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‘So I wasn’t thinking of it as evidence that Myriam was the one who killed old Tucker Kale. I’ve known that ever since I covered this story back in the 1960s – for this newspaper, where I’d started as a cub reporter seven weeks previously. But it took me a while of being out in the world and watching people at their worst to see what it was that Myriam was doing.’

Mallisham shrugged massively. ‘Maybe this is fanciful,’ he said. ‘But I think she was making a point, to herself. For her own satisfaction. She’d been sexually abused by a lot of men.

I think she enjoyed being on the other side of that particular transaction. The anal rape is part of that. And the burning is part of it too. She burned him with a cigarette. She smoked a cigarette and stubbed it out on his forehead. Does that suggest anything to you?’

I would have got it, but Juliet, to whom the rituals of sex are second nature, got it first. ‘The cigarette afterwards,’ she said, and Mallisham nodded, holding out his hands as if he was surrendering the entirety of his argument into her hands.

‘The cigarette afterwards. Yes. It was all symbolic, in my opinion. And what it was symbolic of was sex. Bad sex. The kind where you don’t respect the other person, you just use them for what you want and then get up and walk away.’

There was a silence as we mulled this over. It was Mallisham who eventually broke it.

‘It seems pretty clear to me,’ he observed in a brisker tone, slotting the sheet of paper back into the box and closing up the lid again, ‘that Luke Poulson – the man that Myriam met and murdered on the interstate – was her second victim, not her first.

The pattern was already established when she killed her husband. And she followed it in every kill she made thereafter.’

‘Jesus,’ I said involuntarily, and then, ‘Sorry, Juliet.’ She hates it when people use that kind of language.

‘Jesus is not part of this equation, Mister Castor.’

‘No, I suppose not. But you’re saying that Myriam Kale was driven to kill because of her background and her childhood experiences.

That after she went to Chicago she became a serial killer – like Aileen Wuornos – rather than a£p;rd h Mob enforcer? Or is the whole Chicago thing just part of the legend, too?’

‘No, that part is true,’ Mallisham confirmed. ‘She did go to Chicago, and she did work as a prostitute for a couple of years. I think she killed one or two of her customers, but they’re not part of the official tally and there’s no way of knowing now.