Dead Men's s Boots

‘I’ll tell you in the car.’

We retraced out steps in silence, back to our bloodied, bowed Cobalt, and I unlocked the doors. When we were inside we sat in silence for a moment. Then, since Juliet didn’t speak, I started the car up and got us out onto the road. There was no way we’d make it all the way back to Birmingham in this undead heap, but we could drive into Brokenshire and then make some calls, see where we had to go to drop it off and pick ourselves up another ride for the homeward leg of the journey. Best pick another road, though: the one we’d come on was probably still blocked.

18

The waitress at the Golden Coffee House had clearly taken a fancy to Juliet: the fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

‘The blond man from out of town,’ she said. ‘The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.’

‘Yeah.’ I ran the conversation through again in my mind, placed the reference. ‘The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?’

‘He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she heard your accent.’

That made a lot of sense now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that it was the mention of Myriam that had made Ruth weak at the knees: but there couldn’t be many other reasons besides Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense. In a different way, though, this didn’t either.

‘When she told that story,’ I said, picking over the logic in my mind, ‘she didn’t give the impression that she was there when Tyler died. In fact I’m pretty sure she said she was told about it afterwards.’

Juliet bit through a chicken leg, flesh and bone and all, and crunched down hard. She nodded, mouth full, but I had to wait for elaboration until she’d chewed and swallowed.

‘She wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘But she met this man later. He’d been sent to kill Tyler by Myriam, that’s fairly obvious. Probably he arranged the other deaths, too – Lucas and the other two brothers. Ruth always knew she had a guardian angel, and she knew who it was. But there was no reason why Myriam couldn’t work through proxies.

‘The man came up to the farm on the day of Myriam’s execution, and he introduced himself. Under the circumstances, which I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you, the fact that he’d helped to beat Tyler Seaforth to death wasn’t much of a barrier to polite conversation. Ruth was much more inclined to kiss his hands than to call the police.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘The name he gave her was Bergson.’

I almost laughed. ‘I think that’s a pretty rarefied piece of wordplay,’ I said. ‘Bergson was a French philosopher back in the 1930s. I think he had some idea about a universe of pure spirit. Kind of like Plato, only with a more outrageous accent.’

‘Ruth didn’t believe that was his real name. The point was that he told her – told her so she knew it was the truth – that he’d worked for Myriam or done favours for her in the past. And he said he was still working on her behalf now. He insisted on that: all of this was for Myriam’s sake.

‘He gave Ruth the address and telephone number of the Illinois State Penitentiary, and he told her everything she needed to know about claiming Myriam’s body. She had an absolute legal right, he said: all she had to do was exercise it. The body should be brought to the farm, and she should refuse all offers of help with the burial. If anyone asked, she was to say that it was all taken care of. And as soon as she was alone – as soon as the circus of cops and journalists and death-junkies was off the premises – she was to call him on a number he gave her.’

‘Ruth had her doubts, but she also felt she had good reasons to trust this man. She argued it backwards and forwards with herself, but in the end she did what she’d been told. She called him and told him when is was safe to come.

‘He drove out in a flat-bed truck, with two other men. They loaded the casket onto the truck, and tied it down. They covered it with a tarpaulin. Then just before they left, Ruth screwed up her courage and asked the blond man where they were taking her dead sister. He didn’t want to answer, but she burst into tears and begged him. She was going to be left alone, she told him. More alone than she’d ever been. She didn’t miss her father or her brothers in the slightest, but now Myriam was gone and she didn’t have anyone. The least he could do was tell her where he was taking her.’

‘And in the end he did. “To the next life,” he said.’

I let a forkful of mashed potato drop back into the mountainous mass I’d scooped it from.

‘Fuck,’ I said blankly. It wasn’t Oscar Wilde but it expressed my feelings. ‘What are we talking about here? Gangsters raising gangsters from the dead? Why? Out of professional courtesy? And how could he promise that if he hadn’t done it before? It’s like some kind of fucking resurrectionist assembly line. Dead men pulling themselves up out of the grave by each other’s bootstraps . . .’

‘You may be exaggerating the scale of this,’ Juliet told me coolly. ‘We still only know for sure about two cases. Kale, and the man who was both Aaron Silver and then Les Lathwell.’

She was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better. ‘The scary thing is that fingerprint,’ I muttered, shoving my plate away still mostly full. ‘If they’ve found a way to cheat, Juliet – to steal the bodies of the living out from under them, the same way you and your brothers and sisters can – and if they can do it on the money, time after time . . .’

‘Two big ifs,’ Juliet observed. I was barely listening. The same ones as before, John had said to me when I met him in my dream. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

Shying away from that unpleasant thought, I found another one that had been niggling at me while she spoke. ‘Did Mister X say why he was doing all this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, we know from all the available evidence that he wasn’t sleeping with Myriam. He wouldn’t have woken up again. So was he trying to recruit her? Did he owe her a favour? What was in it for him?’

Juliet impaled me on a cold stare. ‘Ruth thinks he loved her. Passionately.’

‘Then why was he still alive?’

‘Perhaps he never raped her.’

‘Alastair Barnard never raped her, either,’ I pointed out. ‘If anything, it was the other way around, but he’s still dead. And not because he was an abuser of women. He was fucking gay.’

‘Married and gay.’

‘Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.’

‘And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?’

I blinked. ‘Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.’

‘By exorcising her.’

‘Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the programme.’

‘Not for me.’

The sudden hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said: it was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room was listening.

‘Say how what now?’

Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly off-handed shrug. ‘Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathise. More. I find a certain elegance in it.’

I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Where’s the elegance in a random murder spree spanning half a