The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  There it was again, that numb feeling on the left side of her head. She reached for the edge of the door to steady herself in case she was about to fall. She’d rarely been ill in her life and had always imagined that she’d die in bed, peacefully in her sleep. Never contemplated any kind of fatal illness or something that might take away her reason.

  She’d been astonished when the doctor had suggested an appointment with a specialist. She’d submitted to the X-rays, bitten her lip and grudgingly allowed the technicians to manipulate her, pretended not to understand when they’d avoided her questions. Ridiculous, she thought now, how she had felt impelled to allow them to feel good about themselves. That inexplicable willingness always to please doctors.

  But there was that numb feeling and from time to time a shift in the visual plane. ‘This is not something I want you to worry about,’ the doctor had said, rubbing his hands together. ‘There could be a completely reasonable explanation for it.’

  Her appointment in Leeds, to get the results of the scan, was in a few days’ time. Until then she’d keep it to herself. No point in starting a panic.

  When her dizziness cleared she did a quick recce to make sure the house was secure. She was outside on the street within a few minutes, walking back towards Lord Mayor’s Walk where her own house was. She’d have something to eat and a bath and then she’d get into bed with Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things...’ But she’d keep her mobile on the bedside cabinet, wait for George or Sam to ring and let her know that he was back on the street.

  5

  Marilyn was washing herself in the bathroom and taking her lithium, the first dose of the day, to correct the chemical imbalance in her brain cells when her mother, Ellen Eccles, crept into her daughter’s bedroom and scanned the walls. Marilyn had straightened the crumpled playing card and placed it in a frame. She’d hung it on the wall between a promotional photograph of Diamond Danny Mann and a collage of his press cuttings.

  The eight of spades, and written across it in red feltpen, Marilyn Eccles.

  Ellen sighed. She hoped it wasn’t going to be a repetition of the business with Jeremy Paxman: listening to Start the Week every Monday morning, watching Newsnight and University Challenge, and waiting for the postman in the morning, expecting a letter from the man.

  When she looked at Marilyn’s wall and the photograph of Danny Mann and his press cuttings she wondered why there wasn’t a photograph of her dead granddaughter there. She was confused for a moment because it was wrong of Marilyn not to have a photograph of her baby.

  But it was simple, the answer, because there were no photographs of the baby. It had been born dead and you don’t take photographs of dead babies. In a way, Ellen thought now, the playing card was a kind of code for her granddaughter. And she wondered exactly what it meant to her daughter, this playing card, the one item in the whole universe that had been handled by both Danny Mann and Marilyn.

  The absence of a photograph of the baby was problematic in other respects. Without a photograph people didn’t realize that Marilyn had been a mother. Because she was so small, exactiy one hundred and fifty centimetres, people regarded her as still a child herself. To compensate for her size Marilyn wore a belt with a steel buclde in the shape of a pentagram. Ellen could see the buckle now, dangling from the back of the chair by Marilyn’s dressing table.

  She wore anything that had a metallic colour or feel to it. Shoes with buckles, jingling bangles and necklaces, a hair-band in beaten copper and a silver chain on each ankle. Somehow, in her mind, Marilyn associated metal with height. The more metal she could carry around on her person, the taller she seemed to feel.

  The pentagram buckle on her belt was something else as well. It was a magical sign, something that might catch the eye of Danny Mann. Marilyn had explained that it was a five-pointed star, the number of destiny. Ellen had shaken her head, it sounded like mumbo-jumbo to her. What Marilyn meant was that Danny Mann was her destiny, just as Jeremy Paxman had been and those other unreachable celebrities and actors she’d attached herself to. The difference with Danny Mann was that he lived in York, only a couple of streets away. The poor man’s life was destined to become a misery if Ellen failed to keep her daughter Marilyn under control.

  The lavatory flushed and Marilyn padded along the landing to her bedroom singing, ‘Danny Boy. The hills, the hills are caw-aw-ling...’

  I don’t want you getting fixated on him,’ Ellen said when her daughter came into the room.

