The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  Ruben eyeballed the guy but he was never going to shift. He looked straight ahead as if he was part of the Queen’s guard; should’ve had a busby on his head.

  They kept him waiting for an hour in the police station. Even then he didn’t get to see the Detective Chief Inspector who had interviewed him the previous day. A Detective Sergeant with a permanent smirk on his face took Ruben into a small interview room behind the front desk. ‘We don’t have any news,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s the chief suspect?’

  ‘Earlier we thought there might be a connection with her ex-husband. But we can’t prove he was in Nottingham. He has witnesses who place him in York.’

  ‘But you think he did it?’

  ‘We’re following several leads at the moment, sir.’ j They had nothing. If they were following several leads that meant they didn’t have a clue. Ruben would have to find the killer himself. He’d talk to everyone who knew Kitty and somehow he’d track the murderer down. He pushed his chair away from the table and got to his feet.

  ‘You should have some counselling, son,’ the Detective Sergeant said. ‘See your doctor and set something up. Or ring these people, they’re there to help you.’ He handed over a card with the telephone number of Victim Support. Logo in the top corner of a dark cloud and a yellow sun rising over it.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ Ruben said. He turned and left the room and walked into the city. Something had changed in him. He felt no sense of urgency but in that tiny room in the police station he had committed himself to avenging Kitty’s death. His own life held no joy for him now. With splendid clarity he knew that there was only one thing left for him to accomplish. Everything else was dross.

  Back in his flat he wrote down the name of every person he could think of who had known Kitty. He racked his brain to recall everyone she had ever mentioned, however distant. When he’d finished he sat back in the chair and looked at the wall. He was like Superman, as if he had X-ray eyes and could pierce through bricks and mortar with his vision. But beyond the walls there was only Kitty mothballed in his memory. Kitty as she had been in life. Her hair and fair skin, her bright eyes and the brilliant promises she could no longer deliver.

  He put his mobile and camera on the passenger seat and filled the Skoda’s tank with petrol, headed out towards the Ml and took the slip-road to join the north carriageway. Kitty hadn’t talked much about her ex, Sam Turner, and she’d never said anything to indicate she was frightened of the man. In fact, there had been a wistfulness about her when she’d remembered her marriage, not enough to make Ruben actively jealous because Kitty always let him know that he was number one, but there had been times late at night when Ruben had definitely seen the ex-husband as a threat.

  Could be him. Ruben remembered someone in the joint telling him that most murders were domestic. Either the guy tops his missis with an axe or a broken bottle or she finally gets it together and feeds him Warfarin for breakfast - the point being that the statistics about murders are misleading. There’s all these little old ladies scared to go out of the house because the murder rate’s going up every year. They sit at home and watch killings on the box instead. But they’ve got nothing to worry about really; they could walk around all night and nobody’d bother them because the guy most likely to blow them away is the one they go visit in the cemetery on a Sunday morning.

  This life, Ruben thought, it hasn’t got anything going for it. You start with demons on all sides and they chip away at you until you’re on your knees. Then you’re given Kitty and you fall on your feet again. Least, you think you’ve fallen on your feet. That’s what it feels like, you’re so up you’d have to be psychic to remember that there’s no substance under you. The devil’s got you by the tail and he’s shifting the parts of the universe around all the time so you can’t see where anything fits. You think you’re set up with a woman by your side and the woman is telling you there’s nothing to worry about and she’s the one you were looking for and you’re the one she’s been looking for and now you’ve found each other. It’s like the whole world is a fairy story and you two’ve got the starring parts.

  So you arrive where she lives to take her out for the day and she’s drained of blood and there’s a hole in her chest where someone tried to cut her heart out. The fairy story is a nightmare, the demons never went away, you’re back on your knees and nothing fits. It was all illusion.

