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Jan was nodding vigorously. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s absolutely right. She came from somewhere a long way down in the South. Brokenshire, Alabama. But she was already a killer before she ever got to Chicago. The first man she killed was a man who stopped and picked her up on the road, after she left home. The story is that he tried to rape her and she killed him with a wheel wrench.

‘Then later on, when she worked for the mobs, she only killed men. That was one of her rules. And she seemed to like humiliating them as well as killing them. She had a sort of ritual.’

Some of the story was coming back to me now, in all its lurid colours. Myriam Kale: the homespun farm girl who hitch-hiked up the interstate to Illinois and got lost in the big city, only to surface again as one of the few women ever to become a Mafia contract killer; the real-life femme fatale who inspired a hundred sanitised movie imitations, murdering nine men before the FBI cornered her in Chicago’s Salisbury Hotel and brought her in alive so that they could try her, condemn her and give her the electric chair. Or maybe it was lethal injection, I’m hazy on the details.

I had the barest beginning of an inkling of where this was going now.

‘Kale died in the 1960s,’ I said. ‘More than forty years ago. On the other side of the world.’ It wasn’t an absolute objection, I knew: just a place marker – something we’d have to come back to.

But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

‘I told you that Barnard had been tortured before he died,’ Jan said, using the unmentionable word this time rather than talking around it.

‘Go on.’

‘When the pathology report came back, it turned out that one of his injuries was later than all the rest. Postmortem. It was a cigarette burn. On his face, just underneath his eye. That was her trade mark, Mister Castor. She did that to all the men she murdered. The first man, the one who picked her up, she burned with the cigarette lighter out of his car. All the rest she burned with a cigarette. It was the last thing she did, always after they were already dead. Like . . . signing off on the kill.’

I tried not to meet Jan’s over-intense stare. ‘Anything like that,’ I said, guardedly, ‘any detail that becomes associated with a particular murderer’s style – copycat killers are going to pick up on it and use it as a matter of course.’

Jan nodded again: she’d seen that objection coming and it didn’t faze her. ‘This is the third ti Cs tth=me Kale has killed since her death,’ she said. ‘And all three times have been here, in England, not in the States. Paul Sumner has been tracking her – that’s why he knew what this was as soon as he read about Doug’s case. The first time was in 1980, up in Edinburgh. The second was in 1993, in Newcastle. And now this. All three of them, middle-aged men picked up on the street and taken back somewhere for sex. All three of them, tortured, murdered, then burned. Do copycat killers rest up for more than a decade between outings, Mister Castor?’

‘I’ve never known any,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe they’re cyclical, like locusts.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Jan said, with the look of someone who was turning over their hole card to reveal a big fat ace. ‘The cleaner at the Paragon Hotel – Joseph Onugeta – said in his statement that he walked past room seventeen sometime around five o’clock. That was about an hour after Doug and Barnard went in there. And he heard voices – people arguing. Two men and a woman, he said. Definitely three voices, because one of the men had a really cut-glass BBC voice – that would have been Barnard – and the other had a thick accent that he couldn’t understand properly.’

‘Doug was –?’ I interjected.

‘He was from Birmingham, and he never lost it. I couldn’t understand him myself when we started going out together. It used to really embarrass me. And then the third voice, the woman’s voice, she had an accent too. He said “like on the TV, or in a cinema.” I think that means an American accent. It was Myriam Kale, Mister Castor. It was Myriam Seaforth Kale, and whatever else he may have done, my husband isn’t going to prison for a murder that was done by some bloody ghost.’

I assumed that when Jan said ‘whatever else’, she was talking about the cottaging and the sodomy. So she’d somehow rolled with the blow of finding out that her husband was trawling the streets of London for anonymous sex with other men. I was torn between being impressed by her faithfulness and wondering what inconceivably spectacular shit-storm Doug would have to put her through before she decided that their ship was on the rocks.

I didn’t say any of that. I just asked her whether she’d mentioned her theory to the police. She snorted contemptuously. ‘Oh yes. Of course I did. The detective in charge – Coldwood – didn’t even listen to me. He’d made up his mind already, and it didn’t matter what I said, he wasn’t going to—’

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