by Baker, John
‘Not something we can leave to Mr Plod, then?’
Sam grinned. ‘Last I heard,’ he said, ‘they were gonna try to pin it on me. The police don’t solve cases, JD; you know that as well as I do. Sometimes they get lucky and find the perpetrator on the job, catch him red-handed, as they say. Other times they get a tip-off, somebody who wants to get rid of the competition. Or the guy’s girlfriend gives him up for the reward money. But most of the time they’re feeling their way around in the dark.’
‘Your favourite people, the fuzz, aren’t they, Sam?’
‘By a long way. They blow the competition right out of the water.’
He reached for the phone and dialled the number of the local cop shop, waited for the operator to put him through. He could use four fingers of his right hand, the thumb was still hidden in the folds of bandage. ‘Rossiter?’ he asked.
There was a pause. He could see the guy at the other end weighing up his reaction. Dark hair with a touch of premature grey at the temples. Sharp, needle-point eyes. A flare to his nostrils that could’ve won him an Oscar if he’d been in the movies. He’d have to work out if the call was from one of his superiors or a nobody. Sam had a silent bet with himself that the guy’d play safe.
‘Detective Superintendent Rossiter speaking. How may I help you?’
Sam smiled into the mouthpiece. He said: ‘Sam Turner. Listen, Angeles Falco’s received a note you might be interested in. Asking for five grand.’
‘Turner,’ said the youngest detective superintendent in the country. He spoke Sam’s surname as though it was a fresh turd. ‘When was this received?’
‘Couple of hours.’
‘Careful how you handle it. It might be a vital piece of evidence. Have you opened it?’
Sam didn’t reply. He left the question where it hung, waited for the cop to answer it himself.
‘I expect it’ll have your prints all over it,’ Rossiter said.
‘It was opened by an associate,’ Sam said. ‘Janet Black. You’ve got her prints on file. She’s the only one who’s touched it.’
‘Where is it?’
‘My office.’
‘I’ll come and collect.’
‘Do that,’ said Sam. He looked at his watch. ‘We close in twenty-four minutes.’ He put the phone down. The police would get little from the note. It was a fair bet that there would be no usable prints on it.
He nursed his right hand. It was cold and the nerve endings were singing, leaving a nagging ache, extending from just above the wrist into the length of his thumb. Forensic science was a useful tool, but too often it could only give the police a list of possibilities. Psychological and criminal profiling on the other hand were the stuff of fiction. The press loved it, the whole idea that each criminal left behind a signature, which, in the right hands, would identify him or her beyond any doubt. The results in crime novels and in film and television portrayals of clinical psychologists at work were always successful, but in the real world the overall results were pitiful.
It was true that psychological profilers added something new to the task of investigating crime, but it would be a long time before their methodology was reliable. One of the biggest hurdles for the profession was that the police resented them, regarded them as interlopers and meddlers and usually disregarded their suggestions.
Sam glanced at the note again. ‘Get the cash and wait.’ What was the guy’s next move gonna be? Another note? A phone call?
Angeles had said she’d get the cash if Sam thought it would help. But she didn’t want to pay someone off who had killed her sister.
He picked up the note with a pair of tweezers, folded it with the aid of a paper-knife, and inserted it in the original envelope.
‘I’m going,’ he called through to Celia. ‘The cops’ll be here in a minute to pick up the evidence. Tell Rossiter I was heartbroken to miss him. Give him my love.’
33
‘I’d have liked to see the original,’ Sly Beaumont told Marie. ‘But I would guess that all the letters come from the same magazine.’ Sly was the crime editor at the Yorkshire Evening Press, and he was speaking in his office looking out over Walmgate. He was a grizzled old bear of a man with creases in his leathery face that defied access to his razor. His suit looked as though it was still hanging in his wardrobe, draped from his coat-hanger shoulders but not touching any other part of his anatomy. A suit that shone with age and that spoke quietly of a time before its owner’s body had begun to shrink.
