‘Married and gay.’
‘Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.’
‘And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?’
I blinked. ‘Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.’
‘By exorcising her.’
‘Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the programme.’
‘Not for me.’
The sudden hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said: it was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room was listening.
‘Say how what now?’
Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly off-handed shrug. ‘Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathise. More. I find a certain elegance in it.’
I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Where’s the elegance in a random murder spree spanning half a century? Getting your own back on the men who abused you is one thing: carving your way through the whole male gender is another.’
I could see from Juliet’s expression that this little speech hadn’t made the slightest dent in her. With an unpleasant going-down-in-a-lift feeling in my stomach, I saw where this was going. If Juliet enlisted in Myriam Kale’s cause, things could get messy: so messy I didn’t want to think about it.
‘What about your rep?’ I asked her, changing tack. ‘You said it was a big thing to you to deliver as promised. Doug Hunter didn’t kill Barnard. We know that now. He was possessed.’
‘It was his hand that held the hammer.’
‘But not his mind that decided to. Like you said, you were paid to uncover the truth about what happened in that hotel room. Are you going to stop halfway because suddenly you’re a cheerleader for the real murderer? And what about the others – Mister X and his friends? All the other fun-loving criminals who’ve been buried in coffins fitted with sliding doors? They’re all men, apart from Myriam. They may have been using her in some game of their own. They’ve certainly left her to carry the can for this latest killing.’
Juliet had gone back to eating. She was listening to me, but I wasn’t having any impact. I was unnerved by the mask-like impassivity in her face. Normally Juliet doesn’t bother to disguise her feelings because her feelings come out like water from a high-pressure hose. Right there and then I couldn’t read her at all. And I had just the one shot left in my locker.
‘You think she’s happy?’ I asked.
Juliet set down the nub-end of bone that was all that was left of her chicken leg. Her eyes impaled mine.
‘What?’
‘Kale. Do you think she’s happy? Because she didn’t look happy to me, staring out from behind Doug Hunter’s face. One prison inside another prison, that’s how I saw it. She looked like someone stuck in a bad dream that she couldn’t wake up from. And Jan said she used to hear Doug crying at night, for hours—’
‘All right.’ Juliet’s tone was cold, clipped. ‘So?’
‘So carry on working with me. Let’s at least find out what the fuck is really going on, and where she comes into it. Maybe find out what she really wants. What’s keeping her walking, and killing, and raping, forty years after she fried. Then you can decide what you want to do.’
I looked up to find the waitress standing at my shoulder with the menus. She stared at me with big, startled eyes: she must have heard most of that last speech.
‘Umm – you want any coffee or dessert?’ she blurted. ‘Or should I just –?’ She mimed turning around and walking away.
‘I think we’re good,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Just the bill.’
The waitress fled, and Juliet stood, moving with a slight stiffness that suggested she still wasn’t fully recovered from her earlier evisceration.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘But I take the point. Perhaps she isn’t happy. And perhaps that is my responsibility, at least partly, since I provided some of the evidence that Coldwood used to arrest her.’
Jumping up myself, I caught her wrist. ‘Juliet, no,’ I said, appalled. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and that’s not what she needs at all. She’s trapped in a loop. She’s still getting revenge for things that were done to her half a century ago. You’re thinking of her as some kind of demon, but she’s not. She’s not like you. Alive or dead, she’s human, and for humans there’s a law that always applies – action and reaction. What you do sticks to you, and becomes a part of you. The more she kills, the more lost and fucked up she’s going to get.’
‘Let go of my hand, Castor.’
‘Then tell me you’re not going to go and bust Doug Hunter out of jail.’
‘I’ll do what I think is best.’
Juliet was still staring at me. I did my best to lock onto those midnight-black eyes without falling into them and collapsing in a heap on the floor.
‘I can’t let you,’ I said simply. ‘Listen, when we met for the first time, when you seduced me and almost swallowed me whole, I was – imprinted. I heard you, as a tune. I can’t forget that music now, because I hear it every fucking day, whether you’re with me or not. If you set Myriam Kale free, more people are going to die the way Barnard died – and it’s a squalid, horrible way to die. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll play you out, Juliet. I’ll do it. I’ll exorcise you.’
She didn’t answer. For a moment we just stood, my hand holding her wrist across the table, a frozen tableau.
Then she snatched her hand free, brought it up and around almost faster than I could see it, and slapped me hard across the face.
Actually, hard isn’t an adequate word. I felt the impact and then heard the sound. The impact was something like crashing through your windscreen at fifty and hitting a brick wall – except that since it was the wall rather than me that was moving I went pinwheeling backwards through the air. The sound was like a gunshot – sharp and clear and very, very loud.
Nothing else was clear, though. Suddenly, for no very good reason that my dazed mind could grab hold of, I was on my back in the wreckage of someone else’s table, splinters of wood and porcelain still falling in slow motion through the still air, and a ringing in my ears like a million Munchkins celebrating the demise of the Wicked Witch.
Then, equally abruptly, I was yanked to my feet again, and Juliet was holding me, one-handed, up close to her own lithe, unyielding body. It was somewhere I often fantasised about being, but the agonising pain in my back and shoulders and the vice-like grip of her fingers around my throat took an awful lot of the fun out of it.
‘You’ll have to bind me before you can break me,’ she said. ‘Let’s see who’s quicker, Castor. Because I’ll hear the first note of that tune, however far away you are when you play it, and I’ll rip your throat out before you get to the second.’
This time the silence all around us was reaclass="underline" everyone frozen in unnatural, off balance postures as though terrified of attracting Juliet’s attention by a sound or a movement. I struggled to speak and managed to choke out a few words.
‘We – going Dutch – this time?’
With a wince of disgust she let me drop. My legs wouldn’t hold me so I fell in a heap on the floor. Through eyes canted at ninety degrees to the vertical I saw her turn and stalk out of the café. Then, after a few seconds more of just enjoying the luxury of breathing, I rolled over onto my hands and knees and picked myself up. For a second I thought I was going to black out: the wound in my shoulder, given to me by the loup-garou at the Nexus lab, felt as though it had been torn open when I fell, and the whole of my right side was on fire.