The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  ‘There’s no phone here,’ the girl said.

  ‘I’ve got a mobile in the car,’ Ruben told them.

  ‘No, I’ll be all right,’ Lewis said. He reached for the mug and took a sip. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Kitty Turner,’ Ruben told him.

  His already large eyes almost popped out of his head. ‘Kitty Turner? You mean Katherine? She was murdered.’

  ‘The woman who was knifed in Nottingham?’ said the girlfriend. ‘In her own bed. What about her?’

  ‘It was me who found her,’ Ruben said. ‘We were... We had a relationship.’ He gritted his teeth for a moment, nearly lost it for some reason. The thought of Kitty and what they’d had going. The image of her broken body and the sound of her name on his lips. The police had offered him counselling and he’d turned it down. But maybe he shouldn’t have done. There might be some comfort there.

  Grief counselling. How to live out the rest of your life without betraying your devastation.

  ‘But why come here?’ Lewis said. ‘Why the violence?’

  ‘I already apologized for that,’ Ruben told him. ‘That wasn’t in the plan. I know she went out with you a while back. I wanted to check if you were the one.’

  ‘If I was the one what? If I killed her? Jesus.’

  ‘And I can see you didn’t do it. You haven’t got that, whatever it takes. But I didn’t know that before I met you.’

  ‘Met him?’ the girlfriend said. ‘You call this meeting people?’

  ‘It’s not how I planned it. When I thought about coming here, even driving over this morning, in my head it was all calmer. I just had some questions.’

  ‘Well, ask away,’ Lewis said. ‘But I didn’t kill Katherine and I don’t know who did. I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. That she was dead.’

  ‘You might know someone who was around, someone who could have done it.’

  Lewis shook his head. ‘I met one of her neighbours,’ he said. ‘An old guy who brought cuttings over from his garden. But there was nobody else.’

  ‘She didn’t talk about anyone else?’

  ‘Not that I remember. I can’t think of anyone.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you leave this to the police?’ the girlfriend asked.

  ‘I wanna make sure the guy doesn’t get away with it,’ Ruben told her.

  But Pete Lewis didn’t know anything. Ruben would have to call it quits for now, look up some of the other people on his list. Explore different avenues, like they said in the movies.

  ‘Keep him in bed a few hours,’ he told the girl. ‘He’ll be OK tomorrow.’

  ‘If I was you,’ Lewis said as Ruben was stepping out of the door, ‘I’d look up the guy she was married to. Sam Turner. He runs some outfit in York, security, private detection, that kind of thing. He might have some ideas. In fact, come to think of it, he could be the one.’

  Back in Nottingham Ruben collected his snaps from Prontaprint. He sat in a newly opened coffee house and looked at the images. Liverpool in late-summer. Kitty with the Catholic Cathedral behind her, laughing at the joke he’d told her. ‘Doctor, when my broken arm is better will I be able to play the piano?’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  ‘How strange, I could never play it before.’

  Not even funny. But to see and to remember how she’d laughed, Ruben would have gone on telling Kitty jokes for the rest of his life. He’d never have run out. He would have bought joke books.

  To live with that laugh.

  There was another one, the two of them together outside The Beatles Story on Albert Dock, a yellow submarine over to the right of the entrance. Ruben had given his camera to a woman from Munich, asked her to point and click, but she couldn’t do it. Then he’d found a Frenchman who took the photograph sweet as you like, no problems. He had his arm around Kitty’s waist and she was looking up at him and about to plant her lips on his cheek when the guy pressed the shutter. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the kiss.

  It came back easily. There was nothing about Kitty he could forget. He imagined a time in the future, a hundred years from now, when he would still be alive and still remembering. He’d be a mass of leathery wrinkles and memories. When he looked back at the photograph in his hand his knuckles were white.

  The next photograph showed Sam Turner in York. There were four or five of them where the guy was too far away, side on so you could see his profile, get some idea of his bearing but not close enough to see what he looked like. Then there was another, much closer, but he was looking surprised, not clear if he was having his photograph taken or if he was accidentally being caught in a photograph of somebody else. It wasn’t a perfect photograph but it was the best of the bunch. The last two were close-ups and you could see his features clearly but he had realized what was happening by then and was pissed off. If the pictures had been able to talk you would have heard the guy yelling.

  Ruben swilled the remains of his coffee in the bottom of the cup and drank it down. He went back to Prontaprint and ordered six photocopies of the Sam Turner print and asked them to enlarge the ones of Kitty.

  ‘When do you want them, sir?’

  ‘I want them now. I’ll wait.’

  The assistant did the thing where they stop writing on the form and let the pen hover for a moment, deciding if they’ll do you a favour or turn themselves into an obstacle. Ruben kept his cool. He’d already put two people into shock this morning and split open the head of one of them. He didn’t want to go through that again. He hoped this broad with the big hair and the pen would make the right decision.

  She looked at him and smiled. ‘The technician’s busy at the moment but if you come back in half an hour, I’ll have them ready for you.’

  Ruben said, ‘Thanks.’ He said, ‘You’ve got a nice smile, you know that. You should use it more.’

  He tucked the ticket she gave him into his top pocket and made his way back to the coffee house. He took a copy of the Sun out of the rack and read it while he waited for his double espresso. There was an article about a priest with a mistress, and a soldier somewhere had borrowed a gun from the army to shoot a teenager. An obituary for some surgeon who had performed more than three thousand mastectomies. Strange, the different jobs in the world. Ruben always thought delivering milk was an odd way to make a living, but there were weirder jobs. Pleading with an imaginary God to care for someone’s soul. Shooting rubber bullets at Ulstermen. Sticking knives into the breasts of women with cancer.

  But there had been something about the girl behind the counter at Prontaprint. The typeface of the Sun swam before his eyes when he thought about her. It was the smile, it reminded him of Kitty. Not that they had the same smile, or the smile of the counter assistant resurrected any smile that Kitty had ever given him, the connection was more distant and proved something that Ruben had suspected for the last couple of days. That anything could remind him of Kitty. Anything in the world. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes,’ he had told her. He didn’t know where the words came from. They weren’t part of a song or a poem and he’d never heard anyone else say them, not even in a film. He’d invented them in order to tell her how he felt. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes.’ He hadn’t needed to sit down to think up the words in that particular order. He’d just opened his mouth one night when they were sitting on opposite sides of the table in Kitty’s house and the words had come out like that, as a complete sentence.

  A couple of times he’d tried to do it again but the words never fell out of him so naturally when he forced them. He wasn’t a poet. They’d worked that once, though, and that was enough. They’d shown her something about him that he wasn’t sure of himself. Something that had been born in him when he met Kitty Turner.

  There’d be another time, Ruben thought. He’d have Sam Turner at his mercy again. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, they’d find themselves in the same position. The detective would be on the tarmac and Ruben would be standing a
bove him. But that time Ruben wouldn’t walk away. He’d stomp the life out of the bastard.

  By early afternoon Ruben was on the south side of the river a couple of streets from Kitty’s house. He rang the bell on the door of the Greenwood Guesthouse and waited until the lady of the house answered. She was one of those women who had a smile that was a wince in disguise. If he’d been looking for somewhere to stay Ruben would have had serious misgivings. But that wasn’t why he was here.

  He showed her the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘I’m trying to trace this man,’ he said. ‘He might have stayed here in the last week or so.’

  The woman looked at Ruben for a long time without glancing at the photograph. Her face betrayed nothing of her thoughts.

  ‘It’s a serious matter,’ he told her. ‘Do you recognize him?’

  The woman looked at the photograph. She shook her head. ‘Never seen him before.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘If he’d stayed here, I’d remember. I don’t forget faces.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ruben said. ‘Sorry to bother you.’

  He left the house and closed the gate. If necessary he’d visit every guesthouse and hotel in the city. If he could find someone who recognized Sam Turner, someone who could prove that he was in Nottingham when Kitty was killed, then he’d have the bastard.

  Simple proof, that’s all he needed. And the way to get it was down to leg-work. That’s how the police solved crimes, they didn’t follow up clues and solve puzzles except in books and films. They used leg-work.

  And that’s what Ruben would do. And when he found the place where the detective stayed, he’d go back to York and kill him, hang him out to dry.

  17

  It was raining when he left Newcastle but by the time his plane circled Gardermoen, Oslo’s airport, the sky was pastel blue and the landscape shimmered in an extraordinary early-evening light. It made Geordie think about those filters that photographers use to bathe everything in red or blue. It was as if someone had invented a filter that simply made everything clearer, undermined the blurring effects of distance and pasted them into the windows of the plane.

  He’d got himself a book called Welcome to Norway and had read it from cover to cover during the flight, probably knew more now about the country than the people who lived there. He knew they’d been occupied by the Nazis during the war and that they liked to think of themselves as progressive even though they had a king. This airport, if they ever got to stop circling round it and land, levied a surcharge on all flights operating between midnight and six in the morning. This was so people who lived close by could get a better night’s sleep. Keep the decibel count down. Cool. Government for the people by the people. Nearly like communism.

  Geordie knew about Ibsen and another one of their writers but he couldn’t remember his name. Would come later, on the tip of his tongue. Guy who didn’t write plays like Ibsen but novels like JD. He knew about the painter, Munch, madman who had people screaming and merging into each other, except that one called The Kiss which reminded Geordie of him and Janet. There was the composer as well, Grieg, who’d written the Peer Gynt tune which Celia had played for him. Made you think of fairies.

  That was history, all those people. There were probably people writing and painting and composing now in Norway who were just as good as those old guys, maybe even better. But countries liked to have a history so they remembered the old guys for as long as they could. Governments would do anything to keep you from living in the present. Geordie had seen a play by Ibsen at the Leeds Playhouse, A Doll’s House, something like that. He’d thought it would be old-fashioned and full of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ but it wasn’t. Really exciting, kept you on the edge of your seat for two hours. Made you think all the way home. Made you question your attitudes.

  The woman at passport control looked more like a waitress than a government official. She barely glanced at Geordie’s passport. The customs guy eyed him suspiciously and Geordie was expecting a strip search when the man nodded him through.

  Geordie was lost in a foreign country. He stopped a tall fair man dressed in a new lightweight suit with matching shirt and practised the words from his Norwegian phrasebook. ‘Kan de fortelle Meg hvor tog stasjonen er?’

  ‘The railway station?’ the Norwegian said. ‘Yeah. Take the escalator down and keep walking. You can’t miss it.’

  Geordie had brought a novel to read but hadn’t got very far with it. Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, about the murder of a woman in northern Kenya. Janet had given him it at York station when he’d got on the train to Newcastle. He’d kissed Echo and then he’d held Janet and kissed her for a long time. She’d whispered love to him and the old words started an echo that lasted more than a thousand kilometres.

  He watched Norway go by through the windows of the train. Red barns and wooden houses. Seemed like whichever way you framed the view through the window you’d end up with something like a postcard. Geordie would have liked to watch the view, see how this new landscape was different from England or Holland, the only other country he’d visited. Either that or he’d have liked to read more of the le Carre, try to understand how Lake Turkana, where the woman in the story was killed, was the birthplace of mankind. Far as Geordie could remember, the birthplace of mankind was somewhere in India. But who was he to argue with le Carre?

