Mike Carey - Dead Men's s Boots

‘I’ve got evidence,’ she said quickly. ‘You have to hear this, Mister Castor. Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out.’

‘What evidence?’ I asked, with huge reluctance.

Jan picked up her gin and tonic and downed it in one go before answering. She grimaced as the pungent liquor went down.

‘All right,’ she said, her tone hardening into something belligerent and stubborn. The students at the pool table looked around: it must have sounded as though we were having a marital tiff. ‘Something happened to me. About two weeks after Doug was arrested. I was sitting at home. To be honest, I was more or less drunk, even though it was only the middle of the afternoon. I was –’ she made a sudden, sharp gesture ‘– falling apart. I really was, just . . . bits and pieces. I couldn’t keep a thought in my head. There was so much that had to be done. Not just talking to the lawyers. Bills. Letters. Doug had done all that, and now he wasn’t there. I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t even trying to. I was just sitting there feeling sorry for myself.’

That sounded reasonable enough to me, but Jan’s face twisted in self-disgust. ‘Sitting there and waiting for something to happen. As though, you know, a light was going to shine down out of the sky and a voice was going to tell me what to do. Pathetic.

‘And then the phone rang.

‘It was an American voice. He told me his name, and I didn’t hear it. I just thought he was a friend of Doug’s or someone from the site. His foreman or something. But then he said he wanted to talk to me, about Doug’s case.

‘“Your husband didn’t do it”, he said. “He’s innocent. You may even be able to prove it.”’

‘Well, I was sitting up straight now, but I still thought he might be, you know, some sort of crank. Like that nutcase who made the Ripper phone calls. One of these people who gets off on being close to a juicy murder, even if it’s at second- or third-hand. I asked him who he was, and he told me his name again. It was Paul Sumner. Paul Sumner Junior.’

I’d vaguely heard the name, but I didn’t place it until Jan went on.

‘He writes books. True crime. He wrote that history of the Mob that they made into a TV series. And a biography of John Wayne Gacy. Stuff like that. I’d never read any of it, but I sort of knew who he was. And he said he’d read about Paul’s case on the Net. He’s got all these news feeds on his desktop that link to weird crime stories from all around the world. Because that’s how he makes his living. And he read about Paul’s case, and it just made his radar go off. He said he was waiting for something like this to happen, so he knew what it was as soon as he heard. Do you remember Myriam Seaforth Kale? She was a lady gangster, back in the 1960s. Sort of like Bonnie Parker was in the 1930s.’

I gave an eyebrow shrug. Of course I’d heard of her: she was one of those bad girls like Belle Starr or Beulah Baird who go into folklore because of their connection with violent men, or because they do some of the things that violent men do routinely. I was nearly certain she’d turned up in a crappy movie that Roger Corman or someone had directed. Daughters of Blood ? Children of Blood ? The Blood Family Robinson ? ‘Chicago Mob scene,’ I said. ‘She was Jackie Cerone’s girlfriend, or something, and then he used her on a job.’

Jan was nodding vigorously. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘That’s absolutely right. She came from somewhere a long way down in the South. Brokenshire, Alabama. But she was already a killer before she ever got to Chicago. The first man she killed was a man who stopped and picked her up on the road, after she left home. The story is that he tried to rape her and she killed him with a wheel wrench.

‘Then later on, when she worked for the mobs, she only killed men. That was one of her rules. And she seemed to like humiliating them as well as killing them. She had a sort of ritual.’

Some of the story was coming back to me now, in all its lurid colours. Myriam Kale: the homespun farm girl who hitch-hiked up the interstate to Illinois and got lost in the big city, only to surface again as one of the few women ever to become a Mafia contract killer; the real-life femme fatale who inspired a hundred sanitised movie imitations, murdering nine men before the FBI cornered her in Chicago’s Salisbury Hotel and brought her in alive so that they could try her, condemn her and give her the electric chair. Or maybe it was lethal injection, I’m hazy on the details.

I had the barest beginning of an inkling of where this was going now.

‘Kale died in the 1960s,’ I said. ‘More than forty years ago. On the other side of the world.’ It wasn’t an absolute objection, I knew: just a place marker – something we’d have to come back to.

But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.

‘I told you that Barnard had been tortured before he died,’ Jan said, using the unmentionable word this time rather than talking around it.

‘Go on.’

‘When the pathology report came back, it turned out that one of his injuries was later than all the rest. Postmortem. It was a cigarette burn. On his face, just underneath his eye. That was her trade mark, Mister Castor. She did that to all the men she murdered. The first man, the one who picked her up, she burned with the cigarette lighter out of his car. All the rest she burned with a cigarette. It was the last thing she did, always after they were already dead. Like . . . signing off on the kill.’

I tried not to meet Jan’s over-intense stare. ‘Anything like that,’ I said, guardedly, ‘any detail that becomes associated with a particular murderer’s style – copycat killers are going to pick up on it and use it as a matter of course.’

Jan nodded again: she’d seen that objection coming and it didn’t faze her. ‘This is the third time Kale has killed since her death,’ she said. ‘And all three times have been here, in England, not in the States. Paul Sumner has been tracking her – that’s why he knew what this was as soon as he read about Doug’s case. The first time was in 1980, up in Edinburgh. The second was in 1993, in Newcastle. And now this. All three of them, middle-aged men picked up on the street and taken back somewhere for sex. All three of them, tortured, murdered, then burned. Do copycat killers rest up for more than a decade between outings, Mister Castor?’

‘I’ve never known any,’ I admitted. ‘Maybe they’re cyclical, like locusts.’

‘And there’s something else,’ Jan said, with the look of someone who was turning over their hole card to reveal a big fat ace. ‘The cleaner at the Paragon Hotel – Joseph Onugeta – said in his statement that he walked past room seventeen sometime around five o’clock. That was about an hour after Doug and Barnard went in there. And he heard voices – people arguing. Two men and a woman, he said. Definitely three voices, because one of the men had a really cut-glass BBC voice – that would have been Barnard – and the other had a thick accent that he couldn’t understand properly.’

‘Doug was –?’ I interjected.

‘He was from Birmingham, and he never lost it. I couldn’t understand him myself when we started going out together. It used to really embarrass me. And then the third voice, the woman’s voice, she had an accent too. He said “like on the TV, or in a cinema.” I think that means an American accent. It was Myriam Kale, Mister Castor. It was Myriam Seaforth Kale, and whatever else he may have done, my husband isn’t going to prison for a murder that was done by some bloody ghost.’

I assumed that when Jan said ‘whatever else’, she was talking about the cottaging and the sodomy. So she’d somehow rolled with the blow of finding out that her husband was trawling the streets of London for anonymous sex with other men. I was torn between being impressed by her faithfulness and wondering what inconceivably spectacular shit-storm Doug would have to put her through before she decided that their ship was on the rocks.