The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  Down in the courtyard there were two other cops who were shouting for their comrade to hang on. Someone was getting a ladder.

  Sam wanted to stay and watch, see if they made it in time or if the cop hanging on to the guttering would fall before they came with the ladder. But there wasn’t time for that.

  As the light began to fade he inched his way over the rooftop, making his way to the end of the building. He caught a glimpse of something flashing in the late sunshine over by Calmeyers gate and stopped momentarily to focus on it. There was a single figure, obviously male but too far away to make out any facial features. He was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes, training them on Sam as he made his way along the rooftop. As he watched the man lowered the binoculars and turned away. Sam couldn’t tell if there was a movement of the man’s arm, a salute of recognition. The man walked away and was soon obscured by the rooftops.

  Sam didn’t know how he knew that the figure with the binoculars was the man who had murdered Holly and the others, but he knew all the same. And he knew that the man had outclassed him again. This was someone who could make Sam do exactly what he wanted and when he wanted.

  And Sam’s own malleability, his seeming inability to refuse the murderer’s wishes and aspirations, had led to another death. There was no doubt that this shadowy figure was a brutal and conscienceless killer, but by the same rule Sam Turner himself was complicit in the deaths of the women whose only sin had been to give themselves to him.

  Sam got back to earth via the service ladder attached to the outer wall, all the time expecting the cry to go up and a fresh influx of police to come pouring in and drag him off to the cells. He found himself in a small alley off the cobbled courtyard and, keeping his back to the wall, snatched a moment to watch the police with a ladder, trying to position it below the cop who was still dangling from the guttering.

  While they were occupied with that Sam had time to move into the overhang which led to the back entrance of the flats. He tried the first door and found it locked. The second door was the same. The third was unlocked and gave easily. Sam stepped inside. He held his breath and listened.

  In another room a dance band was playing and a singer, in a voice filled with emotion, was accentuating the lyrics:

  No tiene pretensión,

  no quiere ser procaz

  se llama tango y nada más.

  Made you think of the house where you were born. All the things and people you’d ever known and lost.

  He was in a kitchenette. There was cold fish soup in a pan on the cooker. Over in the corner was an antique Norsk cupboard painted with red roses on an ultramarine background, chipped gold-leaf frame defining the limits of each door. Sam took a dishcloth from the sink and wiped the roof-dirt from his hands. He gave his trousers and shoes a rub. If he made it to the street he wanted to look halfway decent.

  The kitchen door led him into a hall where the music became louder. In the room to his right a couple were dancing the tango. The man was black and wearing cord trousers with braces and a light blue shirt, two-tone dancing shoes. His woman wore high-heels and a skirt with a hemline cut on the cross, bare breasts and spectacles. Their eyes were locked together.

  Any other time, any other circumstances, Sam would’ve stayed to watch.

  But he stepped past the opening to the room, took a gabardine raincoat and peaked cap from a hook by the door, and let himself out of the flat, finding himself by an exit a hundred metres further along Osterhaus gate.

  The police car was still there but only manned by a solitary cop. The others must still be struggling with the ladder in the courtyard.

  Sam had wanted to go to the hospital to see Geordie, find out how the kid was doing, make sure he wasn’t going to die. But he would be mad to go there. The police would be swarming all over the place. The best he could do was to return to the Internet cafe and get word through to Janet. She would be the best tonic for Geordie. A word from her would get him back on his feet quicker than anything else in the world.

  Clinging to the shadows, he slowly moved out of the area and a few minutes later hit the anonymity of Henrik Ibsen’s gate, walked past a chrome and glass fashionable cafe and allowed the silent tentacles of the international city to wind their way around him.

  27

  You had to speak through an intercom because everyone else had gone home and there was only the counsellor in the building. Ruben checked his watch - 7.35 - and hit the intercom button with the index finger of his right hand.

