Dead Men's Boots Read online

  I could have played coy, but I was curious about how she’d tracked me down here and what she wanted: and maybe I just jumped at the chance of a distraction from the thoughts that were weighing on my own mind right then. I crossed to the table, gave her a nod as she turned to stare at me.

  ‘Paul said you were asking after me,’ I said.

  She sat bolt upright, roused from whatever reverie she’d been in. ‘Felix Castor?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I’m Janine. Jan. Jan Hunter.’ She put out a hand and I shook it. ‘I got your name from Cheryl Telemaque. She said you’re good. I’d like to hire you.’

  ‘Okay if I sit down?’ I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at: given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it might be kind of a loaded question.

  I took a seat opposite Janine Hunter and she swivelled round to face me.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ I asked – the standard opening phrase for doctors, mechanics and ghostbreakers.

  ‘My husband,’ she said, and then seemed to hesitate. ‘He’s . . .’

  The pause went on: whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over it. I tried to help.

  ‘Passed on?’ I suggested.

  She looked surprised. ‘No! He’s on remand, at Pentonville.’ Another leaden pause. ‘For sexual assault and murder.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  ‘And he didn’t do it, Mister Castor. Doug looks really tough, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s – I’ve got to find the real killer. I want her to tell everybody what she did. So they’ll let Doug go.’

  I noted the female pronoun in passing. This was getting stranger by the second: it was also veering gracefully away from what I think of my core competencies.

  ‘I’m an exorcist, Mrs Hunter,’ I reminded her, as gently as I could manage. ‘I could only find this killer for you if she happened to be—’

  And before I could get the word out, Jan Hunter cut across me with the inevitable punchline. ‘She is, Mister Castor. She’s dead. She’s been dead for forty years.’

  4

  I stared at Jan Hunter for a moment, letting the idea grow on me.

  ‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘Provisionally, I mean. Okay with provisos. You’d better tell me the whole story. Then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I can do for you.’

  By way of answer, Jan rummaged in her handbag and came up with a photo, which she handed to me. It showed a man – the same age as Jan or maybe a couple of years older – with a suede-head haircut and slightly over-large ears, looking to camera with a goofy grin while holding up two dead fish on a hook. The background was a river bank; the props, a canvas chair and a keepnet. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a wedding ring, and that was all I could tell you about him from memory. It wasn’t a face that left a deep impression.

  ‘Doug,’ I said.

  ‘Look at that face,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘Can you imagine him hurting anyone? Let alone killing—’

  ‘He did for those two fish,’ I said, trying to inject a little reality back into the proceedings. She gave me a wounded look and I shrugged an apology. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened?’

  She looked down at the photo, drawing in a long, ragged breath. It was mind over matter: I saw her shovelling the emotions back inside and locking them down. When she looked at me again, she was almost clinically calm.

  ‘Just the facts, ma’am?’ she said, presumably being Dan Ackroyd rather than Jack Webb.

  ‘To start with.’

  So she told them to me. And they were as nasty a set as I’d ever come across.

  The twenty-sixth of January. Sometime after four p.m. A man named Alastair Barnard, age forty-nine, checked into a hotel room in King’s Cross, along with another, younger man – this other man described as having close-cropped mid-brown hair and brown eyes, and wearing a black donkey jacket with a green paint stain on the left sleeve. The hotel in question was the Paragon: it rents by the hour, because the clientele it caters to are the prostitutes who work the back streets off Goods Way and Battle Bridge Road.

  The desk clerk, one Christopher Merrill, gave them a key – room seventeen, which offers a fine view of the freight yard. He assumed that the younger man was a rent boy bringing his work in off the streets: but he didn’t ask any questions or make any small talk, because you don’t mess with your core business.

  Normally the clerk would have expected to see the two men emerge again half an hour later and walk away in different directions. In this case that didn’t happen, but the clerk didn’t see anything unusual in that because he’d forgotten all about them. It was a Friday afternoon and there were a lot of comings and goings: nothing compared to the traffic that would be coming through later in the evening, but plenty to keep him busy.

