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.
‘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 time 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,
‘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—’
‘Coldwood?’ I interrupted, making sure I hadn’t misheard.
‘Yes. Coldwood. He’s a sergeant.’ She read it in my face. ‘Do you know him or something?’
‘I worked with him a few times. I used to do consulting work for the Met when business was thin.’
That seemed to knock Jan back a little. ‘The police use exorcists?’
I nodded. ‘Sometimes we can get a fix on how or where someone died. Sometimes we can confirm that someone who’s missing isn’t dead at all. It’s standard practice now, although we can’t give evidence in court. Most judges hate us like poison, just on general principle. Most cops too, come to that. But I always got on okay with Gary Coldwood.’
That was a slight exaggeration. Our relationship had actually become fairly strained when I was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who in fact I only got to meet after she was already dead. My association with the Met was a dead letter now, and I hadn’t seen Coldwood in four months or more: but we’d parted on good terms, more or less, and he’d stuck his neck out for me at least once when it would have been easier to leave me swinging in the wind. And, as cops went, I’d found he had a more open mind than most.
All of this was pushing me towards a decision. If Coldwood was involved I could at least talk it over with him, get the bigger picture if there was one.
‘If I agree to take this on,’ I told Jan, ‘I’ll be asking for a grand in all, and at least three hundred up front. Is that going to be a problem?’
‘No,’ she said, reaching for her handbag again. ‘I was expecting that you’d want some kind of down payment. I only brought two hundred and fifty, but—’
‘Two hundred and fifty is fine,’ I said. ‘And it’s refundable if I change my mind.’
She froze, hand inside the bag in the process of drawing out her purse. ‘If you-?’
‘If I look into it and it turns out there’s nothing I can do. I’ll give you the money back.’
Jan looked at me hard. ‘And what about if you talk to your old friends in Scotland Yard and decide not to rock the boat?’ she demanded.
‘Victoria Street,’ I said.
She was false-footed. ‘What?’
‘The Met moved to Victoria Street. Around about the same time that Myriam Kale was shooting G-men at the Salisbury. People just use the old name out of nostalgia.’ I lifted my glass for one last swig of beer but changed my mind when I felt how close it now was to room temperature. ‘I said I knew Coldwood. That doesn’t mean we’re picking out curtains.’
She gave a grudging nod, no doubt remembering Cheryl Telemaque’s personal recommendation. Probably better if she didn’t know how Cheryl and I had behaved back when our paths had crossed. It hadn’t been exactly my high point as far as professional ethics were concerned.
We exchanged contact details and Jan counted out the money into my hand, most of it in ten-pound notes. As I tucked it away in yet another pocket of my always-accommodating greatcoat, she gave me a searching look.
‘You were going to say no,’ she said. ‘I could see it in your face. Why did you change your mind?’
I had to think about that one. ‘Two reasons,’ I said at last. ‘Coldwood’s one. On a job like this, it helps if I can at least get some of the facts straight, and I know he’ll level with me as far as he can. And then . . .’ I paused, wondering how best to phrase this.
‘And then?’
‘Well, then there’s the hammer. I’m presuming from what you said that Doug didn’t have it on him when he was arrested?’ She shook her head, eyes a little wide. ‘No. And I’m willing to bet that the boys in blue have been over every square inch of Battle Bridge Road – in fact, the whole of King’s Cross – with a fine-toothed comb. If it was there, they’d have found it.’
I stood up to leave.
‘So it wasn’t with Doug, and it wasn’t out on the street. Which means that somebody else took it, presumably out of the hotel room.’
‘You believe me,’ Jan said, with a slight tremor in her voice.
I gave a slight grimace. I really didn’t want to lead her on when I knew so little about what I was getting into. ‘I’m prepared to believe – for the sake of argument – that there was someone else in that room.’ I finished the pint anyway, to fortify me against the night chill. ‘And if the “someone else” turns out to have been the ghost of an American serial killer, then we’re in business.’
Walking home I got a repeat of the prickling premonitions: the sense of being watched that had dogged me all the way back from Stoke Newington. But this time I was out in the open, on a busy street. I looked around.
