Dead Men's s Boots — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

In a different way, though, this didn’t either.

‘When she told that story,’ I said, picking over the logic in my mind, ‘she didn’t give the impression that she was there when Tyler died. In fact I’m pretty sure she said she was told about it afterwards.’

Juliet bit through a chicken leg, flesh and bone and all, and crunched down hard. She nodded, mouth full, but I had to wait for elaboration until she’d chew®ieted and swallowed.

‘She wasn’t there,’ she said. ‘But she met this man later. He’d been sent to kill Tyler by Myriam, that’s fairly obvious. Probably he arranged the other deaths, too – Lucas and the other two brothers. Ruth always knew she had a guardian angel, and she knew who it was. But there was no reason why Myriam couldn’t work through proxies.

‘The man came up to the farm on the day of Myriam’s execution, and he introduced himself. Under the circumstances, which I’m sure I don’t need to spell out for you, the fact that he’d helped to beat Tyler Seaforth to death wasn’t much of a barrier to polite conversation. Ruth was much more inclined to kiss his hands than to call the police.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘The name he gave her was Bergson.’

I almost laughed. ‘I think that’s a pretty rarefied piece of wordplay,’ I said. ‘Bergson was a French philosopher back in the 1930s. I think he had some idea about a universe of pure spirit. Kind of like Plato, only with a more outrageous accent.’

‘Ruth didn’t believe that was his real name. The point was that he told her – told her so she knew it was the truth – that he’d worked for Myriam or done favours for her in the past. And he said he was still working on her behalf now. He insisted on that: all of this was for Myriam’s sake.

‘He gave Ruth the address and telephone number of the Illinois State Penitentiary, and he told her everything she needed to know about claiming Myriam’s body. She had an absolute legal right, he said: all she had to do was exercise it. The body should be brought to the farm, and she should refuse all offers of help with the burial. If anyone asked, she was to say that it was all taken care of. And as soon as she was alone – as soon as the circus of cops and journalists and death-junkies was off the premises – she was to call him on a number he gave her.’

‘Ruth had her doubts, but she also felt she had good reasons to trust this man. She argued it backwards and forwards with herself, but in the end she did what she’d been told. She called him and told him when is was safe to come.

‘He drove out in a flat-bed truck, with two other men. They loaded the casket onto the truck, and tied it down. They covered it with a tarpaulin. Then just before they left, Ruth screwed up her courage and asked the blond man where they were taking her dead sister. He didn’t want to answer, but she burst into tears and begged him. She was going to be left alone, she told him. More alone than she’d ever been. She didn’t miss her father or her brothers in the slightest, but now Myriam was gone and she didn’t have anyone. The least he could do was tell her where he was taking her.’

‘And in the end he did. “To the next life,” he said.’

I let a forkful of mashed potato drop back into the mountainous mass I’d scooped it from.

‘Fuck,’ I said blankly. It wasn’t Oscar Wilde but it expressed my feelings. ‘What are we talking about here? Gangsters raising gangsters from the dead? Why? Out of professional courtesy? And how could he promise that if he hadn’t done it before? It’s like some kind of fucking resurrectionist assembly line. Dead men pulling themselves up out of the grave by each other’s bootstraps . . .’

‘You may be exaggerating the scale of this,R³le he 17; Juliet told me coolly. ‘We still only know for sure about two cases. Kale, and the man who was both Aaron Silver and then Les Lathwell.’

She was right, but it didn’t make me feel much better. ‘The scary thing is that fingerprint,’ I muttered, shoving my plate away still mostly full. ‘If they’ve found a way to cheat, Juliet – to steal the bodies of the living out from under them, the same way you and your brothers and sisters can – and if they can do it on the money, time after time . . .’

‘Two big ifs,’ Juliet observed. I was barely listening. The same ones as before, John had said to me when I met him in my dream. Always the same ones, again and again and again.

Shying away from that unpleasant thought, I found another one that had been niggling at me while she spoke. ‘Did Mister X say why he was doing all this?’ I asked. ‘I mean, we know from all the available evidence that he wasn’t sleeping with Myriam. He wouldn’t have woken up again. So was he trying to recruit her? Did he owe her a favour? What was in it for him?’

Juliet impaled me on a cold stare. ‘Ruth thinks he loved her.