Dead Men's Boots

by Mike Carey

  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 is
n’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.

  18

  The waitress at the Golden Coffee House had clearly taken a fancy to Juliet: the fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

  ‘The blond man from out of town,’ she said. ‘The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I ran the conversation through again in my mind, placed the reference. ‘The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?’

  ‘He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she heard your accent.’

  That made a lot of sense now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that it was the mention of Myriam that had made Ruth weak at the knees: but there couldn’t be many other reasons besides Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. In a different way, though, this didn’t either.

  ‘When she told that story,’ I said, picking over the logic in my mind, ‘she didn’t give the impression that she was there when Tyler died. In fact I’m pretty sure she said she was told about it afterwards.’

  Juliet bit through a chicken leg, flesh and bone and all, and crunched down hard. She nodded, mouth full, but I had to wait for elaboration until she’d chewed and swallowed.

  ‘She wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘But she met this man later. He’d been sent to kill Tyler by Myriam, that’s fairly obvious. Probably he arranged the other deaths, too – Lucas and the other two brothers. Ruth always knew she had a guardian angel, and she knew who it was. But there was no reason why Myriam couldn’t work through proxies.

  ‘The man came up to the farm on the day of Myriam’s execution, and he introduced himself. Under the circumstances, which I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you, the fact that he’d helped to beat Tyler Seaforth to death wasn’t much of a barrier to polite conversation. Ruth was much more inclined to kiss his hands than to call the police.’

  ‘What was his name?’ I asked.

  ‘The name he gave her was Bergson.’

  I almost laughed. ‘I think that’s a pretty rarefied piece of wordplay,’ I said. ‘Bergson was a French philosopher back in the 1930s. I think he had some idea about a universe of pure spirit. Kind of like Plato, only with a more outrageous accent.’

  ‘Ruth didn’t believe that was his real name. The point was that he told her – told her so she knew it was the truth – that he’d worked for Myriam or done favours for her in the past. And he said he was still working on her behalf now. He insisted on that: all of this was for Myriam’s sake.

  ‘He gave Ruth the address and telephone number of the Illinois State Penitentiary, and he told her everything she needed to know about claiming Myriam’s body. She had an absolute legal right, he said: all she had to do was exercise it. The body should be brought to the farm, and she should refuse all offers of help with the burial. If anyone asked, she was to say that it was all taken care of. And as soon as she was alone – as soon as the circus of cops and journalists and death-junkies was off the premises – she was to call him on a number he gave her.’

  ‘Ruth had her doubts, but she also felt she had good reasons to trust this man. She argued it backwards and forwards with herself, but in the end she did what she’d been told. She called him and told him when is was safe to come.

  ‘He drove out in a flat-bed truck, with two other men. They loaded the casket onto the truck, and tied it down. They covered it with a tarpaulin. Then just before they left, Ruth screwed up her courage and asked the blond man where they were taking her dead sister. He didn’t want to answer, but she burst into tears and begged him. She was going to be left alone, she told him. More alone than she’d ever been. She didn’t miss her father or her brothers in the slightest, but now Myriam was gone and she didn’t have anyone. The least he could do was tell her where he was taking her.’

  ‘And in the end he did. “To the next life,” he said.’

  I let a forkful of mashed potato drop back into the mountainous mass I’d scooped it from.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said blankly. It wasn’t Oscar Wilde but it expressed my feelings. ‘What are we talking about here? Gangsters raising gangsters from the dead? Why? Out of professional courtesy? And how could he promise that if he hadn’t done it before? It’s like some kind of fucking resurrectionist assembly line. Dead men pulling themselves up out of the grave by each other’s bootstraps . . .’

  ‘You may be exaggerating the scale of this,’ Juliet told me coolly. ‘We still only know for sure about two cases. Kale, and the man who was both Aaron Silver and then Les Lathwell.’

  She was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better. ‘The scary thing is that fingerprint,’ I muttered, shoving my plate away still mostly full. ‘If they’ve found a way to cheat, Juliet – to steal the bodies of the living out from under them, the same way you and your brothers and sisters can – and if they can do it on the money, time after time . . .’

  ‘Two big ifs,’ Juliet observed. I was barely listening. The same ones as before, John had said to me when I met him in my dream. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

  Shying away from that unpleasant thought, I found another one that had been niggling at me while she spoke. ‘Did Mister X say why he was doing all this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, we know from all the available evidence that he wasn’t sleeping with Myriam. He wouldn’t have woken up again. So was he trying to recruit her? Did he owe her a favour? What was in it for him?’

  Juliet impaled me on a cold stare. ‘Ruth thinks he loved her. Passionately.’

  ‘Then why was he still alive?’

  ‘Perhaps he never raped her.’

  ‘Alastair Barnard never raped her, either,’ I pointed out. ‘If anything, it was the other way around, but he’s still dead. And not because he was an abuser of women. He was fucking gay.’

  ‘Married and gay.’

  ‘Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.’

  ‘And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?’

  I blinked. ‘Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.’

  ‘By exorcising her.’

  ‘Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the programme.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  The sudden hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said: it was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room was listening.

  ‘Say how what now?’

  Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly off-handed shrug. ‘Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathise. More. I find a certain elegance in it.’

  I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Where’s the elegance in a random murder spree spanning half a century?
Getting your own back on the men who abused you is one thing: carving your way through the whole male gender is another.’

  I could see from Juliet’s expression that this little speech hadn’t made the slightest dent in her. With an unpleasant going-down-in-a-lift feeling in my stomach, I saw where this was going. If Juliet enlisted in Myriam Kale’s cause, things could get messy: so messy I didn’t want to think about it.

  ‘What about your rep?’ I asked her, changing tack. ‘You said it was a big thing to you to deliver as promised. Doug Hunter didn’t kill Barnard. We know that now. He was possessed.’

  ‘It was his hand that held the hammer.’

  ‘But not his mind that decided to. Like you said, you were paid to uncover the truth about what happened in that hotel room. Are you going to stop halfway because suddenly you’re a cheerleader for the real murderer? And what about the others – Mister X and his friends? All the other fun-loving criminals who’ve been buried in coffins fitted with sliding doors? They’re all men, apart from Myriam. They may have been using her in some game of their own. They’ve certainly left her to carry the can for this latest killing.’

  Juliet had gone back to eating. She was listening to me, but I wasn’t having any impact. I was unnerved by the mask-like impassivity in her face. Normally Juliet doesn’t bother to disguise her feelings because her feelings come out like water from a high-pressure hose. Right there and then I couldn’t read her at all. And I had just the one shot left in my locker.

  ‘You think she’s happy?’ I asked.

  Juliet set down the nub-end of bone that was all that was left of her chicken leg. Her eyes impaled mine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Kale. Do you think she’s happy? Because she didn’t look happy to me, staring out from behind Doug Hunter’s face. One prison inside another prison, that’s how I saw it. She looked like someone stuck in a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. And Jan said she used to hear Doug crying at night, for hours—’