‘I just want to know what you think.’
Juliet looked at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s not likely he could have taken it onto the street,’ she admitted. ‘Someone would have seen what he did with it, and it would have been recovered by now.’
I nodded. ‘And if it was anywhere in the hotel, the police would have turned it up inside of ten minutes.’
She put her fork down, giving up on the broccoli. ‘That’s an interesting point, Castor,’ she acknowledged. ‘However, it’s a point that holds equally well no matter who killed Barnard. So it doesn’t particularly point towards Douglas Hunter being innocent.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying that Hunter is innocent – just that there may be more to the story than Coldwood is seeing right now. I was hoping you might be able to fill me in on what you read in the hotel room. It might give me a better idea of whether or not I’m wasting my time.’
Juliet tapped her incisors with the tip of one immaculate fingernail.
‘I think you are,’ she said. ‘Wasting your time, I mean. But yes, I can do that.’
‘Thanks. So when would be good for you?’
‘Now.’ She pushed the plate full of vegetables away with a decisive movement and stood. ‘Now would be good for me. That’s why I drove us here. The Paragon is just around the corner.’
The Paragon Hotel lived up – or maybe down – to all my expectations.
Like a lot of early-twentieth-century London architecture, it’s the type of building that was thrown up to take advantage of negative space: in other words, it fits into a gap between older buildings that somebody decided to exploit even though it had no rational shape. You can tell what you’re getting as soon as you round the bend of Battle Bridge Road and see the frontage ahead of you: a narrow slice of soot-blackened mulberry brick inelegantly slotted in between a stolid warehouse and a bigger hotel that was trying to look respectable – not an easy trick with the Paragon clinging to your leg like an amorous dog.
The interior managed to be both constricted and sprawling at the same time. The lobby went back a long way, but it was ludicrously narrow and it had a dog-leg, the front desk thrusting out into a high-ceilinged space no wider than a corridor, which seemed to flinch away from it in a nervy zigzag. Naive anthropomorphising, I know: but when you deal with the risen dead on a day-to-day basis you tend to see the life in almost everything. And the death, too, which is maybe the downside.
The clerk looked up from a computer monitor as we came in, his gaze flicking from Juliet to me and then back to her, and hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard. He could just have been hiding a solitaire game, but something about his studiously blank expression as we walked up to the desk made me suspect that whatever window he’d closed had been a little more incriminating than that. Then again, this was a whore hotel and the last time he’d seen Juliet she’d presumably been part of Detective Sergeant Coldwood’s travelling circus. He had good enough reason to be circumspect.
He ran a hand through his thinning, sand-brown hair – which I was seeing in a glorious three-sixty-degree perspective because of the huge mirror behind him. He seemed to have some kind of thyroid condition, or at any rate he had the bulging-eyed stare that sometimes goes with hyperthyroidism. His beaky nose and hair-trigger blink reminded me irresistibly of the dead comedian Marty Feldman. There was a long loose thread on the shoulder of his herringbone jacket which stuck out to the side as though he was on a fuse.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked us in a slightly nasal voice.
‘I’m with the police,’ Juliet said, which I guess was a white lie. ‘Investigating the Barnard case. You remember I came in about a week ago to read the room.’
The clerk nodded. Of course he remembered. You didn’t see Juliet and then just forget about it.
‘We need to go over it again,’ Juliet said. ‘I presume it’s still locked off?’
‘Oh yes,’ the clerk said, already reaching for the key. They were ranged behind him in pigeon-holes, each one with a thick wooden fob five or six inches long.
‘If you meet any of our other guests,’ the clerk said, handing the key over to Juliet with some diffidence, ‘I hope you’ll be discreet. It’s been very hard for us over the past few days, and we’ve cooperated in every way we could. We’d really like to start putting the whole thing behind us now.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Juliet. The clerk watched us unhappily as we walked on around the dog-leg to the stairs, his hand smoothing down his hair again.
There was no lift; but then the Paragon was only three storeys high, and the whole point of the place was to give people healthful aerobic exercise. We went up one flight and came out onto a corridor somewhat broader than the entrance hall. Thick pile carpet in shades of dark red created the right carnal ambience, but bare hospital-green plasterboard let the side down a little. The place was silent, and there was nobody else in sight.
Juliet already knew where room seventeen was, so she led the way. ‘Was that Merrill?’ I asked as I followed her, dredging up the name from Jan Hunter’s account. ‘The guy who called the police on the day of the murder?’
‘That was Merrill,’ Juliet confirmed. ‘But it wasn’t him who placed the call – it was the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta.’
‘Sorry, you’re right. I wouldn’t mind talking to him. I’ll have to ask if he’s here.’
Juliet stopped in front of a door that badly needed a paint job – or maybe a surgical scrubbing. Its dark brown surface had a smeared, rucked look to it as though the paint had been plastered on too thickly and had run as it dried. ‘I think they’re both here every day,’ she said. ‘They seem to run the place between them. The owner lives in Belgium somewhere and he only turns up on the quarter days to check the books.’
She turned the key in the lock and pushed. A sour, musty smell came out to meet us as the door opened, and I hesitated for just a moment to step inside, not sure how much of the physical evidence would have been left
Juliet just went on in, and as she swung the door wide I could see that the room was almost bare. There was a bed frame standing against one wall, taking up most of the available space. No mattress or covers, and no pillows: just two dark rectangular spaces in the divan that had once held drawers, and now looked like the empty eye sockets of a skull. On the pale beige carpet there were dark and very extensive stains: square windows had been let into some of these, the bare boards showing through where small, regular sections of carpet had been taken away by the police forensics team. There were similar stains, rich rust-brown in colour, down the near side and the bottom of the divan. Alastair Barnard might be gone, but ‘gone’ was a relative term.
The air reverberated soundlessly with his suffering and his fear – an emotional effluvium like the ghost of a bad headache.
‘So this is where it happened?’ I said, unnecessarily – as much to disturb those silent echoes as anything else.
Juliet nodded her head in the direction of the fouled divan. ‘X marks the spot,’ she said coolly.
‘When you read the room for Coldwood,’ I asked, looking around the chill, claustrophobic space, ‘was it like this? Or was the body still here?’
‘It was still here,’ Juliet said, in the same disinterested tone. ‘Nothing had been touched. He wanted me to read it while it was still fresh.’
‘So tell me what you saw.’
She looked at me for confirmation. ‘With which eyes, Castor?’
I waved an expansive hand. ‘All of them. What was physically there, in front of you, and anything else you saw.’
Juliet stared at the ground, thought for a few moments, then pointed to a spot almost at my feet – a point midway between the bed and the door. ‘Barnard was lying there when I came in,’ she said. ‘What was left of him. His body had been hurt – damaged – very extensively. I knew he was a man mainly by the smell. There was too little left of his head to tell what he’d looked like when he was alive.
‘But then when I looked backwards, into the past, I saw him clearly enough.’
The quality of her voice changed, making me look up from the carpet’s intricate organic geography and check her face. I’d caught an emphasis that seemed just a tiny bit off.
‘Was there something else that you couldn’t see?’ I demanded.
Juliet didn’t seem to hear. She was staring right through me at the door and I could tell that what she was seeing now was not me but the events of January the twenty-sixth. She was squinting into the middle distance, along a dimension that just wasn’t there for members of my particular species.
‘They walk in together,’ she said slowly. ‘Barnard is the older man, obviously – the one in the suit, his face all
