Dead Men's s Boots

‘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 a£eadm"" go 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.