  But when nine o’clock rolled around and the pressure on the rooms started building up, he noticed that that key was still out. Five hours? Even with a double dose of Viagra and a pint of amyl nitrate, nobody can keep it up that long. And now they owed him money, because they’d only paid for an hour. With the sour suspicion that the men had fucked and run, he summoned the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta, who was the only other guy on the Paragon’s daytime staff. Together they took the master key up to the first floor and unlocked the door.

  ‘Barnard was on the floor,’ Jan said, frowning slightly as though she was quoting from memory. ‘He’d fallen off the bed, and he’d brought the sheets and the coverlet with him. He was all tangled up in them so you could only see him from the waist up. His head had been smashed into pulp.’

  The desk clerk started screaming, which brought people running from the other rooms. Most of them took one look at the devastation and fled. None had come forward since. It was the cleaner who called the police, explaining in heavily accented English that there’d been an accident of some kind and a man was dead.

  The cops dismissed the accident hypothesis as soon as they walked in the door. Barnard had been hit more than two dozen times with something hard and heavy, wielded with frenzied energy. Other things – crueller and sicker things – had been done to him too, presumably before that. He’d died on his stomach, crawling across the floor away from the bed, trying to make it to the door.

  As far as the damage to his skull went, there were two different kinds of wound. Some of them had been made with something blunt and round-ended: some were narrower and had penetrated right through the bone instead of impacting on it. Pre-empting the forensics team who arrived later, one of the uniformed constables – the only one with the stomach to get close enough to see – immediately and confidently predicted that when the implement used on Mister Barnard was found, it would turn out to have been a claw hammer.

  ‘Was he right?’ I asked.

  Jan halted in her recitation, which had assumed a deadpan, running-on-automatic quality. ‘They haven’t found it yet,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  ‘If the weapon was a hammer,’ I said, picking my words carefully, ‘I guess you’re talking about a certain degree of premeditation. It couldn’t have been a . . . crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The killer brought the weapon in with him.’

  I was aware that I’d used the male pronoun, not the female. But unless I’d miscounted somewhere, there wasn’t a woman in the case yet. In fact, if memory served-

  ‘You mentioned sexual assault,’ I said. ‘Sexual assault and murder.’

  Jan nodded. ‘This man – Barnard – he’d had what they call “receptive anal sex”. And it had been rough.’

  ‘Rough enough to have been non-consensual?’

  ‘Rough enough to raise a doubt. There was . . . damage.’

  It was time for the make-or-break question. ‘Where does Doug fit into all this?’

  Jan dropped her gaze to the table, where the photo of her
husband was still lying. ‘He hadn’t even gone a hundred yards,’ she said, almost matter-of-factly. ‘He had blood all over him, so people were staring at him, getting out of his way. Someone called the police, and they just routed the call to one of the cars that had been sent out to the Paragon. When the squad car got to Cheney Road they didn’t even have to ask – people saw them coming along the road, pointed the way, and they found Doug sitting on the edge of the pavement, a block up from the station. Just sitting there, staring at his hands like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. They brought him in right there. Then they got a DNA match and they charged him.’

  ‘A DNA match?’ I echoed. ‘Then—’

  She didn’t flinch: under the circumstances that was mightily impressive. ‘Yes. It was my husband’s semen they found inside Alastair Barnard.’

  I turned the expression ‘open-and-shut case’ over in my mind, checking to make sure that it had no sordid double meanings that would make it inadvisable to use. Before I could say it, though, Jan was carrying on at a rush.

  ‘There’s no denying that part of it,’ she said. ‘Doug had sex with this man. I suppose he went there, to that hotel, specifically to do that. But I don’t believe he killed anyone, Mister Castor. I don’t believe he’s even capable of doing that.