‘You can’t say which mag?’ asked Marie.
He shook his head. ‘The headings are in Hermes, but they’ve used Times for the body.’ He made a face at the copy. ‘Arial condensed, which might be from a different mag, or for a special section within the same one. Something modern, probably aimed at a young audience. Professionally printed, but designed by someone without much imagination. That’s as close as I can get.’ He handed the photocopy of the note back to Marie. ‘How’s Sam doing? Never calls in to see me any more. Tell him he owes me a visit.’
‘I will. And thanks for the help with the note. It’ll narrow down my search.’
‘Any time.’ He gave her a smile that resembled a deflated football, then had another thought. ‘He still grieving over Dora?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Marie said. ‘He took it hard, but you know Sam: “life’s for the living”, all that practical philosophy he carries around with him.’
‘He got himself a woman?’ Sly asked.
Marie shook her head. ‘There are signs that he’s beginning to think about it. Seems keen on our current client.’
‘A man needs a woman,’ Sly said. ‘You don’t have a woman, you end up looking like me.’
Marie laughed with him. ‘Is that something you want me to tell him?’
‘It’s a warning. Sam’s the kind of guy needs all the advice he can get. He never listens, but that’s no reason to stop telling him.’
‘I’m writing this down,’ said Marie. ‘He’ll get every word of it.’
El Piano for coffee and a piece of carrot cake to fill the gap caused by a missed lunch. Quiet at this time of day, just Marie and a thin man playing around with the chords of ‘Love for Sale’; humming the melody, his voice and the ivories clambering around each other like a wild red rose on a cross.
She watched him for a moment, saw pain in his hunched shoulders, understood for the space of a breath that he could sing no other song. His profile was a line of genius; she wanted to reach out and trace it with the tip of her finger. The slope of the brow, the slight loop of nose, and its echo there again in the chin. He was young, early or middle twenties, and the blues had found a deep gash in his soul and come to rest there for a while. Undeniably queer and undeniably a god.
Sam had always been a friend and never a lover and that was the best way round. He was constant as a friend. If they’d ever overstepped the mark and hopped into bed, turned friendship into a sexual affair, they might have gained the moment but the loss would have been incalculable.
Marie sometimes wondered if the world saw her as a Miss Moneypenny, spending her life waiting for the odd glimpse of James Bond. She couldn’t see herself and Sam Turner as an emotional item, and the things you couldn’t see were not meant to be.
The Greek god left the piano and paid Maggie at the bar for his coffee. They both watched him turn a corner in Swinegate and disappear into the silent and lonely world of the truly beautiful.
‘Who was that?’ Marie asked.
Maggie raised her eyebrows, looked over at the freshly deserted piano, and slowly wiped down the counter. ‘I’m not sure he really happened.’
Smith’s. The shelves lined with magazines of every description. Music, Women’s, Pets, Lifestyle, Computers. All of them tempting the passing trade in a variety of voices, commanding attention with whispers and fluttering eyelashes or glass jewellery and hysterical screams. Each one held out a promise: objects to furnish the home or objectivity, nudity or the bare facts,
a free gift or personal freedom. She half-closed her eyes, walked past the women’s section, picked up magazines at random and checked out the typefaces. Aviary Birds, The Spectator, Bodybuilding, Time Out, Punch, The Internet, each had a tale to tell, but none of them had the feel of the letters that made up the blackmail note.
‘Something aimed at a young audience,’ Sly Beaumont had said. She watched the customers for a while. Girls gravitated towards the women’s section, thumbed through copies of New Woman, Cosmopolitan and Tatler. Young men tended to make their way to the computing section, or gazed wistfully at scantily clad models in the lad mags. Both sexes sniffed around the music section in equal parts.
