by Baker, John
‘Common,’ said the receptionist. ‘You wouldn’t’ve given him a job. He looked like a criminal.’
Dear God, Marie said to herself. What kind of work is this, where you have to talk to morons all day long?
‘I was thinking about other boyfriends,’ she said. ‘Did she ever mention a dancer or a waiter?’
‘Tell you the truth,’ the receptionist said, ‘she liked them rougher than that. I don’t usually talk ill of the dead, Saul will bear me out about that, but Katherine was the type who wouldn’t look twice at a decent man. Always went for the exotic.'
‘A dancer?’
She shook her head. ‘No, Katherine had two left feet. She liked films and she bought CDs. Rock ’n’ roll. But she didn’t go dancing.’
‘What about a waiter?’
‘I don’t remember her talking about any waiter. She might have... someone who worked in a cafe, some kind of greasy spoon place. But if you’re thinking of a posh waiter in a proper restaurant, she probably wouldn’t.’
‘What I’m thinking of,’ Marie said, ‘is someone who wears trousers with braid down the seam of the leg.’
‘Oh, no, not Katherine. She’d never look twice at someone like that. What do you say, Saul?’
Saul performed something approximating to a smile followed by a grunt which moved a body of viscous fluid from his lungs to his tonsils.
Back at the car Marie tried to put a list together. Who wears braid on his trousers? If we dismiss the military there are people who wear it as part of the uniform for their job, like waiters or professional dancers. There are a whole group of other men who might have been to some kind of formal function, a wedding or a posh dinner party. And after that there are entertainers, singers perhaps, a compere at a cabaret, or someone in the theatre.
Then there was the question of the trilby. Who wears a trilby? Sam Turner did sometimes, but not a lot of men, not these days. It was a kind of affectation.
In itself a trilby would be something to think about, but in combination with dress trousers it was decidedly odd. With dress trousers you would expect a top hat, white gloves and a cane. And the overcoat was odd as well. With trousers like that it would be more fitting to wear a cape.
Did the man who was in Katherine Turner’s garden that night have these other clothes? If so, what had he done with them? In the full rig he would have looked like a professional gambler or a vampire. A roue. Where had he been before checking out Katherine’s house?
The other explanation, of course, was that he didn’t have the rest of the clothes. He’d bought the trousers at a second-hand or charity shop at the same time as he bought the trilby and the black overcoat. They were a working disguise, something to throw would-be pursuers off the scent. And to throw away once the deed was done.
But Marie was not here to make guesses. Not in the age of the CCTV camera.
The Riverside Student House was not on the side of the river. It was a quarter of a mile away from Katherine Turner’s house and constructed of redbrick with a black pantiled roof. A small plaque under the name of the house informed Marie that it was built in the year 1815, but some modernization had occurred since then, the double-glazing for example and the high-mounted camera that scanned the street outside.
The manager of the house, Jurgen Grimes, was a technophile and only too happy to show off his system. ‘Do you know about digital imaging?’ he asked Marie.
‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘I know the quality’s good.’
He sat her in front of a bank of screens in one of the upper rooms. ‘I’ve got eight cameras at this house,’ he said. ‘Another eight at Warwick House further along the street. There’s eight at Windermere, which is closer to the main campus, and there’s still room on the system for more when I need them.’
Most of the screens, some of which were split, showed internal scenes, halls and stairways, but others showed front and rear views from the various houses and tracked images of people and vehicles approaching from either direction.
‘Do you keep archived material?’ she asked.
‘How far back?’
Marie mentioned the date of Katherine Turner’s death.
‘That’s not archived,’ Jurgen said. ‘That’s still current. The system is set to compress stretches of time when nothing happens but any movement in the camera area is saved to the hard disk.’ He used the keyboard to enter the date. ‘What time of day?’
‘Night,’ Marie told him. ‘Try between midnight and around two in the morning.’
