Dead Men's s Boots

On the pale beige carpet there were dark and very extensive stains: square windows had been let into some of these, the bare boards showing through where small, regular sections of carpet had been taken away by the police forensics team. There were similar stains, rich rust-brown in colour, down the near side and the bottom of the divan. Alastair Barnard might be gone, but ‘gone’ was a relative term.

The air reverberated soundlessly with his suffering and his fear – an emotional effluvium like the ghost of a bad headache.

‘So this is where it happened?’ I said, unnecessarily – as much to disturb those silent echoes as anything else.

Juliet nodded her head in the direction of ke do d the fouled divan. ‘X marks the spot,’ she said coolly.

‘When you read the room for Coldwood,’ I asked, looking around the chill, claustrophobic space, ‘was it like this? Or was the body still here?’

‘It was still here,’ Juliet said, in the same disinterested tone. ‘Nothing had been touched. He wanted me to read it while it was still fresh.

‘So tell me what you saw.’

She looked at me for confirmation. ‘With which eyes, Castor?’

I waved an expansive hand. ‘All of them. What was physically there, in front of you, and anything else you saw.’

Juliet stared at the ground, thought for a few moments, then pointed to a spot almost at my feet – a point midway between the bed and the door. ‘Barnard was lying there when I came in,’ she said. ‘What was left of him. His body had been hurt – damaged – very extensively.

‘But then when I looked backwards, into the past, I saw him clearly enough.’

The quality of her voice changed, making me look up from the carpet’s intricate organic geography and check her face. I’d caught an emphasis that seemed just a tiny bit off.

‘Was there something else that you couldn’t see?’ I demanded.

Juliet didn’t seem to hear. She was staring right through me at the door and I could tell that what she was seeing now was not me but the events of January the twenty-sixth.

‘They walk in together,’ she said slowly. ‘Barnard is the older man, obviously – the one in the suit, his face all red from climbing the stairs. Hunter is the big, well-built one who moves like a fighter.