Dead Men's s Boots

I’d been nearly certain it was there back when I was lane-hopping in Birmingham: certainly someone way back behind us had been zigging when we zigged and zagging when we zagged. But the press of traffic in the city and the need to keep my eyes on the road in an unfamiliar car had meant that I never got a decent look at it. Now I could see that it was a big dark grey van with an ugly matt-black bull-bar, the driver and any passengers invisible behind tinted windows.

It kept pace with us as we drove on south and west.

It kept a long way back, but then it could afford to: there was no traffic besides the two of us, and the turn-offs were five miles apart.

Brokenshire is a town of twenty-eight thousand, situated in a valley close to a railhead serving a now-defunct copper mine. Literally and figuratively, it’s the end of the line. Where Birmingham mixed affluence and entropy in roughly equal measure, Brokenshire just looked as though it had quietly sailed past its sell-by date without anyone caring enough to mark the occasion.

On the map a small creek runs through it, but there was no sign of it as we drove in towards the town square past post-war houses as small as egg boxes, many of them burnished with the variegated silver and red of half-rusted aluminium siding. I guess at some point in the town’s history the creek got covered over. Probably just as well: if we’d had to drive across running water, there would have been logistical problems for Juliet. In fact, in her current weakened state there was probably no way she could have done £ouls rit.

We parked up in the town square, in front of a prim granite courthouse like something out of Gone With the Wind, and got out to look around. The car got some looks, and so did we. Juliet’s mojo was slowly starting to come back, which meant that the unsubtle aura of sexual promise hung over her again like an invisible bridal gown. We ignored the hungry stares and did a slow, ambling tour of the downtown area that took us all of half an hour.

Unsurprisingly, maybe, Myriam Kale had been turned into something of a local industry. The town’s bookshop had turned its whole window display over to books about great American gangsters, with a – presumably secondhand – copy of Paul Sumner’s out-of-print biography as its centrepiece. It was the same edition as mine: maybe there’d only ever been the one.