Dead Men's s Boots

So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying a passenger, I asked her why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s diagnosis that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line went very quiet for a moment.

‘Incipient psychosis,’ Jan corrected me at last. ‘Not full-blown.’ She sounded defensive, but not apologetic. ‘I just thought that if I told you Doug was losing his mind you might not agree to help me. And really it’s not relevant – not to the case. It’s only come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.’

‘I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,’ I reminded her. ‘And then he went AWOL for a week and didn’t even call you.’

‘But he was still himself.’ Her voice was thick with tears now. ‘Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself it wasn’t like he was mad. Just . . . like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer. I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!’

‘Maybe not,’ I allowed. ‘Anyway, for what it’s worth I think Doctor Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.’

‘You don’t?’ Through the tears, hope and relief showing like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. ‘Then what is it? What’s happening to him?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I hedged. ‘And Jan, I hate to say this but it may not make any difference in any case. Not in terms of the verdict. But there’s a lot more to it than the police have got their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to get you some answers. We’ve got a window – probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary – DS Coldwood – had to say, the trial date hasn’t come down yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck, so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid-’ That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous and formless all my speculations were. ‘Well, whatever I turn up,’ I finished lamely, ‘I’ll hand it over to you and you can decide for yourself what to do with it.’

‘So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mister Castor?’

I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I {uthwid didn’t have a bastard clue. ‘I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,’ I said. ‘But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the why of it, or at least get some idea of—’

‘“Why” isn’t an issue.’ Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. ‘She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors, or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.’

‘And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.’

Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the obvious answer. Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman . . . Meanwhile my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I was subconsciously looking for a way out of this conversation. A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big that it spilled all the way down to the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons as they flew from one equestrian statue to the next, its tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it. An art student, or maybe just a hobbyist, was sketching Charles the First in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she sat cross-legged on the stones.

But it was almost as though Jan could see the chasm yawning up ahead of her and knew instinctively to veer away from it. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘Whatever you can find, Mister Castor – whatever you can tell me –’

And I could have taken the invitation right there, but like a coward I veered too. I grabbed a question from my mind’s cluttered desktop and waved it like Chamberlain waved his famous autograph from Adolf Hitler.

‘Doug mentioned spraining his ankle,’ I said. ‘Was that something that really happened?’

‘Yes.’ Jan sounded surprised. ‘A few months ago. He was coming down a ladder and his foot slipped. He was in agony. The stupid bastards who are running that site didn’t even have a first-aid kit.