Dead Men's s Boots

17

The Seaforth farm was seventeen miles out of town, but they were country miles and I was tired. Jouncing around on the dirt tracks, our progress punctuated by potholes and thick roots, I brooded on what Mallisham had told us. On the one hand, if Myriam Kale was a psychotic serial killer rather than a paid enforcer who carried out bespoke murders for a living, that might explain the terrible strength of purpose that would be needed to keep her from sailing on down the river of eternity – to bring her back out of the grave forty years after she died so that she could carry on her interrupted killing spree. But on the other, it seemed to weaken Kale’s connection to the Chicago mobs, and therefore to make her even more of a pickle in John Gittings’s little fruit salad.

‘I’m not figuring this,’ I confessed to Juliet, who hadn’t said a word all this time. ‘There’s something we’re still missing, and it has to be something big.’

‘More deaths,’ she mused.

‘Say what?’

‘More deaths,’ she repeated. ‘Myriam Kale’s father. Her brothers. Paul Sumner. Everyone who knew her first-hand, and could have told us anything about her.’

‘Not everyone,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s still Ruth.’

Juliet nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she allowed. ‘There’s still Ruth. Perhaps we ought to be asking why—’

Whatever the next word was going to be, it was lost as something rammed us hard from behind. The Cobalt bucked and bounced like a startled horse, and metal ground loudly against metal.

‘Shit!’ I exploded, fighting the car back under control as the back end tried to slew off the road. My eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. The grey van filled it, which meant it was already accelerating towards us for a second pass. There was no room on this narrow track to swerve aside, and no way we’d hold together if we left the road and tried our luck among the trees: too many rope-thick roots, too many leaf-camouflaged pits and troughs.

I did the only thing I could do, flooring the accelerator and jumping away from the van as we put on speed. But they were already closing the distance again, and there wasn’t a scratch on those black bull-bars from where they’d rammed us the first time. Mass and momentum and position were all on their side: they could run us off the road and not feel it. The van’s tinted windows didn’t allow me to see who was driving, but whoever he was I cursed his name and his Ray-bans.

Juliet was looking over her shoulder too. ‘We should stop and deal with them,’ she said, with an amazing degree of calm.

‘Great,’ I growled, weaving from side to side on the road in the hope of presenting a slightly less easy target. ‘The only problem with that idea is that if we stop now they’ll ram us into the side of a tree and we’ll fold like a concertina.’

Juliet gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Like a what?’ she said.

‘A concertina. Musical instrument. Makes sound by drawing air in through a bellows and then pumping it out through a – shit, can I explain later?’

‘Yes,’ said Juliet, just as the van caught up with us again. There was another shuddering impact and our back end actually left the road for a couple of moments, then smacked down again hard enough to rattle my teeth inside my skull. I rode it out, slightly better this time because I’d seen it coming, but a stench of burning rubber reached my nostrils. I had no idea what that meant: my best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tyres had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably make at least one of them blow.

But Juliet was winding her window down with as little haste as if she just wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as it reeled itself back into the holder. ‘Keep driving,’ she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at ninety-five miles an hour.

I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: the van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull-bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen. Instead she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatter-proof glass as though she were delivering an oversized baby.

She dumped him under the wheels of the van and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line: he died without ever knowing what had hit him. The van started to veer left, losing speed now that there was no one to lean on the gas, but still with a terrific amount of momentum to burn off and nowhere to spend it.

There was a thunder-crack sound that was repeated two more times: Juliet pivoted on one arm as someone moved inside the van, gun raised to fire again. If she’d been hit, she didn’t show any sign of being hurt. The van’s side ground against the thick trunk of a mature tree and the vehicle ricocheted away again across the narrow track, slewing more violently now and starting to lean over sideways at a steeper and steeper angle. Juliet swarmed up onto the roof, rode the movement with unconscious grace and was already jumping off as the van’s side smacked down into the dirt and it bounced, end over end.