  Some prick in a Jaguar honked his horn, telling Ruben to get out of the fast lane, pulled up to within a metre of the Skoda’s rear end. Ruben stayed in the lane, slowed his speed a little, gave the guy the finger. The driver of the Jag waited for a gap in the traffic and overtook him on the inside. Ruben gritted his teeth and took off after him, pumping the Skoda for everything it could give. No contest. The Jag pulled ahead with ease and when they came to the junction with the M18 Ruben turned off and let it go- He wasn’t here to play around with guys in fast cars.

  On the A1 he pulled into a Little Chef and got himself a cup of coffee and a full breakfast with extra bacon. For a moment there he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. There’d been a tuna sandwich in the police station the previous day, a couple of biscuits in the saucer every time they gave him a cup of tea.

  He sat back .for a time when he’d finished eating, thought about his world. He should keep the milk-round going. It got him out of bed in the mornings and provided readies. He didn’t want to go back on benefits, the hassle of all that. And after he’d finished work there was still a good chunk of the day left for him to track down the bastard who’d wasted Kitty.

  He’d have lost some of his customers already. You can’t leave people for two days without milk before they start looking for another supplier. But there were plenty of them who’d sign up again if he delivered tomorrow. There were a lot of them owed him money anyway, women who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. That was economics. It wasn’t so much to do with supply and demand like they taught you on the small business startup course. The real key to economics was market share, getting rid of the competition, buying them out or making it so difficult for them that they threw in the towel. When Ruben had started the milk-round he was going to take over the world, corner the market, become king of milk distribution, maybe expand horizontally into Production. Corner that market as well.

  Kitty never understood that. She was a woman. For her the world was about sharing and fair-play, even arguing that he should give milk away if his customers had children and couldn’t afford to pay. That was another reason Ruben liked her so much, because she had compassion and thought that everyone should have humanitarian principles, even the government. Ruben ‘ had never given milk away but he could see it as a possibility. Something to work towards. Once he got the market share, he argued, then he’d be in a position to be generous.

  Something else nagging away at the back of his brain. If he didn’t have a job at all he’d start brooding and before he knew what was happening he’d be knocking back too much drink, end up taking it all out on some schmuck down the boozer. On one level that would work for him, like it always had in the past. You ignore the real crap that is fucking up your life and find someone you can slap around, maybe break a few bones. Therapy. You end up back in the can and blame the system for being unfair, blame your folks for not giving you a good start in life.

  But if he did that now, whoever had killed Kitty would go free. Ruben had never come across justice. When the word came up in conversation there was a part of him that wanted to laugh. Justice? What’s that?

  Only now there was a chance for justice, because it wasn’t going to be meted out by the cops or the courts, it was going to be administered by Ruben Parkins. In fact Ruben was justice. He was the thing itself, the concept, and he was also its executor.

  Justice should be about justness. Making sure that everyone got what they deserved. The world didn’t understand that. They only understood the statue, that goddess with her scales and her sword. But the scales and
the sword weren’t reality, or they hadn’t been up to now. With Ruben in charge the scales would weigh out how much Kitty’s life was worth and the sword would chop mercilessly into the flesh of the man who’d sent her to her maker. Ruben would be just, impartial, he would ensure that everyone received their due.

  He paid for his breakfast and got back behind the wheel of the Skoda. At junction 45 he left the motorway and followed the signs to York, watching his speed on the A64. He pulled into the park-and-ride centre on the outskirts of town and took a bus into the city. Had a seat behind a couple of German tourists wrapped in waterproof clothing. In the seat opposite was a woman who looked like Kitty might have looked when she was twenty, only she couldn’t smile, not even with her eyes.

  The bus put him down in the centre of York and he stopped to watch the swollen river breaking free from its banks. Ruben was one of a gaggle of tourists and sightseers looking down from the Ouse bridge. The river had flooded King’s Staith and swamped a pub and a restaurant and cut off the houses along the waterfront. In the pale sunlight the rising waters didn’t seem to pose a threat and parents lifted their children so they could look over the parapet of the bridge and watch the unthinking power of natural forces unfolding and invading the preserves of human beings.