Jurgen pointed to the monitor to her right and Marie watched it change from a four-part split screen to a fullscreen view of the street outside the house. The digital clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen showed 12.01 a.m. but quickly changed to 12.17 when the camera locked on to a couple of girls swaying along the street with their arms around each other. They were around twenty years old and had been drinking. One of them was crying. The camera followed them until they drew level with the house and then switched and followed them along the street until they turned the corner and disappeared.
The digital clock leapt forward again, 12.51 a.m.
At the far end of the street was a figure with a hat. As he drew closer to the house it was apparent that the hat was a trilby and that the man was wearing a neat black overcoat. ‘Can you zoom in?’ Marie asked.
‘We’ll lose quality.’
‘That’s OK.’
Jurgen operated a mouse and the camera zoomed in on the area of the man’s face. But there was nothing recognizable there, only a mass of pixels. The camera pulled back fractionally but the man kept his head down, his eyes on the pavement, so that his features were hidden in shadows.
‘Damn!’ Marie said.
‘He’s avoiding the camera,’ Jurgen said. ‘But he’s white, we can see that.’ He entered something on the keyboard and the man’s height and weight flashed up on the screen. ‘He’s one metre seventy-eight and around sixty-eight kilos.’
‘That’s neat,’ Marie said. ‘Will it give us his name and address?’
Jurgen laughed. ‘The way the technology’s progressing it might be able to do that one day.’
‘Can you go down to his feet?’ Marie said. ‘His shoes.’ Jurgen moved the mouse down the length of the man’s body.
‘A little higher,’ Marie said. ‘I want to see the bottom of his trousers.’
The man was wearing grey trousers with a sharp crease. There was no braid on them.
‘Highly polished shoes, though,’ Jurgen said. ‘Shows someone who’s fastidious.’
‘Or he lives with someone who is,’ Marie said. ‘Maybe his mother?’
Jurgen let the image run and they watched the man pass the house and the camera switch to his rear view until he turned out of the street in the direction of the quiet avenue where Katherine Turner, unknowingly, waited for him.
‘Can you give me a copy of that?’ Marie asked.
‘If you give me an e-mail address I’ll send it as an attachment,’ he said. ‘You might lose quality but you can always come back here for a better view.’
Marie left the house and followed in the footsteps of the man in the trilby hat. She could feel Jurgen tracking her from his terminal as she walked the length of the street.
20
Sam watched an Oslo dawn through the windows of the flat in Osterhaus gate. He’d turned in around halfmidnight and gone deep for a couple of hours. Dreamed of the Christmas Eve that Holly walked out on him. It was all there in his mind, the tinsel and the whisky on his breath. Kind of dream if it was a play you’d say, Great set, but I couldn’t believe the characters, especially the guy.
He’d gone out and bought a turkey and eight bottles of Scotch in the morning. Brought them back home safely. He’d noticed the van outside the house but didn’t think it was anything to do with him. Blue transit with the rear doors open, straw inside, looked like it’d been used to transport animal feed.
Holly had the wardrobe door open and was piling
her clothes on the bed. ‘I’ve met someone,’ she told him. ‘I’m moving out. We want to spend Christmas together.’ Sam went downstairs, opened one of the bottles and filled a glass. He was truculent but buried it under an avuncular mask. Thought civilized thoughts. He brought the drink upstairs and said. ‘I’m in reasonable mode. I’m not gonna be violent. Who is it? Anyone I know?’
He didn’t know anyone who would have handled it better under the circumstances.
Holly was wary, but she answered. ‘No one you know. A doctor. Norwegian.’
‘Going up-market,’ he said. She gave him a look that might’ve been imported from the Arctic.
He told her, ‘I’m trying to be calm but there’s a residue of bitterness in me. And I just bought a turkey.’
‘I hope you’ll be happy together,’ Holly said.
‘I can’t believe you said that.’
