red from climbing the stairs. Hunter is the big, well-built one who moves like a fighter.’
‘He used to box when he was younger,’ I said.
‘Yes. He’s aware of where his weight is: he stands solid, four-square, as though someone is going to come at him and try to knock him down. He crosses to the bed, puts down a bag that he’s carrying – a long green canvas holdall that looks as though it’s used to carry tools – and then he turns to say something to Barnard. He grins as he speaks. One of the words is “now”. Barnard is nervous, but it’s the nervousness of arousal. He closes the door, fumbles with the lock for quite some time. He doesn’t want to be disturbed, obviously.
‘Hunter is already taking off his clothes. Barnard crosses to the bed, starts to undress too, but Hunter stops him. He pushes Barnard down onto his knees . . .’
‘I think we can take the next part as read,’ I said.
Juliet nodded. ‘They copulate,’ she confirmed. ‘For a long time. Hunter takes the dominant role; takes it very aggressively, and the violence is part of the sex. Barnard doesn’t mind. Not yet. He’s excited. Enjoying it very much. Then . . .’
Her voice tailed off. She was staring at the bed now, her eyes narrowed.
‘Then?’
‘Then it starts to hurt.’
She walked around the bed, her gaze still fixed on it, triangulating on the past with her exquisite, dark- adapted eyes.
‘What Hunter is doing now will leave marks. Barnard doesn’t want that. It makes him afraid, and it makes him indignant. He says something, tries to sit up. Hunter . . . hits him, hard, on the side of the head, and he falls down again. He’s dazed. His mouth is bleeding, not where the blow landed but where he bit his lip because of the force of the impact.
‘He tries again. Hunter straddles him, forces him down with his own weight. He’s hitting Barnard with his closed fists, and at the same time . . . he enters him again. He beats him and rapes him at the same time.’
I opened my mouth to speak; to ask Juliet to skip forward again, maybe, and spare me some of the gory details. But the details were what I needed to hear: there was no point being in this room at all if I didn’t take a good, long look at what had happened here. At the same time, though, Juliet’s words had sharpened my own responses to the place. I couldn’t see its history the way she could, but I could feel the emotional afterwash of the events with a terrible clarity now – and everything she said fell into place with a dull, heavy inevitability, anchoring the emotions and giving them form.
‘He twists Barnard’s right arm behind his back: up and back, as far as it will go. He’s leaning on it, with his full weight. He’s still riding him at this point. And then . . .’
There was a long silence. I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath until I let it out.
‘. . . And then he gets the hammer out of the bag and smashes Barnard’s skull in,’ I finished. But there was something in Juliet’s expression that I couldn’t read. I waited, resisting the urge to throw another question at her. She was still staring into the past, with minute, almost furious attention.
‘I don’t see that,’ she said at last.
‘You don’t see . . . ?’
‘The end of the torture. The hammer coming down. The moment of death. Something moves across the room. Something very big. It’s been there all the time, but it’s been standing very still. I only see it when it moves.’
‘What sort of something?’ The words sounded banal, but I had to ask because I had no referent for what she was describing. An elephant that had been disguised as a standard lamp? A battleship making an awkward right turn out of the bathroom?
‘I don’t know,’ Juliet admitted reluctantly. ‘Not something solid – not something that’s physically there. A darkness. A darkness without a body of its own. I don’t know whether they brought it in with them or whether it was waiting for them. But it doesn’t seem to do anything to interrupt what’s happening. It hovers for a few minutes, almost filling the room. I can see through it, but it’s a little like seeing through thick fog. The two men are still there. They’re still on the bed, moving together, with Hunter on top. Then they separate, come together again.
‘It gets even darker. Even harder to see. When the shadow passes, Hunter is gone. Barnard is lying there –’ she pointed ‘– on the floor, now, not on the bed. There’s nothing left of his head but a bloody smear.’
‘And the hammer?’
‘There.’ She pointed again, to a place just under the window. A small cluster of old bloodstains marked the spot she was indicating, although it was some distance away from the bed in the opposite direction to the one in which Barnard had crawled in his last pathetic attempt to escape from this brutal, arbitrary death.
Silence fell between us. Juliet glanced from bed to window to door, measuring distances and angles with the abstract curiosity of a professional.
‘What happens to the hammer after that?’ I pursued. ‘Can you carry on watching it?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s the intensity of the emotions here that lets me see into the past. With Barnard dead and Hunter gone, that intensity fades very quickly. Fades to black, you could say.’
I thought over what she’d said. ‘So it’s possible,’ I summed up, ‘that someone else was present in the room when all this was happening? It’s possible that someone else comes in at the kill, as it were, takes the hammer and uses it while Doug is . . . doing his thing.’
Juliet looked at me for a long time before shaking her head. ‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘But this shadow . . .’
‘I told you, it’s not like a physical thing. It’s more like an accident of the terrain.’
‘I don’t get your drift, Juliet.’
She frowned impatiently. ‘I’m trying to describe invisible things, Castor. Most of this is metaphor.’
‘Are you absolutely sure there was no one else here?’ I persisted doggedly ‘You said yourself that something blocked your . . . perceptions. Something got in your way, whether it was solid or not, and suddenly, if we stick with the metaphor, you were seeing through a glass, darkly. Anything could have happened behind that fog.’
‘If there was someone else there, I’d sense them on some level,’ said Juliet coldly.
‘And you don’t?’ This was coming to the crunch. I stood facing her, held her blacker-than-black gaze without flinching. It wasn’t easy: it was like standing up in a stiff wind that sucks you in instead of blowing you backwards. ‘You don’t sense anything else at all? Anything that makes you doubt, for a fraction of a second, that Coldwood’s got his hand on the right collar? Barnard and Hunter were meant to be in here alone, but that cleaner, Onugeta, heard a woman’s voice when he walked past the door. Three voices, he said: two men and a woman. Was he wrong, or was there a woman here? Is there any emotional trace in the room that you can’t explain by two men coming in here to fuck each other’s brains out?’
Thinking about Alastair Barnard’s shattered skull, I wanted to drag those words back and scrub them clean with Dettol as soon as I’d said them, but Juliet didn’t bother delivering the hideous punchline. She didn’t say no, either.
‘There’ve been many women in this room,’ she said slowly. ‘Many and many, and most of them were sad. Most of them resented what was done to them here, or hated the men who were doing it to them. Perhaps that’s all the shadow was – the stain left by their unhappiness.’
My gaze broke first: I’m only human, after all. But it was Juliet who was being evasive here, and I didn’t have to say anything else. I just waited for her to fill in the blanks, staring out of the window at the King’s Cross marshalling yar karshinds while my pulse came down again.
‘There is something else,’ she admitted at last. ‘A residue that’s very strong, and very noticeable. Perhaps it
‘Was it here already?’ I asked, ‘or did it come in with Hunter and Barnard? Was it following them? Does it leave with them? Was one of them being haunted by this . . . residue?’
I glanced at Juliet as I delivered the last word. She shrugged eloquently, her breasts shifting under the tantalisingly translucent fabric of her shirt. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, with visible reluctance.
I couldn’t resist pressing my advantage. ‘I want to go and visit Doug Hunter in jail,’ I said, ‘and get his take on what happened. Will you come with me?’
Juliet looked blank. ‘Why?’
‘Well, have you ever met him?’