  There was a grating sound from the grille. It sounded like a steam train pulling into a station. And her voice, when it came, was distorted. The register was wrong for a human being, too high. It would’ve been all right as special effects, one of those films that have human beings flying over treetops, women who are hybrids, crosses between people and animals.

  He pushed his face close to the grille. ‘What did you say?’

  The hybrid again. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ruben Parkins. I’ve got an appointment.’

  The grating sound made him pull away. ‘Push the door and come upstairs.’

  Weird, seeing the place like this. Every time Ruben had been to the surgery previously the place was buzzing. There were the receptionists in their white coats, old-age pensioners and mothers with babies. One time he’d been here and a guy had a heart attack in the waiting room, clutching his chest and rolling around on the floor. Some of the kids thought it was a circus. Doctors came out of their rooms, running down the stairs to get the receptionists to help. In the end it was one of the single mums who’d called an ambulance on her mobile. Didn’t stop the guy from dying but the paramedics said it could’ve done if she’d rung a minute earlier.

  The place was deserted, eerily silent. Ruben walked the length of the hallway and started up the winding staircase. Plush pile carpet, ebony handrail polished as bright as a saint’s foot.

  When he got to the upper floor he didn’t know if he should sit in the waiting room or go into the doctor’s surgery. But the counsellor’s voice sang out, saying, ‘Come straight in, Mr Parkins.’ Nothing like it had sounded over the intercom. Fairly good voice, middle-class, like Katherine’s, you could tell she’d been studying somewhere. A woman who understood you had to sound the vowels and the consonants. But there was no edge to it, she didn’t need to put you down.

  She was sitting behind the doctor’s desk. Slim woman, stylish, short brown hair, thirty-five, forty, silver choker round her neck, black round-necked top with long sleeves. A smile on her face, but not too wide.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Have a seat.’

  There was no choice about seats. There was the one she had which was obviously taken, and then there was the one this side of the desk. Wooden job with arms, no padding. Ruben sat on the edge of it. He waited.

  ‘My name’s Sarah Murphy,’ she said. ‘I’m not a doctor. The doctors in the practice retain me to talk to some of their patients. I don’t have access to medical records.’ She paused to make sure she had his attention. Held his eyes without blinking.

  ‘Sometimes people come to the doctor with a problem that isn’t strictly medical. Maybe it falls somewhere between a medical definition and what we call a life problem. When the doctor thinks that is the case she suggests the patient comes to see me, and she thought that in your case which is why we are meeting here now.

  ‘We can meet six times, and usually the client feels better about things after that time. If it’s necessary we can then arrange a further six meetings. If there has been no change in the client’s condition then the doctor could prescribe medication, or she might want to get a second opinion.

  ‘Do you want to ask me any questions?’

  ‘She thought I was inhabited by depression,’ Ruben said.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘If the police had found the guy, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘The police?’

  Ruben took a deep breath. ‘Kitty was my gi
rlfriend. She was killed in her own bed. Somebody came in and knifed her. I found her the next morning and the police think it was her ex-husband. He’s on the run.’

  ‘Is this the same case I’ve been reading about in the newspapers? The private detective?’

  ‘Yeah. He killed another woman in Leeds. Now he’s gone missing. But the police had him when he killed Kitty and they let him go.’

  ‘You’re telling me that you’re depressed because the police let the murderer go.’

  ‘Yeah. They shoulda kept him. Banged him up. Then the other woman would still be alive.’

  ‘You knew the other woman, the one in Leeds?’

  ‘No, I was just saying.’

  ‘Because it seems to me that the main reason you’re depressed is because of your girlfriend’s death. Would you agree with that? It could be that facing up to that is too painful, so you’re transferring your feelings of pain on to the murderer, looking for revenge.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you understand what I mean, Mr Parkins?’

  ‘I wanna kill the guy.’

  ‘That’s a normal response. In the same circumstances almost everyone would react in the same way.’

