The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  The other thing about Sam’s partners was that they didn’t stay. Angeles, his current flame, had already lasted longer than most. She was blind, of course, which must be part of the answer as to why she was still around. She was another one who was far too young for him and yet they seemed happy together. She was vulnerable because of her lack of sight but she was also strong. And she was emotionally and financially independent. So all in all there were more pluses than minuses.

  Marie liked Angeles. You could talk to her and it didn’t have to be about drinking or TV soaps or about how men were from Mars.

  She asked for St Catherine’s Index in the Central Library and when the librarian found it Marie asked her if it was popular.

  ‘It’s used a couple of times a week. Sometimes more.’

  ‘All the marriage records are in here, right?’

  ‘It’s fairly comprehensive.’

  ‘So if I wanted to find a marriage record and I didn’t know how to do it, would you do it for me?’

  ‘Of course, but it’s easy to use.’

  ‘I’m a private detective,’ Marie told her. ‘I’m trying to find out if anyone has been making enquiries about Sam Turner.’

  ‘Is he the one who’s gone missing? The one who killed those women?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a suspect. The police want to talk to him.’ The librarian took a deep breath. ‘How exciting,’ she said. ‘What’s your question?’

  ‘Has anyone asked about marriage records for Sam Turner in the last few weeks? Or do you recall the name or description of anyone who has recently used the St Catherine’s Index?’

  ‘Is this what you call a long-shot?’ the librarian asked.

  Marie smiled. ‘Yeah. We’re scraping the barrel.’

  ‘I don’t recall anyone asking about that particular name but I’m not the only one who works here. I’ll ask my colleagues and get back to you. Do you want to leave a phone number?’

  Marie gave her her card. ‘You can get me at either of those numbers.’

  ‘We know most of the people who use St Catherine’s,’ the librarian said. ‘Many of them use it frequently. They’re interested in family history, ancestry, genealogy. People are fascinated by it.’

  ‘So if someone new came in you’d probably remember?’

  ‘It’s not out of the question. If it’s been a busy day I can’t remember anything that happened when I get back home. But if it’s slower I remember the interesting ones. I’ll remember you.’

  Marie let her have a faint smile, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘All right,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll ask around and come back to you.’ She waved Marie’s visiting card in the air like a miniature fan.

  Back at the office Marie got the keys for the Montego and asked Celia for some cash.

  ‘As in wages?’ Celia asked. She was wearing an ancient black dress with slits at both sides. Tango shoes with a chain around her ankle. She’d been quieter than usual since the death of Nicole Day in Leeds and Sam’s disappearance. Although she was over seventy, Marie usually thought of her as much younger. But today Celia looked her age. The extravagant clothes and jewellery that she normally carried with aplomb seemed excessive and overindulgent. She could have been an ageing transvestite.

  ‘No, expenses. I’m going to Nottingham. Might have to stay overnight.’

  ‘I’ve got about a hundred. If you need more than that I’ll have to go to the bank.’

  ‘A hundred’ll do. I’ve got a credit card.’

  ‘Be careful, Marie. Whoever’s behind these killings won’t let anyone stand in their way.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow, maybe tonight if I run out of people to talk to. I don’t expect to go head to head with a psychotic butcher. Besides I was never married to Sam Turner, which seems to be a guarantee of immunity in this case.’

  Celia shook her head. ‘I don’t know if anyone’s immune.’ As an afterthought she added: ‘Have you had something to eat?’

  Marie laughed. ‘I’ll get a sandwich on the way.’

  ‘Pity. I got us a couple of pork chops for tonight.’

  ‘They’ll keep,’ Marie said. ‘Put them in the fridge.’

  As she was ready to leave she looked back at Celia who gave her a quick smile and looked away.

  ‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ Marie said. ‘Yes, there is,’ Celia said. ‘I’m still not sure how wrong.’

  ‘Tell me?’

  ‘I’ve been having these headaches. The side of my head goes numb, inside, as if part of my brain has frozen. Sometimes my sight goes wonky, I see things in twos and threes.’

