Dead Men's s Boots

Jan shook her head violently. ‘No. No, I didn’t. But in the last few months I knew I wasn’t satisfying him. We were scarcely ever together. He didn’t want to touch me, although he was still . . . he still seemed to love me. There was just something he couldn’t tell me. I’d wake up in the night sometimes and I’d hear him crying in the dark. Sometimes I’d doze off and wake up again, and it would be hours later. But I’d still hear the same sounds. He was just crying and crying, all through the night. Something was eating away at him. Something he couldn’t share.

‘I’d started to think he had to be seeing someone else. It was the only explanation that made any sense. He was working on a big site over in East London – they’re building one of those new super-casinos – and he was coming home later and later. Overtime, he said, but there’s never that much overtime to go round in the winter. You can’t mix cement in the dark.

‘And then, before the murder, he didn’t even come home for a week. I hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t called, or . . .’ Jan’s voice trailed off. She stared at me, her expression bleak. ‘I was waiting for bad news. Just not this kind.’

Face to face with her grief and her pain, I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t think I could help her. That I couldn’t think of anything that would get her husband off a rap as solid as this. She saw my expression and forestalled me.

‘I’ve got evidence,’ she said quickly. ‘You have to hear this, Mister Castor. Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out.’

‘What evidence?’ I asked, with huge reluctance.

Jan picked up her gin and tonic and downed it in one go before answering. She grimaced as the pungent liquor went down.

‘All right,’ she said, her tone hardening into something belligerent and stubborn. The students at the pool table looked around: it must have sounded as though we were having a marital tiff. ‘Something happened to me. About two weeks after Doug was arrested. I was sitting at home. To be honest, I was more or less drunk, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. I was –’ she made a sudden, sharp gesture ‘– falling apart. I really was, just . . . bits and pieces. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head. There was so much that had to be done. Not just talking to the lawyers. Bills. Letters. Doug had done all that, and now he wasn’t there. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t even trying to. I was just sitting there feeling sorry for myself.’

That sounded reasonable enough to me, but Jan’s face twisted in self-disgust. ‘Sitting there and waiting for something to happen. As though, you know, a light was going to shine down out of the sky and a voice was going to tell me what to do. Pathetic.

‘And then the phone rang.

‘It was an American voice. He told me his name, and I didn’t hear it. I just thought he was a friend of Doug’s or someone from the site. His foreman or something. But then he said he wanted to talk to me, about Doug’s case.

‘“Your husband didn’t do it”, he said. “He’s innocent. You may even be able to prove it.”’

‘Well, I was sitting up straight now, but I still thought he might be, you know, some sort of crank. Like that nutcase who made the Ripper phone calls. One of these people who gets off on being close to a juicy murder, even if it’s at second- or third-hand. I asked him who he was, and he told me his name again. It was Paul Sumner. Paul Sumner Junior.’

I’d vaguely heard the name, but I didn’t place it until Jan went on.

‘He writes books. True crime. He wrote that history of the Mob that they made into a TV series. And a biography of John Wayne Gacy. Stuff like that. I’d never read any of it, but I sort of knew who he was. And he said he’d read about Paul’s case on the Net. He’s got all these news feeds on his desktop that link to weird crime Co w217stories from all around the world. Because that’s how he makes his living. And he read about Paul’s case, and it just made his radar go off. He said he was waiting for something like this to happen, so he knew what it was as soon as he heard. Do you remember Myriam Seaforth Kale? She was a lady gangster, back in the 1960s. Sort of like Bonnie Parker was in the 1930s.’

I gave an eyebrow shrug. Of course I’d heard of her: she was one of those bad girls like Belle Starr or Beulah Baird who go into folklore because of their connection with violent men, or because they do some of the things that violent men do routinely. I was nearly certain she’d turned up in a crappy movie that Roger Corman or someone had directed. Daughters of Blood? Children of Blood? The Blood Family Robinson? ‘Chicago Mob scene,’ I said. ‘She was Jackie Cerone’s girlfriend, or something, and then he used her on a job.’