Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

 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. There was a coffee table, only very slightly ring-stained at the edges, a three-piece suite and an upright piano, and three lovebirds gossiping softly in a cage hooked to a sturdy metal stand. On top of the piano was an old framed photograph of a family – presumably the Seaforths – posed awkwardly for a cameraman they didn’t know and who had done nothing to put them at their ease.

‘Please sit down,’ Ruth Seaforth said, and she disappeared through another door. I crossed to the photo instead and examined it. If it was the Seaforths, the period had to be the mid-1950s. Father and mother at the back, arm in arm but with no real suggestion of intimacy: the man smiling, although the look in his eyes was a little stern and serious.

Three teenaged boys, then, forming the middle row: all much of a muchness, all broad, boisterous, manly self-satisfaction, looking as though they’d been caught in a rare moment of stillness and balance.

Then Ruth and Myriam, gazing solemnly up from where they sat in the front row. I was probably imagining things, but they didn’t look happy. The look in the eyes of the girl on the left, particularly, was like a message in a bottle: Help, I am stranded on a desert island and I need to be rescued. They were dressed in identical blue crinolines: Sunday best. They looked like dolls, and that wasn’t a comparison I was happy with right then.

Juliet had sat down on the t«t d behree-piece’s sofa: I went and joined her on it.

‘Feeling any better?’ I asked.

She gave me a sour look. ‘Castor, the next time you ask me how I feel I’m going to break the little finger on your right hand.’

‘I’m left-handed,’ I pointed out.

‘I need to be able to escalate for repeat offences.’

Ruth Seaforth came in with a tray on which there were three glasses, a jug, a plate of biscuits and a neatly folded stack of napkins. She set it down on the table in front of us, poured the lemonade and then sat down in one of the chairs. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said, indicating the refreshments with a slightly trembling hand.

I picked up a biscuit, took a bite – it was about as tasty as dried Polyfilla – and washed it down with a sip of lemonade which was ice-cold and refreshing and so sour that my lips were sucked down into my throat. Juliet ignored both food and drink.

‘It must have been devastating,’ she said, ‘when Myriam was executed.’

I winced at the bluntness, but Ruth took it on the chin. She nodded. ‘It was hardest for my father,’ she said. ‘He had to meet people every day, and he felt as though they were all looking at him differently now: as though they saw Myriam when they spoke to him. He said –’ she hesitated, shook her head as though denying the words even as she spoke them ‘– he said that it would have been better if she’d never been born.’

‘That’s a terrible thing for a father to say,’ Juliet observed. I made a mental note to ask her in a calmer moment if she’d ever had one herself: after all, if she was somebody’s sister then presumably she was somebody’s daughter. A baby Juliet was a scary thing to contemplate.

‘Yes,’ Ruth answered, still sounding calm and almost detached. ‘It was a terrible thing. But it was like him. My father was a very cold man.’

I stepped in on cue. ‘Some men are cold to strangers, but to their family they’re entirely different.’

Ruth smiled a pained smile. She bent down to pick up a biscuit, but her eyes remained locked on mine. ‘My father was very cordial with strangers,’ she said. ‘It was to his wife and his children that he was – hard.’

‘Does it hurt you to talk about this?’ Juliet asked, as direct as ever.

Ruth shook her head. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘No. It used to hurt, when he and my brothers were still alive. Now that I’m the only one left – now that I know all this is going to die with me – it doesn’t seem to matter so much. I’d like to know, though, why you need to find out these things. And I’d like to know where you saw Myriam.