  Ruben wondered if it would go on for ever. If the waters would continue to rise until there was no trace of the pub and restaurant. If the bridge would be swept away and all the people with it. If this was God’s revenge on humanity for allowing Kitty to be taken from the world. From now on there would be nothing but rain, the towns and villages and cities would be obliterated. York Minster, which had towered above the city for eight hundred years, would be reduced to rubble under the swirling waters. The priests and the choirboys would become food for fishes, their bloated corpses useful only as landing stages for exhausted birds.

  And at some point in the distant future a latterday Noah in a hastily converted river boat would release a pigeon, and when the bird did not return there would appear a vision of Kitty’s face and the sailor would deduce that the waters were receding. It’d be a new start for the world and all the children would learn about the murder and the floods and how a huge vision of Kitty’s face had filled the sky on a new dawn.

  But that would only happen if there was a God. And if there had been a God He would never have let Kitty be killed in the first place.

  Ruben enquired his way to the Central Library and found a copy of the York telephone directory. The Sam Turner Detective Agency was situated in St Helen’s Square, only five minutes’ walk away. The woman at the desk drew a map with a ballpoint pen, showing him how to find the place. An L for the library and a large misshapen H for St Helen’s Square.

  Ruben sat on the bench outside the library and dialled the number on his mobile.

  A female voice said: ‘Sam Turner Detective Agency.’

  ‘Sam Turner, please,’ Ruben said into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Just a moment, I’ll get him. Who’s calling?’

  Ruben closed the keyboard cover on the phone and cut off the call. He tucked the mobile into his pocket and let a smile spread over his face. So the guy was there, available.

  In St Helen’s Square he found the office by a wooden plaque on its wall. He took up position on the other side of the square ensuring that he’d see the guy as soon as he came to the door. He made sure that his camera was switched on, that the zoom function was working. He knew what Sam Turner looked like because he could remember the guy’s face from the photographs in Kitty’s albums.

  There was a middle-aged woman waiting for someone in the square. Little blue suit and an expensive-looking floral stole. Tinted glasses to filter out the grey of the day. Strappy shoes and a pair of legs could’ve belonged to a teenager or a film star. Legs built for high summer and blue swimming pools. What was fascinating about her was the way she held her head; straight, tilted backwards as if she was balancing something on it. Maybe it was her bank account?

  The rains came suddenly and people ran for cover. Betty’s tea shop was packed within a couple of minutes. Ruben pushed his back against the wall and stood his ground. The downpour lasted three, four minutes and it was over. Sam Turner came out of the office door and hesitated for a moment at the top of the stone steps. He was trim, wearing a short black jacket with a mandarin collar, black jeans and shoes. He was older than in the pictures Kitty had had of him. There was nothing boyish about his face which had become an amalgam of angles and jowls. There were touches of grey in his hair but his body was still erect and quick. What betrayed him was his bearing, a kind of natural arrogance, a stubborn certainty of his place in the world. There was power there - not necessarily physical power although the guy could obviously look after himself. Charisma, maybe that was it. The ability to look as though he had God on his side.

  Turner moved to his left and made for the entrance to Stonegate. Ruben took a couple of shots with his zoom but could only get the man’s profile. Breaking cover he ran across the square, cutting the detective off, clicking away with his camera as he moved. By the entrance to Stonegate he stood his ground and took a couple of full-face shots of the guy.

  Sam Turner was a couple of metres away and stopped in his tracks as if he might be considering posing for the camera. He looked behind him to check that the guy with the camera wasn’t focusing on someone else. Then he turned back and said, ‘What the...? What you doing, man?’ Real confusion on his face.

  Ruben took another photograph, made sure he had what he’d come for. Then he turned away and walked quickly along Davygate.

  He heard Sam Turner call after him but took no notice, kept on walking.