  ‘And I don’t want you snooping in my bedroom,’ Marilyn said. She threw off her dressing gown and stood m front of the wardrobe. She was pear-shaped with surplus flesh on her thighs, bottom and stomach, but surprisingly pert and firm breasts. Her skin was milky-white, dappled and becoming varicose on the back of her legs.

  Ellen looked away. She wondered what had become of the small girl she had dragged around for all those years, the pretty teenager with the wide eyes. There was something gross and feral and unknown about this woman’s nakedness that seemed to defy any relationship to her.

  ‘All the signs are there, Marilyn.’

  ‘What? What signs? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Jeremy Paxman.’

  ‘That was different. He was married, with kids.’

  ‘And how do you know this magician isn’t married?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you don’t, Marilyn. It’s the same thing. You talk yourself into it. You convince yourself. This is going to I lead to more trouble, I just know it.’

  Marilyn slammed the wardrobe shut, turning to face her mother. Her naked back was reflected in the mirror on the door. ‘He chose me,’ she said. ‘You were there, I you saw it. He chose me last night. How many women were in that theatre? Come on, tell me, how many?’

  ‘I don’t know, love.’

  ‘How many?’ She stamped her foot, a residue of red nail varnish clinging to the nail on her big toe.

  ‘A hundred... five hundred? But it doesn’t mean...’

  ‘A thousand more like, maybe more than that. And out of all of them Danny picked me. He took me on the stage with him. I was a star.’

  ‘Not a star, Marilyn. You see what I mean, how you exaggerate? You have an idea in your head and it gets out of proportion. He needed someone to help with that trick. It doesn’t mean he loves you. It was a card trick.’

  ‘Fuck you, Mother,’ Marilyn said. ‘I know what this is about, you want him for yourself. You’re jealous that he picked me instead of you.’

  ‘I’m going downstairs now,’ Ellen said. ‘We can talk about this later, when you’ve got yourself dressed and when you’ve stopped using profane language.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Marilyn shouted after her. ‘That means I’ve won.’

  Ellen went outside to the back garden and lit up a Benson & Hedges, drawing the smoke and nicotine deep into her lungs. She watched the water from the river creeping over the field towards their house. Every day it drew a little closer. If it didn’t stop raining up in the hills they would find themselves marooned one morning. Life had been a battle for as long as she could remember and looked set on remaining so for as far as she could see into the future.

  There had been a period of calm when Marilyn married a soldier boy and went to live in a house near Fulford Barracks. Soldier boy helped to train dogs in the art of sniffing out bombs. Ellen felt her life had entered a tranquil patch then and had taken herself off to Scotland to live in a cottage by the Dee, reading books and growing flowers and trying to write.

  She would willingly have lived out her last years there, free from the cares of the world.

  But some of the soldier boy’s mates had plied a couple of working Alsatians with gin and the dogs had gone mad and attacked him, killing him and consuming most of his face and throat.

  So Ellen had said goodbye to Scotland and come home to help her daughter back from the brink of madness. What else was she supposed to do? She was a mother first, a Scot
second, a gardener third, and a writer... well, not at all.

  But being a mother is not everything. That is one of the great lies that people have told for ages past, and which they still perpetuate. Being a mother can make you feel that you should be everything to your children, to your child, but as you grow older you have to realize that it isn’t true. When they are tiny you might be able to supply their needs, but as they grow they want a wider world.

  Marilyn needed sex, she needed an emotional entanglement with a man, a real, loving and mutually supportive relationship, and Ellen couldn’t supply that.

  Almost as soon as soldier boy was buried in the churchyard Marilyn was head over heels in love with a Leeds United striker. Irish lad, no more than twenty-two, twenty-three. He had no idea. Not at first.

  Ellen blamed herself. She had accepted the seed of the man who was Marilyn’s natural father, knowing that his father and mother had jumped together off the Valley Bridge in Scarborough. Her egg had been fertilized by the sperm of a card-carrying screwball. A man who had opened his veins in the bath to save making a mess in the kitchen.

