Dead Men's s Boots

Got it here somewhere, I’m reasonably sure.’

Mallisham tapped one of the boxes, then a second, as if touching them helped him to remember what was in them. But it was a completely different box he hauled out, from the next shelf down. He brought it over to the desk and opened it up.

‘Now if old Tucker got drunk and drove himself into a ditch, which is what the police said he did, then some of those injuries he took to the head require a little explaining. Looks to me like he must have backed up and taken a good few runs at that ditch until he go it right, because his head sure was dented in a lot of different places.

’ He held up a very old foolscap sheet, on the kind of glossy paper the earliest photocopiers used. ‘Yeah, here it is. You can look at it if you want, but I’d rather you didn’t take a copy. This one is traceable to me, and like I said, I’m not going on the record with any of this.’

‘Just summarise for us,’ Juliet suggested.

Mallisham nodded. ‘Well, there were also the injuries to his rectum. They didn’t even get a mention when the county coroner sat and gave his verdict, but they’re all down here in black and white.

Tucker Kale was anally raped after he died.’

‘Raped?’ I echoed. Images of Alastair Barnard, whose dead body I’d fortunately never had to see, inconsiderately flashed before my eyes anyway as if they had a right to be there.

‘Artifi£"">&rtucially raped,’ Mallisham amended. ‘I wouldn’t normally be talking about this in front of a lady, but you’re . . . what you are, so I guess it’s nothing new to you.

I guess nothing that one body can do to another body is news to you.

‘Something had been put inside him. With a lot of force. And it was something made of wood because there was a wood splinter that they found. Handle of a hammer? Fence post? I don’t know, but I’d lay odds that whatever Myriam used to kill him she put to this other use afterwards.

‘But what clinches it for me is the burn mark on Tucker’s forehead.’

‘Myriam’s signature,’ I muttered, but Mallisham waved that away.

‘I don’t mean that,’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s part of what became her modus operandi, but I think this was the first time she’d ever killed a man. And she didn’t do it in cold blood: it wasn’t planned or practised, I’m willing to lay long odds. It wasn’t something she had any kind of a choice about, it was something that came up from inside her and had to let itself out. It was the reasoned crisis of her soul, as some poet on your side of the water put it.