The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  ‘Danny isn’t the first man to come along. He’s the answer to all my prayers.’

  ‘Go and get the lithium,’ Ellen said.

  Marilyn tramped up the stairs and came down with a single tablet in the palm of her hand. She walked to the kitchen sink and splashed water into a mug. She stood in front of her mother and placed the lithium tablet on her tongue. Then she took a gulp of the water, emptied the mug.

  ‘Satisfied?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Ellen said. She reached out and stroked her daughter’s cheek. ‘You know I love you, Marilyn. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m here and not in Scotland. And it’s because I love you that I want you to take your medicine and not get out of yourself. We don’t want another episode like, you know, the footballer or... You don’t want that, either, do you?’

  Marilyn shook her head. ‘No. I don’t want that.’

  ‘So, who were you talking to on the telephone?’

  ‘The hairdresser. I want a trim, something to make me feel better.’

  ‘And where were you this morning? You took the car.’

  ‘It’s a surprise. I don’t want to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t want a surprise, Marilyn. I’ve had enough surprises in my life.’

  ‘I went to look at some earrings. They were supposed to be for your birthday. A present for you.’

  Ellen shook her head and smiled. She held out her arms and Marilyn let herself be enfolded in her mother’s bosom. While there, snuggled up between arm and breast, she removed what remained of the lithium tablet from her mouth and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. Outside the window the river water on the field was creeping closer to the house, every day a little closer.

  ‘It’s not that you’re bad,’ Ellen was saying. ‘I know that You’re a good girl at heart, always were. You just go off the rails from time to time, when you’re left to your own devices. But if we stick together we can beat it, Marilyn. The two of us together are bigger than this thing.’

  ‘I know,’ Marilyn said, making her body shudder like it would at the onset of tears. ‘And I’m so glad you’re here. Without you there’d be nothing to live for.’

  10

  Sam watched the weather from his office window and wondered where he was with Angeles. Had the best of their relationship already happened? Was the future another slow decline into separate paths? Was there anything he could do to influence the situation one way or another? Grey city was almost deserted. There were a few damp tourists in Betty’s tea shop but the usual queue to get into the place had been absent since the rains came. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Marie. ‘We gonna have a flood?’

  ‘The river’s high,’ she said. ‘Another couple of inches and it’ll be over the towpath. I might have to move out of my house.’

  ‘Come and stay with me,’ he said. ‘Be it ever so humble it’ll be nice and dry.’

  Marie smiled. ‘Celia’s already offered me a room at her place. Thanks.’ She joined him at the window, looked down on scurrying figures with umbrellas, a middle-aged woman in a tartan plastic raincoat and a street person standing outside the Mansion House with a tin whistle and a dripping nose. The sky was padded with black cloud. It was as if the divinity had gone into clinical depression and His system had developed an immunity to all the usual drugs. He wasn’t interested any more.

  Marie was wearing a loosely knitted jumper from French Connection with a pair of trousers in shiny black cotton and new laced boots of Spanish leather. She was a large-boned woman, above average weight but well capable of carrying it. She wore her hair short and was conscious of an overbite which gave her face an interest that eclipsed mere prettiness.

  ‘Do we have any work?’ she asked.

  Sam shook his head. ‘Not a lot. There’s routine stuff that keeps Geordie busy. And there was the Nottingham job last week, but the telephone doesn’t ring. I keep thinking they’ve disconnected us.’

  ‘I suppose it gives me more time to work at the Centre, but if I don’t earn money the bills don’t get paid.’

  The Centre was a women’s refuge where Marie helped out whenever the detective business was in the doldrums. She’d been a nurse and had the ability to listen as well as a well-honed social conscience, and there were times when she was utterly convinced that she could live without men.

  ‘If you need money...’ Sam said.

  ‘Thanks.’ She smiled. ‘I’d just ask. You’d be the first person I thought of, you being so rich. But I’m not broke, there’s money in the bank. And tomorrow or the next day or next week, whenever, some time soon you’ll be telling me we’ve got so much work we can’t manage. Celia’ll be going out on surveillance and you’ll be bringing in the part-timers like JD and Janet.’

  ‘This is true,’ Sam said. ‘Whatever goes around comes around. We’ve got a million customers, it’s just a marketing problem. You busy at the Centre?’

  ‘Always. Why is it that a young mother with a baby attracts a guy with shit for brains and fists the size of lump hammers?’

  ‘Sometimes seems like understanding or tenderness are too much to hope for,’ he said. ‘The culture these guys move in regards reason as unacceptably intelligent.’

  ‘You blame the culture?’

  The government if you like, the way we’ve let ourselves be organized. I don’t have those kinds of answers, Marie. I’m a PI not a medic. My job’s to blow the bad guys away.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘Belief isn’t any kind of answer.’

  ‘Neither is violence.’

  ‘Not in the long run,’ he said.

  ‘Have you ever hit a woman, Sam?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Does that mean you have?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Could mean I have but I’ve opted to forget it.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Only in self-defence, m’lawd.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I shot her,’ Sam said. ‘You know that. It’s not my best memory but I’d do it again in the same circumstances, it kept me alive to fight another day.’