I hit my own brakes, aware that I should have been watching the road ahead of me instead of what was coming up behind. There were no other cars in sight, but I took a broad bend way too fast and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road with a handbrake turn that would have been elegant and accomplished if I hadn’t blown out both of the driver-side tyres in the process.

It had all happened so fast that the echoes of the van’s crashing fall were still dying away as I leaped out of the car. The trees hid it from my sight for a couple of seconds, though, and by the time I rounded the bend the action had moved on a little.

Juliet was down in the road, and the surviving occupants of the van were crawling out as best they could through doors and windows. One of them – judging by the gun in his hand, he must have been the guy who’d been blazing away at Juliet from inside the van – raised his arm to shoot her at point-blank range. She ducked under the bullet and pirouetted so fast she was a blur: the roundhouse kick that caught him high up in the chest must have staved in half his ribs. He folded up, fell and didn’t move again after that.

That left three: two men and a woman, who I saw now for the first time. She was a petite, washed-out little thing dressed in shades of beige, streaked with vivid red here and there because she’d just struggled through a shattered window and hauled herself to her feet in time to watch Juliet dispatching her colleague only a few feet away. Incongruously, she was barefoot: maybe that should have tipped me off, but it didn’t.

The two guys were dressed in finest mafioso chic, but the black suits and wraparound shades looked less menacing given how the situation had spun out of their control. One of them was down on hands and knees, crawling away from the van towards the undergrowth in desperate, indefatigable slo-mo. The other stood facing Juliet irresolutely, fists clenched but not knowing what to do. She took a step towards him, opening her arms as if to embrace him. He staggered back, groping belatedly at his waist for some weapon he carried there.

That was when the woman struck. She was only waiting for Juliet to be broadside on to her: now she moved in a staccato blur, slamming the heel of one hand into Juliet’s left temple and then, as Juliet turned to acknowledge her, following up with a raking slash from the other hand. Juliet’s head snapped to the side, and blood sprayed up into the still, sun-speckled air.

The woman was already changing: had already changed, more like a stiletto blade snicking out of its sheath than like the slow, camera-friendly metamorphoses of horror movies. She seemed to stand up taller as her torso narrowed and elongated: at the same time her elbows and her knees bent and locked into a new configuration that a human being wouldn’t have been able to achieve without ripping a dozen bones out of their sockets. Hairs as thick as porcupine spines bristled on her flesh, like a cat’s hairs standing up when it’s making a squalling, spitting last stand.

Juliet struck out at the loup-garou but she was blinded by her own blood and the sleek, monstrous thing leaped over the wildly hazarded punch to land on Juliet’s shoulders. Its hands, long and slender now and ending in two bristling thickets of unfeasibly long claws, flashed in and out, raking at Juliet’s face. Another jump and it was away before her opponent could get a proper grip on it. Juliet staggered like a drunk as the loup-garou landed four-square in the dust and turned for another pass.

By now I was racing hell for leather towards them. There was no time to think it through. I stuck out my hand, grabbed a handful of something from the bushes to my left and tore it free as I ran. ‘Benedicite, domine meus,’ I panted under my breath, ‘hunc florem, et noli oblivisci –’ Coming from me it was bullshit, but it would have to do.

The loup-garou went low this time, diving under Juliet’s flailing guard and laying open her stomach with a scything kick from one backward-slashing foot. But I was almost there now, and all I had to do was to lay my loaded foliage on the creature before she turned and saw me coming.

The surviving guy still on his feet, whose existence I’d completely forgotten, tackled me from the side and sent me sprawling, coming down on top of me. The force of the impact knocked a lot of the wind out of me, and before I could get it back I felt his fingers closing on my windpipe. His flushed, sweating face glared down into mine, his lips drawn back from clenched teeth. I couldn’t get my right hand up to prise his fingers loose: the injury to my shoulder had left the entire arm too weak and too stiff to give me any purchase. But my left hand – the one that was full of greenery – was still in full working order, and since he obligingly came in so close, I threw it around his neck, hugged him closer still and butted him in the face with nose-flattening force. He sagged and I rolled so he was under me, kneeing him in the balls en passant to make sure he didn’t get up any time soon. I scrambled free and managed to get upright again, leaving him wrapped around his pain.

