Dead Men's s Boots

’ Words seemed to fail her, although her mouth still worked, offering up speechless syllables.

Juliet went and sat«et p;. down next to her. ‘We didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. The old woman was still staring at me, and I was finding that hollow, stunned, rabbit-inthe-headlights gaze pretty unsettling. Juliet put her hand on Ruth’s and gave her a reassuring pat. That at least had the effect of making her finally take her stare off me. ‘We’ve come from London,’ Juliet said. ‘A man was murdered there, in the way your sister Myriam used to murder people.

Brutal honesty seemed to do the trick. Ruth visibly pulled herself together, moved her head in a tremulous nod, and with Juliet’s gentle assistance got to her feet again. She blinked, three or four times: probably not blinking away tears, but that was what it looked like.

‘I haven’t seen my sister since she died,’ she said. In other circumstances it might have seemed an odd thing to announce, but as it was I was grateful to have that clarified.

‘We have,’ Juliet said. ‘We saw her and spoke to her only a few days ago.’ She was still holding the old woman’s hand, and it was just as well because at that point she buckled and almost fell. Juliet had to put her other hand across Ruth’s shoulders to support her until the moment passed.

‘You saw her?’

‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘We did. She . . . looked very different from the way she looked when she was alive, but it was her, all the same.

Ruth Seaforth looked from me to Juliet and then back again. After a long, strained silence she said, ‘Would you like some cookies and lemonade?’

The living room of the Seaforth farm was very wide and very low-ceilinged; an odd combination which, along with the fact that there were shutters up over most of the windows, made me feel like I’d just descended into somebody’s cellar. I’d been expecting the place to be as much of a ruin inside as out, but the room was very neat and tidy: the floorboards were warped and shrunken, just as they were out on the porch, but a peach-coloured rug disguised that fact fairly effectively except at the corners of the room, where it didn’t stretch.