  ‘What about Katherine?’

  ‘Did I hit her? Or did I kill her?’

  ‘I know you didn’t kill her.’

  ‘What’s the question, Marie?’

  ‘Who was she? Did I meet her?’

  ‘No, she was before your time. We were both drinkers. She got out. In a way her getting out was an encouragement to me. I found a way around it myself later, a few years later, but if someone else gets free it gives you strength. You don’t resent them, you appreciate the lesson. It’s good to know that something’s possible.’ Marie nodded encouragement.

  ‘We were young,’ he said. ‘I met her in a bar. It was opening time and she was more or less as pissed as I was. We were the only people in the place, six o’clock in the evening and drinking doubles. I was at the stage I could focus better if I kept one eye shut. The barman was a soak well and he told us the old joke about the drunk who c0uldn’t work out what his limit was because he always assed out before he reached it. And Katherine said she’d been in a bar earlier in the day and asked for the usual so the landlord carried her outside. And we were laughing together, all three of us, and I was supposed to tell a drunk joke but I couldn’t remember one and they both thought that was funnier than if I’d told a good one so we laughed some more.

  ‘I dunno how long we kept going that night. At some point I ended up at her place. It was one room somewhere and we slept together with the light on because she was frightened of the dark. Sometimes we’d go to bed during the day and we still had to sleep with the light on because Katherine would say we might wake up in the dark.

  ‘We were swimming in booze. We’d laugh a lot and we’d always come up with some kind of scam to get the money together for another bottle, or we’d fight like cat and dog and still come up with a solution. We convinced each other we were a good couple, we couldn’t live without each other. S
o we got married.’

  ‘Sounds like you were in full flight,’ Marie said.

  ‘No doubt about it. I was half-crazy. When Donna and Bronte were killed I stopped sleeping. I used to stand at the corner of that street with a pad and a pen and jot down the number of every car that was over the speed limit. When I got a full sheet I’d take it round the police station and then go back to the corner and fill up another one. I did that for a year, never missed a day. Must’ve started taking a bottle with me about nine months in and soon the bottle became more important than watching the cars.

  ‘I’d wake up screaming in the street, sitting on the pavement, or the cops would put me in a cell. Bronte was two when she died. I’d play the impact over and over again in my head. The head-on collision with iron and steel at ninety miles an hour, her body sailing through the air like a missile. And I’d know it was a dream, although I wasn’t really asleep, it was a vision, a nightmare. The whole thing would take place in silence, like a film when the sound has been lost. And then I’d be awake, wide awake again and back in the world, and Bronte and Donna had both gone in the same fell swoop and it wasn’t a dream at all.’

  Marie touched his hand and stood beside him while they looked out at the rain. He’d still been a drunk when she first met him. The police had brought him into the hospital where she was in the final year of her SRN training. He’d got into a fight with a gang of squaddies; he had a fractured arm, two broken ribs, and his head and face had been used like a football. Before they left him one of them stabbed him in the neck with a sheath knife. By that time his drunk had lasted too many years. After they’d nursed him back to health he’d carried on drinking for another five.

  Sam laughed.

  ‘Something funny?’

  ‘When I came round,’ he said, ‘at the hospital, the police came to see me. Check if they should launch a murder hunt for the squaddies or give them a medal each. I was half-asleep and you came to the side of the bed with the Chief Superintendent - what was his name? - and he said, “What’s the prognosis?”

  ‘You told him, “Oh, his condition is very satisfactory.” And then the two of you wandered away towards the nurses’ station.

  ‘Very satisfactory? I thought. Must mean I’m going to die.’

  Marie smiled. ‘Didn’t stop you drinking though, did it?’

  Sam shook his head. It made me think,’ he said. ‘Made me realize I wasn’t the man I’d set out to be.’

  ‘And now you are?’

  ‘Still need to develop some humility.’

  ‘Shall I tell you something, Sam? About you?’

  ‘Don’t be bashful.’

  ‘You don’t talk about them much, but when you get around to telling about past relationships, how they failed, it’s always you who was at fault.’

  ‘It’s because I’m the centre of my own universe,’ he said. ‘I look at the world from my point of view and I report what I see. If I could see it from Katherine’s point of view it’d look different.’

  ‘But which is right?’

  Sam laughed. ‘And where is reality?’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s somewhere in between or it could be in another place entirely, somewhere we haven’t looked yet.’

  The telephone rang and he turned to his desk and picked up the handset. ‘Sam Turner,’ he said.

  ‘The detective?’ asked the voice in his ear. Sounded like a mobile connection. A voice which was croaky and at the same time slightly nasal. An uncertain individual; not a voice to trust.

  ‘That’s me. Can I help?’

  ‘I need someone to investigate my staff,’ the man said. ‘Things are going missing.’

  ‘And you are?’ Sam asked.

  ‘The name’s Bonner,’ the man said. ‘But I don’t want to speak over the phone. Could you come to my home?’

  ‘Address?’ Sam reached for his pad.

  ‘I’m in Leeds. Do you know Headingley?’

  ‘The cricket ground?’

