She added another man to her score as the cops broke the doors of the suite down and burst in on her. She was stark naked, according to the papers – fresh out of the bath, manicured and smelling of Madame Rochas, she shot the first man to walk through the door, twenty-two-year-old constable Dermot Callister, in the face, killing him instantly. She herself was shot seven times within the next few seconds (the bullets were later removed, counted, inventoried, stolen and sold for souvenirs) but still managed to wound three more officers before being taken alive. And her will to live must have been truly extraordinary, Sumner pointed out, because one of those bullets hit her liver and another collapsed her left lung. It was a miracle she survived long enough to go to court; long enough to spend three years on death row; long enough to die, at last, at a time and place of the state’s choosing.
That was the rough outline of the story Sumner told, but he embellished it along the way with some fairly elaborate reconstructions of Kale’s sexual encounters with the made men of the Chicago mob scene. I wondered what his sources were for some of the more circumstantial accounts: maybe Kale kept a journal or something. ‘Dear diary, you’ll never guess with which widely feared psychotic gang-lord I had a knee-trembler in the lift at Nordstrom’s today – or what he likes to be tickled with.’
I was only skimming, but even so my attention was starting to wander long before I got to the end. It’s not that I’m prudish, or even morally fibrous, but pornography that’s written as a list of sexual positions and uses the word ‘turgid’ as though it was punctuation gets old fairly quickly.
I skipped to the last chapter, which turned out to be an account of Myriam Kale’s last two hits – the ones she was meant to have carried out from beyond the grave. In 1980 a guy who lived on George Street in Edinburgh was murdered in his own bathroom. Forensic evidence suggested that he’d been murdered immediately after sex, and his cheek and temple were scarred by post-mortem cigarette burns.
In 1993, ditto: some middle-aged sales rep in Newcastle left work on a Friday night, announcing his intention to ‘get laid, get wrecked and get to bed early’. He was found the next day in the laundry room of a hotel on Callerton Lane, stuffed into one of the baskets. Again, his face had been burned, and again there was evidence that he’d been engaging in coitus before meeting his violent death.
Cause of death in both cases was blunt-instrument trauma, and the weapons were never recovered. Sumner offered no explanation at all as to why Kale should have chosen the British Isles as the site of her post-mortem adventures: he just presented the facts, humbly and pruriently, for our consideration.
For a change of pace, I dug out the bag of bits and pieces that Carla had retrieved from behind John’s desk drawer. I flipped through the pages of the A to Z again, this time with my own oversized hardcover London street guide beside me on the bed, and got slightly more out of it this time. The list of place names – Abney Park, Eastcote Lane, St Andrew’s Old, St Andrew’s Gardens, Strayfield and the rest – turned out to be a list of London cemeteries. A pretty exhaustive list, too, I was guessing, because it ran to well over a hundred sites. Most had either been struck through with a single strike of the pen or had a large cross next to them on the line where they appeared. Whatever John had been looking for, it looked like he’d had really exacting standards.
At the bottom of the page, set off from the list by a couple of inches of glaringly empty space, was a single word: SMASHNA. It wasn’t crossed out, but John had circled it again and again in red ink. He’d then added three question marks in green. It was a powerful graphic statement: it just didn’t mean a damn thing to me.
The other lists – the ones that consisted of people’s names – were even more opaque. I checked through initial letters, last letters and a bunch of other assorted things to see whether some kind of acrostic message was hiding in there, but they were still just names: some friends, some the opposite of friends, most just strangers.
That left the key and the matchbook. I picked up the matchbook and looked at that number again, and this time, maybe because I was coming to it in a code-breaking frame of mind, the truth hit me at once.
The final digits were 76970. That could be a phone number after all – if the phone was a mobile and the number had been written backwards.
I keyed the number into my mobile and it rang. I had a brief sense of something like vertigo: a peek down the sheer vertical colonnades of a mind under terrible stress. Who had John been keeping secrets from? What had made him so obsessively careful? Nicky Heath, who ought to know, once told me that paranoia is a survival trait as well as a clinical condition: it hadn’t been that for John, but it looked as though he’d done all he could to keep what he was working on from falling into the wrong hands. Or any hands at all.
The ring tone sounded three times, then someone pick kn stheed up.
‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, brisk and cheerful. ‘What’s the score?’
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m a friend of John Gittings . . .’
There was a muttered ‘Fuck!’ and then the line went dead with a very abrupt click. Interesting. I tried again, and this time the phone at the other end rang six, seven, eight times before it was picked up. No voice at all this time: just an expectant silence.
‘I really am a friend of John’s,’ I said, trying to sound calm and reassuring and radiantly trustworthy. ‘My name is Felix Castor. I worked with John on a couple of jobs, a little while back. His widow, Carla, gave me some of his things, and your number was in there. I called because I’m trying to find out what he was working on before he died.’
That was enough to be going on with, I thought. I waited for the line to go dead again. Instead, the same male voice said, ‘Why?’ Not so cheerful now – tense, with an underlying tone of challenge.
Actually, I had to admit that that was a pretty good question. ‘Because he seemed to think it was something really important,’ I said, slowly because I was picking my words with care in case any of them turned out to be loaded. ‘But he didn’t tell anybody what it was all about. I’m thinking that maybe finishing the job for him might make him rest easier. Because right now he’s not resting easy at all.’
There was a long, strained silence.
‘Not tonight,’ the man said at last. ‘Tomorrow. Twelve o’clock. The usual place.’
He hung up before I could ask the obvious question, and this time when I dialled again the phone just rang until I got a voicemail service. I tried twice more, with the same results. For some reason – maybe creeping paranoia – I didn’t want to leave a message. But in any case, I thought I knew where the usual place had to be: there was presumably a reason why John had written this number down on the matchbook from the Reflections Café Bar – and fortunately he’d left the postcode showing when he tore off the cover. That plus the yellow pages ought to be enough to get me there. The timing was going to be tight, though. I needed to be back at the courthouse in Barnet for two p.m. for the start of the afternoon session, when Rafi’s hearing would resume.
I’d just have to make sure the meeting was a short one.
10
A hundred and fifty years ago, HM Prison Pentonville was considered a model of the perfect nick. Politicians made millenarian speeches about it; penal experts came from all over Europe to see it and coo over it; and no doubt many an old lag committed imaginative new crimes just so he could get banged up in it.
It was the first prison in England built to an American blueprint known as the separate system. It was sort of a refinement of the Victorian panopticons, where sneaky little architectural tweaks and twiddles allowed the prisoners to be watched for every second of every day, no matter where they went.