Dead Men's s Boots

The Seaforth farm was hard to tell at first from the surrounding woodland and scrub, because its fields were a dense tangle of weeds and young trees out of which an ancient, weathered scarecrow with a face made of sun- bleached sacking protruded like a shipwrecked sailor going down for the third time. But catching a glimpse of the farmhouse through a gap in the foliage, I wrestled the uncooperative car off the road and parked it a few yards away from an iron cattle-gate whose white paint was two-thirds flaked away.

‘This must be the place,’ I said. ‘At least, there’s sod-all else out here. Want to go take a look?’

Juliet glanced at me, her expression suggesting that that wasn’t a question in need of an answer. We got out and approached the gate. The heavy chain and rusting padlock made it clear that it wasn’t in daily use. Juliet climbed over without preamble, and I followed more slowly, leaning out past the overgrown hedge to get a better look at the house.

It was in as bad a state of repair as the gate: the wood of the boards warped and dry, the shingled roof settled into a lazy concave bowl. An old mattress lay flopped over the porch rail like a heaving drunk, next to a wooden swing that looked as though it had seen better centuries. Hard to believe that anyone still lived here.

It was tough going through the shoulder-high weeds: somewhere there had to be another gate and an actual driveway, but Juliet was already striding ahead so I followed, letting her break the trail for me. That was a good idea in theory, but Juliet seemed to walk around the brambles and devil’s-claw rather than through them, squeezing herself through gaps that were unfeasibly narrow for a grown woman, so I still found myself struggling. By the time we got to the porch I was scratched and dishevelled and in a fairly uneven temper.

There was no bell or knocker. I banged a tattoo on the screen door while Juliet turned three hundred and sixty degrees, surveying the devastation. From here, no other man-made structure was visible. We might have dropped out of the sky along with the farmhouse, into the merry, merry land of Oz.

I hit the screen door again, harder this time. There was no answer, and the echoes of the banging had that hollow finality that suggests an empty house. I was about to turn away, but then I caught a movement off on my left-hand side and turned.

It turned out the porch went around to the side of the house. At the far end of it, having just turned the corner and come into our line of sight, stood a very old woman dressed in a white dress whose hem was stained with dirt. Her face was almost as pale as Juliet’s, but that was the only point of resemblance. Her hair was wispy silver, so thin that her scalp showed through. Her bare arms hung like lengths of string, her elbows awkward knots. Her feet were bare, too, and I noticed that one of them was turned at an odd angle so that she walked on its outer edge. She was carrying an orange plastic bowl, and she had a frown deeply etched into her face.

‘Who are you people?’ she said. Her voice had the broadest Southern twang I’d heard since we touched down, but it was so quiet that a lot of the vivid effect was lost. It was barely louder than a sigh.

‘Miss Seaforth?’ I said, approaching her as slowly and unthreateningly as I could. I held out my hand. ‘My name is Felix Castor, and this is Juliet Salazar. I’m sorry to just barge in here like this, but we were hoping you might be prepared to talk to us about your sister—’

I broke off. Ruth Seaforth’s eyes had grown big and round. She sat down suddenly on the porch swing, making it shudder and creak.

‘Oh Lord,’ she said, staring at me as though I was a telegram bearing a whole raft of politely coded bad news. ‘Oh . . .’ Words seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.

Juliet went and sat down next to her. ‘We didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-in-the-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her stare off me. ‘We’ve come from London,’ Juliet said. ‘A man was murdered there, in the way your sister Myriam used to murder people. That’s why we’ve come.’

Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s gentle assistance got to her feet again. She blinked, three or four times: probably not blinking away tears, but that was what it looked like.

‘I haven’t seen my sister since she died,’ she said. In other circumstances it might have seemed an odd thing to announce, but as it was I was grateful to have that clarified.

‘We have,’ Juliet said. ‘We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.’ She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and it was just as well because at that point she buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders to support her until the moment passed.

‘You saw her?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘We did. She . . . looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her, all the same.’

Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence she said, ‘Would you like some cookies and lemonade?’

The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged; an odd combination which, along with the fact that there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d just descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy: the floorboards were warped and shrunken, just as they were out on the porch, but a peach-coloured rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the room, where it didn’t stretch. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family – presumably the Seaforths – posed awkwardly for a cameraman they didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.

‘Please sit down,’ Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be the mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

Three teenaged boys, then, forming the middle row: all much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The look in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: Help, I am stranded on a desert island and I need to be rescued. They were dressed in identical blue crinolines: Sunday best. They looked like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.

Juliet had sat down on the three-piece’s sofa: I went and joined her on it.

‘Feeling any better?’ I asked.

She gave me a sour look. ‘Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.’

‘I’m left-handed,’ I pointed out.

‘I need to be able to escalate for repeat offences.’

Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade and then sat down in one of the chairs. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

I picked up a biscuit, took a bite – it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla – and washed it down with a sip of lemonade which was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat. Juliet ignored both food and drink.

‘It must have been devastating,’ she said, ‘when Myriam was executed.’

I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. ‘It was hardest for my father,’ she said. ‘He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently now: as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him. He said –’ she hesitated, shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them ‘– he said that it would have been better if she’d never been born.’

‘That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,’ Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d ever had one herself: after all, if she was somebody’s sister then presumably she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet was a scary thing to contemplate.

‘Yes,’ Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. ‘It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was a very cold man.’