Dead Men's s Boots

 any factor that might help to explain her turning up in London, alive or dead – then that would be gravy. But really we just want to get more of a handle on her, as a person rather than a legend.’

‘That’s a laudable goal,’ Mallisham mused. ‘Not all that easy, though, after forty years of disinformation. You’ve presumably read Sumner’s . . . well, some call it a book.’

‘Inside Myriam Kale? Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve read it.’

‘Then your best move now would be to forget it,’ Mallisham rumbled, making a sour face. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that man made a career out of telling the kind of lies that would have turned Pinocchio’s nose into a goddamned national monument. To listen to him, you’d think Myriam Kale was two-parts nymphomaniac to one part mob assassin.’

‘And that’s not an accurate summary?’ I hazarded.

The balding man snorted in a mixture of amusement and indignation. ‘No, sir,’ he said curtly, ‘it is not. It takes no account of what made her the way she was, and it ignores the way she killed – the reason why she killed. Paul Sumner blithely assumes that most of the murders attributed to Myriam Kale were bought and paid for, purely because the men concerned were known or thought to be mobsters. But after she was picked up by Jackie Cerone, most of the men she met were mobsters. It’s a skewed sample.’

‘If not money,’ Juliet asked, ‘then what?’

Mallisham stroked the bridge of his nose again, this time leaving his glasses in situ. ‘Well,’ he said, studying the clutter on his desk, ‘I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s just that if you look at how the story starts, you come to different conclusions. Or maybe you just hold off from conclusions. Are you going to take notes, Mister Castor?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

‘Or a recording?’

‘No.’

‘Good. I’d like it best if all this stayed off the record. Use the information, by all means, but don’t use my words. And if by any chance you’ve lied to me and you belong to my own and Mister Sumner’s profession, I’ll deny any words you put into my mouth and collaterally sue your ass into a sling.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Okay.’ He settled down in his chair, as if he was hunkering down for what he knew was going to be a long haul. ‘First off, you ought to know that Myriam Seaforth – as she was then – was almost certainly abused by her father and one or more of her brothers. I can’t prove it, but it’s the damn truth all the same. It happened to her sister Ruth, and it happened to her. ’Course, all the Seaforth men are dead now, so there’s nobody left to give me the lie anyway, but people around here take reputation pretty seriously. None of this is ever going to make the front page of the Picayune. Nor yet the Sunday supplement.’

‘How can you be so sure she was abused?’ Juliet threw in. There was a stillness about her now – an intensity of attention that was almost intimidating. She’s got this thing about battered women: a kind of razor-edged sentimentality.

‘How can I be sure?’ Mallisham echoed her. ‘Well, let’s say I know people at the county hospital over in Sprott, and I know people in the sheriff’s office. Myriam was brought in for stitches once, in a place where she didn’t ought to have got torn, and Ruth said something at school another time about something a twelve-year-old girl doesn’t have any right to know. A lot of people got a piece of information and never tried to find out more. I’m a newsman, first and foremost. I collect up those pieces, looking for stories. But some stories I know better than to tell.’

‘You mean,’ Juliet said, with dangerous calm, ‘that you knew these girls were being hurt, and you did nothing to stop it.’

‘No,’ Mallisham said, neither angry nor defensive. ‘I knew later on – after they were all grown up – that someone had hurt them back when they were small. Don’t be so quick to judge, missy. I wouldn’t have sat by if blowing the whistle would have done any good. But like I said, the Seaforth line’s dead now. Lucas Seaforth died thirty years back, and the brothers all perished in various accidents and drunken brawls, so Myriam’s generation is the last there ever was.’

‘Ruth never married?’ I asked.

Mallisham pursed his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She still lives out there, on the farm. The only Seaforth left. And she’s seventy years old, so she’s left it a little late to think about starting a family. But then, when you look at the kind of marriage Myriam made, you can understand her feeling a mite chary about getting spliced herself.

‘Tucker Kale was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that. There’s some people who say he bought Myriam off of Lucas Seaforth, cash down. I doubt it was that simple, but Lucas was a farmer and Kale ran the feed store, so I’d guess there was more of commerce than of love about the whole thing. I knew the man pretty well – my house is only half a mile from where the feed store used to be – and speaking personally, I wouldn’t have given him a kitten if my cat dropped a litter of ten. It’s certain that he beat Myriam, and he liked to show her up in front of people, too. He was the kind of polymorphous sadist who can take his recreation intellectually as well as physically.

‘So he was another brick in the wall, so to speak. But Myriam was damaged when he got her. Her own family had already given her more hurt than anyone should ever have to take.’

He spoke with a weary finality that made me ashamed my own interest in Myriam Kale was so tangential. ‘How long were they married?’ I asked, conscious of Juliet’s scary stillness on my left-hand side.

‘Seven years, give or take.’

‘And then he was killed in a car crash.’

Mallisham shrugged. ‘If you like.’

‘If I like?’

‘Well, I told you a person’s good name was kind of an issue around here.’ He got up, pushed his chair back and went across to one of the bookcases, where he started scanning the box files with his face thrust right up close to them, holding his glasses up out of the way of his eyes as he squinted at the writing on their spines. ‘That’s what they said at the time. And sure enough, the man was found dead in his car, which was kind of a wreck, But it was kind of a wreck when he bought it, and when he drove round town in it. I didn’t ask any questions because at the time there didn’t seem any reason to doubt that things happened that way. But a long time later, after Myriam became such a celebrity and all, I took a look at that autopsy report myself. Got it here somewhere, I’m reasonably sure.’

Mallisham tapped one of the boxes, then a second, as if touching them helped him to remember what was in them. But it was a completely different box he hauled out, from the next shelf down. He brought it over to the desk and opened it up.

‘Now if old Tucker got drunk and drove himself into a ditch, which is what the police said he did, then some of those injuries he took to the head require a little explaining. Looks to me like he must have backed up and taken a good few runs at that ditch until he go it right, because his head sure was dented in a lot of different places.’ He held up a very old foolscap sheet, on the kind of glossy paper the earliest photocopiers used. ‘Yeah, here it is. You can look at it if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t take a copy. This one is traceable to me, and like I said, I’m not going on the record with any of this.’

‘Just summarise for us,’ Juliet suggested.

Mallisham nodded. ‘Well, there were also the injuries to his rectum. They didn’t even get a mention when the county coroner sat and gave his verdict, but they’re all down here in black and white. Tucker Kale was anally raped after he died.’

‘Raped?’ I echoed. Images of Alastair Barnard, whose dead body I’d fortunately never had to see, inconsiderately flashed before my eyes anyway as if they had a right to be there.

‘Artifically raped,’ Mallisham amended. ‘I wouldn’t normally be talking about this in front of a lady, but you’re . . . what you are, so I guess it’s nothing new to you. I guess nothing that one body can do to another body is news to you.

‘Something had been put inside him. With a lot of force. And it was something made of wood because there was a wood splinter that they found. Handle of a hammer? Fence post? I don’t know, but I’d lay odds that whatever Myriam used to kill him she put to this other use afterwards.

‘But what clinches it for me is the burn mark on Tucker’s forehead.’

‘Myriam’s signature,’ I muttered, but Mallisham waved that away.

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s part of what became her modus operandi, but I think this was the first