time she’d ever killed a man. And she didn’t do it in cold blood: it wasn’t planned or practised, I’m willing to lay long odds. It wasn’t something she had any kind of a choice about, it was something that came up from inside her and had to let itself out.
‘So I wasn’t thinking of it as evidence that Myriam was the one who killed old Tucker Kale. I’ve known that ever since I covered this story back in the 1960s – for this newspaper, where I’d started as a cub reporter seven weeks previously. But it took me a while of being out in the world and watching people at their worst to see what it was that Myriam was doing.’
Mallisham shrugged massively. ‘Maybe this is fanciful,’ he said. ‘But I think she was making a point, to herself. For her own satisfaction. She’d been sexually abused by a lot of men. I think she enjoyed being on the other side of that particular transaction. The anal rape is part of that. And the burning is part of it too. She burned him with a cigarette. She smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on his forehead. Does that suggest anything to you?’
I would have got it, but Juliet, to whom the rituals of sex are second nature, got it first. ‘The cigarette afterwards,’ she said, and Mallisham nodded, holding out his hands as if he was surrendering the entirety of his argument into her hands.
‘The cigarette afterwards. Yes. It was all symbolic, in my opinion. And what it was symbolic of was sex. Bad sex. The kind where you don’t respect the other person, you just use them for what you want and then get up and walk away.’
There was a silence as we mulled this over. It was Mallisham who eventually broke it.
‘It seems pretty clear to me,’ he observed in a brisker tone, slotting the sheet of paper back into the box and closing up the lid again, ‘that Luke Poulson – the man that Myriam met and murdered on the interstate – was her second victim, not her first. The pattern was already established when she killed her husband. And she followed it in every kill she made thereafter.’
‘Jesus,’ I said involuntarily, and then, ‘Sorry, Juliet.’ She hates it when people use that kind of language.
‘Jesus is not part of this equation, Mister Castor.’
‘No, I suppose not. But you’re saying that Myriam Kale was driven to kill because of her background and her childhood experiences. That after she went to Chicago she became a serial killer – like Aileen Wuornos – rather than a Mob enforcer? Or is the whole Chicago thing just part of the legend, too?’
‘No, that part is true,’ Mallisham confirmed. ‘She did go to Chicago, and she did work as a prostitute for a couple of years. I think she killed one or two of her customers, but they’re not part of the official tally and there’s no way of knowing now. I’m just going on Chicago coroners’ court records documenting corpses with post-mortem burns.
‘But I believe Aileen Wuornos is a valid comparison. Myriam Kale wasn’t a mobster: she was a psychotic who killed because she had to. Because her mind was so damaged from the hurt that had been heaped on her, hurting was all she knew. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Cerone ever paid her to carry out a hit. In my humble opinion, she killed hoodlums because she mixed with hoodlums. And, in one or two cases, she killed people who Sumner
‘She was bisexual?’ Juliet asked.
Mallisham looked almost comically shocked. ‘Good lord, no. She was a lesbian. Even when she was married to Tucker Kale, I think, although she may not have done anything about it until after she killed him and went north. Men forced themselves on her, sometimes, and she used men sometimes to get what she wanted. Sex with men was never a pleasure for her, unless she enjoyed raping them with household tools. When she chose her own partners, she chose women. Now, unless there was anything else you specifically wanted to ask me, I need to get back to work. I’ve got a couple of articles to type up, and some ad space to sell. These days, as you may have gathered, I pretty much am the
I stood, and Juliet followed my lead. I held out my hand and Mallisham took it again, gave it another of those wrist-crushing shakes. He seemed a lot less placid than before: going over this old ground again seemed to have unsettled his mood a little.
I thanked him for making the time for us, but he waved the words away brusquely. Juliet offered him a hand too: after a moment’s hesitation he shook his head.
‘I’d rather not,’ he said. ‘No offence. Just natural caution.’
I tensed momentarily, wondering how Juliet would take that, but she seemed if anything to be impressed with Mallisham’s solid common sense. She nodded. ‘I understand,’ she purred. ‘If I were in your situation, I wouldn’t want one of Baphomet’s sisters to have my sweat on her hands, either.’
Mallisham gave a double take, then nodded with a slightly rueful expression, acknowledging the insider information.
‘That would have been my second guess,’ he said. ‘But of course if I’d met you in the field I wouldn’t have lived long enough for a second guess. So – it’s lucky for me I didn’t, isn’t it? Enjoy the rest of your day.’
We headed for the door, but just as we were about to leave I remembered something that he’d said that I wanted to follow up on. I turned on the threshold, Columbo-style, and looked back at him. He was already back at his keyboard, but he paused with his fingers poised and waited for me to speak.
‘Mister Mallisham,’ I said, ‘when you mentioned Paul Sumner just now, you talked about speaking ill of the dead. How long ago did he pass on?’
‘Couple of years back,’ Mallisham said, ‘to the best of my recollection. Why? Were you hoping to look him up while you were here?’
‘It was a possibility,’ I said. ‘Now it isn’t.’
Which was true as far as it went: but it was a different impossibility that I was thinking of. Jan Hunter had said Sumner had called her up in January, less than two months ago: and that conversation was what had started her off on asking questions about Myriam Kale – had made her approach me, and enlist me in this bizarre search.
One more open grave, to go with all the rest? Or something else?
As we walked back out into the sunshine and the heavy air, I imagined puppet strings dangling down out of the clouds, attached to my arms and legs. If I found out who was pulling on those strings, I was going to wrap them round his throat in a lover’s knot and pull it tight.
17
The Seaforth farm was seventeen miles out of town, but they were country miles and I was tired. Jouncing around on the dirt tracks, our progress punctuated by potholes and thick roots, I brooded on what Mallisham had told us. On the one hand, if Myriam Kale was a psychotic serial killer rather than a paid enforcer who carried out bespoke murders for a living, that might explain the terrible strength of purpose that would be needed to keep her from sailing on down the river of eternity – to bring her back out of the grave forty years after she died so that she could carry on her interrupted killing spree. But on the other, it seemed to weaken Kale’s connection to the Chicago mobs, and therefore to make her even more of a pickle in John Gittings’s little fruit salad.
‘I’m not figuring this,’ I confessed to Juliet, who hadn’t said a word all this time. ‘There’s something we’re still missing, and it has to be something big.’
‘More deaths,’ she mused.
‘Say what?’
‘More deaths,’ she repeated. ‘Myriam Kale’s father. Her brothers. Paul Sumner. Everyone who knew her first- hand, and could have told us anything about her.’
‘Not everyone,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s still Ruth.’
Juliet nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she allowed. ‘There’s still Ruth. Perhaps we ought to be asking why—’
Whatever the next word was going to be, it was lost as something rammed us hard from behind. The Cobalt
