It kept pace with us as we drove on south and west. It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to: there was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turn-offs were five miles apart.
Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now-defunct copper mine. Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure, Brokenshire just looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion. On the map a small creek runs through it, but there was no sign of it as we drove in towards the town square past post-war houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminium siding. I guess at some point in the town’s history the creek got covered over. Probably just as welclass="underline" if we’d had to drive across running water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state there was probably no way she could have done it.
We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of Gone With the Wind, and got out to look around. The car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.
Unsurprisingly, maybe, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had turned its whole window display over to books about great American gangsters, with a – presumably secondhand – copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography as its centrepiece. It was the same edition as mine: maybe there’d only ever been the one. Beside it was a reproduced photo: the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.
A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of local history, which turned out to be ninety per cent Kale to ten per cent prizewinning pigs. No insights there, either, though: just the familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.
‘I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?’ I said to Juliet.
‘Do you mean hard information, Castor,’ she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, ‘or hard alcohol?’
‘Neither.’ I headed for the door. ‘It was just sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the Picayune are on the next block. And since we’re expected . . .’
In fact it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-storey brownstone building that bore the Picayune’s masthead in German black-letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a pre-teen Mark Twain as a copy boy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish: that turned out to be because they had an office cat, lean and tabby, and I flinched in spite of myself – recent memories sparking inside my head – as it uncurled itself from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom. It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offence, then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yawling cry. Juliet mewed back and the cat turned its tail and fled.
‘You talk to cats?’ I asked her.
‘Only when they talk to me,’ she answered shortly.
She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets were stuffed to bursting, too. The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.
They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavy-set black guy in his shirt sleeves, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair. His face as he raised his head to look at us was as rucked up as a bulldog’s. ‘What can I do for you people?’ he snapped, as if he didn’t much want to know but was working from a script he had to follow. He had much less of an accent than the guy in the museum. I wondered whether that was because he’d come here from somewhere else and hadn’t quite blended into the local dialect, or if it was a relic of a college education in another state.
‘My name’s Castor,’ I said, ‘and this is Juliet Salazar. I think Nicky Heath contacted you and asked if it would be okay for us to pay you a call.’
He frowned, trying to place the name. ‘Nicky Heath?’ Then it came to him and his face sort of unfolded, some of the seams disappearing as his eyebrows went up and back. ‘Oh, wait. Dead man with a dot co dot uk suffix?’
‘Yeah, that’d be him.’
He got to his feet and thrust out a hand. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Gale Mallisham. Pleased to meet you. A lot of people walk in here in the mistaken belief that their lives qualify as news. I find that it’s a mistake to let such people get a running start.’
I took the hand and shook it, and I got the usual instant telegraphic flash of information about his mood – which was calm and only mildly curious. I got my fingers crushed, too, because he had a fierce grip.
He gestured us to sit down, realised there was only one chair on our side of the desk and went off to steal one from the other, empty desk. ‘The dead man said you were in a position to offer me a quid pro quo. He was deliberately vague about what you were offering, though.’
‘Well,’ I said, cautiously, ‘he probably told you that we’re chasing information about Myriam Kale. And yeah, we’ve got some to trade. Recent information, if you take my drift. Something that might make a story.’
Gale Mallisham wheeled the other chair back across to us, and Juliet took it with a smile and a nod. He caught the smile full in the face and didn’t stagger, so it was clear that Juliet wasn’t back to anything like full proof yet – but his stare stayed on her as he walked back around to his own side of the desk. Even without her lethally addictive pheromones, Juliet is beautiful enough to make people walk into furniture and not feel the pain.
‘Something that might make a story,’ he repeated, swivelling his gaze back to me. ‘And would that be a Paul Sumner story, by any chance?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meet me halfway, Mister Castor. I won’t be coy with you if you’re direct and honest with me.’
I sighed and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I admitted, ‘it’s that kind of story. Kale reaching out from beyond the grave to claim another victim.’
Mallisham sat back, resting his hands on his stomach with the fingers intertwined and steepled. ‘We don’t cover stories of that type,’ he said. ‘Not as a rule, anyway. You’ve got an uphill struggle, now, but I’m still listening.’
I told him in stripped-down form about the murder of Alastair Barnard, and then about the events of the past few days – touching not just on the testimony of Joseph Onugeta but also on John Gittings’s weird collection of gangster memorabilia and what Nicky had sieved out of it. He listened in complete silence, except when he wanted a detail repeated or clarified. About halfway through, he found an A5 notebook and a pencil in the clutter on his desk: he looked at me for permission, waving the pencil in the air, and I nodded, not breaking stride. After that he scribbled notes while I talked.