Juliet was down on one knee, her face a mask of blood but her guard still up despite the terrible damage she’d already sustained: the loup-garou was dancing around her, looking for an opening. It danced right into my open arms and I nailed it with the flowering branch right in the kisser.

‘Hoc fugere,’ I snarled.

The beast jackknifed like a sideswiped truck, its head snapping back, its eyes wide but unseeing. A ripple of pain passed through it and its feet found no purchase for a second or two as its shorted-out nerve endings popped and fizzed with agonising static. I used those precious seconds to shift my balance and slam both my fists into its throat.

For all its wiry strength it didn’t weigh all that much, and the effect was gratifying. It hit the ground hard at an oblique angle, tumbling and rolling in a cloud of dust across the full width of the dirt track.

My sense of triumph was short-lived, though, because it touched down on all four feet like a cat and it was suddenly heading my way again as though I’d never landed a finger on it. I knew the punch wouldn’t do much damage, but I’d had better hopes for my makeshift ward. I guess its lack of efficacy had something to do with my lack of faith: a Christian blessing spoken by an atheist isn’t likely to hit as hard as one spoken by the archbishop of wherever-the-fuck.

The loup-garou, claws raised to rend and tear, launched itself into the air with a miawling scream that rooted me to the spot. If it had landed where it was aiming for, it would probably have excavated half my internal organs in a single blood-boltered moment. But Juliet plucked it out of the air and used its own momentum to slam it hard into the dirt once more. Really hard: this time it was seeing stars, and it was a few seconds before it moved again. By that time, Juliet was kneeling beside it. She took the loup-garou in a tight embrace as it scrambled up and slowly, almost lovingly, bent it backwards until its spine broke. It slid to the ground, its head twitching feebly, its body terribly still. Juliet raised one stilettoed foot and I looked away. I just wish I’d thought to slam my hands over my ears, too, because the sound of a skull giving way under pressure is one that’s kind of hard to forget once you’ve heard it.

‘Bitch took me by surprise,’ Juliet growled, wiping blood away from her eyes: actually from her eye, because the other socket was empty. There was blood bubbling at her lips, too, and pretty much everywhere else. Her right shoulder was laid open to the bone. She walked across to the edge of the track and lowered herself carefully onto a stump.

‘That was a neat trick with the stay-not,’ she muttered.

I looked at the ragged clump of greenery I was still clutching in my left-hand. I opened my fingers and let it fall. ‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘General rule is that anything that’s flowering will do the job, but you know some herbs work better than others. I never did get the hang of sympathetic magic.’

Hand clasped to her empty eye socket, Juliet flicked a meaningful glance at the only one of our erstwhile opponents who was present, breathing and conscious: it was the man whose nose I’d broken.

‘So who have we been fighting?’ she asked.

I walked over to the guy, straddled him, bent down, got a double handful of his lapels and hauled him up onto his knees. He was in a lot of pain, and his eyes took a few seconds to get focused on me.

‘Two words,’ I spat. ‘Who? Why? And make it convincing, or I’ll feed you to the succubus.’

‘S – Sate-’ he gurgled. ‘Sate—’

‘Not getting it. Try harder.’

‘Satanist Church – of the – of the Amer—’

‘Fuck!’ I let him fall, and he hit the dirt again. ‘You’re putting me on! Juliet, these guys are—’

‘I heard.’ Her voice sounded strained. ‘Don’t look around, Castor. I’m changing.’

Once she said that, I had to fight the urge to sneak a sly peek. The van’s side mirror had popped out when it went over and was lying in the roadway at my feet. All I had to do was lean forward and look down. But the indelible sound of that splintering skull was still reverberating inside my head: I decided I didn’t want an indelible sight to go with it.

