Dead Men's Boots (22 page)

All the same, as Juliet and I checked in at the clanging gates and banging doors the next morning, it didn’t seem like the
jolliest place on earth. The acoustics in a prison are unique: Every echo sounds like a taunt or an insinuation, and there
are always a lot of echoes. It didn’t help that the sky outside was blue-gray like a bruise, with the first drops of rain
starting to fall, or that the security procedures, even for remand prisoners, are so much like decontamination protocols—as
though you’re bringing the outside world in with you, and they don’t want any atom of it touching the prisoners.

We were randomly chosen to be searched, but given the effect that Juliet has on people of all sexes and persuasions, I wasn’t
sure how much randomness was involved. The women officers who searched her certainly took their time, and I had to loiter
outside the guard station long after their male counterparts had impounded my hip flask and ceremonial dagger and given me
a receipt. When the doors opened and Juliet strode out with her hands nonchalantly in her pockets, the women warders who followed
her looked a little dazed and haunted. It was a standard nonintimate search—a “rubdown”—but if you gaze into the abyss, the
abyss also gazes into you.

Reunited, we were ushered through another set of doors—more bangs and clangs, more echoes, like the opening credits of
Porridge
—to the interview hall.

Remand prisoners have their own visiting room, and although there’s a guard present, the regime is a bit more relaxed than
it is for other inmates. Instead of the glass shields and wall phones you see in the movies, there’s a room like the common
room in a school—bare walls enlivened by a few yellowing posters advertising long-defunct public information campaigns, semicomfortable
chairs set up around low tables, and a coin-op coffee machine.

The room was empty, and I threw a questioning look at the guard, who wrenched his eyes away from Juliet with an effort. “He’s
on his way down, sir,” he said. “Won’t keep you more than a minute or two.”

Juliet crossed to one of the clusters of chairs and sat down to wait. I got a coffee from the machine before I joined her.
She watched me approach with detached interest. “You’re walking a little stiffly,” she observed as I sat down. “I noticed
that yesterday, but I forgot to ask.”

“Someone tried to drop me down a lift shaft a few nights ago. It’s okay. I dodged.”

Stuff like that doesn’t faze Juliet in the slightest. She noted my unwillingness to talk and didn’t ask any more. The truth
was, that whole incident with the faulty lift had been preying on my mind more than somewhat. If someone tries to kill a private
detective, it’s almost a mark of respect. It means you’re getting close to something, and the opposition is taking you seriously.
If someone tries to kill a jobbing exorcist, and if said exorcist is as badly in the dark as I felt right then, it’s probably
a sign of a basic character flaw.

Or maybe I was close to something and I was too dense to see it when it was right under my nose. That was a sobering thought,
and I was still soberly thinking about it when a man walked into the room. It obviously wasn’t Doug Hunter: too old, for one
thing, and for another, he didn’t fit the description Jan had given me in any respect at all. He was slightly built, almost
bald, and very pale. He wore a nondescript light gray suit that looked as faded as his skin, but his eyes were a darker, colder
gray, magnified by strong prescription lenses, and his thin face wore an expression of brusque impatience.

“Mr. Castor?” he inquired. I was expecting him to do the usual comic double take when he saw Juliet, but from where he was
standing, she must have been out of sight behind me.

“That’s me,” I said.

“My name’s Maxwell.
Dr.
Maxwell. I’m one of the medical staff here at the prison. Douglas Hunter is a patient of mine, and I need to speak with you
before you see him. If you’ve a moment?”

I nodded, but he was taking my assent for granted and already carrying on. “Douglas’s condition is still deteriorating,” he
said. “Even in the last few days, there’s been a marked change, and it’s all for the worse.”

My confusion must have shown on my face. “He’s not well?” I said. “I didn’t realize—”

Maxwell made a palms-out “don’t put words in my mouth” gesture. “The medical situation is complicated by the legal one,” he
said. “Not unusual in here. I’ve made a diagnosis, but you’ll forgive me if I don’t share it with you. The point is that Douglas
has had to be quite heavily medicated. With aripiprazole, if that means anything to you.”

“It doesn’t,” I admitted.

Maxwell raised his eyebrows expressively. “It will mean something to the defense, mark my words,” he said. “The point is,
since this is your first visit, you’re apt to find him a little odd to talk to. He’ll be drowsy and unresponsive, but at the
same time, he’s likely to show a certain restlessness and discomfort. These are side effects of the drug, not of his condition.”

“And his condition is?” I probed.