Marie’s brain began clicking into PI mode. A middle-aged man wearing a blazer picked up a copy of the Radio Times and she didn’t need to look at it to know that it wasn’t the source of the note. Whoever had written the blackmail note was unlikely to have been a woman. You could never be completely sure; as time marched on Western culture seemed to throw up more crimes of violence that had the woman’s touch. There had been reports of gangs of young females recently perfecting the art of mugging. But this one smelled like a man.
She moved over to the section with the men’s glossies and read the titles: Men’s Health, Esquire, Loaded, Bizarre. Escapist mags, offering tales of sexual prowess, soft-porn photographs of implanted breasts and tanned thighs, the latest casual fashions and reviews of videos and films. All of them aimed at low achievers, the kind of guys who were already convinced they were descended from kings. Young men who were the victims of their own egos, ripe fodder for the siren cry of the pornographer. Marie had been avoiding them all her life.
She remembered a well-known occult phenomenon, according to her boyfriend, David Styles, who knew about such things. If you put in all the effort you could in the early stages, the angels came along to help you out when the going got rough. Marie preferred to think she just got lucky, but there was an extra bonus in sharing a bed with someone who believed in angels.
Stuff didn’t ring any bells, Later and GQ both felt wrong, but Loaded had headings and intros in that distinctive Hermes font. As she thumbed through a copy she came across the phrase ‘five grand’ in a sub-heading the same size and density as the phrase in the note. ‘Gotcha,’ she said, and the guy next to her with his head in a copy of Bizarre quickly put it down and left the shop.
Sam laughed when she told him. ‘So we’re looking for a young guy with a hard-on?’ he said over the phone.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said. ‘And I thought I’d moved on from there.’
This remark elicited another Sam Turner chuckle, followed by a line of angst. ‘Sex and death, Marie. It keeps on coming back.’
‘If it’s not obvious, you know it’s always there, hidden deep in the kernel of every case.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘No, I’m convinced,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about Isabel. There was no sexual interference. No obvious signs of sexual violence. She was drugged and her back was broken. None of her clothes were removed.’
‘I see where you’re going,’ Marie said. ‘We’re looking for someone who keeps a more or less constant watch on two sisters, obsessive, he kills, he’s into soft-porn mags and chastity.’
‘And there’s the thing about ice skating, been in the back of my mind all day. You think anything about that?’
‘No, Sam. I’d forgotten all about it. The missing piece. Maybe it was just one of the words that got to her. “Ice” or “skating”? What about the accident that killed her parents? Black ice on the road? It doesn’t have to be connected with the case.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothing. But it makes me itch.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘The case doesn’t hold together. Every time we get a new piece of info we lose some cohesion. I still don’t have a handle on the guy who’s calling the shots.’
‘It makes sense if you think about there being two of them,’ Sam said. ‘Two guys from different ends of the street.’
‘Working together?’
‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Too early to say. Maybe they’re working together, that would account for the different signals we’re getting. But it could be they’re in competition, a couple of psychopaths working the same patch.’
‘You mean they don’t know each other? What’s going to happen when they come face to face?’
‘Interesting,’ said Sam, leaning heavily on the word. ‘I don’t suppose it’s covered in the textbooks. Makes me think about a couple of express trains heading towards each other on the same track.’
‘Nasty.’
‘Yeah, specially for the folks who just happen to be in the neighbourhood.’
34
There was a woman once, back in the days Sam first landed in York, made a profession out of green fingers. Must’ve been one of the first organic gardeners in the world. Betty? Yeah, Betty Carter, could dig a twenty-metre plot before breakfast, cook up ham steaks with eggs and mushrooms and around a gallon of coffee, then go back outside and lift half a ton of carrots while dinner stewed gently in the oven.
Betty thought good sex, good home-cooking, hard work and the smells of the earth would work miracles on Sam Turner. And she was right in a way. He got fit and tanned and lean living with her. Spent every penny he had on booze, and when he’d emptied his pockets he’d reach for Betty’s purse. Didn’t matter where she hid it. Found it once buried under the compost heap. A man gets to know a woman’s ways.