The Satanist Church of the Americas. So these guys were nothing to do with Myriam Kale or our current fact-finding mission. They were Anton Fanke’s boys and girls: another contingent of the same bunch of arseholes I’d rumbled with in West London the year before, when I was looking for the ghost of Abbie Torrington. They must have been following us all the way from the airport. But before that?

I leaned down and gave the guy I was still standing over another shake. ‘You put a trace on my passport?’ I demanded. ‘That’s how you knew I was coming?’

He gave a twitch that looked as though it might have started out as an attempt to shake his head. ‘Told us,’ he slurred. His eyes were rolling on different orbits: he was probably in an even worse way than he looked.

‘Who told you?’

‘Friend. Friendly interest. Told us when. Where.’

‘Give me a name,’ I demanded.

‘Don’t – have—’

‘Give me a name or I’ll throw you to the succubus and let her finish you off.’

He whimpered brokenly, ‘A–Ash! Said his name – was Ash!’

‘Someone you’ve used before?’

Shake.

‘Just a call out of the blue? Word to the wise?’

Nod.

‘You can turn around now,’ Juliet said quietly from right behind me. I let the guy drop again, and he twisted away in terror just from the sound of her voice – but he was too weak to move very far.

I stood and looked her up and down. She shot me a look as if challenging me to say something, so I bit back whatever profanity had come to my lips.

She’d done a good job, but it clearly hadn’t come easy. Her eye was back in place in its socket, and through her ripped shirt I could see that her shoulder was whole again: no tell-tale glint of bare bone. But she held herself stiffly, suggesting that she was still in pain, and she hadn’t healed the rents in her clothes or removed the bloodstains. And that sense of fading I’d got when I’d looked at her on the plane was even stronger now: she looked like a watercolour picture of herself that had been rained on. She wasn’t strong enough yet to take what she’d just done in her stride.

‘Shall we move on?’ she murmured.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just give me a moment.’

I knelt down beside Schnozzle Durante again and started going through his pockets. He was barely conscious, and in no state to put up any kind of resistance. I found a mobile phone in his trouser pocket, threw it down on the ground and stamped it into shards.

‘It would be easier just to kill him,’ Juliet said, at my shoulder.

‘Why bother if there’s no need?’ I countered. ‘He’s got no wheels, no phone, and he just screwed up what should have been a routine hit. Unless Uncle Sam’s Satanists are a lot more forgiving than the home-grown variety, he’s going to want to go off the radar for a while. Either way, we’ll be done before he gets his act together.’

I walked on, forcing myself not to look back, tensed internally for the insinuatingly liquid smashed-skull noise I’d heard before. But either Juliet bought my reasoning or she couldn’t be bothered to have an argument about it. She appeared at my elbow a moment later and walked on past me at a fast clip.

‘You’re too sentimental,’ she snapped back over her shoulder.

‘I know. I’m all about puppy dogs and scented letters.’

We got back into our spavined car and I turned it around with difficulty. It was hard to control with two tyres out, and the grinding noise I was hearing was probably the front axle doing something it shouldn’t. But it stayed on the road, just about; and what the hell, it was all covered on the insurance.

We bumped and ground our way to the tiny hamlet of Caldwell, and out of it again on a road that made the previous dirt track look like a superhighway.

‘Someone told those guys we were coming,’ I said to Juliet.

‘I know.’

‘The same someone who put a tinkler on my passport number. Our card’s been marked. Not here: back in England.’

She nodded without answering. She was looking out of the window at the rolling fields, her expression distant and cold.

The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun-bleached sacking protruded like a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time. But catching a glimpse of the farmhouse through a gap in the foliage, I wrestled the uncooperative car off the road and parked it a few yards away from an iron cattle-gate whose white paint was two-thirds flaked away.

‘This must be the place,’ I said. ‘At least, there’s sod-all else out here. Want to go take a look?’

