Dead Men's s Boots

Okay, you already did pretending that you’re worried about the time. You want to go and pretend you need to eat?’

She nodd c""2e217ed. ‘Certainly.’ She put her hand in her pocket and drew it out with something small and dark glinting between her fingers. She pressed it with her thumb and the car that was standing beside her on the pavement – a very jaunty-looking little number that was wasp-yellow and sleek and elongated at the front end in a way that suggested a great amount of discreetly stabled horsepower – made a self-satisfied warbling sound. Juliet opened the door.

‘Get in,’ she said.

I stared incredulously at this transport of delight. I’m not a car fetishist by any means, but I know something way out of my price range when I see it. The badge on the bonnet bore the distinctive trident logo of Maserati – a sweet little touch for a demon’s wheels. It had a very low centre of gravity, the sculpted cowling underneath the front bumper almost touching the road. It had the look of a car that might have ‘Gransport’ in its name, and maybe ‘Spyder’ too.

‘Is there something wrong, Castor?’ Juliet asked, with an edge of impatience.

‘No,’ I assured her. ‘No, I’m fine. It’s just – you can drive now?’

‘Obviously. I’ve been living among human beings for more than a year, Castor. I’m not intimidated by your technologies.’

‘And – you drive this?’

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

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

9

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

Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any the 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 drive 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, over-powered 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 finally we fetched up in the ragged borders of King’s Cross where we stopped at a bistro c fbutalled something like Fontaine’s or Fontanelle’s or something equally euro-gastric. I’d gone for pasta; Juliet as usual was only interested 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 she was currently my only client it would be a good idea to eke it out.