Dead Men's s Boots

‘Investigating the Barnard case. You remember I came in about a week ago to read the room.’

The clerk nodded. Of c kk ne. ourse 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 pigeon-holes, 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. The clerk watched us unhappily as we walked on around the dog-leg to the stairs, his hand smoothing down his hair again.

There was no lift; but then the Paragon was only three storeys 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 else in sight.

Juliet already knew where room seventeen was, so she led the way. ‘Was that Merrill?’ I asked as I followed her, 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 him 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 had 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 he 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 just 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 there were dark and very extensive stains: square windows had been let 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 colour, 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 her head in the direction of ke do d the fouled divan. ‘X marks the spot,’ she said coolly.

‘When you read the room for Coldwood,’ I asked, looking around the chill, 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. He 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.’

Juliet 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 backwards, 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 just a tiny bit off.

‘Was there something else that you couldn’t see?’ I demanded.

Juliet didn’t seem to hear.