Juliet glanced at me, her expression suggesting that that wasn’t a question in need of an answer. We got out and approached the gate. The heavy chain and rusting padlock made it clear that it wasn’t in daily use. Juliet climbed over without preamble, and I followed more slowly, leaning out past the overgrown hedge to get a better look at the house.

It was in as bad a state of repair as the gate: the wood of the boards warped and dry, the shingled roof settled into a lazy concave bowl. An old mattress lay flopped over the porch rail like a heaving drunk, next to a wooden swing that looked as though it had seen better centuries. Hard to believe that anyone still lived here.

It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds: somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet was already striding ahead so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea in theory, but Juliet seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s-claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly narrow for a grown woman, so I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch I was scratched and dishevelled and in a fairly uneven temper.

There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned three hundred and sixty degrees, surveying the devastation. From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky along with the farmhouse, into the merry, merry land of Oz.

I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left-hand side and turned.

It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots. Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and she had a frown deeply etched into her face.

‘Who are you people?’ she said. Her voice had the broadest Southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.

‘Miss Seaforth?’ I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could. I held out my hand. ‘My name is Felix Castor, and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to just barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about your sister—’

I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down suddenly on the porch swing, making it shudder and creak.

‘Oh Lord,’ she said, staring at me as though I was a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. ‘Oh . . .’ Words seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.

Juliet went and sat down next to her. ‘We didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her stare off me. ‘We’ve come from London,’ Juliet said. ‘A man was murdered there, in the way your sister Myriam used to murder people. That’s why we’ve come.’

Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s gentle assistance got to her feet again. She blinked, three or four times: probably not blinking away tears, but that was what it looked like.

‘I haven’t seen my sister since she died,’ she said. In other circumstances it might have seemed an odd thing to announce, but as it was I was grateful to have that clarified.

‘We have,’ Juliet said. ‘We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.’ She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and it was just as well because at that point she buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders to support her until the moment passed.

‘You saw her?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘We did. She . . . looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her, all the same.’

Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence she said, ‘Would you like some cookies and lemonade?’

The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged; an odd combination which, along with the fact that there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d just descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy: the floorboards were warped and shrunken, just as they were out on the porch, but a peach-coloured rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the room, where it didn’t stretch. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family – presumably the Seaforths – posed awkwardly for a cameraman they didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.

‘Please sit down,’ Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be the mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

Three teenaged boys, then, forming the middle row: all much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The look in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: Help, I am stranded on a desert island and I need to be rescued. They were dressed in identical blue crinolines: Sunday best. They looked like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.

Juliet had sat down on the three-piece’s sofa: I went and joined her on it.

‘Feeling any better?’ I asked.

She gave me a sour look. ‘Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.’

‘I’m left-handed,’ I pointed out.

‘I need to be able to escalate for repeat offences.’

Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade and then sat down in one of the chairs. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

I picked up a biscuit, took a bite – it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla – and washed it down with a sip of lemonade which was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat. Juliet ignored both food and drink.

‘It must have been devastating,’ she said, ‘when Myriam was executed.’

I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. ‘It was hardest for my father,’ she said. ‘He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently now: as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him. He said –’ she hesitated, shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them ‘– he said that it would have been better if she’d never been born.’

‘That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,’ Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d ever had one herself: after all, if she was somebody’s sister then presumably she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet was a scary thing to contemplate.

‘Yes,’ Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. ‘It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was a very cold man.’

I stepped in on cue. ‘Some men are cold to strangers, but to their family they’re entirely different.’

Ruth smiled a pained smile. She bent down to pick up a biscuit, but her eyes remained locked on mine. ‘My father was very cordial with strangers,’ she said. ‘It was to his wife and his children that he was – hard.’

‘Does it hurt you to talk about this?’ Juliet asked, as direct as ever.

