Of course, knowing that doesn’t make me want her any the less. Most of the time it’s hard not to feel that being devoured in the middle of coitus would be a price worth paying for Juliet’s undivided attention. But it’s no damn good. Men make her hungry in all the wrong ways: now she’s discovered a way to keep her sex life and her nutritional needs apart, and she says she’s sticking to it.
‘How’s Susan?’ I asked her, probing the wound – mine, obviously, not hers – as she cut her twelve-ounce steak into two pieces and filled her mouth with one of them. The drive had been rough going – Juliet drove with a focused aggression that made most road-rage incidents seem like brief, contemplative interludes, and she punished the sleek, over-powered sports car as though it had done her some terrible harm – but it didn’t seem to have dented her appetite at all. We’d driven more or less at random, it seemed to me, but always bearing west until finally we fetched up in the ragged borders of King’s Cross where we stopped at a bistro called something like Fontaine’s or Fontanelle’s or something equally euro-gastric. I’d gone for pasta; Juliet as usual was only interested in large slabs of animal flesh.
She swallowed once, without chewing, then dabbed her mouth fastidiously with her napkin. ‘Overworked,’ she said. ‘They’ve put her in charge of children’s events at the library, and they haven’t even given her a budget. She’s on the phone all day trying to find authors who’ll come in and read for free, and she spends every evening inventing competitions with prizes that she buys out of her own salary. I keep telling her to get out of it. I can make enough for both of us.’
‘Nobody wants to be a kept woman,’ I pointed out tactfully. ‘It causes all sorts of stresses in a relationship.’
‘So does being too tired for sex,’ Juliet growled.
‘So anyway,’ I went on, my cheerfulness sounding a little brittle. ‘Alastair Barnard. Claw hammers. Want to talk, or are you sticking to Gary Coldwood’s big red book of Metropolitan etiquette?’
She shrugged, spearing the other half of the steak. ‘I’m not interested in politics. Coldwood is a friend, but so are you. Don’t put me in a position where I have to choose, and we should be just fine.’
‘More than fair,’ I said. ‘Should I order you another one of those?’ It was a reckless offer. I still had the remains of Jan Hunter’s cash burning a hole in my jacket pocket, but given that she was currently my only client it would be a good idea to eke it out.
Juliet shook her head in any case. ‘I’m meant to be cutting down,’ she said. ‘Susan’s fully vegetarian now. She doesn’t like the smell of it on my breath.’
I boggled slightly. ‘So you’ll . . . what? Eat green salads?’
‘And oily fish. It doesn’t matter much to me, Castor. The kind of meat I really want to eat I’m abstaining from right now. I took the pledge eleven months and nine days ago, and I’m managing very well, all things considered.’
‘Still keeping count, though.’
She favoured the space where the steak had been with a very long, very serious stare. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘Still keeping count.’
‘What do you think happened to the hammer?’
She didn’t bat an eyelid at the change of subject, but then from my limited experience a demon’s brain is probably a bit like a hurricane in a box. The illusion of calm can only be maintained as long as you keep the lid nailed firmly down.
‘Hunter hid it somewhere, presumably.’ She ate a piece of the broccoli that had come with the steak: but the gesture lacked conviction in my opinion.
‘Somewhere in the hotel or somewhere out on the street?’
‘Why?’
‘I just want to know what you think.’
Juliet looked at me thoughtfully. ‘It’s not likely he could have taken it onto the street,’ she admitted. ‘Someone would have seen what he did with it, and it would have been recovered by now.’
I nodded. ‘And if it was anywhere in the hotel, the police would have turned it up inside of ten minutes.’
She put her fork down, giving up on the broccoli. ‘That’s an interesting point, Castor,’ she acknowledged. ‘However, it’s a point that holds equally well no matter who killed Barnard. So it doesn’t particularly point towards Douglas Hunter being innocent.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’m not saying that Hunter is innocent – just that there may be more to the story than Coldwood is seeing right now. I was hoping you might be able to fill me in on what you read in the hotel room. It might give me a better idea of whether or not I’m wasting my time.’
Juliet tapped her incisors with the tip of one immaculate fingernail.
‘I think you are,’ she said. ‘Wasting your time, I mean. But yes, I can do that.’
‘Thanks. So when would be good for you?’
‘Now.’ She pushed the plate full of vegetables away with a decisive movement and stood. ‘Now would be good for me. That’s why I drove us here. The Paragon is just around the corner.’
The Paragon Hotel lived up – or maybe down – to all my expectations.
Like a lot of early-twentieth-century London architecture, it’s the type of building that was thrown up to take advantage of negative space: in other words, it fits into a gap between older buildings that somebody decided to exploit even though it had no rational shape. You can tell what you’re getting as soon as you round the bend of Battle Bridge Road and see the frontage ahead of you: a narrow slice of soot-blackened mulberry brick inelegantly slotted in between a stolid warehouse and a bigger hotel that was trying to look respectable – not an easy trick with the Paragon clinging to your leg like an amorous dog.
The interior managed to be both constricted and sprawling at the same time. The lobby went back a long way, but it was ludicrously narrow and it had a dog-leg, the front desk thrusting out into a high-ceilinged space no wider than a corridor, which seemed to flinch away from it in a nervy zigzag. Naive anthropomorphising, I know: but when you deal with the risen dead on a day-to-day basis you tend to see the life in almost everything. And the death, too, which is maybe the downside.
The clerk looked up from a computer monitor as we came in, his gaze flicking from Juliet to me and then back to her, and hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard. He could just have been hiding a solitaire game, but something about his studiously blank expression as we walked up to the desk made me suspect that whatever window he’d closed had been a little more incriminating than that. Then again, this was a whore hotel and the last time he’d seen Juliet she’d presumably been part of Detective Sergeant Coldwood’s travelling circus. He had good enough reason to be circumspect.
He ran a hand through his thinning, sand-brown hair – which I was seeing in a glorious three-sixty-degree perspective because of the huge mirror behind him. He seemed to have some kind of thyroid condition, or at any rate he had the bulging-eyed stare that sometimes goes with hyperthyroidism. His beaky nose and hair-trigger blink reminded me irresistibly of the dead comedian Marty Feldman. There was a long loose thread on the shoulder of his herringbone jacket which stuck out to the side as though he was on a fuse.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked us in a slightly nasal voice.
‘I’m with the police,’ Juliet said, which I guess was a white lie. ‘Investigating the Barnard case. You remember I came in about a week ago to read the room.’
The clerk nodded. Of course he remembered. You didn’t see Juliet and then just forget about it.
‘We need to go over it again,’ Juliet said. ‘I presume it’s still locked off?’
‘Oh yes,’ the clerk said, already reaching for the key. They were ranged behind him in pigeon-holes, each one with a thick wooden fob five or six inches long.
‘If you meet any of our other guests,’ the clerk said, handing the key over to Juliet with some diffidence, ‘I hope you’ll be discreet. It’s been very hard for us over the past few days, and we’ve cooperated in every way we could. We’d really like to start putting the whole thing behind us now.’