‘I’m sure,’ said Juliet. The clerk watched us unhappily as we walked on around the dog-leg to the stairs, his hand smoothing down his hair again.
There was no lift; but then the Paragon was only three storeys high, and the whole point of the place was to give people healthful aerobic exercise. We went up one flight and came out onto a corridor somewhat broader than the entrance hall. Thick pile carpet in shades of dark red created the right carnal ambience, but bare hospital-green plasterboard let the side down a little. The place was silent, and there was nobody else in sight.
Juliet already knew where room seventeen was, so she led the way. ‘Was that Merrill?’ I asked as I followed her, dredging up the name from Jan Hunter’s account. ‘The guy who called the police on the day of the murder?’
‘That was Merrill,’ Juliet confirmed. ‘But it wasn’t him who placed the call – it was the cleaner, Joseph Onugeta.’
‘Sorry, you’re right. I wouldn’t mind talking to him. I’ll have to ask if he’s here.’
Juliet stopped in front of a door that badly needed a paint job – or maybe a surgical scrubbing. Its dark brown surface had a smeared, rucked look to it as though the paint had been plastered on too thickly and had run as it dried. ‘I think they’re both here every day,’ she said. ‘They seem to run the place between them. The owner lives in Belgium somewhere and he only turns up on the quarter days to check the books.’
She turned the key in the lock and pushed. A sour, musty smell came out to meet us as the door opened, and I hesitated for just a moment to step inside, not sure how much of the physical evidence would have been left in situ.
Juliet just went on in, and as she swung the door wide I could see that the room was almost bare. There was a bed frame standing against one wall, taking up most of the available space. No mattress or covers, and no pillows: just two dark rectangular spaces in the divan that had once held drawers, and now looked like the empty eye sockets of a skull. On the pale beige carpet there were dark and very extensive stains: square windows had been let into some of these, the bare boards showing through where small, regular sections of carpet had been taken away by the police forensics team. There were similar stains, rich rust-brown in colour, down the near side and the bottom of the divan. Alastair Barnard might be gone, but ‘gone’ was a relative term.
The air reverberated soundlessly with his suffering and his fear – an emotional effluvium like the ghost of a bad headache.
‘So this is where it happened?’ I said, unnecessarily – as much to disturb those silent echoes as anything else.
Juliet nodded her head in the direction of the fouled divan. ‘X marks the spot,’ she said coolly.
‘When you read the room for Coldwood,’ I asked, looking around the chill, claustrophobic space, ‘was it like this? Or was the body still here?’
‘It was still here,’ Juliet said, in the same disinterested tone. ‘Nothing had been touched. He wanted me to read it while it was still fresh.’
‘So tell me what you saw.’
She looked at me for confirmation. ‘With which eyes, Castor?’
I waved an expansive hand. ‘All of them. What was physically there, in front of you, and anything else you saw.’
Juliet stared at the ground, thought for a few moments, then pointed to a spot almost at my feet – a point midway between the bed and the door. ‘Barnard was lying there when I came in,’ she said. ‘What was left of him. His body had been hurt – damaged – very extensively. I knew he was a man mainly by the smell. There was too little left of his head to tell what he’d looked like when he was alive.
‘But then when I looked backwards, into the past, I saw him clearly enough.’
The quality of her voice changed, making me look up from the carpet’s intricate organic geography and check her face. I’d caught an emphasis that seemed just a tiny bit off.
‘Was there something else that you couldn’t see?’ I demanded.
Juliet didn’t seem to hear. She was staring right through me at the door and I could tell that what she was seeing now was not me but the events of January the twenty-sixth. She was squinting into the middle distance, along a dimension that just wasn’t there for members of my particular species.
‘They walk in together,’ she said slowly. ‘Barnard is the older man, obviously – the one in the suit, his face all red from climbing the stairs. Hunter is the big, well-built one who moves like a fighter.’
‘He used to box when he was younger,’ I said.
‘Yes. He’s aware of where his weight is: he stands solid, four-square, as though someone is going to come at him and try to knock him down. He crosses to the bed, puts down a bag that he’s carrying – a long green canvas holdall that looks as though it’s used to carry tools – and then he turns to say something to Barnard. He grins as he speaks. One of the words is “now”. Barnard is nervous, but it’s the nervousness of arousal. He closes the door, fumbles with the lock for quite some time. He doesn’t want to be disturbed, obviously.
‘Hunter is already taking off his clothes. Barnard crosses to the bed, starts to undress too, but Hunter stops him. He pushes Barnard down onto his knees . . .’
‘I think we can take the next part as read,’ I said.
Juliet nodded. ‘They copulate,’ she confirmed. ‘For a long time. Hunter takes the dominant role; takes it very aggressively, and the violence is part of the sex. Barnard doesn’t mind. Not yet. He’s excited. Enjoying it very much. Then . . .’
Her voice tailed off. She was staring at the bed now, her eyes narrowed.
‘Then?’
‘Then it starts to hurt.’
She walked around the bed, her gaze still fixed on it, triangulating on the past with her exquisite, dark-adapted eyes.
‘What Hunter is doing now will leave marks. Barnard doesn’t want that. It makes him afraid, and it makes him indignant. He says something, tries to sit up. Hunter . . . hits him, hard, on the side of the head, and he falls down again. He’s dazed. His mouth is bleeding, not where the blow landed but where he bit his lip because of the force of the impact.
‘He tries again. Hunter straddles him, forces him down with his own weight. He’s hitting Barnard with his closed fists, and at the same time . . . he enters him again. He beats him and rapes him at the same time.’
I opened my mouth to speak; to ask Juliet to skip forward again, maybe, and spare me some of the gory details. But the details were what I needed to hear: there was no point being in this room at all if I didn’t take a good, long look at what had happened here. At the same time, though, Juliet’s words had sharpened my own responses to the place. I couldn’t see its history the way she could, but I could feel the emotional afterwash of the events with a terrible clarity now – and everything she said fell into place with a dull, heavy inevitability, anchoring the emotions and giving them form.
‘He twists Barnard’s right arm behind his back: up and back, as far as it will go. He’s leaning on it, with his full weight. He’s still riding him at this point. And then . . .’
There was a long silence. I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath until I let it out.
‘. . . And then he gets the hammer out of the bag and smashes Barnard’s skull in,’ I finished. But there was something in Juliet’s expression that I couldn’t read. I waited, resisting the urge to throw another question at her. She was still staring into the past, with minute, almost furious attention.
‘I don’t see that,’ she said at last.
‘You don’t see . . . ?’
‘The end of the torture. The hammer coming down. The moment of death. Something moves across the room. Something very big. It’s been there all the time, but it’s been standing very still. I only see it when it moves.’