  ‘We’ve been married three years now, and he’s – despite the way he looks, despite the way he was brought up – he’s the gentlest man I ever met. Really. He’s six foot three, he works as a brickie and he used to box, but really, he is. If he gets angry, he turns it on himself. He never even shouts. Doug could no more kill someone than you or I could.’

  I let that straight line sail right on by. It’s true that I never pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger; or tenderised anyone with a claw hammer either, for that matter. But I’d done things that had led to people dying, and I’d done them with my eyes open. It was enough to give me a twinge of unease as I listened to Jan Hunter protesting her husband’s innocence on the basis that he was always nice to her.

  ‘Did you know that he was bi?’ I asked.

  Jan shook her head violently. ‘No. No, I didn’t. But in the last few months I knew I wasn’t satisfying him. We were scarcely ever together. He didn’t want to touch me, although he was still . . . he still seemed to love me. There was just something he couldn’t tell me. I’d wake up in the night sometimes and I’d hear him crying in the dark. Sometimes I’d doze off and wake up again, and it would be hours later. But I’d still hear the same sounds. He was just crying and crying, all through the night. Something was eating away at him. Something he couldn’t share.

  ‘I’d started to think he had to be seeing someone else. It was the only explanation that made any sense. He was working on a big site over in East London – they’re building one of those new super-casinos – and he was coming home later and later. Overtime, he said, but there’s never that much overtime to go round in the winter. You can’t mix cement in the dark.

  ‘And then, before the murder, he didn’t even come home for a week. I hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t called, or . . .’ Jan’s voice trailed off. She stared at me, her expression bleak. ‘I was waiting for bad news. Just not this kind.’

  Face to face with her grief and her pain, I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t think I could help her. That I couldn’t think of anything that would get her husband off a rap as solid as this. She saw my expression and forestalled me.

  ‘I’ve got evidence,’ she said quickly. ‘You have to hear this, Mister Castor. Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out.’

  ‘What evidence?’ I asked, with huge reluctance.

  Jan picked up her gin and tonic and downed it in one go before answering. She grimaced as the pungent liquor went down.

  ‘All right,’ she said, her tone hardening into something belligerent and stubborn. The students at the pool table looked around: it must have sounded as though we were having a marital tiff. ‘Something happened to me. About two weeks after Doug was arrested. I was sitting at home. To be honest, I was more or less drunk, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. I was –’ she made a sudden, sharp gesture ‘– falling apart. I really was, just . . . bits and pieces. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head. There was so much that had to be done. Not just talking to the lawyers. Bills. Letters. Doug had done all that, and now he wasn’t there. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t even trying to. I was just sitting there feeling sorry for myself.’

  That sounded reasonable enough to me, but Jan’s face twisted in self-disgust. ‘Sitting there and waiting for something to happen. As though, you know, a light was going to shine down out of the sky and a voice was going to tell me what to do. Pathetic.

  ‘And then the phone rang.

  ‘It was an American voice. He told me his name, and I didn’t hear it. I just thought he was a friend of Doug’s or someone from the site. His foreman or something. But then he said he wanted to talk to me, about Doug’s case.

  ‘“Your husband didn’t do it”, he said. “He’s innocent. You may even be able to prove it.”’

  ‘Well, I was sitting up straight now, but I still thought he might be, you know, some sort of crank. Like that nutcase who made the Ripper phone calls. One of these people who gets off on being close to a juicy murder, even if it’s at second- or third-hand. I asked him who he was, and he told me his name again. It was Paul Sumner. Paul Sumner Junior.’

  I’d vaguely heard the name, but I didn’t place it until Jan went on.

