When I’d finished, he set the pencil down and massaged his wrist. ‘Shorthand hurts more and more as I get older,’ he grunted. He looked at what he’d written, reading it over silently with his lips moving slightly as though he was reciting the words to himself under his breath. ‘Quite a story,’ he said when he’d finished. His tone was dry.
‘It’s only half a story,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for the other half.’
‘To stop this man Hunter from going to jail.’
I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at having to define my stake in this. ‘I think Doug Hunter’s going to jail whatever we do,’ I said scrupulously. ‘Even if we turn up evidence that Myriam Kale was in that hotel room – in the spirit or in the flesh – there’s a better than even chance that the judge will kick it out of court. And it’s nearly certain that it was Hunter’s hand on the hammer, whoever was in the driving seat at the time.’
‘Then why is this worth crossing the Atlantic for?’
‘Because if there’s a connection between Myriam Kale and the East End gangsters who my dead friend John was researching, then she’s the odd man out. And the odd man out is sometimes the best way to crack the puzzle.’
Mallisham was staring at me thoughtfully. Perhaps he’d heard the slight hesitation in my voice when I described John Gittings as a friend. Perhaps he was wondering how much of this was made-to-measure bullshit to prise his lips and his files open. But when he spoke it was only to summarise again.
‘You’ve got a lot of dead men – dead bad men – turning up alive again,’ he said. ‘Or at least you got one or two, could be, and your friend was prodding a whole lot more with a stick to see if they moved. That right? But they’re all from your side of the water. Myriam would be the only woman, and the only American.’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
‘So it’s about your friend, and his . . . unfinished business.’ Mallisham took off his glasses and stroked the pinch-marks on the bridge of his nose. ‘Would I be right in saying that finishing the business would make it more likely he’d lie down and stay down, instead of distressing his nearest and dearest?’
‘Yes,’ I said again. I thought about Carla, and realised that I hadn’t called her before I left. I didn’t even know whether John’s violently unhappy spirit had surfaced again since the cremation. I had to admit to myself that there were other factors operating here besides altruism. One of them was that when someone tries to kill me to keep me from finishing a job, it touches a stubborn streak in me that goes fairly deep.
‘Okay.’ Mallisham put his glasses on again, squinting and grimacing them into position. ‘I’m going to buy that. One out of two of you’s got an honest face, and these days that counts as better than average.’
‘One out of two of us?’ Juliet queried blandly.
Mallisham gave her a hard look. ‘Well, you’re a long way away from being what you look to be, missy,’ he said to her. ‘I’m not sure whether you’re dead or just something that never got born in the first place, but that body that looks so good on you – it isn’t really you, is it?’
There was a long silence. I didn’t rush in to fill it: this was Juliet’s question and I figured she’d field it by herself.
‘No,’ she murmured at last, looking down demurely into her lap. ‘It’s not me. It’s not even a body.’
‘Just something you ran up for the occasion, eh?’ Mallisham’s eyebrows flashed. ‘Well, in a way that makes me feel a little better. You’re, what, her kore aperigrapta? Succubus, maybe?’
Juliet’s gaze jerked back up to meet his. She blinked. ‘You want to guess my lineage?’ she invited, with an edge to her tone. I hadn’t understood the ancient Greek, but it was clear that something in what Mallisham had said had hit home.
He laughed and shook his head. ‘No, no. I’m not of a mind to play twenty questions with you. I used to do a little exorcism on the side, in my early days, is alclass="underline" that’s how I knew what you were. I gave it up a long time ago, on account of how journalism was what I really wanted to do. My daddy said God had put a sword in my hand for the smiting of the ungodly, but there’s lots of different ways of doing that.’ He shook his head again, a little ruefully this time. ‘Well, well. Succubus. But not hunting.’
‘No. Not hunting.’
‘Passing for human.’
Juliet shrugged.
‘You’re the second I’ve met who’s taken that course.’ Mallisham stared at Juliet with intense, unashamed curiosity. ‘I wonder – I hope this doesn’t give offence – I wonder if I’d have had a chance against you, in a straight draw.’
‘You’re not seeing me at my best,’ Juliet said, with a cold smile.
Mallisham smiled disarmingly back. ‘That’s hard to believe. Anyway, Myriam Kale. What was it you wanted to know, exactly?’
I took over again. ‘Any gaps in the official story,’ I said. ‘I mean, if you know of any link she had to England – any factor that might help to explain her turning up in London, alive or dead – then that would be gravy. But really we just want to get more of a handle on her, as a person rather than a legend.’
‘That’s a laudable goal,’ Mallisham mused. ‘Not all that easy, though, after forty years of disinformation. You’ve presumably read Sumner’s . . . well, some call it a book.’
‘Inside Myriam Kale? Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve read it.’
‘Then your best move now would be to forget it,’ Mallisham rumbled, making a sour face. ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but that man made a career out of telling the kind of lies that would have turned Pinocchio’s nose into a goddamned national monument. To listen to him, you’d think Myriam Kale was two-parts nymphomaniac to one part mob assassin.’
‘And that’s not an accurate summary?’ I hazarded.
The balding man snorted in a mixture of amusement and indignation. ‘No, sir,’ he said curtly, ‘it is not. It takes no account of what made her the way she was, and it ignores the way she killed – the reason why she killed. Paul Sumner blithely assumes that most of the murders attributed to Myriam Kale were bought and paid for, purely because the men concerned were known or thought to be mobsters. But after she was picked up by Jackie Cerone, most of the men she met were mobsters. It’s a skewed sample.’
‘If not money,’ Juliet asked, ‘then what?’
Mallisham stroked the bridge of his nose again, this time leaving his glasses in situ. ‘Well,’ he said, studying the clutter on his desk, ‘I’m not claiming to be an expert. It’s just that if you look at how the story starts, you come to different conclusions. Or maybe you just hold off from conclusions. Are you going to take notes, Mister Castor?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’
‘Or a recording?’
‘No.’
‘Good. I’d like it best if all this stayed off the record. Use the information, by all means, but don’t use my words. And if by any chance you’ve lied to me and you belong to my own and Mister Sumner’s profession, I’ll deny any words you put into my mouth and collaterally sue your ass into a sling.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Okay.’ He settled down in his chair, as if he was hunkering down for what he knew was going to be a long haul. ‘First off, you ought to know that Myriam Seaforth – as she was then – was almost certainly abused by her father and one or more of her brothers. I can’t prove it, but it’s the damn truth all the same. It happened to her sister Ruth, and it happened to her. ’Course, all the Seaforth men are dead now, so there’s nobody left to give me the lie anyway, but people around here take reputation pretty seriously. None of this is ever going to make the front page of the Picayune. Nor yet the Sunday supplement.’
‘How can you be so sure she was abused?’ Juliet threw in. There was a stillness about her now – an intensity of attention that was almost intimidating. She’s got this thing about battered women: a kind of razor-edged sentimentality.