  That was why Marilyn was like she was. Part of her a true Scot with a fierce independence and a natural appreciation of beauty and truth; and another part, inherited from her father, which was forever diagonally parked in an unremittingly parallel universe.

  When Ellen had finished her cigarette she returned to the kitchen and watched her daughter eating cornflakes from a bowl. Marilyn was wearing a long wrap-around skirt. She had put on a pair of black tights and a top that her mother had starched and ironed the previous day.

  Ellen pulled a chair up to the table and said, ‘Marilyn, I don’t want us to get into another one of these fixes.’

  ‘What fixes?’ Marilyn asked through a mouthful of cereal.

  ‘Like the footballer. You followed him around. In the end he got the police on to us.’

  Marilyn stopped eating. ‘No,’ she said, thinking. ‘I don’t believe that is what happened. It was his manager got the police out. He was spending too much time thinking about me. He couldn’t concentrate on his game.’

  ‘I don’t want you making a nuisance of yourself over this magician.’

  ‘Danny?’ She smiled. ‘He wouldn’t call me a nuisance. He didn’t think I was a nuisance last night. Not when he was holding my hand.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have gone last night,’ Ellen said. ‘I should’ve known better when you said you’d got the tickets. All the way to Nottingham when we could have seen him here.’

  ‘Oh, I’m going to see him here as well,’ Marilyn said. ‘You can count on that. Danny and me, we’ll probably end up working together.’

  ‘Look,’ Ellen said, ‘I don’t ask for much, Marilyn. But I want you to leave this man alone. I can see it’s going to get you into trouble, and if you’re in trouble I’m in trouble as well. What happened last night - it didn’t mean anything.’

  ‘It didn’t mean anything to you, Mother. But it meant a lot to me and it meant a lot to Danny. You’re an old woman, you’ve had your life. But Danny and me, we’re still young. We’re in love and our whole future is waiting.’

  ‘He doesn’t know you,’ Ellen said. ‘This is just like the others. You’re going to hound the life out of that poor man, drive him to distraction. I’m asking you, please, Marilyn, leave him alone. Let him go.

  Marilyn continued eating her cornflakes. She added more milk and sugar. She said, ‘Do you want to put some bread in the toaster and bring the strawberry jam over to the table? Danny likes a girl with some meat on her. He can’t stand those anorexic types, bloody stick insects.’

  6

  ‘You think I killed her?’ Sam said.

  Delaney shook his head, a snide grin on his face. ‘No one said you killed her. We’re trying to establish why someone wanted her dead.’

  ‘These things are usually domestic,’ Sam said. ‘What about the guy who found her? The boyfriend?’

  The Chief Inspector touched his nose. ‘The local police say he’s not bright enough. He took her body into the street, laid it out on the road. There’s no sign of the murder weapon.’

  ‘He could have dropped it down the drain.’

  George Forester, the solicitor, touched Sam’s arm. ‘Just answer the questions,’ he said.

  ‘They say he’s really cut up about it,’ Delaney said. ‘They don’t think he could put on such a convincing act if he’d killed her. He loved her.’

  ‘It’s good to know somebody did.’

  ‘Which means you didn’t?’

  Sam looked across the desk at the policeman. He didn’t mask his hostility. There were times when he believed he simply hated the uniform, the institution, but in clearer moments he realized that he hated the individuals, the people who were drawn to the profession. ‘I didn’t know her any more,’ Sam said quietly. He looked at his solicitor and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry she died like that. But I haven’t seen her, haven’t thought about her, for years.’

  ‘What about the boyfriend? Did you know him?’

  Sam raised his palms. ‘No.’

  ‘Ruben Parkins? Mean anything?’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He did a stretch in Long Lartin. GBH.’

  ‘Your guys in Nottingham’ll get a confession. Pull his; finger-nails out; that usually does the trick.’

