Dead Men's s Boots

century? Getting your own back on the men who abused you is one thing: carving your way through the whole male gender is another.’

I could see from Juliet’s expression that this little speech hadn’t made the slightest dent in her. With an unpleasant going-down-in-a-lift feeling in my stomach, I saw where this was going. If Juliet enlisted in Myriam Kale’s cause, things could get messy: so messy I didn’t want to think about it.

‘What about your rep?’ I asked her, changing tack. ‘You said it was a big thing to you to deliver as promised. Doug Hunter didn’t kill Barnard. We know that now. He was possessed.’

‘It was his hand that held the hammer.’

‘But not his mind that decided to. Like you said, you were paid to uncover the truth about what happened in that hotel room. Are you going to stop halfway because suddenly you’re a cheerleader for the real murderer? And what about the others – Mister X and his friends? All the other fun-loving criminals who’ve been buried in coffins fitted with sliding doors? They’re all men, apart from Myriam. They may have been using her in some game of their own. They’ve certainly left her to carry the can for this latest killing.’

Juliet had gone back to eating. She was listening to me, but I wasn’t having any impact. I was unnerved by the mask-like impassivity in her face. Normally Juliet doesn’t bother to disguise her feelings because her feelings come out like water from a high-pressure hose. Right there and then I couldn’t read her at all. And I had just the one shot left in my locker.

‘You think she’s happy?’ I asked.

Juliet set down the nub-end of bone that was all that was left of her chicken leg. Her eyes impaled mine.

‘What?’

‘Kale. Do you think she’s happy? Because she didn’t look happy to me, staring out from behind Doug Hunter’s face. One prison inside another prison, that’s how I saw it. She looked like someone stuck in a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. And Jan said she used to hear Doug crying at night, for hours—’

‘All right.’ Juliet’s tone was cold, clipped. ‘So?’

‘So carry on working with me. Let’s at least find out what the fuck is really going on, and where she comes into it. Maybe find out what she really wants. What’s keeping her walking, and killing, and raping, forty years after she fried. Then you can decide what you want to do.’

I looked up to find the waitress standing at my shoulder with the menus. She stared at me with big, startled eyes: she must have heard most of that last speech.

‘Umm – you want any coffee or dessert?’ she blurted. ‘Or should I just –?’ She mimed turning around and walking away.

‘I think we’re good,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Just the bill.’

The waitress fled, and Juliet stood, moving with a slight stiffness that suggested she still wasn’t fully recovered from her earlier evisceration.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But I take the point. Perhaps she isn’t happy. And perhaps that is my responsibility, at least partly, since I provided some of the evidence that Coldwood used to arrest her.’

Jumping up myself, I caught her wrist. ‘Juliet, no,’ I said, appalled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what she needs at all. She’s trapped in a loop. She’s still getting revenge for things that were done to her half a century ago. You’re thinking of her as some kind of demon, but she’s not. She’s not like you. Alive or dead, she’s human, and for humans there’s a law that always applies – action and reaction. What you do sticks to you, and becomes a part of you. The more she kills, the more lost and fucked up she’s going to get.’

‘Let go of my hand, Castor.’

‘Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.’

‘I’ll do what I think is best.’

Juliet was still staring at me. I did my best to lock onto those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.

‘I can’t let you,’ I said simply. ‘Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was – imprinted. I heard you, as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died – and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.’

She didn’t answer. For a moment we just stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.

Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.

Actually, hard isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall – except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving I went pinwheeling backwards through the air. The sound was like a gunshot – sharp and clear and very, very loud.

Nothing else was clear, though. Suddenly, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.

Then, equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me, one-handed, up close to her own lithe, unyielding body. It was somewhere I often fantasised about being, but the agonising pain in my back and shoulders and the vice-like grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.

‘You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.’

This time the silence all around us was real: everyone frozen in unnatural, off balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement. I struggled to speak and managed to choke out a few words.

‘We – going Dutch – this time?’

With a wince of disgust she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. Then, after a few seconds more of just enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and picked myself up. For a second I thought I was going to black out: the wound in my shoulder, given to me by the loup- garou at the Nexus lab, felt as though it had been torn open when I fell, and the whole of my right side was on fire.

Nobody approached me: they just watched, expectantly, with the rapt anticipation of people who’ve just called the cops and are keen to see what happens when they arrive. I threw down a couple of twenties for the meal, nodded my thanks to the waitress and limped out of the door.

The Cobalt made it all the way back to Birmingham, raising sparks from the asphalt for the last ten miles or so: I was amazed not to be pulled over on the way, but by the time I climbed out of the car in the airport car park I’d realised why that was. Juliet sucks in people’s gazes and holds them so completely that nobody in the Golden Coffee House had registered me at all. When the cops had finally arrived and taken statements, I was willing to bet that most of the descriptions had included some variation on ‘just this guy’.

There was paperwork to be filled in on the car, but surprisingly few recriminations. I invented a story about a collision with a concrete bollard: the clerk at the counter transcribed it faithfully and made me sign it. There was an excess of a hundred dollars, which I paid without a murmur. It seemed like the least I could do.

Then I was sitting in the departure lounge again, waiting for the next plane to Heathrow while the huge bruise on the right side of my face spread and deepened. I found myself wondering how Juliet was going to get back: I was pretty damn sure that she wouldn’t leave the ground, anyway, but I had no idea what she’d do instead. Or whether it would be faster or slower than a transatlantic flight.

By the time I landed at Heathrow I was thinking straight again, so the first thing I did was to get to a phone and make the call I should have made from the States. It didn’t do me a lot of good, though: at Pentonville the highest I could get up the chain of command was the night duty officer, and something in his tone told me that he