Maxwell made the same gesture. “I can’t discuss that with you right now,” he said, “although I’ve discussed it at length with
Mrs. Hunter. The other reason for me coming in to talk to you like this is that I’m advising you very strongly not to excite
or upset Douglas in any way. If you do, it could have an adverse effect on his condition, and it could be unpleasant—physically
unpleasant, I mean—for you. The governor is keen that you should express understanding of these conditions. He would have
liked you to sign a waiver, but he’s aware that everything I’m saying here has nuances that could be significant in a court
of law.”

I shook my head in complete mystification. I had the unusual and uncomfortable sense of meanings flying over my head, unapprehended.
“You mean that he’s mentally ill?” I asked, groping blindly in the dark.

“The governor? No, he’s very well balanced, taking into account a constitutional tendency toward depression.”

“Doug Hunter.”

“That would fall under doctor-patient privilege,” Maxwell said with a rigidly impassive face.

Juliet appeared at my side, and he blanched. It took some doing with a face that was already so pale.

“What
is
aripiprazole, Doctor?” she murmured in her throat. “I’ve always wondered.”

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 antipsychotic!” Maxwell blurted. “I really have to—this comes under—”

“Doctor-patient privilege,” Juliet finished. “Of course. Thank you, Doctor.”

She moved her head 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.

“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 grays. 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
favorites. Or three, if you count each eye as a separate feature. His striated mid-brown hair looked as though it might originally
have been a darker brown but had 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 standing to attention.

But his eyes were vague, vacant, the motor behind them rumbling along on idle. He reached up and scratched his temple 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.

“Mr. Hunter.” I stood up and held out my hand for him to shake as he crossed the room toward us. 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 my hand. His gaze flicked from me to Juliet, where it lingered for a long time. That wasn’t unusual, but maybe
it was worth noting in this case. Whatever flavor of sexuality Doug generally favored, 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 than I’d expected. Hadn’t Jan said he had a Birmingham accent? This voice had no discernible accent,
and it was so strangely uninflected, 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. 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 the invitation, so that left the two of us standing face-to-face, me slightly awkward, Hunter foggily indifferent.
Juliet hadn’t gotten 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 antipsychotics that all I would get out of him
was 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 the inscription. Only three days left now. Till the dark of the moon.
They told me never to get lost. Never to miss it. They won’t be happy.”

The inscription? The mention of that word sent a slight frisson down the back of my spine. “Well,” I responded, making an
effort not to let any reaction show on my face, “you know what Jan has hired me for. She doesn’t believe you killed Barnard,
and she thinks your best bet at trial might be to try to establish that someone else was in that room along with the two of
you. A dead someone else, which is why she came to me. But obviously, I’d like to hear your version of what happened.”

“My version.” He looked down at his hands momentarily, palms up, as though checking to see if they were clean. “Nothing,”
he muttered, as if to himself. “Nothing.”

This was getting us nowhere fast. I sat down next to Juliet, hoping Hunter might follow my lead, but he wasn’t even looking
at me. He was looking up at the ceiling.

“My version’s older than that,” he murmured, so low I almost didn’t catch the words.

“Was there someone else, Doug?” I asked, trying again. “Did someone else come into the hotel room with you? Or afterward?
How did Barnard die?”

He lowered his head slowly and made eye contact with me almost accidentally at the bottom of that long, gradual arc. “The
hammer,” he said. “Isn’t that what she used? I’m not sure anymore, but that’s what I remember. His head—was very—I can ask
her. If you like.”

“Then there
was
someone else?” I demanded. The eerie dissociation of his mood was in the air like something you could breathe in and catch.
I had to fight the urge to push my chair away from him, and to force myself to take normal breaths instead of sipping the
tainted atmosphere as shallowly as I could.

Hunter shook his head. “Just me,” he muttered. “Just me and her. Nobody else. Maybe a dead man. Maybe some people who were
dead. Nobody else.” A ponderous frown passed across his face like a ripple across muddy water. “I think he sucked me. My cock.
But I can’t remember why now. That’s really disgusting.”

He sighed long and deep and sat down at last, opposite me. “I sprained my ankle,” he said, sounding slightly wistful. “And
they took me next door. To the church. If they’d had a first-aid kit—but it was all cash in hand, no tax, no pack drill. Nobody
to keep the site up to code. Thought they might have some painkillers or a surgical bandage. Stupid.”

There was a long silence that I didn’t try to fill. I had a feeling that if I let him free-associate, he might lead me to
something important. But after a minute or two, I realized that he’d retreated back into his own head and wasn’t coming out
again without coaxing.

“When was this, Doug?” I asked. “When you were working at the site?”

He blinked once, twice, three times. “They gave me—glass of water,” he said. “Called an ambulance. Told me to wait. Too late
by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.”

His eyes seemed to clear abruptly, and he stared at me with intense, unreadable emotion. His eyes were opened so wide it looked
like it had to hurt. I kept waiting for him to blink, but he didn’t.