was a lesbian. Even when she was married to Tucker Kale, I think, although she may not have done anything about it until after she killed him and went north. Men forced themselves on her, sometimes, and she used men sometimes to get what she wanted. Sex with men was never a pleasure for her, unless she enjoyed raping them with household tools. When she chose her own partners, she chose women. Now, unless there was anything else you specifically wanted to ask me, I need to get back to work. I’ve got a couple of articles to type up, and some ad space to sell. These days, as you may have gathered, I pretty much am the Brokenshire Picayune. What I don’t buy off the wire I write myself, and it’s a long day.’

I stood, and Juliet followed my lead. I held out my hand and Mallisham took it again, gave it another of those wrist-crushing shakes. He seemed a lot less placid than before: going over this old ground again seemed to have unsettled his mood a little.

I thanked him for making the time for us, but he waved the words away brusquely. Juliet offered him a hand too: after a moment’s hesitation he shook his head.

‘I’d rather not,’ he said. ‘No offence. Just natural caution.’

I tensed momentarily, wondering how Juliet would take that, but she seemed if anything to be impressed with Mallisham’s solid common sense. She nodded. ‘I understand,’ she purred. ‘If I were in your situation, I wouldn’t want one of Baphomet’s sisters to have my sweat on her hands, either.’

Mallisham gave a double take, then nodded with a slightly rueful expression, acknowledging the insider information.

‘That would have been my second guess,’ he said. ‘But of course if I’d met you in the field I wouldn’t have lived long enough for a second guess. So – it’s lucky for me I didn’t, isn’t it? Enjoy the rest of your day.’

We headed for the door, but just as we were about to leave I remembered something that he’d said that I wanted to follow up on. I turned on the threshold, Columbo-style, and looked back at him. He was already back at his keyboard, but he paused with his fingers poised and waited for me to speak.

‘Mister Mallisham,’ I said, ‘when you mentioned Paul Sumner just now, you talked about speaking ill of the dead. How long ago did he pass on?’

‘Couple of years back,’ Mallisham said, ‘to the best of my recollection. Why? Were you hoping to look him up while you were here?’

‘It was a possibility,’ I said. ‘Now it isn’t.’

Which was true as far as it went: but it was a different impossibility that I was thinking of. Jan Hunter had said Sumner had called her up in January, less than two months ago: and that conversation was what had started her off on asking questions about Myriam Kale – had made her approach me, and enlist me in this bizarre search.

One more open grave, to go with all the rest? Or something else?

As we walked back out into the sunshine and the heavy air, I imagined puppet strings dangling down out of the clouds, attached to my arms and legs. If I found out who was pulling on those strings, I was going to wrap them round his throat in a lover’s knot and pull it tight.