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘A few weeks, couple of months. I’ve been to see a specialist, had a scan.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Inconclusive. There’s some kind of growth. They think it’s still growing.’

  Marie wrapped her arms around Celia and hugged her.

  ‘I’ve tried to get a prognosis out of the medics but they won’t commit themselves. I’m so old, my whole metabolism is so slow that it could take for ever. If it accelerates they’re worried I might develop epilepsy.’

  ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘Another scan in a few months. See if the growth has got any bigger.’

  ‘A few months? That’s a good sign in itself,’ Marie said. Celia smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. They don’t seem to think that death is imminent. But they don’t always tell the truth.’

  ‘I won’t go to Nottingham today,’ Marie said. ‘I’d be worrying about you all the time.’

  ‘You certainly will go,’ Celia told her. ‘If I’d thought you’d be so fussy, I wouldn’t have told you. And don’t say anything to the others. I can’t cope with baleful looks.’

  The late Katherine Turner’s house in Nottingham was boarded up. The police and forensic people had obviously finished with it because there was no one on sentry duty. The terrace was one of several that had been put up in the late-forties or early-fifties and the houses had been well maintained and refurbished over the years. The terrible act that had taken place in one of them and the subsequent nailing of chipboard panels over its windows and doors seemed to reflect on the whole terrace. The seemingly senseless and particularly brutal death of Katherine Turner had reverberated throughout the fabric of bricks and mortar, seeping like a stain through party walls and running along shared joists and roof-beams. The perpetrator of the crime had been in one house but he had left his mark on all of them. None of the curtains were fully drawn back and there was a silence about this part of the street that was tangible. It was like walking through the entrance of a great cathedral, the feeling of being in the presence of something unseen. But the cathedral feeling was usually benign, benevolent. Whereas Katherine Turner’s house and the others adjoining it seemed to embrace the aura of something much older and darker. Something, Marie thought, that you wouldn’t want to disturb from its slumbers.

  The woman next door was happy to talk. She introduced herself as Jade Chandler and at twenty-five years old was already a faded beauty. She had a light brown baby, the same colour as herself, in a sling on her stomach. In Jade’s sitting room Marie had to step over half-completed jigsaw-puzzles and wooden trucks and action-man figures. They sat opposite each other at a table piled high with dirty washing, lemonade bottles, an ash-tray and the remains of several tabloid newspapers which had been used for Origami and confetti-making.

  ‘You knew Katherine?’

  Jade Chandler smiled. ‘She was my neighbour. We didn’t live in each other’s pocket but we talked from time to time. She’d baby-sit occasionally and she’d bring me things from the shops if I couldn’t get there.’

  ‘Did she have a job?’

  ‘Yes, she worked for a letting agency. Flats and houses. She made sure people were paying the rent and that the houses were maintained properly. Fought landlords to get fire certificates. She liked to talk about it. I reckon she was goo
d at it.’

  ‘Boyfriends?’

  ‘From time to time. Nobody special until the last one.’

  ‘The guy who found her?’

  ‘Yes, Ruben, she liked him. The others were ships passing in the night. She could take or leave them. But she had no kids and she’d get lonely sometimes. You know what it’s like.’

  Marie nodded. She knew exactly what it was like. Sometimes the desire to be held by a man, to be up close against someone else’s skin or inhale their scent, was so urgent it was like a pain. You lost a certain amount of judgement when loneliness echoed around your being, your standards and values tended to slip.

  ‘Some of the guys she’d bring home, they were just wrong.’

  ‘Any of them wrong enough to kill her?’ Marie asked. Jade thought about it. She ran her hand over the sleeping baby on her stomach. ‘The police asked the same question,’ she said. ‘But who can say? Katherine would hook up with a guy from time to time. He’d be a loner or a married man who was looking for something extra. All of them were inadequate in one way or another. Weasels or opportunists, people who had failed in a hundred other relationships. There was one man who was subnormal, a speech defect and he’d never learned to shave properly, Dennis. Another who was thirty years older than her, an old-age-pensioner.

