Dead Men's s Boots

‘It’s the intensity of the emotions here that lets me see into the past. With Barnard dead and Hunter gone, that intensity fades very quickly. Fades to black, you could say.’

I thought over what she’d said. ‘So it’s possible,’ I summed up, ‘that someone else was present in the room when all this was happening? It’s possible that someone else comes in at the kill, as it were, takes the hammer and uses it while Doug is . . . doing his thing.’

Juliet looked at me for a long time before shaking her head. ‘No. I don’t think so.

’

‘But this shadow . . .’

‘I told you, it’s not like a physical thing. It’s more like an accident of the terrain.’

‘I don’t get your drift, Juliet.’

She frowned impatiently. ‘I’m trying to describe invisible things, Castor. Most of this is metaphor.’

‘Are you absolutely sure there was no one else here?’ I persisted doggedly ‘You said yourself that something blocked your . . . perceptions. Something got in your way, whether it was solid or not, and suddenly, if we stick with the metaphor, you were seeing through a glass, darkly.

Anything could have happened behind that fog.’

‘If there was someone else there, I’d sense them on some level,’ said Juliet coldly.

‘And you don’t?’ This was coming to the crunch. I stood facing her, held her blacker-than-black gaze without flinching. It wasn’t easy: it was like standing up in a stiff wind that sucks you in instead of blowing you backwards. ‘You don’t sense anything else at all? Anything that makes you doubt, for a fraction of a second, that Coldwood’s got his hand on the right collar? Barnard and Hunter were meant to be in here alone, but that cleaner, Onugeta, heard a woman’s voice when he walked past the door.

Three voices, he said: two men and a woman. Was he wrong, or was there a woman here? Is there any emotional trace in the room that you can’t explain by two men coming in here to fuck each other’s brains out?’

Thinking about Alastair Barnard’s shattered skull, I wanted to drag those words back and scrub them clean with Dettol as soon as I’d said them, but Juliet didn’t bother delivering the hideous punchline.

She didn’t say no, either.

‘There’ve been many women in this room,’ she said slowly. ‘Many and many, and most of them were sad. Most of them resented what was done to them here, or hated the men who were doing it to them. Perhaps that’s all the shadow was – the stain left by their unhappiness.’

My gaze broke first: I’m only human, after all.