‘Sam, most of the things I’ve said these last months, you haven’t heard.’ She collected the clothes in both arms and picked her way down the stairs. She got a cardboard box and flicked her way through the CDs, taking the ones she thought belonged to her. Sam looked over her shoulder, to make sure she didn’t take anything important. And there was something strange: they’d definitely been CDs in the dream when in reality they were vinyl, albums, maybe a few audio-tapes in there.
When she went outside to the van he poured himself a refill. Cheap and nasty, he could feel it going to work on his liver.
He sat on a chair in the kitchen and put his head in his hands. He caught glimpses of the world fragmenting around him. ‘It’s fucking Christmas,’ he said when she came back into the house.
‘I know the date, Sam.’
‘Christmas Eve.’ He was going to tell her he’d bought a turkey again but she hadn’t been too impressed the first time.
She looked good, as though she was on the verge of something. Sam hadn’t looked at her for a long time, or if he had he hadn’t seen her. She looked as though she had a life and she looked fired-up, as though she couldn’t wait for it to get going. Didn’t really matter what came, she’d make something of it.
‘You can take half the turkey,’ he said. ‘If there’s room in the van. I’ll get a saw.’
‘Look,’ Holly said, ‘it hasn’t worked, that’s all. We both tried and it didn’t come to anything. You haven’t been happy.’
It was true, he hadn’t been. Not for years, long before Holly came into his life. He didn’t understand what happiness had to do with it. While they were together there was hope, that’s how he’d seen it. He’d known it wasn’t enough, but as long as they had each other...
‘You’ll be all right?’ she asked him. ‘You won’t do anything silly?’
He wanted to laugh at that but why torture the woman? No, he wouldn’t do anything silly, he’d carry on making sensible and rational decisions. Soon as he’d finished these eight bottles he’d stop drinking and get a job. Become respectable, rich, maybe famous.
There was a moment, in real time and in the dream, when he thought of going down on his knees, begging her to stay, at least over Christmas. But he didn’t do it because it might have worked. He saw them stuffing the turkey together and sitting down at the table with it between them. And he knew that what he thought was hope was no hope at all. If he begged long and loud enough it would prolong the nightmare. Perhaps indefinitely. But he saw himself with the possibility of alternative nightmares. A man with the luxury of choice.
It was best that she ran off with her Norwegian doctor. And it was best that Sam stayed behind in the empty house. There was so much of him he didn’t know, so much of himself he had avoided. Sam Turner didn’t need a relationship, he needed time and space.
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ he told her. While he was forming the words he tried to make himself believe them. She didn’t reply and he didn’t have anything to add.
When she’d loaded up the van she came back into the house with a small blonde woman. ‘This is Sam,’ she said. ‘And, Sam, this is my friend, Inge Berit Andersen.’
He tried to get to his feet but it was too far to go. He held his glass in a salute and swigged the whisky down.
They left together, hand in hand like a couple of kids.
Sam lived with the turkey and the blowflies for ten days before he propped the carcass against the dustbin by the back gate.
He looked out at Osterhaus gate, found his clothes and got dressed. For a while he sat against the floor-to-ceiling stove which heated the flat and listened to Geordie talking to Janet in his sleep. He listened to Geordie talking to Echo in his sleep, and to Barney, and to his long-lost mother and his dead brother. This was the longest period that Geordie and Janet had been apart since they got hitched. Not surprising the kid was having withdrawal symptoms.
Sam thought about Angeles and wondered how she was doing. He shrugged his shoulders. She’d be all right. She was a strong woman. She’d managed without Sam Turner before they met and she’d manage OK now while he was away, on the run, trying to defend an old girlfriend against a madman.
He couldn’t phone Angeles. The police would trace the call. He could communicate with her through e-mail, using the Hotmail or Yahoo addresses, but he’d need an Internet cafe to do that and it was too early. The news told him that back in York the river level had risen by over four metres and was expected to rise again over the weekend. It was still raining up in the hills and the rivulets and tributaries were collecting every last drop of the stuff and channelling it towards the town.