  ‘Most of them were a waste of time but I couldn’t see them as murderers. Not like that, anyway. So coldblooded. I think any of us could kill in a rage, on the spur of the moment. But whoever killed Katherine planned it. The guys she knew, most of them were incapable of planning. They were like leaves in the wind.’

  ‘So you don’t think it was a boyfriend?’

  ‘No. They didn’t hang around, anyway. She wouldn’t play them off against each other. Since she’d been going with Ruben Parkins she hadn’t seen anyone else.’

  ‘And Ruben, what was he like?’

  ‘At first I thought he was the same. He’d been in prison and he had that machismo thing. Flashy type. He’d wear shades at night, know what I mean? Tattoos, big shoulders, ear-ring, chemical blue suits, chewing gum, hair-gel. It was like he didn’t want to be left out of anything. I’ve seen him wearing Day-Glo socks and decorative chains on his shoes.’ She laughed. ‘Imagine! He was a fashion nightmare. There was so much going on with him you couldn’t focus on who he was.’

  ‘But Katherine liked him?’

  ‘Yes. She saw through all that stuff immediately. She saw his vulnerability. Sounds corny, but she saw the good in him. And he responded to her, listened to her. He modified his opinions, dropped some of his masks. He took her shopping with him when he wanted a new sweater. He was turning into Mr Nice Guy.’

  ‘He sounds a bit flaky, though,’ Marie said. ‘A man who would let a woman take over his personality like that.’

  Jade shook her head. ‘He wasn’t flaky. It happened slowly. Ruben had never learned how to live. When he met Katherine he realized she could teach him. For her part she’d never met a man who loved her for herself. They were good for each other. Each of them allowed the other one to grow. It was something to see. Something special.’

  ‘So Ruben’s not a suspect?’

  ‘No, he never was. He brought her body out of the house and round to my door. He was making noises like an animal. No one could have acted that. He was a man who had had his heart ripped out. She was everything to him.’

  Marie kept quiet. She didn’t know if she believed that a woman could be everything to a man. No man had ever been everything to her. Oh, way back when she was sixteen it might have seemed like that. When her hormones were leaping and dancing around like a chorus from SwanLake. Or even later, when she and Gus were planning a family and it seemed like they’d be together for the rest of their lives. But she hadn’t been in touch with reality on either of those occasions.

  ‘Did you like Katherine Turner?’

  Jade Chandler looked at her and smiled. ‘Yes, I liked her. She was a good neighbour.’

  ‘Not a friend?’

  Jade shook her head. ‘She was older than me. We weren’t friends. But we could have been if we’d spent more time together.’

  Marie gave her a few seconds to digest her own words. ‘So who do you think killed her? You must have a theory.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ Jade said, ‘because I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what we told the police.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My partner Ben and I. He’s at work at the moment. It was a few months ago. I’d lost my ring. We’d been up late with the children and it must have been one-thirty, two o’clock in the morning.’ She looked down at the sleeping child. ‘This one had just gone off to sleep and the other two were finally settled. I said I’d put the kettle on, make us a nightcap, and Ben went outside with a torch to see if he could find the ring.’

  ‘In the middle of the night? In the dark?’

  ‘You lose your marbles when you’ve got three kids under five. Now you mention it, it was a weird thing to do, but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. And he didn’t find the ring because it wasn’t out there. It turned up a couple of days later in the bathroom. But that’s another story. Anyway there was a man outside -Ben didn’t see his face. He got an impression of his size, about average height and weight, and the man was wearing a black overcoat and a trilby. It was something to see anyone down the street at that time in the morning but the funny thing was Ben said he’d looked up and down the street a couple of seconds before and there’d been no one there then.

  ‘He hadn’t heard anyone either. But when he turned the torch on at the gate the beam fell on the man’s feet. Highly polished shoes, that’s what Ben remembered, and the man was wearing those trousers with braid down the outside seam. You could see them as he walked off down the street.’

