Dead Men's s Boots

The guard who’d come in with him moved off to one side but stayed close, keeping him in view, and the other guard who’d been waiting with us took up a position off to the other side, about the same distance away. Remand or not, they knew what Doug was up for – probably knew what Doc Maxwell’s diagnosis was, too – and they weren’t taking any chances.

Doug ignored the hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, of course, but maybe it was worth noting in this case.

Whatever flavour of sexuality Doug generally favoured, he seemed to be capable of responding on some level to Juliet’s charms. I filed that fact away for future reference.

‘You know why we’re here?’ I asked him.

He nodded slowly, turning to look at me again with a slight widening of the eyes, as though he’d forgotten in the interim that I was there.

‘You’re here,’ he said simply.

His voice was different from what I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent at all, and it was so strangely uninflected that it was almost like a robot’s voice.

Except that most robots these days use sampled sound from human voices, so they sound more animated and a whole lot warmer than Doug Hunter did.

Coldwood’s sexual-psychopath hypothesis made sense to me at that moment. Doug sounded like a man whose brain was currently operating only a minimal service during extensive refurbishments. But then again, how much of that was the man and how much was the drug?

‘Right.

Exactly. We’re here to talk to you. Would you like to sit down? I’ll tell you what I’ve found out so far, which isn’t very much, and where we can go from here.’

He didn’t take up the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face to face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent. Juliet hadn’t got up from her seat, or spoken yet. She was watching Hunter intently, unblinkingly.

‘From here,’ Hunter echoed. For a second I thought he was so zoned out on the anti-psychotics that all I was going to get out of him would be echolalia, but then he shook his head very slightly, left and then right and then left again.

‘Never getting out of here,’ he commented, not in the tone of a lament but looking slightly mystified that I’d raised the issue at all. ‘Not now. Not after all that – everything. Everything else. Going to miss it. Only three days left, now. Till the dark of the moon. They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it.