  Ruben didn’t reply. He knew what she meant but she didn’t know what he meant. She thought that was something to say, that he wanted to kill the guy. But Ruben didn’t care whether he said it or not, he wanted to kill the guy, and if he got half a chance he would do it. He didn’t care if they banged him away for life. They could do what they wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. He didn’t have a life, anyway, so how could they take it away from him?

  ‘What happens,’ he told her, ‘I go to sleep. I was delivering milk but it didn’t get delivered. I loaded up the van and sat behind the wheel for two hours, never moved. Today I thought I’d go for a walk, keep myself fit. But I got to the corner of my street and stood there for fifty minutes. I couldn’t go for the walk and I couldn’t turn round and go back home. It was like I was paralysed.’

  ‘Those are classic symptoms of depression.’

  ‘And I’m crying all the time. Sometimes I’m wiping my eyes because I can’t see properly. Maybe I’m watching a match on the telly, whatever, I can’t see it and it’s like I’ve got something in my eye. But there’s nothing there. It’s tears. I’m sitting there crying my eyes out and I don’t even know I’m doing it. This’s me, I don’t cry. Supposed to be a man.’

  ‘I think we should talk about Kitty if you feel up to it. How you feel about losing her.’

  Ruben closed his eyes. ‘Kitty was the best friend I ever lost. All she wanted was good things for everybody, especially me. I’m confused. My heart hurts. Every time I take a drink I know it’s gonna end up as tears. I think about the last moments. What she was thinking of. Did she call out my name? I’m not sure she’s not still alive and every day of my life is some terrible joke. Someone’s fooling me. I want to kill the man who stole away our future.

  ‘I can remember the feel of her, her kiss, the scent of her. I can’t believe it when I wake up and find it’s a dream. She’s got me in the palm of her hand. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not all here. Somebody’s put out the light in me. It’s like I’ve been swallowed by a snake. I’m still alive but there’s no point to it.’

  ‘What about nights?’ she asked. ‘Do you sleep?’

  ‘I want to sleep all the time,’ Ruben told her. ‘When I’m sleeping it’s like it never happened. Kitty’s still here and everything’s normal. I go to bed at night and I can’t sleep. So I slug back a few beers and then it gets easier. Makes me feel like shit in the morning, though.

  ‘Sometimes I sleep in the day. I’ll be watching the box in the afternoon and there’s nothing on you wanna watch. There’s these women with the freak-shows, Oprah, Ricki Lake, guys who sleep with their girlfriends’ mothers. I don’t wanna see that so I snooze through it. One minute I’m awake, the next I’m asleep. Then I’m awake again. Like that, maybe a couple of hours I’m floating around. If it wasn’t for the guy, Sam Turner, I’d be thinking seriously about topping myself. Only I can’t afford to leave it to chance he’ll get away with it. I’m keeping myself going so I can take him out.’

  She maintained eye contact. She looked as though she didn’t know where to go next, but she pulled something out. ‘OK, let’s look at that for a minute. This is hypothetical but I’d like you to respond if you can. If this man, this detective, is arrested by the police and brought to court and found guilty... if he’s punished by the state, sent to prison... how would you feel about that?’

  ‘It’s not gonna happen?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that it will happen, but if it did? The police are looking for him.’

  Ruben thought about it. ‘If it all came out,’ he said eventually. ‘If he admitted it and said why he did it. If they banged him away for the rest of his life. Maybe that would be enough. I don’t really know. It wouldn’t bring Kitty back. She’d still be dead and I’d be walking round wishing she wasn’t.’

  ‘Have you considered that the detective might not be guilty?’

  ‘Yeah, I have. And it seems to me he fits the bill. I’ve been in prison myself. That’s not something you do without learning lessons. One of the things I learned was that just because a guy’s in prison it doesn’t mean he committed a crime - it means a judge sent him to prison, that’s all. Sometimes the guy did the crime and sometimes he didn’t. The system isn’t infallible, it’s crap. I want the right guy, the guy who did for Kitty. I’m not looking for a scapegoat. But everything points to Sam Turner.’