In theory it didn’t have to stop. York could turn into another Venice and eventually a small Atlantis, buried and lost for ever in a watery grave. He imagined himself and Geordie arriving home and finding a bottomless lake where the town was. No trace of the lives they had known before. A vast expanse of water with a solitary bird soaring high in the sky.
He pulled on his boots and wrapped up warm to brave the night. He’d always made excuses about the women in his life - why he couldn’t get home one night, why he didn’t bother to phone another. Sam was a past master.at letting it roll on past, feeling somehow that if the world was really interested it would come knock on his door. They’d all been worth fighting for, the women in his life, but Sam had usually been looking the other way, chasing multi-coloured impossibilities. By the time he got home she’d left and taken the home with her.
He found a tiny Internet cafe by the station, three terminals, all Apple Macs. The proprietor was a teenage entrepreneur who looked like he never slept. Huge young man, cholesterol on the hoof. Sam settled himself down and logged on to his Hotmail account. He told Angeles about the flat and about how well Geordie was sleeping. He told her about his fears for Holly’s safety and how he hoped he wasn’t losing Angeles as well. I’m in a cool room, he said, a room made for long talks. He wrote words that don’t come easily and sent them unencrypted over the world-wide web, imagining them being reinterpreted by her Braille writer at the other end.
He told her about the 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong. And he told her he was working on the statistics, trying to get them into a different order. I hope my train hasn’t been and gone, he wrote.
He didn’t know how to finish the e-mail. He sat with his head in his hands for a long time, hoping for words that would make a difference. Then he told her he loved her and signed off.
*
Sam was back by the window when Geordie padded through from his bedroom. ‘You didn’t sleep?’ he said. ‘Is there something to eat?’
‘Cupboard over the sink,’ Sam told him. ‘Bran flakes, i Milk in the fridge.’
‘Bran? I can’t eat that, Sam. Janet bought bran once and we were both shitting through the eye of a needle for a week. I’m not gonna put myself in that situation in a foreign country. You got anything else?’
‘There’s bread,’ Sam said. ‘No butter, though. There might be some cheese lef
t. Continental breakfast.’
‘What about muesli? We have muesli at home. Janet buys the oats and sunflower seeds, dried banana... I can’t remember everything she puts in. There’s apple and granola, pineapple. She mixes it together and we have it in a big jar with a lid, keep it fresh. Barley flakes, that’s another thing in there.’
‘There’s bran or bread,’ Sam said.
‘Even Weetabix would’ve done,’ Geordie said. ‘Just once, for a change. It’s not what I like to eat every day. If I thought there was gonna be Weetabix every morning I wouldn’t get out of bed. Bran or bread and cheese, I’d end up like you, not being able to sleep.’
‘You can go to the shop,’ Sam told him. ‘Buy some muesli.’
‘What do I ask for?’
Sam looked at him.
Geordie said, ‘I don’t know if they know what muesli is. I could go all the way down there and ask for muesli and the guy could look at me like I’m a legend in my own lunchtime.’
‘It’s called muesli. People here understand English. Not all of them speak it, but most of them understand what you’re saying.’
‘OK. D’you want anything?’
‘Get some eggs,’ Sam said. ‘Pack of bacon. Thin-cut. I’m in need of comfort.’
‘Good idea,’ Geordie said. ‘How about a couple of sausages and some mushrooms?’
‘You’ve gone off the muesli idea, then?’
‘No point being fussy, Sam. I’ll have the same as you.’ Sam got the coffee makings together and found a frying pan. When Geordie came back with the food he said, ‘There’s faces from every corner of the globe out there. There’s black and Asian and Russian and Chinese. Every way you look there’s mothers with children in prams. In the shop there was this Ethiopian woman with her kids, real tall woman, elegant. You seen her?’
‘Maybe. Did she mention me?’
‘I went in a Vietnamese shop, a Thai shop, couldn’t find sausages in either of them. Most of the stuff in there doesn’t look edible. There’s vegetables you never heard of.’