  When he heard Turner’s footsteps and felt the guy’s hand on his arm, Ruben turned quickly and brought up his knee.

  As he increased his pace and distanced himself from the man crumpled on the wet pavement, Ruben reflected that the detective still had some balls. If slightly crushed at the moment. The thing about having balls was, you had to be able to look after them.

  12

  Sam was sprawled in the chair with his legs spread in front of him. His right foot was balanced on a wooden stool and his left on a low table. He held a cushion over his groin and to avert the pain held himself still and tried to concentrate on Springsteen’s lyrics to ‘Hungry Heart’ which Geordie had put on the CD player. Geordie had his dog Barney and daughter Echo with him, and he was explaining to both of them what had happened to his boss.

  ‘Most people,’ he said, ‘guys like me and Barney, we’ve got a couple of grapes hanging down between our legs. But Echo doesn’t because she’s not a guy, she’s a girl like her mum and girls have fannies, which are different, right? Now, Sam here, he used to have a couple of grapes hanging down like the other blokes but somebody came up to him in the street and turned his grapes into melons.’ Barney cocked his head to one side and glanced at Sam with something like sympathy in his brown eyes. Echo didn’t seem to take in her father’s words and was more concerned with trying to remove one of his eyes.

  Sam shifted his weight from one buttock to the other. 'Very droll,’ he said. ‘Not too far off the mark, though. They’ve shrunk back down now, more or less normal size. Except they ache, feel like somebody’s been playing snooker with them.’

  ‘Cue-ball syndrome,’ Geordie said. ‘I’ve had it myself. Got it on my honeymoon. What it does, it keeps you on the straight and narrow. That old argument about sex being for pleasure or for reproduction loses all significance. You don’t have to concern yourself with safe sex, wearing a condom or doing the rhythm method of birth control. All that stuff is for the rest of the world. The Pope, AIDS, all these great questions of our time, they go out the window. It’s a chance for you to concentrate on morality and on improving yourself as a person. You could take up meditation or write poetry. Nothing is entirely negative.’

  ‘You come to visit me or just to piss me off?’ Sam said. ‘I’ve been attacked here, Geordie. Sustained a physical inj
ury. Apart from that there’s the trauma of the thing, the shame of curling up in the middle of the street clutching your balls, a million tourists taking snaps. I’m supposed to be the tough-guy detective. I’ve got a reputation to protect.’

  ‘You should’ve just let the guy take his photographs. You could’ve offered to pose for him. He was probably a fan taking photographs for his scrapbook. Why’d you have to chase after him?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘I didn’t think. There was something wrong about it. I followed my instinct.’

  ‘You try to take the guy’s camera off him, what d’you think he’s gonna do?’

  ‘I wanted an explanation,’ Sam said.

  ‘And you got a knee in the balls.’

  ‘And I got you,’ Sam said. ‘So I don’t have to worry about beating myself up. I can rely on you to come round at the first opportunity and make me feel good about it.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Geordie asked.

  ‘Big guy.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘He was dark, swarthy, lean, sharp clothes, bright socks, six foot two.’

  ‘Fashion freak. You ever see him before?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘And I don’t wanna see him again.’

  ‘You want my opinion, you never will,’ Geordie said. ‘The guy wouldn’t’ve attacked you if you hadn’t gone after his camera. For some reason he wanted a photograph of you. Once he’d got that he was happy. Maybe thought you was a film-star.’

  ‘Gene Hackman,’ Sam said, ‘when he was younger. People always say I look like him. The Popeye Doyle period.’

  Geordie shifted Echo on his knee and gave her a slow wink. Sam had a sense of humour about most things but not his looks. He still believed he looked like that guy. Times in the past Geordie had tried to show him that Gene Hackman had a different-shaped face, that Gene Hackman was kinda good-looking in a sweet old-fashioned way. But Sam wouldn’t have it. According to him Providence had sorted it that he and Gene shared the same DNA.