Dead Men's s Boots

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 small kind?&#er 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.’

I thought over what she’d said. ‘So it’s possible,’ I summed up, ‘that someone else was present in the room when all this was happening? It’s possible that someone else comes in at the kill, as it were, takes the hammer and uses it while Doug is . . . doing his thing.’

Juliet looked at me for a long time before shaking her head. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘But this shadow . . .’

‘I told you, it’s not like a physical thing. It’s more like an accident of the terrain.’

‘I don’t get your drift, Juliet.’

She frowned impatiently. ‘I’m trying to describe invisible things, Castor. Most of this is metaphor.’

‘Are you absolutely sure there was no one else here?’ I persisted doggedly ‘You said yourself that something blocked your . . . perceptions. Something got in your way, whether it was solid or not, and suddenly, if we stick with the metaphor, you were seeing through a glass, darkly. Anything could have happened behind that fog.’

‘If there was someone else there, I’d sense them on some level,’ said Juliet coldly.

‘And you don’t?’ This was coming to the crunch. I stood facing her, held her blacker-than-black gaze without flinching. It wasn’t easy: it was like standing up in a stiff wind that sucks you in instead of blowing you backwards. ‘You don’t sense anything else at all? Anything that makes you doubt, for a fraction of a second, that Coldwood’s got his hand on the right collar? Barnard and Hunter were meant to be in here alone, but that cleaner, Onugeta, heard a woman’s voice when he walked past the door. Three voices, he said: two men and a woman. Was he wrong, or was there a woman here? Is there any emotional trace in the room that you can’t explain by two men coming in here to fuck each other’s brains out?’

Thinking about Alastair Barnard’s shattered skull, I wanted to drag those words back and scrub them clean with Dettol as soon as I’d said them, but Juliet didn’t bother delivering the hideous punchline. She didn’t say no, either.

‘There’ve been many women in this room,’ she said slowly. ‘Many and many, and most of them were sad. Most of them resented what was done to them here, or hated the men who were doing it to them. Perhaps that’s all the shadow was – the stain left by their unhappiness.’

My gaze broke first: I’m only human, after all. But it was Juliet who was being evasive here, and I didn’t have to say anything else. I just waited for her to fill in the blanks, staring out of the window at the King’s Cross marshalling yar karshinds while my pulse came down again.

‘There is something else,’ she admitted at last. ‘A residue that’s very strong, and very noticeable. Perhaps it is a woman. The physical scents are just of the two men, but perhaps, yes. A woman’s feelings. Angry, negative feelings. Disgust, and fear, and defiance – all feeding into anger.’

‘Was it here already?’ I asked, ‘or did it come in with Hunter and Barnard? Was it following them? Does it leave with them? Was one of them being haunted by this . . . residue?’

I glanced at Juliet as I delivered the last word. She shrugged eloquently, her breasts shifting under the tantalisingly translucent fabric of her shirt. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, with visible reluctance.

I couldn’t resist pressing my advantage. ‘I want to go and visit Doug Hunter in jail,’ I said, ‘and get his take on what happened. Will you come with me?’

Juliet looked blank. ‘Why?’

‘Well, have you ever met him?’

‘No.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to meet him, if your testimony is going to send him down for twenty or thirty years?’

‘No.’

I was amazed, and a little exasperated. ‘What, you’re not the slightest bit curious?’

‘Not the slightest bit,’ Juliet confirmed equably. ‘However, I will admit one thing. The possibility that I might have made a mistake in this does trouble me. I take my reputation very seriously.’

‘So is that a yes? You’ll come with me?’

After a fractional pause, Juliet nodded. ‘Yes.