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17

The Seaforth farm was seventeen miles out of town, but they were country miles and I was tired. Jouncing around on the dirt tracks, our progress punctuated by potholes and thick roots, I brooded on what Mallisham had told us. On the one hand, if Myriam Kale was a psychotic serial killer rather than a paid enforcer who carried out bespoke murders for a living, that might explain the terrible strength of purpose that would be needed to keep her from sailing on down the river of eternity – to bring her back out of the grave forty years after she died so that she could carry on her interrupted killing spree. But on the other, it seemed to weaken Kale’s connection to the Chicago mobs, and therefore to make her even more of a pickle in John Gittings’s little fruit salad.

‘I’m not figuring this,’ I confessed to Juliet, who hadn’t said a word all this time. ‘There’s something we’re still missing, and it has to be something big.’

‘More deaths,’ she mused.

‘Say what?’

‘More deaths,’ she repeated. ‘Myriam Kale’s father. Her brothers. Paul Sumner. Everyone who knew her first-hand, and could have told us anything about her.’

‘Not everyone,’ I pointed out. ‘There’s still Ruth.’

Juliet nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ she allowed. ‘There’s still Ruth. Perhaps we ought to be asking why—’

Whatever the next word was going to be, it was lost as something rammed us hard from behind. The Cobalt bucked and bounced like a startled horse, and metal ground loudly against metal.

‘Shit!’ I exploded, fighting the car back under control as the back end tried to slew off the road. My eyes flicked to the rear-view mirror. The grey van filled it, which meant it was already accelerating towards us for a second pass. There was no room on this narrow track to swerve aside, and no way we’d hold together if we left the road and tried our luck among the trees: too many rope-thick roots, too many leaf-camouflaged pits and troughs.

I did the only thing I could do, flooring the accelerator and jumping away from the van as we put on speed. But they were already closing the distance again, and there wasn’t a scratch on those black bull-bars from where they’d rammed us the first time. Mass and momentum and position were all on their side: they could run us off the road and not feel it. The van’s tinted windows didn¦s t217;t allow me to see who was driving, but whoever he was I cursed his name and his Ray-bans.

Juliet was looking over her shoulder too. ‘We should stop and deal with them,’ she said, with an amazing degree of calm.

‘Great,’ I growled, weaving from side to side on the road in the hope of presenting a slightly less easy target. ‘The only problem with that idea is that if we stop now they’ll ram us into the side of a tree and we’ll fold like a concertina.’

Juliet gave me a slightly puzzled look. ‘Like a what?’ she said.

‘A concertina. Musical instrument. Makes sound by drawing air in through a bellows and then pumping it out through a – shit, can I explain later?’

‘Yes,’ said Juliet, just as the van caught up with us again. There was another shuddering impact and our back end actually left the road for a couple of moments, then smacked down again hard enough to rattle my teeth inside my skull. I rode it out, slightly better this time because I’d seen it coming, but a stench of burning rubber reached my nostrils. I had no idea what that meant: my best guess was that we’d come down with enough force to make the suspension momentarily irrelevant, and the tyres had scraped against the inside of the wheel arches at however many thousand revs per minute we were currently hitting. If I was right, another impact like that would probably make at least one of them blow.

But Juliet was winding her window down with as little haste as if she just wanted to spit out some gum. She’d already unbuckled her seat belt, and there was a barely audible sigh of cloth on metal as it reeled itself back into the holder. ‘Keep driving,’ she said laconically. Then she slid out through the window and up onto the roof of the car, out of my field of vision, for all the world as if we weren’t driving along a narrow dirt track at ninety-five miles an hour.

I caught the jump in the side mirror. It was something to see: the van was ten yards behind us at this point, but Juliet cleared the distance in a heart-stopping, balletic giant stride that landed her on top of the bull-bars, so perfectly poised that she didn’t even hit the windscreen. Instead she punched a hole right through it. Then she reached inside and hauled the driver out through the ragged circular hole in the shatter-proof glass as though she were delivering an oversized baby.

She dumped him under the wheels of the van and it jounced over him, making his arms flail and whip like a shirt on a washing line: he died without ever knowing what had hit him.