Dead Men's s Boots

Beside it was a reproduced photo: the photo of Kale and Jackie Cerone in the nightclub, which Sumner had included in his book. It brought home to me how small a pool of facts and images about Kale was being recycled.

A sign in the bookshop window advertised maps of the Kale Walk, taking in the street on which her first married home still stood, her grade school out in nearby Gantts Quarry, the old Seaforth farm where she’d grown up. There was also a museum of local history, which turned out to be ninety per cent Kale to ten per cent prizewinning pigs.

No insights there, either, though: just the familiar photos, the familiar truncated history.

‘I think we’re ready for something harder, don’t you?’ I said to Juliet.

‘Do you mean hard information, Castor,’ she asked mildly, scanning one of the photos with narrowed eyes, ‘or hard alcohol?’

‘Neither.’ I headed for the door. ‘It was just sexual banter. But the nice man at the desk says the offices of the Picayune are on the next block. And since we’re expected .

 . .’

In fact it was barely fifty yards to the modest two-storey brownstone building that bore the Picayune’s masthead in German black-letter type over the door. It looked like the kind of newspaper office that might have had a pre-teen Mark Twain as a copy boy. The bare lobby smelled of dust and very faintly of fish: that turned out to be because they had an office cat, lean and tabby, and I flinched in spite of myself – recent memories sparking inside my head – as it uncurled itself from a mat beside the open door that led through into the newsroom.

It rubbed itself against my leg, refusing to take offence, then looked up at Juliet and let out a long, yawling cry. Juliet mewed back and the cat turned its tail and fled.

‘You talk to cats?’ I asked her.

‘Only when they talk to me,’ she answered shortly.

She let me lead the way into the newsroom. It was a tiny space with only two desks but lots and lots of shelves and filing cabinets. The shelves were full of box files, the desks were groaning with papers and I was willing to bet the filing cabinets were stuffed to bursting, too.

The good news about the paperless office hadn’t penetrated as far as Brokenshire yet.

They had computers, though, and the only thing in the room that looked like a journalist was hammering away at one with a lot of superfluous violence. He was a heavy-set black guy in his shirt sleeves, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair.