The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  The outer door opened and two middle-aged women came into the room. They looked around, from table to table. Sam got to his feet and took a step forward. ‘Holly,’ he said. ‘Hi.’ He was smiling, happy to see her.

  Holly Andersen smiled back, not quite as broadly as Sam. They stood in front of each other and stared. Geordie could see they hadn’t finished with each other. They’d given up and gone in different directions, made separate lives for themselves. But they hadn’t finished with each other, there was still something living there between them, something neither of them had been able to kill. It was important to note it, Geordie thought, to know it was possible. He didn’t think either of them would want to restart their relationship, and if they did restart it there would be no guarantee that it would work. But there was something there nevertheless. It was obvious that both of them knew it. And Geordie picked it up in the space of a few seconds, tangible as the cups on the table and perhaps just as fragile.

  Sam held out his hand and she took it and for a moment they came together in a dry embrace. Their lips grazed each other’s cheeks. When they stood back Sam said, ‘Twenty years?’

  ‘Nearly,’ Holly said. ‘Nineteen. You’ve grown a beard.’

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.

  But she laughed him away. ‘You’ve stayed young, Sam, while I’ve grown old.’

  He shook his head but Geordie could see she was right. Her face was on the point of collapse. The crow’s feet around her eyes had trampled the flesh, giving her a tight, skull-like appearance. You could see she had been beautiful a long time ago but the years had eaten their fill of her.

  ‘This is Inge Berit,’ Holly said, indicating her friend, a woman the same age as herself. Small and blonde with a tummy like a football.

  ‘Yes.’ Sam gave his hand to the other woman. ‘We met before, briefly.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you again,’ Inge Berit said with her Norwegian accent.

  ‘And Geordie you’ve met,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes, hello again,’ Holly said. Inge Berit smiled at him and offered her hand. Geordie took it and gave it a shake. ‘Come and sit down,’ Sam said. ‘D’you want coffee?’ When they were settled Holly said, ‘Geordie told us you think someone wants to kill me.’ She said it lightly, in the same tone of voice she might have used to pass the time of day.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam said. ‘Two people, women, two of the women who lived with me before I met you, have been killed.’

  Inge Berit said, ‘We thought you were making a joke.’

  ‘Nicole?’ Holly said. ‘Nicole’s dead?’

  Sam nodded. ‘In Leeds, last week. Someone broke into her house in the middle of the night. Stabbed her and her husband.’

  Holly drew in her breath. ‘My God. And who else? The other one, what was she called?’

  ‘Katherine.’

  ‘Yes, Katherine. I can’t believe this.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Sam said. ‘Katherine was in Nottingham. It was the same scenario, the same guy. The only thing that connects them is me.’

  They fell silent. Inge Berit put her arm around Holly’s shoulder and pulled her close. Holly reached up and held her friend’s hand. ‘Do you know who he is? Anything about him?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘We’re getting closer. There’s some indistinct video footage back in England, and Geordie thinks he may have spotted the guy here yesterday.’

  ‘In Oslo?’

  ‘Calmeyers gate.’

  ‘Jesus, Sam, you’re frightening me.’

  ‘You should be frightened,’ he said. ‘Both of you. I’d like you to be frightened enough to go away.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Wherever,’ he said. ‘Get out of town, out of the country. Go to Paris or Rome, anywhere but Oslo for as long as it takes to get this guy off the street.’

  The two women looked at each other.

  ‘We could go to the Politi,’ Inge Berit said. ‘They’d give us protection.’

  ‘That’s an option for you,’ Sam said. ‘But the first thing they’d do is arrest me and send me back to England. The English police think I killed the others.’

  ‘And how do we know you didn’t?’ Inge Berit said. Holly put a hand on her friend’s thigh and squeezed gently. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Sam’s capable of a lot of things, but he wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Cheers,’ he said.

  Inge Berit looked at her friend, then turned her attention back to Sam. ‘Could you be wrong about this?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so. There’s a chance, but do you want to take it?’

