‘No, I suppose not. But you’re saying that Myriam Kale was driven to kill because of her background and her childhood experiences. That after she went to Chicago she became a serial killer – like Aileen Wuornos – rather than a Mob enforcer? Or is the whole Chicago thing just part of the legend, too?’
‘No, that part is true,’ Mallisham confirmed. ‘She did go to Chicago, and she did work as a prostitute for a couple of years. I think she killed one or two of her customers, but they’re not part of the official tally and there’s no way of knowing now. I’m just going on Chicago coroners’ court records documenting corpses with post-mortem burns.
‘But I believe Aileen Wuornos is a valid comparison. Myriam Kale wasn’t a mobster: she was a psychotic who killed because she had to. Because her mind was so damaged from the hurt that had been heaped on her, hurting was all she knew. There isn’t a shred of evidence that Cerone ever paid her to carry out a hit. In my humble opinion, she killed hoodlums because she mixed with hoodlums. And, in one or two cases, she killed people who Sumner assumes were hoodlums because Kale killed them. Kind of a circular argument, but there you go. The plain fact is, she killed most of the men she slept with. Only the women she took to bed got away clean.’
‘She was bisexual?’ Juliet asked.
Mallisham looked almost comically shocked. ‘Good lord, no. She was a lesbian. Even when she was married to Tucker Kale, I think, although she may not have done anything about it until after she killed him and went north. Men forced themselves on her, sometimes, and she used men sometimes to get what she wanted. Sex with men was never a pleasure for her, unless she enjoyed raping them with household tools. When she chose her own partners, she chose women. Now, unless there was anything else you specifically wanted to ask me, I need to get back to work. I’ve got a couple of articles to type up, and some ad space to sell. These days, as you may have gathered, I pretty much am the Brokenshire Picayune. What I don’t buy off the wire I write myself, and it’s a long day.’
I stood, and Juliet followed my lead. I held out my hand and Mallisham took it again, gave it another of those wrist-crushing shakes. He seemed a lot less placid than before: going over this old ground again seemed to have unsettled his mood a little.
I thanked him for making the time for us, but he waved the words away brusquely. Juliet offered him a hand too: after a moment’s hesitation he shook his head.
‘I’d rather not,’ he said. ‘No offence. Just natural caution.’
I tensed momentarily, wondering how Juliet would take that, but she seemed if anything to be impressed with Mallisham’s solid common sense. She nodded. ‘I understand,’ she purred. ‘If I were in your situation, I wouldn’t want one of Baphomet’s sisters to have my sweat on her hands, either.’
Mallisham gave a double take, then nodded with a slightly rueful expression, acknowledging the insider information.
‘That would have been my second guess,’ he said. ‘But of course if I’d met you in the field I wouldn’t have lived long enough for a second guess. So – it’s lucky for me I didn’t, isn’t it? Enjoy the rest of your day.’
We headed for the door, but just as we were about to leave I remembered something that he’d said that I wanted to follow up on. I turned on the threshold, Columbo-style, and looked back at him. He was already back at his keyboard, but he paused with his fingers poised and waited for me to speak.
‘Mister Mallisham,’ I said, ‘when you mentioned Paul Sumner just now, you talked about speaking ill of the dead. How long ago did he pass on?’
‘Couple of years back,’ Mallisham said, ‘to the best of my recollection. Why? Were you hoping to look him up while you were here?’
‘It was a possibility,’ I said. ‘Now it isn’t.’
Which was true as far as it went: but it was a different impossibility that I was thinking of. Jan Hunter had said Sumner had called her up in January, less than two months ago: and that conversation was what had started her off on asking questions about Myriam Kale – had made her approach me, and enlist me in this bizarre search.
One more open grave, to go with all the rest? Or something else?
As we walked back out into the sunshine and the heavy air, I imagined puppet strings dangling down out of the clouds, attached to my arms and legs. If I found out who was pulling on those strings, I was going to wrap them round his throat in a lover’s knot and pull it tight.
17
The Seaforth farm was seventeen miles out of town, but they were country miles and I was tired. Jouncing around on the dirt tracks, our progress punctuated by potholes and thick roots, I brooded on what Mallisham had told us. On the one hand, if Myriam Kale was a psychotic serial killer rather than a paid enforcer who carried out bespoke murders for a living, that might explain the terrible strength of purpose that would be needed to keep her from sailing on down the river of eternity – to bring her back out of the grave forty years after she died so that she could carry on her interrupted killing spree. But on the other, it seemed to weaken Kale’s connection to the Chicago mobs, and therefore to make her even more of a pickle in John Gittings’s little fruit salad.
‘I’m not figuring this,’ I confessed to Juliet, who hadn’t said a word all this time. ‘There’s something we’re still missing, and it has to be something big.’
‘More deaths,’ she mused.
‘Say what?’
‘More deaths,’ she repeated. ‘Myriam Kale’s father. Her brothers. Paul Sumner. Everyone who knew her first-hand, and could have told us anything about her.’
‘Not everyone,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s still Ruth.’
Juliet nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she allowed. ‘There’s still Ruth. Perhaps we ought to be asking why—’
Whatever the next word was going to be, it was lost as something rammed us hard from behind. The Cobalt bucked and bounced like a startled horse, and metal ground loudly against metal.
‘Shit!’ I exploded, fighting the car back under control as the back end tried to slew off the road. My eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. The grey van filled it, which meant it was already accelerating towards us for a second pass. There was no room on this narrow track to swerve aside, and no way we’d hold together if we left the road and tried our luck among the trees: too many rope-thick roots, too many leaf-camouflaged pits and troughs.
I did the only thing I could do, flooring the accelerator and jumping away from the van as we put on speed. But they were already closing the distance again, and there wasn’t a scratch on those black bull-bars from where they’d rammed us the first time. Mass and momentum and position were all on their side: they could run us off the road and not feel it. The van’s tinted windows didn’t allow me to see who was driving, but whoever he was I cursed his name and his Ray-bans.
Juliet was looking over her shoulder too. ‘We should stop and deal with them,’ she said, with an amazing degree of calm.
‘Great,’ I growled, weaving from side to side on the road in the hope of presenting a slightly less easy target. ‘The only problem with that idea is that if we stop now they’ll ram us into the side of a tree and we’ll fold like a concertina.’
Juliet gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Like a what?’ she said.
‘A concertina. Musical instrument. Makes sound by drawing air in through a bellows and then pumping it out through a – shit, can I explain later?’
‘Yes,’ said Juliet, just as the van caught up with us again. There was another shuddering impact and our back end actually left the road for a couple of moments, then smacked down again hard enough to rattle my teeth inside my skull. I rode it out, slightly better this time because I’d seen it coming, but a stench of burning rubber reached my nostrils. I had no idea what that meant: my best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tyres had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably make at least one of them blow.