  The solicitor held up his hand. ‘OK, Sam.’ He turned to Chief Inspector Delaney. ‘Are you going to charge Mr Turner?’ he asked. ‘If not, I think we should take a break. My client is doing his best to help but your line of questioning is somewhat provocative.’

  Delaney said, ‘We’re breaking for five minutes.’ He: switched off the tape recorder and got to his feet.

  They finally stepped out of the station at 10.15. The moon was up and a light drizzle colluded with the store signs and the car headlights to give Fulford Road the Monet treatment.

  ‘Home? Or shall I drop you somewhere else?’ George Forester asked.

  ‘Angeles’ house,’ Sam told him. ‘I need to talk my way through this one.’

  He phoned Celia and Geordie on his mobile, spoke to each of them for a few seconds. ‘I’m out,’ he said. ‘Going to see Angeles. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’

  Angeles answered his knock and stood back to allow him into the house. She closed the door and stood still while he put his arms around her. ‘There’s an institutional scent to you,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t know you’d been to the police station I’d guess the tax office or an army barracks. You smell of fixed ideas and intimidation. Good dollop of fear mixed in as well.’

  She was a couple of inches shorter than him, slim and straight. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a sleeveless white blouse. Her feet were bare and her hair was mussed on one side, as though she’d been lying on it. There was Scotch on her breath, one of the Island malts. Laphroaig? When they’d first met Sam had thought she might be a soak but, unlike him, she was one of those people who can walk the line without falling into the vat.

  Angeles had a hereditary eye condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), which was degenerative and incurable and which had now consumed most of her visual experience. During daylight hours she was aware of shadowy outlines, misty silhouettes, and at night she was utterly blind.

  He took her by the hand and led her to the couch. ‘That Coltrane?’ he asked, nodding towards the speakers. Angeles didn’t reply, waiting for him to answer his own question. He smiled as he recognized Bill Evans’ fingers dancing over the piano keys. ‘“Kind of Blue”. That how you’re feeling?’

  ‘I thought they’d locked you up.’

  ‘Not this time. It was close, though.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell them you were in Nottingham?’ He shook his head. ‘Cops don’t believe in coincidence. I don’t believe in coincidence. I didn’t want to give them an excuse to fit me up. If I’d come clean I’d be spending the night in a cell. When the cops haven’t got a main sus
pect they get desperate.’

  ‘Do they have anything? A motive?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Sam said. ‘She was knifed in her bed. As far as they can tell nothing was taken from the house. She was living a quiet life. She had a boyfriend with a shady past, but they reckon he’s reformed. He’s not in the frame.’

  Angeles shuddered. ‘So a complete stranger comes in the middle of the night, kills her and then fades away? Is that credible?’

  ‘No. The police don’t believe that either. They’re looking for someone with an old grudge. Someone out of her past.’

  ‘Like you?’

  ‘Yes, exactly like me.’

  ‘But you didn’t know she was in Nottingham. You were there to do a job.’

  ‘Tell it to the judge,’ Sam said. ‘I already know it wasn’t me.’

  Angeles moved closer to him. She drew her legs up under her on the couch and placed her head on Sam’s shoulder. ‘What was she like?’

  He squinted down at her, stroked her cheek with two fingers. ‘We were both wild. I’d do anything for a drink in those days — steal, cheat, lie. Katherine was the same, or I thought she was for a while. But she was stronger than me. She wanted conventional things; a family, some kind of regular income. We mauled each other, we were each of us someone the other could blame.’

  ‘There must have been more at the beginning,’ Angeles said. ‘When you met, when you decided to get married? A bond of some sort? Love?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘Maybe. There’s a period of several years when I wasn’t available. I would drink myself into a coma and when I came round go looking for another drink. Katherine was one of the things that happened during that time. She was there, we lived together, but I can’t remember who she was. I don’t have a memory of tenderness, or even of us being on the same wavelength. We were always daggers drawn. Then one day she got up and left, stopped drinking and started rebuilding a life. Not long after that we lost touch.’ He smiled ironically. ‘Language is strange,’ he said. ‘We never had any touch to lose.’