  Holly’s friend shook her head. ‘No, we’ll leave tomorrow. I don’t know where, but we’ll go somewhere.’ Holly said, ‘What does he look like, just in case.’

  ‘Sometimes wears a trilby,’ Sam said. ‘Might have braid on his trousers, like a waiter.’

  ‘He’s one metre seventy-eight and sixty-eight kilos,’ Geordie said. ‘He’s clever, obviously. But he thinks he’s cleverer still, so he’ll probably give himself away.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ Holly said.

  ‘I was watching the street yesterday,’ Geordie told her. ‘This’s my speciality, surveillance. I get the surveillance jobs because I’ve got the patience. And because I’ve done a lot of it, I know how it works.’ Geordie looked at Sam and the two women, to make sure he had their attention.

  ‘When you’re watching somebody,’ he said, ‘the most important thing is they don’t see you. Soon as they see you the game’s over. So you’ve got to make yourself as small and quiet and invisible as possible. And you do that by not being in the same street as the guy you’re watching. Best possible way is to have a flat in the street you can use and if that’s not possible you need to be in another street, wherever, but so far away that you can’t be seen as part of the terrain. Then you use glasses, binoculars, which I always have with me. To the other guy you’re just a speck on the landscape, but because you’re using binoculars you can bring him up as close as you like.

  ‘All right, so that’s the principle. You still with me? Good. The next thing is, if you don’t want to be seen you don’t do anything that’s gonna draw attention to you. Like in movies they have guys on surveillance wearing shades. They’re wearing shades in hotel foyers or outside in the middle of winter. Nobody does that in real life. You’re on surveillance you wanna fade into the background. And that’s how I spotted him the first time, because the guy came down the street with a limp. I don’t know what he’s supposed to be, maybe a druggie, something like that, and he’s dragging his left leg after him, really pronounced limp. I mean, how many times do you see that, a guy with a limp? Sometimes you see somebody on crutches, but not that often, and you might see some old guy with a stick. But somebody limping really sticks out. So I check his height and weight and you can bet the guy’s a dead ringer for the one we’re after.’

  Geordie laughed. ‘Limping down the street. I ask you? Who does the guy think I am? He might as well be dressed in a clown’s costume.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can be so sure,’ Inge Berit said. ‘Some people do have a limp. The height and weight could be a coincidence.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Sam said. ‘But we work with statistics. In this situation if we see somebody with a limp and the right height and weight, we can be fairly sure he’s our guy. It’s circumstantial evidence, but we’re sure he’s watching Holly, waiting to see if I make contact. If there was another guy with the right height and weight, we’d put him on the list as well.’

  ‘And there was,’ Geordie said. ‘Somebody dressed like a sailor. But when he came up close he was the same guy. The limping guy without the limp and a different hat.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you stop him?’ Holly asked.

  ‘On what grounds?’ said Geordie. ‘Pretending to limp? What we have to do is find where he’s based, then we can watch his every move. And we can stay one step ahead of him.’

  ‘We’ll tak
e him tomorrow,’ Sam said. ‘Once we know you two’re out of the way, doing some shopping on the Champs Elysees, I’ll take a walk along your street, maybe even go into your flat. You’ll have to leave us a key. Then, when our man makes his move, we’ll be waiting for him.’

  ‘Be careful, Sam,’ Holly said.

  He shrugged. ‘I can look after myself. Once we know you two are out of the country everything’ll go like clockwork.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Inge Berit said.

  ‘Relax,’ Geordie told them. ‘We’re professionals. We know what we’re doing.’

  ‘You OK?’ Sam asked.

  They’d stopped for a sandwich in a small cafe overlooking the harbour. Geordie had put away a baguette full of shrimps and mayonnaise without a word. He’d demolished a slice of cake covered in marzipan and was dropping irregularly shaped sugar lumps into his second cup of coffee.

  ‘Fine,’ he said.

