Dead Men's s Boots

As Jan had already told me, he was big and well muscled: handsome, too, I was prepared to assume, in that his face was symmetrical and featured a square jaw and vividly blue eyes, two perennial favourites. Or three, if you count each eye as a separate feature. His striated mid-brown hair looked as shaiyes though it might originally have been a darker brown, but had then been bleached by years of working in the open air until it looked like flax and straw bundled together. He stood slightly stiffly, legs together, almost as though he was standing to attention.

But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple, just above his eye. His nails left livid marks on his pale skin: three parallel lines, like the feverish crossings out in John Gittings’s A to Z.

‘Mister Hunter.’ I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room towards us. The guard who’d come in with him moved off to one side but stayed close, keeping him in view, and the other guard who’d been waiting with us took up a position off to the other side, about the same distance away. Remand or not, they knew what Doug was up for – probably knew what Doc Maxwell’s diagnosis was, too – and they weren’t taking any chances.

Doug ignored the hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, of course, but maybe it was worth noting in this case. Whatever flavour of sexuality Doug generally favoured, he seemed to be capable of responding on some level to Juliet’s charms. I filed that fact away for future reference.

‘You know why we’re here?’ I asked him.

He nodded slowly, turning to look at me again with a slight widening of the eyes, as though he’d forgotten in the interim that I was there.

‘You’re here,’ he said simply.

His voice was different from what I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent at all, and it was so strangely uninflected that it was almost like a robot’s voice. Except that most robots these days use sampled sound from human voices, so they sound more animated and a whole lot warmer than Doug Hunter did.

Coldwood’s sexual-psychopath hypothesis made sense to me at that moment. Doug sounded like a man whose brain was currently operating only a minimal service during extensive refurbishments. But then again, how much of that was the man and how much was the drug?

‘Right. Exactly. We’re here to talk to you. Would you like to sit down? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far, which isn’t very much, and where we can go from here.’

He didn’t take up the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face to face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent. Juliet hadn’t got up from her seat, or spoken yet. She was watching Hunter intently, unblinkingly.

‘From here,’ Hunter echoed. For a second I thought he was so zoned out on the anti-psychotics that all I was going to get out of him would be echolalia, but then he shook his head very slightly, left and then right and then left again. ‘Never getting out of here,’ he commented, not in the tone of a lament but looking slightly mystified that I’d raised the issue at all. ‘Not now. Not after all that – everything. Everything else. Going to miss it. Only three days left, now. Till the dark of the moon. They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it. They won’t be happy.’

He frowned and shook his head in slow, sombre disapproval.

‘Well,’ I responded, as though everything he’d just said made perfect sense to me, ‘you knew what Jan hired me for. She doesn’t believe that you killed Barnard, and she thinks tha sshet st your best bet at trial might be to try to establish that someone else was in that room along with the two of you. A dead someone else, which is why she came to me. But obviously I’d like to hear your version of what happened.’

‘My version.’ Hunter looked down at his hands momentarily, palms up, as though he was checking to see if they were clean. ‘Nothing,’ he muttered, as if to himself. ‘Nothing.’

This was getting us nowhere fast. I sat down next to Juliet, hoping Hunter might follow my lead, but he wasn’t even looking at me. He was looking up at the ceiling.

‘My version’s older than that,’ he murmured, so low I almost didn’t catch the words.

‘Was there someone else, Doug?’ I asked, trying again. ‘Did someone else come into the hotel room with you? Or afterwards? How did Barnard die?’

He lowered his head slowly, making eye contact with me almost accidentally at the bottom of that long, gradual arc.

‘The hammer,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that what she used? I’m not sure any more, but that’s what I remember. His head – was very – I can ask her. If you like.’ ‘Then there was someone else?’ I demanded again.