Dead Men's s Boots

Very well. Not today, though. Today I have other things to do.’

‘I’ll need to arrange it with Jan Hunter in any case,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘Fine. If I’m not home, leave a message with Sue.’

She turned and walked out of the room without another word. In a human woman it would have seemed spectacularly abrupt, but with fiends from the pit you have to make allowances: after all, Juliet had only been living on Earth for a little over a year, and you have to assume that in Hell a lot of the normal conversational rules don’t operate in quite the same way. For example, tearing someone’s head off and spitting down their neck probably has an entirely different meaning down there.

I lingered in the room for a few minutes more, searching it myself now with my eyes tight shut. But the susurrus of fright and cruelty was everywhere: it was like trying to echolocate in the midst of a ticker-tape parade. I gave up, let myself out and closed the door again. The lock had an automatic catch, and Juliet had taken the key with her when she left, so that was it as far as examining the crime scene went: there was no way I could get back in.

The desk clerk, Merrill, had his back to me as I approached the desk again, because he was putting some keys back in the pigeon-holes – including number seventeen, I noticed. I waited until he realised I was there and turned to face me.

‘Can I talk to Joseph Onugeta?’ I asked. ‘I just wanted to check a couple of details in the statement he gave.’

‘He’s not in today,’ Merrill said.

‘I thought he was in every day.’ ‘He called in sick.’

‘Well, is it okay if I come by and talk to him tomorrow?’

‘It’s okay with me, yes. His shift starts at six.’

I chanced my arm. ‘Did a woman check in here on her own on the day of the murder?’ I asked.

Merrill looked surprised: for a moment I thought I’d insulted his professional standards. ‘We cater to couples,’ he said shortly.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘I know that. I was just wondering if—’

‘There wasn’t any woman in that room. I don’t care what Joseph says he heard.’

I felt the weight of words not yet spoken.

‘But?’ I prompted.

Merrill stared at me for a moment or two in silence. ‘A man came in by himself,’ he admitted at last. ‘I was in the back room there, and I saw him walk straight past the desk. I thought maybe he was a cab driver and he’d come to pick someone up. But then he walked out again about ten minutes later and he was still by himself, so if he was a driver he came to the wrong place.’

‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘Before Barnard and Hunter arrived, or after?’

‘I think after,’ he said. ‘But it must have been before we went up and opened the room, because after that we had the police here and they closed the place down for the whole of the rest of the day.’

‘What did this guy look like?’

Merrill thought for a moment. ‘Pretty old,’ he said. ‘That’s all I remember. I didn’t get to see him up close.’

I threw a few more questions at him, but he wasn’t throwing anything very much back. He wasn’t kidding about his mind going blank: I could probably have got more circumstantial detail out of a six-year-old. Then again, everyone’s got their own way of dealing with stress, and Merrill looked like the kind of man who stressed easy.

I left him my number and asked him to call if anything else occurred to him. To make that slightly less unlikely, I slipped him a couple of tenners: doing that made it very clear, if he needed the confirmation, that whatever connection I had with Juliet I sure as hell wasn’t a cop. On the other hand, I guessed that was probably a plus rather than a minus for a man who worked in the hinterlands of the sex industry. And I doubted there were any lands from London to silken Samarkand that were much more hinter than the Paragon Hotel.

Before I went back to Wood Green I stopped off at Charing Cross Road and kicked around a few of the bookshops there until I found Paul Sumner’s biography of Myriam Seaforth Kale. It was out of print, so Borders and Foyle’s couldn’t help me at all: I turned a copy up at last in one of the second-hand bookshops further down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American paperback and the badly glued pages had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knock-down price of seven pounds fifty.

No blue van staking out the entrance to Ropey’s block. On the downside, the two lifts that hadn’t been used recently for murder attempts both seemed to have broken down in the course of the day. I slogged my way up to the eighth floor, closed the door on the world and put some soothing music on the stereo – I think it was Rudra’s Primordial this time, described in the sleeve notes as ‘seminal Vedic thrash metal’.