Dead Men's s Boots

You can tell what you’re getting as soon as you round the bend of Battle Bridge Road and see the frontage ahead of you: a narrow slice of soot-blackened mulberry brick inelegantly slotted in between a stolid warehouse and a bigger hotel that was trying to look respectable – not an easy trick with the Paragon clinging to your leg like an amorous dog.

The interior managed to be both constricted and sprawling at the same time. The lobby went back a long way, but it was ludicrously narrow and it had a dog-leg, the front desk thrusting out into a high-ceilinged space no wider than a corridor, which seemed to flinch away from it in a nervy zigzag.

Naive anthropomorphising, I know: but when you deal with the risen dead on a day-to-day basis you tend to see the life in almost everything. And the death, too, which is maybe the downside.

The clerk looked up from a computer monitor as we came in, his gaze flicking from Juliet to me and then back to her, and hurriedly hit a button on his keyboard.

He could just have been hiding a solitaire game, but something about his studiously blank expression as we walked up to the desk made me suspect that whatever window he’d closed had been a little more incriminating than that. Then again, this was a whore hotel and the last time he’d seen Juliet she’d presumably been part of Detective Sergeant Coldwood’s travelling circus. He had good enough reason to be circumspect.

He ran a hand through his thinning, sand-brown hair – which I was seeing in a glorious three-sixty-degree perspective because of the huge mirror behind him.

He seemed to have some kind of thyroid condition, or at any rate he had the bulging-eyed stare that sometimes goes with hyperthyroidism. His beaky nose and hair-trigger blink reminded me irresistibly of the dead comedian Marty Feldman. There was a long loose thread on the shoulder of his herringbone jacket which stuck out to the side as though he was on a fuse.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked us in a slightly nasal voice.

‘I’m with the police,’ Juliet said, which I guess was a white lie. ‘Investigating the Barnard case. You remember I came in about a week ago to read the room.’

The clerk nodded. Of c kk ne. ourse he remembered. You didn’t see Juliet and then just forget about it.

‘We need to go over it again,’ Juliet said. ‘I presume it’s still locked off?’

‘Oh yes,’ the clerk said, already reaching for the key.