  But he couldn’t do either of those things because he didn’t know why he was here and he didn’t understand the events that had led him here. Geordie was disoriented. Not only that, he was probably alienated as well because events in the outer world were spinning in directions he had never envisaged. One, Sam’s ex-wife Katherine had been killed in Nottingham when Sam just happened to be visiting the city. Two, another woman, one of Sam’s old girlfriends, Nicole Day, and her husband Rolf, had been killed in Leeds when Sam was knocking on the doors of houses in the same street. Three, Sam had split. He had packed a bag well quick and disappeared without trace. Four, the police were after him. There was a manhunt on, with pictures in the newspapers and captions telling people not to approach this man because he was dangerous. And the man was Sam Turner.

  No word for three days, then last night the telephone rang. Geordie was sitting by the window looking out at the dark and he could hear Janet singing upstairs, trying to settle Echo for the night. Barney was curled in front of the wood-burning stove, sleeping as usual. Geordie was worried that Barney was getting near the end of his life. Well, worried wasn’t the right word. Barney and Geordie had been together since the dog was a pup. They’d been on the street together, looked after each other when there was nobody else to care, before Sam came along and offered them a job. And if Barney gave up the ghost some day soon it would be the end of a friendship. More than that, it would mark the end of a whole stage in Geordie’s life.

  Yeah, worrying about Barney and the phone rang. Geordie moved quickly, not wanting the ringing to disturb Echo who was descending into that whimpering stage which would soon be deep breathing and sleep. And as he picked up the handset he knew it was Sam. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oslo. Can you come over?’

  ‘Oslo? That’s in Finland, right?’

  ‘Norway,’ Sam said.

  ‘Right, Norway. Just testing. When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You know those puzzles psychologists use, where there’s a sequence and you have to find what comes next?’

  ‘There’s a two and a four,’ Geordie said, ‘and you have to decide if the next number is six or eight.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘When the marriage to Katherine hit the dust I got myself mixed up with Nicole. And they’ve both been killed in that order.’

  ‘That’s not much of a link, Sam.’

  ‘It’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘So how does that lead to Oslo?’

  ‘After Nicole dumped me I fell into the arms of Holly.’

  ‘Holly? What kind of name’s that?’


  ‘If my bet’s right it’s the third name in the sequence.’

  ‘But why Oslo, Sam?’

  ‘Because that’s where Holly lives.’

  ‘Jesus. Then that’s the place you shouldn’t be. If she’s lulled in Oslo while you’re there you’re never gonna be able to explain it.’

  ‘Geordie, I’m here to make sure she doesn’t get killed.’

  ‘You’re the kiss of death to these women, Sam. Why do you want me there?’

  ‘To help, of course. And...’

  ‘And? And what?’

  ‘If it goes wrong and we can’t save Holly, you’ll be my witness.’

  ‘Why would it go wrong, Sam? If there’s two of us on the job we should be able to keep her safe.’

  Sam sighed down the line. ‘Holly doesn’t always do what I tell her,’ he said. ‘In fact, when I speak she turns off, doesn’t listen.’

  Sam hadn’t asked what was happening in York. Maybe he knew the police and the press had painted him as a demented wife-killer. You read the news or you listened to the local radio station and Sam Turner, the neighbourhood good guy, had been transformed into a cynical murderer who stalked the environs of his ex-wives and girlfriends, waiting for the moment when they were most vulnerable. You believed the media and Sam was back on the bottle with a vengeance, often so drunk he couldn’t stand. He sprawled on the threadbare carpet of his flat wearing a string-vest with his flies forever open. He didn’t shave for days and his body was emaciated from lack of food and vitamins, his skin slack and pale as he plotted the evil end of the women whose lives he had already ruined.

  Everybody in the business had been hauled down to the police station. Celia, Marie, they’d called in JD and George Forester. Even Fred Taylor had been questioned, and his only connection to Sam was that he failed to sell him an insurance policy from time to time.

  Geordie had spent seven hours in the Fulford Road nick, helping them with their enquiries. They’d come for him at eight o’clock the evening after Sam disappeared and he’d walked back home again at three o’clock in the morning. Chief Inspector Delaney had all the questions, beginning with: ‘I don’t like Sam Turner, son, and I don’t like the people who do like him.’