He didn’t answer, but he was still giving me the fish-eye, so I rolled straight on. ‘It may not be something you can help me with in any case. There was a gangster back in the 1960s named Myriam Seaforth Kale. I don’t know if you ever heard of her. She killed a dozen people, all of them men, then the FBI shot up a hotel to get hold of her and sent her to the chair.’
‘An American gangster,’ Nicky said, with careful emphasis.
‘Yeah. Sorry, I thought I said that already. Anyway, you know the way these things work, probably better than I do. There’s always a market for celebrity souvenirs. And it’s kind of like an iceberg – some of it’s above the water, most of it isn’t.’
‘Sure,’ Nicky said. He seemed mollified now. Whatever I’d said to upset him, he’d either bounced back from it or else filed it away for later. I still couldn’t figure out what had got under his skin in that way, but right then didn’t seem like the best time to ask.
‘So,’ I summed up, shielding my eyes as the sun unexpectedly broke through the clouds, ‘you think you could lay your hands on something?’
He nodded a few times, not in answer to the question but acknowledging that it was an interesting commission. ‘Funnily enough,’ he said, shooting me another narrow-eyed stare, as if warning me off making any smart one-liners, ‘I’ve got some contacts in that line of business.’
‘No kidding?’
‘No kidding.’ Nicky slid away along the bench, out of the patch of sunlight. He might have reclaimed the day, but he was clearly going to be selective about which parts of it he kept. ‘I’m not making any promises. Stuff like that doesn’t come up for sale too often, and when it does it tends to go for crazy prices. Supply and demand. There’s a whole lot of sickos out there, and only so many dead serial killers. You might not want to pay the asking price.’
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘That’s why I said we should keep the payment issue open for the time being. We’d only be looking to have this thing in our hands for, like, a day. Maybe we could rent it.’
‘Buy it, sell it on again,’ Nicky mused. It was obvious that he saw the potential there: two transactions in quick succession, with commission to be made twice over. ‘Yeah, maybe. Who’s this “we”, by the way, and what do you want this little keepsake for?’
I got up. ‘Call me if you get a bite,’ I said. ‘Or if you click on what the fuck is going on in that notebook. Sooner the better, Nicky. I’m kind of under the gun on both of these.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s life,’ Nicky observed.
When a dead man says that, he means it’s somebody else’s problem.
11
Sometimes synchronicity is your friend. Everything flows together, and the thing you’re looking for just turns out to be in the first place where your groping fingers come down. Much as I complain about my luck, even I get days like that. But this wasn’t feeling like one.
I had an appointment at noon at the Reflections Café, which going by the postcode was somewhere around Victoria. Didn’t know who I was going to meet there, or what light he might be able to shed on John Gittings’s weird little list, but I didn’t want to miss it. In the meantime though, I had some time to kill. So I strolled back up to Trafalgar Square, for the hell of it and the Harris hawks, and while I was walking I called Jan Hunter to tell her how my meeting with Doug had gone. I didn’t try to explain about Juliet: I just said that I’d taken along a colleague for the sake of getting a second opinion. I didn’t mention Kale, either: not at first. I was afraid of offering her any shred of hope, because I was nearly certain that whatever I turned up would still leave Doug in the frame for murder. So instead of telling her that her husband was carrying a passenger, I asked her why she hadn’t mentioned the prison doctor’s diagnosis that Doug was suffering from a psychosis. The line went very quiet for a moment.
‘Incipient psychosis,’ Jan corrected me at last. ‘Not full-blown.’ She sounded defensive, but not apologetic. ‘I just thought that if I told you Doug was losing his mind you might not agree to help me. And really it’s not relevant – not to the case. It’s only come on since he was arrested. It’s that place. And the stress of everything that’s happened. He was fine before.’
‘I think you said he was increasingly distant and hard to read before,’ I reminded her. ‘And then he went AWOL for a week and didn’t even call you.’
‘But he was still himself.’ Her voice was thick with tears now. ‘Some of the time, anyway. And when he wasn’t himself it wasn’t like he was mad. Just . . . like he wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t believe a week would be enough to turn him into a murderer. I don’t believe a lifetime would be enough!’
‘Maybe not,’ I allowed. ‘Anyway, for what it’s worth I think Doctor Maxwell got the wrong end of the stick. Whatever’s wrong with Doug, I don’t think he’s going crazy.’
‘You don’t?’ Through the tears, hope and relief showing like the shiny edge of a fifty-pence piece in the muddy ruck of a sewage trench. Fuck it. I really needed to watch my mouth. ‘Then what is it? What’s happening to him?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I hedged. ‘And Jan, I hate to say this but it may not make any difference in any case. Not in terms of the verdict. But there’s a lot more to it than the police have got their little pointy heads around. And whether it helps or not, I’m going to get you some answers. We’ve got a window – probably a few weeks, at the very least. Going on what Gary – DS Coldwood – had to say, the trial date hasn’t come down yet. The police are still looking for the murder weapon and not having much luck, so nobody’s pressing for an early hearing. If I can turn up something solid-’ That word felt a little odd, given how tenuous and formless all my speculations were. ‘Well, whatever I turn up,’ I finished lamely, ‘I’ll hand it over to you and you can decide for yourself what to do with it.’
‘So you believe that Doug is innocent, Mister Castor?’
I grimaced. I would have preferred not to be pinned down on that score right then, because the truth was that I didn’t have a bastard clue. ‘I believe Myriam Kale was in that hotel room,’ I said. ‘But I’d dearly love to nail down the how and the why of it, or at least get some idea of—’
‘“Why” isn’t an issue.’ Jan broke in, her voice strained and angry. ‘She killed dozens of men when she was alive. They don’t know how many. And she’s still doing it. And we don’t need to know how she got there, either. If she’s a ghost, she can go where she likes. She doesn’t have to knock on doors, or take trains and planes and taxis. She can walk through walls, and she can be gone when the police get there. She wouldn’t even show up on cameras.’
‘And she’d have a hell of a time swinging a hammer.’
Sudden silence from the other end of the line. I waited for Jan to ask the obvious question, to which I’d have to give the obvious answer. Your husband’s soul has run off with another woman . . . Meanwhile my gaze wandered around the square almost as if I was subconsciously looking for a way out of this conversation. A Japanese tourist a few feet away was unfolding a map of London that ended up being so big that it spilled all the way down to the ground. A big feral cat, black with dirty white splashes across its back, was watching the pigeons as they flew from one equestrian statue to the next, its tail twitching in tight arcs like a severed cable with a thousand volts pouring through it. An art student, or maybe just a hobbyist, was sketching Charles the First in pastels, a bottle of Red Stripe resting at her side as she sat cross-legged on the stones.
But it was almost as though Jan could see the chasm yawning up ahead of her and knew instinctively to veer away from it. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ she said. ‘Whatever you can find, Mister Castor – whatever you can tell me –’
And I could have taken the invitation right there, but like a coward I veered too. I grabbed a question from my mind’s cluttered desktop and waved it like Chamberlain waved his famous autograph from Adolf Hitler.