Dead Men's s Boots

I left him my number and asked him to call if anything else occurred to him. To make that slightly less unlikely, I slipped him a couple of tenners: doing that made it very clear, if he needed the confirmation, that whatever connection I had with Juliet I sure as hell wasn’t a cop. On the other hand, I guessed that was probably a plus rather than a minus for a man who worked in the hinterlands of the sex industry. And I doubted there were any lands from London to silken Samarkand that were much more hinter than the Paragon Hotel.

Before I went back to Wood Green I stopped off at Charing Cross Road and kicked around a few of the bookshops there until I found Paul Sumner’s biography of Myriam Seaforth Kale. It was out of print, so Borders and Foyle’s couldn’t help me at all: I turned a copy up at last in one of the second-hand bookshops further down the street, past Cambridge Circus. It was an American paperback and the badly glued pages had come loose from the cover, so I got it for the knock-down price of seven pounds fifty.

No blue van staking out the entrance to Ropey’s block. On the downside, the two lifts that hadn’t been used recently for murder attempts both seemed to have broken down in the course of the day. I slogged my way up to the eighth floor, closed the door on the world and put some soothing music on the stereo – I think it was Rudra’s Primordial this time, described in the sleeve notes as ‘seminal Vedic thrash metal’. Then I lay back on kI lthe bed, opened up the disintegrating paperback and immersed myself in the last death throes of the American mobs.

Sumner wrote in a spare, almost bald style, using adjectives only when they were already clichés and therefore guaranteed not to convey any actual information. The Alabama farm where Kale – then just plain Myriam Seaforth – had been born and had spent the early years of her life was ‘humble’ and her family’s poverty was ‘grinding’. She herself, though, was ‘fresh-faced’ and ‘comely’.

Okay, she had a chickenpox scar over her left eye which some people thought was disfiguring, but she was still a statuesque redhead, very tall and very full-figured: most accounts seemed to agree that she was a hundred-per-cent-proof bombshell. She ‘left the family nest’ at age fifteen, given in marriage (legal from fourteen in Alabama) to Tucker Kale, a well-to-do feedstore owner from neighbouring Ryland.