  ‘He writes books. True crime. He wrote that history of the Mob that they made into a TV series. And a biography of John Wayne Gacy. Stuff like that. I’d never read any of it, but I sort of knew who he was. And he said he’d read about Paul’s case on the Net. He’s got all these news feeds on his desktop that link to weird crime stories from all around the world. Because that’s how he makes his living. And he read about Paul’s case, and it just made his radar go off. He said he was waiting for something like this to happen, so he knew what it was as soon as he heard. Do you remember Myriam Seaforth Kale? She was a lady gangster, back in the 1960s. Sort of like Bonnie Parker was in the 1930s.’

  I gave an eyebrow shrug. Of course I’d heard of her: she was one of those bad girls like Belle Starr or Beulah Baird who go into folklore because of their connection with violent men, or because they do some of the things that violent men do routinely. I was nearly certain she’d turned up in a crappy movie that Roger Corman or someone had directed. Daughters of Blood? Children of Blood? The Blood Family Robinson? ‘Chicago Mob scene,’ I said. ‘She was Jackie Cerone’s girlfriend, or something, and then he used her on a job.’

  Jan was nodding vigorously. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s absolutely right. She came from somewhere a long way down in the South. Brokenshire, Alabama. But she was already a killer before she ever got to Chicago. The first man she killed was a man who stopped and picked her up on the road, after she left home. The story is that he tried to rape her and she killed him with a wheel wrench.

  ‘Then later on, when she worked for the mobs, she only killed men. That was one of her rules. And she seemed to like humiliating them as well as killing them. She had a sort of ritual.’

  Some of the story was coming back to me now, in all its lurid colours. Myriam Kale: the homespun farm girl who hitch-hiked up the interstate to Illinois and got lost in the big city, only to surface again as one of the few women ever to become a Mafia contract killer; the real-life femme fatale who inspired a hundred sanitised movie imitations, murdering nine men before the FBI cornered her in Chicago’s Salisbury Hotel and brought her in alive so that they could try her, condemn her and give her the electric chair. Or maybe it was lethal injection, I’m hazy on the details.

  I had the barest beginning of an inkling of where this was going now.

  ‘Kale died in the 1960s,’ I said. ‘More than forty years ago. On the other side of the world.’ It wasn’t an absolute objection, I knew: just a place marker
– something we’d have to come back to.

  But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

  ‘I told you that Barnard had been tortured before he died,’ Jan said, using the unmentionable word this time rather than talking around it.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When the pathology report came back, it turned out that one of his injuries was later than all the rest. Postmortem. It was a cigarette burn. On his face, just underneath his eye. That was her trade mark, Mister Castor. She did that to all the men she murdered. The first man, the one who picked her up, she burned with the cigarette lighter out of his car. All the rest she burned with a cigarette. It was the last thing she did, always after they were already dead. Like . . . signing off on the kill.’

  I tried not to meet Jan’s over-intense stare. ‘Anything like that,’ I said, guardedly, ‘any detail that becomes associated with a particular murderer’s style – copycat killers are going to pick up on it and use it as a matter of course.’

  Jan nodded again: she’d seen that objection coming and it didn’t faze her. ‘This is the third time Kale has killed since her death,’ she said. ‘And all three times have been here, in England, not in the States. Paul Sumner has been tracking her – that’s why he knew what this was as soon as he read about Doug’s case. The first time was in 1980, up in Edinburgh. The second was in 1993, in Newcastle. And now this. All three of them, middle-aged men picked up on the street and taken back somewhere for sex. All three of them, tortured, murdered, then burned. Do copycat killers rest up for more than a decade between outings, Mister Castor?’

  ‘I’ve never known any,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe they’re cyclical, like locusts.’

  ‘And there’s something else,’ Jan said, with the look of someone who was turning over their hole card to reveal a big fat ace. ‘The cleaner at the Paragon Hotel – Joseph Onugeta – said in his statement that he walked past room seventeen sometime around five o’clock. That was about an hour after Doug and Barnard went in there. And he heard voices – people arguing. Two men and a woman, he said. Definitely three voices, because one of the men had a really cut-glass BBC voice – that would have been Barnard – and the other had a thick accent that he couldn’t understand properly.’