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’m working, earning money. I’m eating and I’m sleeping. I’ve got good health and I’m young and I’m away from home in a foreign country which I haven’t been to before, and it’s great. I’m grateful to the master of the universe for giving me these privileges.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But nothing. I’m having the time of my life.’

  ‘You’re missing Janet and Echo and you’re depressed.’

  ‘What about you?’ Geordie asked. ‘I suppose you aren’t missing Angeles.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m missing her, Geordie. But I’m admitting it.’

  ‘OK, I’m missing them. I’m not sleeping too good, thinking about them, worrying.’ He laughed. ‘A game of football would be good. You know what I mean? That’s what I usually do at home, works every time. All that aggression and sweat, the one thing in the universe makes you forget who you are.’

  Sam was quiet. He traced his finger through a spill of cold coffee on the wooden table. ‘I could use some of that,’ he said. ‘This guy is ravaging my past, picking out the good bits, the parts worth remembering, and laying them to waste.’

  He looked out over the water, fixing his eyes on the horizon. ‘I could hardly bear to look at Holly this morning. I kept seeing this spectre over her shoulder. Death as a dark shadow, a ravenous spirit searching her blood and her body for somewhere to be.’

  ‘Jesus, Sam. She’ll be out of the country tomorrow. We’ve done everything we can.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I just hope it’s enough. With a guy like this, someone who believes passionately, you can never be sure how they’re gonna react. To kill these women just to set me up takes a really weird mindset. He’ll have everything stacked in his favour: God, morality, justice, truth. Because of something I did to him, or something he imagines I did to him.’

  ‘You should know who he is, Sam. Someone you’ve hurt so bad that he’s prepared to kill innocent people to get back at you.’

  ‘Yeah, there’s that as well,’ he said. ‘I think I should know who it is, too. I can’t come up with an answer, though. One thing I keep thinking is the guy must be nursing something from his childhood. It must’ve been traumatic. Something a young mind couldn’t cope with.’

  ‘Some kid you’ve wronged?’

  ‘I dunno, Geordie. And if it is that, some kid with a twisted mind because of me, then I don’t want to know. But I have to, because if I don’t he’ll go on working his way through everyone in my life.’

  25

  Quarry House, the building which houses the Department of Social Security HQ in Leeds, is like something out of the Third Reich. Designed and built in the dying days of the Thatcher era, it imposes itself on the city’s skyline with the authority of a jackboot.

  Coming in from York and travelling the Leeds urban motorway towards the centre of the city, Marie passed under the shadow of the building with mixed feelings of disgust and fascination. ‘You’d need a really good reason to go inside,’ she said to Celia, sitting next to her in the passenger seat. With its heavy rectangular design and the mystic symbolism of its central, star-like, rooftop emblem it could have been a fitting monument to Albert Speer.

  Celia glanced back at the edifice. ‘I can’t believe someone has designed a Social Security building in such a way that it puts people off going inside. It seems so perverse. Surely it would be better to abandon the concept of Social Security altogether?’

  ‘Buildings like that come out of the gap between reality and dreams,’ Marie said, ‘out of that space between what people believe they want and what they really want. The man who designed it probably sees himself as a liberal humanitarian.’

  ‘You don’t think it could have been a woman?’

  ‘No way,’ Marie said. ‘The bricks are held together with testosterone. If you half-close your eyes you can picture Mussolini or Hitler standing in the doorway.’

  She pulled into a parking space opposite the Grand Arcade and switched off the engine.

  Celia opened the car door and stepped on to the pavement. ‘Will you pick me up from here?’

  ‘Yes.’ Marie glanced at her watch. ‘Five o’clock OK?’

  ‘That’ll give me three hours,’ Celia said. ‘Plenty of time to buy a few old clothes.’

  Marie left her spinning round on the pavement. She caught her in the rear-view mirror crossing towards the Grand Arcade, an ancient figure on her spindly legs, black beret pulled down over one eye, Marlene Dietrich-style.

  She drove out to North Lane in Headingley, parked the car and went into the Taps. The landlord was a burly man with a clipped white beard and moustache and a smile that continued past his face and reached deep down into the depths of his brown eyes.

