Dead Men's s Boots

’

Maxwell looked like a distressed fish – if a fish could be simultaneously caught on a hook and out of its depth. ‘Well, that information is in the public domain,’ he floundered. ‘You could look it up very easily.’

‘And if we did?’ Juliet pressed, without mercy. ‘What would we find?’

‘It’s a partial – a partial agonist to the D2 receptor. A dopaminergic modulator, if you will, in the mesolimbic—’

‘In English?’

‘An anti-psychotic!’ Maxwell blurted. ‘I really have to – this comes under-’ ‘Doctor-patient privilege,’ Juliet finished.

‘Of course. Thank you, doctor.’

She moved her head, just a fraction, and Maxwell seemed to wake from a trance. He excused himself with as meaningless a combination of syllables as I’ve ever heard and fled back through the door by which he’d entered.

‘You could have cut him some slack,’ I chided Juliet. ‘He was just trying to do his job.’

‘I was only asking for clarification, Castor.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘And I respected his holding to those professional standards.

I admire men whose passions are intellectual and moral. In fact I find that really arousing.’

I gave her a hard look to see if she was taking the piss, but she bowed her head demurely and sat down so I didn’t get a good look at her face. At that moment the door opened again and Doug Hunter came in between two burly guards.

He made quite a strong impression, even in his prison greys. As Jan had already told me, he was big and well muscled: handsome, too, I was prepared to assume, in that his face was symmetrical and featured a square jaw and vividly blue eyes, two perennial favourites.

Or three, if you count each eye as a separate feature. His striated mid-brown hair looked as shaiyes though it might originally have been a darker brown, but had then been bleached by years of working in the open air until it looked like flax and straw bundled together. He stood slightly stiffly, legs together, almost as though he was standing to attention.

But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple, just above his eye. His nails left livid marks on his pale skin: three parallel lines, like the feverish crossings out in John Gittings’s A to Z.

‘Mister Hunter.’ I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room towards us.