  ‘You see, Mr Parkins, what I believe will happen is that the police will capture this man. And if he’s guilty he’ll go to prison for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. What I’m trying to discover is how you’ll cope when that happens. I’d like to think that you’ll accept that, that you’ll remember the good times you had with Kitty and be thankful for them. And that you’ll find a way of carrying on with your life. I know that doesn’t seem like a possibility for you right now, but I’d like to think that it will gradually seem more possible as time goes on.’ Ruben shook his head.

  ‘I don’t expect you to achieve that by yourself, Mr Parkins. I’m here to give you all the help and support I can. And there are other agencies that can help in different ways. Let’s say that that is our goal. Now, it’s usual to meet weekly but I think we ought to try to see each other twice in the next seven days. How does that sound?’

  ‘Sounds fine,’ Ruben said. ‘I like you. It’s good to talk. But you haven’t heard what I’m saying, not entirely. You heard some of it, but there’s other parts you don’t want to hear.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to listen,’ she said. She had a genuine smile on her face. ‘This is the first time we’ve met. Maybe next time you can tell me what it is you think I haven’t heard.’

  ‘I’ll tell you now,’ Ruben said. ‘I wanna strangle the bastard who killed Kitty. I wanna do it with my own hands. That seems like the only thing that makes sense to me.’

  Around the Lace Market Ruben knocked on the door of another B&B. ‘Can you spare me a moment?’ he asked the man who answered. He showed him the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘We’re trying to trace this man and have reason to believe he stayed in this area recently. Have you seen him before?’

  The man took the photograph into his bony hands. Thin fingers, long, like twigs. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘We don’t know that he’s done anything, sir. We need to talk to him because we think he can help with our enquiries into a couple of rather serious incidents.’

  ‘I don’t know him,’ the man said. ‘Never seen him before.’

  Ruben wasn’t convinced about his own impersonation of a policeman. He’d known cops all his life, talked to dozens of them and listened to dozens more while he was waiting for them to decide what to do with him. But his impersonation wasn’t true. It was a cliché. That was because he couldn’t believe in himself as a copper. To
be a good impersonator or a good liar you have to believe it yourself, or as near as possible.

  Still, it was good enough to get by. One hotelier this afternoon had asked to see his ID and he’d had to admit he wasn’t a cop. He’d told the truth: that Kitty had been killed and he was checking out if the guy had been in Nottingham that day. The man had softened immediately, introduced him to the receptionist and showed her the photograph. But she didn’t recognize the detective.

  Ruben used the cop impersonation because it saved explaining everything. When he told people his girlfriend had been murdered, they took a step back. It was as if Kitty’s death marked him out as someone with a curse. People recoiled from him because he’d been visited by tragedy and, like a disease, he might still be carrying it and pass it on to them.

  He liked the counsellor, Sarah Murphy, with her silver choker and her middle-class way of explaining everything in words of one syllable, desperate to be understood. Or maybe the desperation was to avoid being misunderstood? She had something of Kitty in her. Not a lot, but it was there. She knew things out of books and from courses she’d attended. But she’d never been on the street and was attracted by and frightened of men like Ruben.

  What it was, he recognized her professional manner and the propriety with which she conducted their interview as a veil to hide her own insecurities. And she knew he did. Ruben had managed to tell her so without saying a word.

  He smiled as he approached the next B&B. It was more democratic that way. If he hadn’t found some weakness in her he wouldn’t have continued the counselling. Because she’d have had all the power and he’d have been a geek. There would have been no point in seeing her. She would have patronized him and he would have resented her for it. And then he’d have been stuck with the depression.

  Ruben hadn’t read any textbooks. In the joint he’d read novels. Cowboys. Cops and robbers. And he hadn’t been on any courses. Unless you counted the small business start-up course. But he knew the difference between grief and depression. Grief was something he had to cope with by himself. It was grief that made him cover his head with the duvet and scream at the top of his voice for an hour at a time. It was grief that made him want to explode.