Ruth shook her head. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘No. It used to hurt, when he and my brothers were still alive. Now that I’m the only one left – now that I know all this is going to die with me – it doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’d like to know, though, why you need to find out these things. And I’d like to know where you saw Myriam.’

I told her the story of Doug and Janine Hunter, or at least the parts that were fit to print: I went very light on the forensic details. Ruth Seaforth sighed a lot as she listened, and after I was done.

‘It sounds like her,’ she said, seeming not the slightest bit surprised to hear about her sister’s return from the dead. ‘I mean – the violence sounds like her. You have to understand, Mister – I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name . . .’

‘Castor. Felix Castor.’

‘Mister Castor. I don’t believe that violence was something she was born with. I think it was my father’s gift to her.’ After a pause she added: ‘To us all.’

‘You don’t strike me as a violent woman, Miss Seaforth,’ I demurred.

‘Don’t I?’ Ruth dabbed her mouth on a lace-edged napkin. ‘No, maybe not. But that’s mainly because I’m old, isn’t it? Old people always seem harmless. I guess because they move slowly and look a little vague sometimes. It doesn’t mean there’s any less fire inside. It just means you don’t get to do so much about it.’

There was a bitterness in her voice that surprised me. I tried to get the conversation back on track. ‘So would it be fair to say that you and Myriam had an unhappy childhood?’ I asked. ‘I mean, did you feel that-?’

Juliet cut right through my measured and mealy-mouthed phrases. ‘Did your father abuse you?’

Ruth folded the napkin three times with excessive care before putting it back down on the plate. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

‘Sexually? Or did he just beat you?’

‘The one shaded into the other. I was happy when he died, because he was the fountainhead of violence in this house. It all flowed from him. To our brothers, Zack, Paul and Tyler. To Myriam. And to me.’

‘How did he die?’ I asked.

Ruth seemed to consult her memory – or at least she paused, looking into the depths of her lemonade, before she answered. ‘Well,’ she said, almost dreamily, ‘he slipped and fell off the roof of the barn when he was fixing it for winter. I wrote to Myriam to tell her, and she wrote back that she’d already heard. She said she was happy he hadn’t died in his bed, but sorry it wasn’t slower.’

‘And your brothers?’ Juliet asked.

Another pause. ‘Tyler died first,’ she said. ‘Some men from out of town came into the Pit Stop Bar in Caldwell. A blond man in a white suit, they said, and two others. They picked a fight with him, and they took it outside. Beat him to death, more or less, though he lived a couple of days on a machine.

‘Zack got himself drowned in some mud, over by Caldwell Creek. There’s a wallow there that’s very deep, and he fell into it and didn’t come out. Perhaps he was drunk. It’s not that difficult to climb out if you’re sober.

‘And Paul died from a heroin overdose. That was a big scandal, as you can imagine. Nobody even knew you could get heroin around here back in those days. The doctor said it had to be the first time Paul had ever tried it, because there were no needle marks anywhere on his body. So I guess he didn’t know how strong the dose was, and he just took more than he could handle. I gather that’s easy to do.’

When Ruth finished this litany of disasters, nobody spoke for a moment or two.

‘How long ago did these thing happen, exactly?’ I asked, breaking the strained silence.

‘A long time,’ she said. She met my gaze and stared me out.

‘While Myriam was still alive?’

‘Yes. That long ago.’

‘So is it possible . . . ?’ I left the question hanging. Ruth put her glass back down on the tray, hard. It hit the side of the jug, and the ringing sound hung in the air for a second. She tensed, seeming to be about to stand, but the impulse spent itself in a sort of tremor that passed through her. Still she didn’t avoid our eyes: she seemed to me to have made a decision at some point in her life not to duck or flinch from anything.

