‘How can I be sure?’ Mallisham echoed her. ‘Well, let’s say I know people at the county hospital over in Sprott, and I know people in the sheriff’s office. Myriam was brought in for stitches once, in a place where she didn’t ought to have got torn, and Ruth said something at school another time about something a twelve-year-old girl doesn’t have any right to know. A lot of people got a piece of information and never tried to find out more. I’m a newsman, first and foremost. I collect up those pieces, looking for stories. But some stories I know better than to tell.’
‘You mean,’ Juliet said, with dangerous calm, ‘that you knew these girls were being hurt, and you did nothing to stop it.’
‘No,’ Mallisham said, neither angry nor defensive. ‘I knew later on – after they were all grown up – that someone had hurt them back when they were small. Don’t be so quick to judge, missy. I wouldn’t have sat by if blowing the whistle would have done any good. But like I said, the Seaforth line’s dead now. Lucas Seaforth died thirty years back, and the brothers all perished in various accidents and drunken brawls, so Myriam’s generation is the last there ever was.’
‘Ruth never married?’ I asked.
Mallisham pursed his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She still lives out there, on the farm. The only Seaforth left. And she’s seventy years old, so she’s left it a little late to think about starting a family. But then, when you look at the kind of marriage Myriam made, you can understand her feeling a mite chary about getting spliced herself.
‘Tucker Kale was a drunk, and a nasty drunk at that. There’s some people who say he bought Myriam off of Lucas Seaforth, cash down. I doubt it was that simple, but Lucas was a farmer and Kale ran the feed store, so I’d guess there was more of commerce than of love about the whole thing. I knew the man pretty well – my house is only half a mile from where the feed store used to be – and speaking personally, I wouldn’t have given him a kitten if my cat dropped a litter of ten. It’s certain that he beat Myriam, and he liked to show her up in front of people, too. He was the kind of polymorphous sadist who can take his recreation intellectually as well as physically.
‘So he was another brick in the wall, so to speak. But Myriam was damaged when he got her. Her own family had already given her more hurt than anyone should ever have to take.’
He spoke with a weary finality that made me ashamed my own interest in Myriam Kale was so tangential. ‘How long were they married?’ I asked, conscious of Juliet’s scary stillness on my left-hand side.
‘Seven years, give or take.’
‘And then he was killed in a car crash.’
Mallisham shrugged. ‘If you like.’
‘If I like?’
‘Well, I told you a person’s good name was kind of an issue around here.’ He got up, pushed his chair back and went across to one of the bookcases, where he started scanning the box files with his face thrust right up close to them, holding his glasses up out of the way of his eyes as he squinted at the writing on their spines. ‘That’s what they said at the time. And sure enough, the man was found dead in his car, which was kind of a wreck, But it was kind of a wreck when he bought it, and when he drove round town in it. I didn’t ask any questions because at the time there didn’t seem any reason to doubt that things happened that way. But a long time later, after Myriam became such a celebrity and all, I took a look at that autopsy report myself. Got it here somewhere, I’m reasonably sure.’
Mallisham tapped one of the boxes, then a second, as if touching them helped him to remember what was in them. But it was a completely different box he hauled out, from the next shelf down. He brought it over to the desk and opened it up.
‘Now if old Tucker got drunk and drove himself into a ditch, which is what the police said he did, then some of those injuries he took to the head require a little explaining. Looks to me like he must have backed up and taken a good few runs at that ditch until he go it right, because his head sure was dented in a lot of different places.’ He held up a very old foolscap sheet, on the kind of glossy paper the earliest photocopiers used. ‘Yeah, here it is. You can look at it if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t take a copy. This one is traceable to me, and like I said, I’m not going on the record with any of this.’
‘Just summarise for us,’ Juliet suggested.
Mallisham nodded. ‘Well, there were also the injuries to his rectum. They didn’t even get a mention when the county coroner sat and gave his verdict, but they’re all down here in black and white. Tucker Kale was anally raped after he died.’
‘Raped?’ I echoed. Images of Alastair Barnard, whose dead body I’d fortunately never had to see, inconsiderately flashed before my eyes anyway as if they had a right to be there.
‘Artifically raped,’ Mallisham amended. ‘I wouldn’t normally be talking about this in front of a lady, but you’re . . . what you are, so I guess it’s nothing new to you. I guess nothing that one body can do to another body is news to you.
‘Something had been put inside him. With a lot of force. And it was something made of wood because there was a wood splinter that they found. Handle of a hammer? Fence post? I don’t know, but I’d lay odds that whatever Myriam used to kill him she put to this other use afterwards.
‘But what clinches it for me is the burn mark on Tucker’s forehead.’
‘Myriam’s signature,’ I muttered, but Mallisham waved that away.
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s part of what became her modus operandi, but I think this was the first time she’d ever killed a man. And she didn’t do it in cold blood: it wasn’t planned or practised, I’m willing to lay long odds. It wasn’t something she had any kind of a choice about, it was something that came up from inside her and had to let itself out. It was the reasoned crisis of her soul, as some poet on your side of the water put it.
‘So I wasn’t thinking of it as evidence that Myriam was the one who killed old Tucker Kale. I’ve known that ever since I covered this story back in the 1960s – for this newspaper, where I’d started as a cub reporter seven weeks previously. But it took me a while of being out in the world and watching people at their worst to see what it was that Myriam was doing.’
Mallisham shrugged massively. ‘Maybe this is fanciful,’ he said. ‘But I think she was making a point, to herself. For her own satisfaction. She’d been sexually abused by a lot of men. I think she enjoyed being on the other side of that particular transaction. The anal rape is part of that. And the burning is part of it too. She burned him with a cigarette. She smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on his forehead. Does that suggest anything to you?’
I would have got it, but Juliet, to whom the rituals of sex are second nature, got it first. ‘The cigarette afterwards,’ she said, and Mallisham nodded, holding out his hands as if he was surrendering the entirety of his argument into her hands.
‘The cigarette afterwards. Yes. It was all symbolic, in my opinion. And what it was symbolic of was sex. Bad sex. The kind where you don’t respect the other person, you just use them for what you want and then get up and walk away.’
There was a silence as we mulled this over. It was Mallisham who eventually broke it.
‘It seems pretty clear to me,’ he observed in a brisker tone, slotting the sheet of paper back into the box and closing up the lid again, ‘that Luke Poulson – the man that Myriam met and murdered on the interstate – was her second victim, not her first. The pattern was already established when she killed her husband. And she followed it in every kill she made thereafter.’
‘Jesus,’ I said involuntarily, and then, ‘Sorry, Juliet.’ She hates it when people use that kind of language.
‘Jesus is not part of this equation, Mister Castor.’