  ‘No,’ the voice said. ‘North Lane. There’s a pub at the top called the Taps.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘I know the place.’

  He scribbled the house number and street on his pad. ‘Today?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m away today,’ the guy said with the speed of a young Mozart. ‘But tomorrow morning would be good. Nine o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll be there, Mr Bonner.’

  Sam replaced the handset in its cradle and looked at it. ‘Something wrong?’ Marie asked.

  ‘No, it’s work,’ he said. ‘Exactly what we need. Something odd about the guy is all. He seemed to be winging it, making it up as he went along.’

  Marie made a face. ‘That’s the main drawback to this business,’ she said. ‘The customers. Some of them are fine but we get a higher percentage of slimeballs than North Yorkshire Water.’

  11

  After he was released from the police station Ruben Parkins went back to his flat on the Lenton Boulevard and thought it through. The police had believed him. When he’d found himself in the interview room he’d expected to be fitted up. In the past, whenever he’d found himself facing a couple of them in that room or another room identical to it in other police stations, they’d always been absolutely sure he’d done the deed. Sometimes they’d been right and sometimes they’d been wrong, but either way they’d do their damnedest to pin the crime on Ruben. Every other time but this. They didn’t suspect that he’d killed Kitty, even though he was on the spot and covered in her blood.

  The difference was Kitty herself. She had brought something intangible to his life. She would have laughed if he’d said that to her. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she’d have said. ‘Everything you are was already in place when we met. All I did was help you find something that was part of you.’

  She had natural modesty. Ruben had never met that before. Not like Kitty’s. Most people you met, they were falling over themselves to prove how great they were. Among guys it was direct competition, the strut or the curled lip, the way they’d show off their women or their biceps or the length of their schlongs. Women were subtle sometimes but even the quiet ones with no equipment weren’t modest, not really. They just drew attention to themselves without all the hullabaloo. They shouted as loud as the leggy blondes but they used a different language.

  Kitty was different because she was interested in Ruben Parkins. She caught a glimpse of something in him that, from time to time, he’d suspected might be there but had I never found the courage to believe in. ‘You complete me,’ j she’d said. ‘All the other men I’ve known were aliens. 1 Some of them were nice and some of them were shite but: either way you could take them or leave them. They were wallpaper, didn’t really touch me. But with you it’s like finding a key. You open me up; you make me grow.’

  ‘It’s the same for me,’ he’d told her. ‘I’m a different man, someone I didn’t know I could be. Weird.’

  She’d smiled. ‘It’s not weird, it’s love. That’s what it does to people. I love you.’

  And it was like a jolt going through his body. Because women had said that to him before but it had been an act, one of the things you said when you were into a heavy sweat. And he’d said it back a couple of times and it hadn’t meant a thing. It was convention, manners, like -saying thank you to your aunties when they gave you a present for your birthday. Even when the present was something naff like a colouring book.

  But when Kitty said it to him and he said it back to her, that was something else. That was closer to religion or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or a fuckin’ space rocket. Ruben didn’t know what exactly.

  It was like discovering that an obvious and blatant lie was the only truth in the world. That everything you’d given credence to in the past was false, full of holes, designed to lead you into corruption and despair. The truth was what the world said it was and all your fighting and opposition to it hadn’t made one jot of difference. There was a rock there, beneath all the chaos and confusion. There was nothing to worry about or to kick a
gainst. There was certainty.

  Kitty.

  Kitty and Ruben.

  Together they could conquer the world.

  He went down to the Skoda but it wasn’t in its usual parking space. It would still be outside Kitty’s house. He could picture it there, up against the kerb, after they’d put her body in the ambulance and hustled him into the patrol car.

  He walked, letting the re-runs play over inside his head. The water splashing down the side of the bath, the sodden carpet, the blood-soaked bedclothes. He’d clasped her to his chest and refused to part with her when the two cops arrived. They’d held his arms while the paramedics prised her from his grasp.

  The neighbours had come out of their houses and formed a circle around him. Ruben and his dead lover pacing the tarmac; she a rag doll in his arms, he howling at the bright day which had promised so much. And Kitty was weightless in his arms, as if her physical substance had departed together with her life. That fracture of her spine in the crook of his arm. Her body telling him how the murderer’s knife had plunged through her chest and pierced her heart, but as if that wasn’t enough he had thrust deeper still, smashing through the fibrous cartilage of the discs and vertebrae and rupturing the spinal cord.

  Why?

  Why would anyone do that to Kitty? There were fifty other houses in the street and they had all been left untouched. This killing seemed so personal: the overflowing bath, the intimacy of the bedroom setting. This was no random killing, not a lone psychopath on the nighttime streets of Nottingham. This was a planned crime, Kitty had been targeted. But by whom? And what had she done to bring out such wanton violence in the murderer?

  The Skoda was where he had left it. The front of Kitty’s house had been sealed off from the road and the constable on duty refused to let Ruben through.

  ‘But I know the house,’ he explained. ‘I might see something you would miss. A clue?’

  ‘You’ll have to talk to the governor,’ the cop said. ‘I can’t let you go inside. I’m not allowed in myself. SOCOs only allowed in there.’