  Marie told him a long, complicated lie about how she was writing a book around the Rolf and Nicole Day killing and that she’d like to meet some of their neighbours and friends.

  ‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. ‘Nicole Day. Wouldn’t have recognized her. She was in here once or twice according to a couple of the locals, but I don’t remember her. Him I did know, Rolf. Called in from time to time. He’d prop the bar up and make a pint last forty minutes. Thin wrists, like a woman. Glasses. Not much hair. Guys in here called him the Professor.’

  ‘Is there anyone else I could talk to?’ Marie asked. ‘Someone who knew them both?’

  The landlord looked around the bar. ‘Not at the moment,’ he said. ‘But Steve’ll be in soon. He lives at number thirty-seven, actually talked to Sam Turner before he killed the woman, or maybe it was just after. I’ll introduce you.’

  Marie got herself a large glass of cold red wine and tried to warm it between her hands while she watched the regulars at the Taps. There’d been no doubt in the landlord’s mind that it was Sam who did the killings. The police and the press had done a real job on him. He’d been tried and found guilty. The hangman was checking his rope, oiling the hinges on his trapdoor. Sam had always been a survivor but his future was looking increasingly bleak in the face of the evidence in this case.

  Maybe that was how it would end? A long and charmed life, forever lived on the edge and brought to a sudden ironic end by a series of events in which he was implicated but never actually involved. Sam would recognize the scenario. She could see him grinning as he said, ‘Just remember... if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.’

  The outer door of the pub opened and Marie watched a pink and golden youth carrying the best part of fifty years walk up to the bar. He ordered a drink and exchanged a few words with the landlord. He glanced over his right shoulder at her while his host was pulling the pint. Attempted a long-distance smile.

  He paid for the drink and supped the top off. He hitched up his tracksuit trousers and ambled over to Marie’s table. ‘They tell me you’re writing a book,’ he said.

  ‘You’re Steve?’

  ‘The same. The man who met the murderer.’

  Marie knew women who would consider him good-looking but she couldn’t understand why. She felt waves of antipathy coursing through he
r body. There must be a relationship between the chemical reactions that stimulated sexual responses and the muscles that created the cringe.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘The murderer?’

  ‘Good question,’ he said, pulling out a chair and settling himself opposite her. ‘The guy I met was called Sam Turner, a private investigator from York. And he’s the guy the police are looking for. But it might not be him.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I didn’t think this up myself. My sister-in-law works for the Coroner’s Office, so it’s her theory. The woman, Nicole Day, she was killed around the time that I was talking to Sam Turner at my house. He was looking for somebody called Bonner, and this was nine o’clock in the morning. I’d come back from my morning run. I was listening to the news headlines.

  ‘He had a scrap of paper with the name and address on it. But the address was my house, number thirty-seven, and I’m not Bonner, no one called Bonner lives there, I didn’t need to be a detective to know that.’ Steve smiled knowingly, as though he’d made a joke.

  ‘Anyway, the guy accepted that he’d got the wrong house and I watched out of the window. He went up the street to number seventy-three, tried there but there was nobody home. I’m still watching him through the curtains. He comes back down the street and he stops this black woman, lives at number twenty, bit tasty, just divorced her husband. And I see her shaking her head so he’s asking her the same question: where does Mr Bonner live? But there’s nobody called Bonner in the street, the police checked everybody. Used to be an Alison Bonner who lived at fifty-four but apparently she died five years back. A widow. Her daughter sold the house to a speculator.

  ‘After that the guy, the detective, he got back in his car and drove away. And nobody’s seen him since. Me, I’ve gone over it time and time again. This was a guy looking for somebody called Bonner. The police come along and tell me he was the murderer but I can’t put the two things together. First I can’t believe he’d just killed the woman with a knife because he’d be covered in blood or at least be rattled. But he was calm. He was pissed off when he couldn’t find this Bonner guy, but he wasn’t someone who had just killed somebody in her bed.