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‘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. Passionately.’

‘Then why was he still alive?’

‘Perhaps he never raped her.

’

‘Alastair Barnard never raped her, either,’ I pointed out. ‘If anything, it was the other way around, but he’s still dead. And not because he was an abuser of women. He was fucking gay.’

‘Married and gay.’

‘Juliet, this isn’t about sexual etiquette. It’s about recidivism. Kale is the worst kind of repeat offender: the kind who won’t stop even when you put twelve thousand volts through them.’

‘And is that still what you want to do, Castor? Stop her?’

I blinked. ‘Is that a trick question? Yeah, of course I do.

’

‘By exorcising her.’

‘Whatever it takes. I know it’s a lot bigger than that now, but exorcising her is still on the programme.’

‘Not for me.’

The sudden hush that descended over the café had nothing to do with what Juliet had just said: it was one of those statistical blips, the pauses in a couple of dozen conversations all falling at the same point. But it gave her words additional momentum as they sucker-punched me in the gut. And it made me lower my own voice when I answered, as though everyone in the room was listening.

‘Say how what now?’

Juliet twitched her shoulders in a chillingly off-handed shrug. ‘Mallisham’s account of Kale’s life has made me see what she’s doing in a different light. She only murders men. She was destroyed by men, and now she gives some of the pain back. I sympathise. More. I find a certain elegance in it.’

I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said.