  ‘Braid?’ Marie said. ‘As in a uniform?’

  ‘No, not like that. More like the trousers you see when someone is in full evening dress.’

  ‘Last time I saw someone wearing them he was waiter.’

  ‘Or ballroom dancers, they wear them sometimes. But the shoes weren’t dancing shoes.’

  ‘And you think this was the murderer?’ Marie asked. ‘Why?’

  ‘He wasn’t in the street when Ben went outside. The only place he could have been was in Katherine’s garden.’

  ‘Another boyfriend?’

  ‘No. She would have mentioned it. She was with Pete Lewis at the time and she didn’t two-time. Katherine had morals.’

  ‘But did you ask her about it?’

  ‘Yes, I asked the next day. She didn’t know anyone who wore a trilby. And it wasn’t that important, we let it drop, forgot about it. It only came up again when Katherine was killed.’

  Marie liked Jade Chandler. A strangely old-fashioned girl, open and straightforward. She reminded her of an era when falling in love wasn’t complicated by the spectre of children on alternate weekends. The other neighbours were not so helpful. When Katherine was alive they’d distrusted and envied her, especially the string of assorted men she’d brought back to her house, and obviously equated her death with some unthinking and ancient code of just deserts. Neighbours from Hell, the kind of people who thought you got AIDS from homosexuality.

  Braid. A killer with braid down the seam of his trousers. This was the first indicator they had had. Before they had been looking at everyone in the world. Now the field had narrowed down.

  Marie parked the Montego in the NCP car park on Mount Street and walked to the offices of Shaw & Shaw -Let Us Let It - Estate Agents and Letting Agency, which was situated on a corner position in a dark street behind the Playhouse. There was a receptionist with bright red lipstick who answered the phone and an office boy with one of those mouths that won’t close.

  ‘Can I speak to either of the partners?’ Marie asked.

  The receptionist pursed her painted lips and said, ‘No. Not without an appointment, I’m afraid.’ She wore a floral-pattern dress with a grey cardigan draped around her shoulders.
She had just missed being attractive and dressed to accentuate the fact.

  ‘I’m only here for the day. I wanted to talk to someone about Katherine Turner.’

  ‘You can talk to me, if you like. And Saul. You don’t mind talking about Katherine, do you, Saul?’

  The boy was a contortionist. He managed to shake his head in such a way that his bottom jaw remained stationary. A minor Vesuvius was erupting on his forehead.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ the receptionist continued. ‘Mrs Shaw’s been up to here since Katherine, well... you know. Katherine dealt with the rented properties and now Mrs S has to do it all herself.’

  ‘And Mr Shaw?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Well, he’s out of it, isn’t he? Hasn’t been to the office for years. If he walked in today I don’t know if I’d recognize him. He’s got that disease... turns you into an old codger. Mrs S has someone come in at home to see to him while she’s running the business.’

  ‘Did you know Katherine Turner well?’

  ‘Well as anyone, I should think. We saw more of her before the accident than we did of Mrs S.’

  ‘Why do you call it an accident?’

  ‘It sounds nicer, don’t you think? The other word’s more violent.’

  ‘Murder. She was murdered.’

  ‘I don’t like saying it. Neither does Saul, do you, Saul?’ He swallowed some air but the fly-trap remained open. Marie saw him ten years down the line, a captain of industry, a magnate in the tradition of Robert Maxwell, Nick Leeson, Jonathan Aitken and Lord Archer. Perhaps he was Mrs S’s nephew or the son of a friend? Another instance of the old school tie and nepotism saving British industry from any form of change or innovation. Vesuvius threw out a fine spray of lava when he shook his head.

  ‘Did she talk about boyfriends?’ Marie asked.

  ‘She talked about Ruben all the time. Ruben this, Ruben that. You would’ve thought he was Prince Charming to hear her go on about him. But he came to collect her from the office a couple of times and he was, well, you know.’

  ‘No,’ Marie told her. ‘I don’t know. What was he?’