‘God works in mysterious ways,’ she said, her voice very low. ‘Or so we’re told. But He doesn’t have a monopoly on that, does He, Mister Castor? It was an awful thing. Of course it was. But it spared me. All those deaths . . . spared me. I was twenty years old, and I was hoping to escape this house by getting married, but my father wouldn’t let me out and he wouldn’t let any boys come by. He said he’d had one daughter go wild on him and he wasn’t going to have another go the same way. So I stayed here, with him. And with my brothers. All the day, and all the night.’ She looked at her hands, spreading the fingers slowly as if she was examining them for scars or imperfections. ‘Somebody had to come and save me. And somebody did.’

Ruth paused, but she didn’t seem to have finished speaking, and neither I nor Juliet jumped into the gap. After a few moments she took up again in a different tone, softer and more wistful. ‘She only came back to visit a couple of times, and it was always in secret, because she was afraid they’d hold her for Tucker’s murder. But she used to write me letters. About Chicago. About the things she was doing there. They were full of lies – but nice lies. Lies that would make me happy for her. And it did make me happy, to think that she was free of this place.’

‘Why do you stay here?’ Juliet asked. There was no indication in her voice of what she was feeling, but I recognised the look on her face. All things considered, it was probably a lucky break for Lucas Seaforth and his three sons that they were dead already.

Ruth’s eyebrows rose and fell again. ‘It’s my home,’ she said. ‘It’s the only place I know, really. And it’s the only place she’d ever be able to find me, if she wanted to come and see me again. And I’m too old to start over, anywhere. I could move, if I wanted to. Insurance paid off a lot when my father died, and it all came to me when there was no one else left to lay claim to it. But I don’t really have any use for money. And I don’t really have any use for travel. I’m happy where I am.’

The last sentence was belied by the tears that sprang up in her eyes and overflowed suddenly down her cheeks. Water in a dry place: she blinked it away almost angrily, but it kept right on coming.

‘You’ll have to go now,’ she said, her voice perfectly clear despite the rain of tears.

‘I’m sorry, Miss Seaforth,’ I said, meaning it. ‘We didn’t want to upset you. But there’s one more thing we’d really like to do while we’re here. If you could just point us to where Myriam’s grave is, with your permission we’ll visit it before we leave.’

Ruth stood up and folded her arms with brittle ferocity. ‘No,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘No, you do not have my permission. Like I said, you have to go. I’m sorry, it’s not because you’ve offended me in any way. I’m just very tired now, and I need to sleep. I hope you’ll take account of my age and do as I ask.’

‘Of course.’ I stood up, and Juliet followed my lead. ‘Thanks for all your help, Miss Seaforth. And I’m sorry if we’ve trespassed on your time. We’ll let ourselves out.’

Ruth watched us all the way to the door, not moving an inch. I opened the door and stood aside for Juliet to go first, but she waved me through and then didn’t follow. ‘I’ll be a moment,’ she said.

I turned and stared at her. ‘What?’

‘I’ll be a moment, Castor. Wait on the porch.’ She took hold of the door and shut it in my face.

I think it was all that talk about abusive men that made her so brusque – and as symbolic humiliations went, it was one I could walk away from without a permanent limp so on the whole I was cool with it. I sat on the porch swing and waited for Juliet to finish whatever business she had with Ruth that required my not being there.

She came out about a quarter of an hour later, shot me a look in passing and walked on down the steps back into the thick, encroaching undergrowth. I jumped to my feet, ran and caught her up.

‘Is it this way?’ I asked, falling in beside her.

She didn’t look in my direction, or slow down. ‘Is what this way?’

‘Myriam’s grave.’

‘No. It isn’t.’

‘Then-?’

‘I’ll tell you in the car.’

We retraced out steps in silence, back to our bloodied, bowed Cobalt, and I unlocked the doors. When we were inside we sat in silence for a moment. Then, since Juliet didn’t speak, I started the car up and got us out onto the road. There was no way we’d make it all the way back to Birmingham in this undead heap, but we could drive into Brokenshire and then make some calls, see where we had to go to drop it off and pick ourselves up another ride for the homeward leg of the journey. Best pick another road, though: the one we’d come on was probably still blocked.