Dead Men's s Boots

Juliet shook her head in any case. ‘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 favoured 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 only be maintained 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.’

Juliet 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’ k16;f ts 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 towards 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 right now. 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 her incisors 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 plate full 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 fits 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 dog-leg, 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 anthropomorphising, 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. And the death, too, which is maybe the downside.

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 hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard. He could just 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 than that. 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 travelling 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 three-sixty-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 which stuck out to the side as though he was on a fuse.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked us in a slightly nasal voice.

‘I’m with the police,’ Juliet said, which I guess was a white lie.