degree of premeditation. It couldn’t have been a . . . crime of passion, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. The killer brought the weapon in with him.’
I was aware that I’d used the male pronoun, not the female. But unless I’d miscounted somewhere, there wasn’t a woman in the case yet. In fact, if memory served-
‘You mentioned sexual assault,’ I said. ‘Sexual assault and murder.’
Jan nodded. ‘This man – Barnard – he’d had what they call “receptive anal sex”. And it had been rough.’
‘Rough enough to have been non-consensual?’
‘Rough enough to raise a doubt. There was . . . damage.’
It was time for the make-or-break question. ‘Where does Doug fit into all this?’
Jan dropped her gaze to the table, where the photo of her husband was still lying. ‘He hadn’t even gone a hundred yards,’ she said, almost matter-of-factly. ‘He had blood all over him, so people were staring at him, getting out of his way. Someone called the police, and they just routed the call to one of the cars that had been sent out to the Paragon. When the squad car got to Cheney Road they didn’t even have to ask – people saw them coming along the road, pointed the way, and they found Doug sitting on the edge of the pavement, a block up from the station. Just sitting there, staring at his hands like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. They brought him in right there. Then they got a DNA match and they charged him.’
‘A DNA match?’ I echoed. ‘Then—’
She didn’t flinch: under the circumstances that was mightily impressive. ‘Yes. It was my husband’s semen they found inside Alastair Barnard.’
I turned the expression ‘open-and-shut case’ over in my mind, checking to make sure that it had no sordid double meanings that would make it inadvisable to use. Before I could say it, though, Jan was carrying on at a rush.
‘There’s no denying that part of it,’ she said. ‘Doug had sex with this man. I suppose he went there, to that hotel, specifically to do that. But I don’t believe he killed anyone, Mister Castor. I don’t believe he’s even capable of doing that.
‘We’ve been married three years now, and he’s – despite the way he looks, despite the way he was brought up – he’s the gentlest man I ever met. Really. He’s six foot three, he works as a brickie and he used to box, but really, he is. If he gets angry, he turns it on himself. He never even shouts. Doug could no more kill someone than you or I could.’
I let that straight line sail right on by. It’s true that I never pointed a gun at someone and pulled the trigger; or tenderised anyone with a claw hammer either, for that matter. But I’d done things that had led to people dying, and I’d done them with my eyes open. It was enough to give me a twinge of unease as I listened to Jan Hunter protesting her husband’s innocence on the basis that he was always nice to her.
‘Did you know that he was bi?’ I asked.
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 stories 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.
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
