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Best pick another road, though: the one we’d come on was probably still blocked.

18

The waitress at the Golden Coffee House had clearly taken a fancy to Juliet: the fried-chicken platters she brought us were huge even by American standards, which meant that for a Brit like myself, with a delicate constitution, they were a little way short of a suicide note. I picked fastidiously while Juliet talked.

‘The blond man from out of town,’ she said. ‘The one who killed Tyler Seaforth, the first brother.’

‘Yeah.’ I ran the conversation through again in my mind, placed the reference.

‘The guy in the ice-cream suit. What about him?’

‘He wasn’t just from out of town. He was from England. London, in fact. That’s why Ruth almost had a heart attack when she heard your accent.’

That made a lot of sense now I thought about it. I’d figured at the time that it was the mention of Myriam that had made Ruth weak at the knees: but there couldn’t be many other reasons besides Myriam why strangers would come calling, so that hadn’t made a whole lot of sense.

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.