When he’d taken her to the verge of bankruptcy, and there was no more money for him to drink, he’d started chasing other women. Sam could always summon a charming smile if it was paving the road to a bottle. And he didn’t understand at all when Betty showed him the door. Called it betrayal. He stood on one side of the door and Betty stood on the other, and for the length of a long black night he howled chaos as grey worms invaded his brain and his thick, beached tongue sponged industrial alcohol from a gallon can.
Must’ve been Betty who rang for the ambulance, but she didn’t visit him in the hospital, and when he was discharged she’d changed all the locks, put shutters up at the windows.
‘Fuck ’em,’ he’d said at the time. He’d turned around and changed direction but kept on going down the same old rutted track of self-deception, perpetrating mindless violence on himself and everyone who came into contact with him.
‘I must’ve been a real prize in those days,’ he said to himself. When it didn’t matter how much he drank; when whisky was equal to blood and he saw the world through a combination of them both. And there were still women prepared to take him on. Young and old, women whose self-esteem had fallen so low that the only redemption was through the resurrection of another. Women who would only be able to face themselves if they could wrench Sam Turner from the jaws of Hell.
‘Betty,’ he said. ‘Where are you now?’
Sam knew where she was. Not exactly, but last he’d heard she was digging up a patch in the south of France. She wasn’t a lost love, a ghost who haunted his dreams like Dora, or Donna, his first wife. She was someone else he’d abused and who held a place in his conscience. He would never look her up; knowing there would be nothing he could say or do to repair his violence. He’d have liked to offer her a chunk of her life back.
One thing Betty had left with Sam. When he was sober she’d take him round her garden and she’d show him the plants. She’d talk to them herself; he’d sometimes find her there, squatting down by the tomatoes pouring out her heart. But when they were together, she’d point out the different characteristics of the plants, say why she was adding bonemeal around the roots of one, wood ash to another. And she’d be able to see when one of the plants, or sometimes a group of them, needed water. She’d see that several hours before they began to wilt.
‘How d’you know?’ Sam’d ask. ‘I can’t see that. They all look the same to me.’
‘You’re no
t looking at them right,’ she’d say. ‘You look at them and you see stems and leaves, a collection of plants.’
‘Well, yeah, Betty. You think there’s something else there?’
‘A whole lot more. In a way there’s everything there. Everything that “is” in the universe is a reflection of the whole. If you look for it, you’ll find it.’
Wise women, there’s one round every corner.
‘So how can I tell the cucumber wants water twelve hours before it starts gasping?’
‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Betty said. ‘Look at its expression.’ And it was exactly the same with Geordie. You could tell when he wanted something by his expression. Before he got through the door, maybe an hour or two before he got around to saying what it was.
Geordie had a poker face. He blinked infrequently and he kept his head angled downward so you couldn’t always see his eyes. It was a mysterious face; the nose and chin prominent but the mouth small, with a hint of femininity in the bow of the lips. It was as if he deliberately sent out mixed signals.
But when he wanted something, which in Geordie’s case was usually the answer to one of the riddles of the universe, he made his eyes available and the ambiguity of his features was replaced with a kind of light.
‘You thought any more about moving out of here?’ he asked in a voice as casual as a pit helmet.
Sam watched him. Geordie looked back, his eyes wide open and popping, as if there was some kind of pressure behind them.
‘Moving out?’
‘Yeah. You said you was thinking of moving out, handing the place over to homeless people, something like that.’
‘Haven’t thought much about it,’ Sam said. ‘Been waiting for inspiration.’
‘JD says that’s bollocks,’ said Geordie. ‘Waiting for inspiration. JD says if he waited for inspiration, he’d never write anything. He’s written five, six books and he didn’t have inspiration for any of them. Just went ahead and wrote them without the inspiration.’
