Mike Carey

by Dead Men's Boots (v5)

  “And—you drive this?”

  “It was a gift,” Juliet said simply, sliding in behind the wheel with the sinuous grace of a cat curling up to sleep.

  I didn’t ask. But don’t think I didn’t want to know.

  Nine

  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 with its scent and then digests them when they fall into it.

  Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any 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 trip here 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, overpowered 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 we finally 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 interested only 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 Jan was currently my only client it would be a good idea to eke it out.

  Juliet shook her head. “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 favored 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 be maintained only 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.”

  She 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 toward 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. 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 an incisor 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 plateful 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 fit 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 dogleg, 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 anthropomorphizing, 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. The death, too, which is maybe the down side.

  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 he hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard. He could 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. 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 traveling 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 360-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 that stuck out to the side as though he were on a fuse.

  “Can I hel
p 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 pigeonholes, 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. His hand smoothing down his hair again, the clerk watched us unhappily as we walked around the dogleg to the stairs.

  There was no lift, but then the Paragon was only three stories 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 in sight.

  Juliet already knew where room 17 was, so she led the way. “Was that Merrill?” I asked as I followed, 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 he 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 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 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 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 were dark and very extensive stains. Square windows had been cut 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 color, 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 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 chilly, 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. Coldwood 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.”

  She 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 backward, 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 a tiny bit off. “Was there something else that you couldn’t see?” I demanded.

  She didn’t seem to hear. She was staring right through me at the door, and I could tell that what she was seeing was not me but the events of January 26. She was squinting into the middle distance, along a dimension that 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, foursquare, 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 and 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 trailed off. She was staring at the bed, 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 Barnard 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 her 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 if I didn’t take a good, long look at what had happened. At the same time, 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, 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 realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out. “… And then he gets the hammer out of the bag and smashes Barnard’s skull in,” I finished. But there was something in Juliet’s expression that I couldn’t read. I waited, resisting the urge to
throw another question at her.

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

  “You don’t see—”

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

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

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

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

  “And the hammer?”

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

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

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

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