Dead Men's s Boots

‘Okay if I sit down?’ I asked, and she took her handbag off the table to make room for me to put my drink down. I carefully neglected to ask what Cheryl had said I was good at: given the way my relationship with her had gone, that seemed like it might be kind of a loaded question.

I took a seat opposite Janine Hunter and she swivelled round to face me.

‘So what’s the problem?’ I asked – the standard opening phrase for doctors, mechanics and ghostbreakers.

‘My husband,’ she said, and then seemed to hesitate. ‘He’s . . .’

The pause went on: whatever the next word was, she couldn’t get over it. I tried to help.

‘Passed on?’ I suggested.

She looked surprised. ‘No! He’s on remand, at Pentonville.’ Another leaden pause. ‘For sexual assault and murder.’

‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

‘And he didn’t do it, Mister Castor. Doug looks really tough, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. So it’s – I’ve got to find the real killer. I want her to tell everybody what she did. So they’ll let Doug go.’

I noted the female pronoun in passing. This was getting stranger by the second: it was also veering gracefully away from what I think of my core competencies.

‘I’m an exorcist, Mrs Hunter,’ I reminded her, as gently as I could manage. ‘I could only find this killer for you if she happened to be—’

And before I could get the word out, Jan Hunter cut across me with the inevitable punchline. ‘She is, Mister Castor. She’s dead. She’s been dead for forty years.’

4

I stared at Jan Hunter for a moment, letting the idea grow on me.

‘Okay,’ I said at last. ‘Provisionally, I mean. Okay with provisos. You’d better tell me the whole story. Then I’ll tell you if there’s anything I can do for you.’

By way of answer, Jan rummaged in her handbag and came up with a photo, which she handed to me. It showed a man – the same age as Jan or maybe a couple of years older – with a suede-head haircut and slightly over-large ears, looking to camera with a goofy grin while holding up two dead fish on a hook. The background was a river bank; the props, a canvas chair and a keepnet. He was wearing a lumberjack shirt, a wedding ring, and that was all I could tell you about him from memory. It wasn’t a face that left a deep impression.

‘Doug,’ I said.

‘Look at that face,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice. ‘Can you imagine him hurting anyone? Let alone killing—’

‘He did for those two fish,’ I said, trying to inject a little reality back into the proceedings. She gave me a wounded look and I shrugged an apology. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened?’

She looked down at the photo, drawing in a long, ragged breath. It was mind over matter: I saw her shovelling the emotions back inside and locking them down. When she looked at me again, she was almost clinically calm.

‘Just the facts, ma’am?’ she said, presumably being Dan Ackroyd rather than Jack Webb.

‘To start with.’

So she told them to me. And they were as nasty a set as I’d ever come across.

The twenty-sixth of January. Sometime after four p.m. A man named Alastair Barnard, age forty-nine, checked into a hotel room in King’s Cross, along with another, younger man – this other man described as having close-cropped mid-brown hair and brown eyes, and wearing a black donkey jacket with a green paint stain on the left sleeve. The hotel in question was the Paragon: it rents by the hour, because the clienteled a„ it caters to are the prostitutes who work the back streets off Goods Way and Battle Bridge Road.

The desk clerk, one Christopher Merrill, gave them a key – room seventeen, which offers a fine view of the freight yard. He assumed that the younger man was a rent boy bringing his work in off the streets: but he didn’t ask any questions or make any small talk, because you don’t mess with your core business.

Normally the clerk would have expected to see the two men emerge again half an hour later and walk away in different directions. In this case that didn’t happen, but the clerk didn’t see anything unusual in that because he’d forgotten all about them. It was a Friday afternoon and there were a lot of comings and goings: nothing compared to the traffic that would be coming through later in the evening, but plenty to keep him busy.

But when nine o’clock rolled around and the pressure on the rooms started building up, he noticed that that key was still out. Five hours? Even with a double dose of Viagra and a pint of amyl nitrate, nobody can keep it up that long. And now they owed him money, because they’d only paid for an hour. With the sour suspicion that the men had fucked and run, he summoned the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta, who was the only other guy on the Paragon’s daytime staff. Together they took the master key up to the first floor and unlocked the door.