by Baker, John
Though it was true that you never really knew another person. She was absolutely sure she wasn’t wrong, not about Sam Turner, but her doubt wouldn’t be stifled. It simply was a fact of life, you could never be absolutely sure.
She put on her coat and wound a long lamb’s wool scarf around her neck. At the street door she stepped into a pair of new green Wellington boots and strode over the sandbags on her front step. The garden and the street were a lake. There was a break in the weather and the sun was reflected in the smooth surface of the water.
Alice paddled through it. It was shallow on the garden path but by the time she got to the public footpath it was already near the top of her boots. Black river water, almost half of it silt, and giving off a stench of decaying organisms. The river was still rising, almost five metres above normal now. If it continued for another couple of days it would be in the house. They’d already taken up the carpets on the ground floor and had been living upstairs for the last ten days.
There were army trucks at the corner of the street and soldiers were laying sandbags, trying to keep the properties safe. For people lower down, closer to Terry Avenue, it was already too late. Their houses were awash and many of them were abandoned to the rising waters. Soldiers... dear God, most of them looked little older than Dominic. Sixteen, seventeen years old. Alice didn’t know how old you had to be to join the army, but looking at some of these kids she thought the entry age should be raised. What if there was a war, she wanted to ask their commanding officer, are you going to give them guns?
Hannah and Conn were waiting for her at the school gate, seemingly unconscious of the waders that reached to the top of their thighs. Hannah, ten years old now, was chatting to one of her friends, completely oblivious of her brother. Conn, the baby of the family, just past his seventh birthday, was gazing up at the sky as if expecting rain. They were as different as toast and marmalade, these two. Hannah was her father’s daughter, somewhat selfobsessed but in possession of a modicum of empathy for others which seemed to have bypassed Alex, the sperm-donor. Conn, named after Alice’s father was, like his grandfather, enquiring his way through life. He was forever inquisitive, a silent boy with big eyes and a degree of warmth far beyond anything Alice had discovered in herself. He certainly hadn’t inherited that from Alex or his line and it was either a throwback to one of Alice’s forgotten Irish ancestors or some kind of blessing. A gift from the angels.
Alice smiled. She had let her religion lapse and now only the terminology remained. That and the guilt. Especially the guilt. But she kept it close to herself, hidden in case it should somehow leak out and taint her children. Conn meant sense, reason and intelligence, and Hannah meant gracious, and these were the qualities that she wanted them to embrace. She didn’t want them to be bound by the strictures of organized religion, slaves to medieval ideas and sensibilities.
God was a wonderful idea, she thought. But He was never there when you needed Him. He had spread himself too thin - trying to be everywhere at once. And a God that let Himself get into a state like that really wasn’t worth bothering about.
‘Have you seen Dominic?’ she asked.
‘He’s by that green car,’ Conn said. ‘With his friends.’
Dominic was with two boys from his class and a girl who looked like a boy with eye-shadow and a pierced lip. A swagger of fifteen-year-olds, Alice said to herself, pleased with the invention of the collective noun.
‘They’re going to Lauren’s house to smoke dope,’ Conn said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Alice told him. ‘Dominic doesn’t smoke.’
‘That’s all you know,’ Conn told her.
‘It’s true, Mum,’ Hannah said. ‘They smoke dope and then they do an orgy.’
‘Really? And do they tell tales on their brothers and sisters?’
‘Probably do,’ Conn said. ‘That’s what happens in families. Everybody is fighting for the attention of their parents.’
Alice pulled him close. Seven years old and he already knew too much. There was something dreadfully wrong with the education system. It wanted them all to conform at the same level of cynicism and neo-maturity, producing a generation of political luvvies who thought it was clever to work overtime without getting paid. You could step out of the footprints of the church but you couldn’t avoid what came in its place.
Dominic waved as they went past his group on the other side of the road. ‘You coming home for tea?’ Alice called.
He shook his head. ‘I’ll be back by ten,’ he said. ‘I’m eating at Rafiq’s.’
Rafiq gave her the thumbs-up with both hands, the pale sunlight glinting on the lenses of his National Health spectacles. Vegetable curry and chapatti again, seemed to be the only thing Dominic ate these days. Said that meat made him sick; too much fat, too much protein, human beings weren’t designed for it.
Hannah and Conn were both like Alex in a way, their natural father. But Dominic was different. And it wasn’t because she or Alex treated him differently from the other kids. It was a simple genetic thing, and it showed.
Alice had told Dominic that his natural father was someone she’d lost contact with. A man she’d been fond of, but who in the end had not proved reliable enough to marry. And the story was essentially true. The only part of it that was not true was the part about losing contact.
TOLS, she called it in her mind, indulging her generation’s preference for acronyms. That One Last Shag with Sam long after their relationship had died, after she’d moved out of the house and come back to collect the last of her belongings. A suit she never wore, a Van Morrison album she never listened to and a collection of copper-bottomed pans she’d inherited from her mother. TOLS on the couch in the sitting room.
She was fully dressed apart from her knickers and he was in his boxer-shorts and T-shirt, his breath stale with whisky fumes. TOLS with no love or passion. She acting out of guilt and compassion and he following the unconscious urgings of his genes, spreading seed.
When they’d finished she struggled out of the house with two cardboard boxes of belongings. In the tiny flat she’d found for herself she played the Van Morrison album while lying in the bath and envisioning a future. And all the time one of those sperms was struggling up the moist lining of her uterus, through into the fallopian tubes and penetrating the cell membrane of her egg, beginning the process that would eventually result in Dominic.
And maybe that’s what it was about, this long-term relationship with Sam Turner? Being the bearer of a secret. Because apart from her there was no one in the world who knew the real identity of Dominic’s father. Dominic himself seemed entirely uninterested. He had come out with a few questions but had seemed to accept his mother’s vague answers. Alex had also been inquisitive during the first weeks and months of their relationship, but during the last ten years he had never breached those areas again.
And Sam? Sam was so out of it in those days he wouldn’t have remembered that they’d done it. He’d assumed that Dominic was the result of an encounter after Alice had left him, which was true. And at the same time it wasn’t true at all.
She couldn’t have told Sam at the time. He wouldn’t have been interested. He would have been incapable of processing the information. If it didn’t lead to a drink in those days he wouldn’t bother taking it on board. But the real reason that Alice didn’t tell Sam was because it might have forced them back together. It had been bad enough living with the guy by herself, she couldn’t imagine taking a baby into the situation.
And so she’d become the bearer of the secret. The only one to know of the connection between this now almost respectable man and her lanky teenage son feeling his way to maturity and adulthood. She fantasized that she would tell them both one day, introduce them casually to each other. Dominic, this is Sam, your father; and Sam, this is Dominic, your son. One day, when they’d both grown up, when she was sure they could handle it. The biology, the connection, the length of time that they’d been kept from the truth. S
he’d dreamed it a hundred times. Half the time the dream turned into a nightmare. The other half it felt good, warm, like being part of a second family.
And now Sam was in trouble again. Maybe the worst trouble he’d ever seen. The women he’d left behind or who had left him in the past were turning up dead. It must seem to him almost as though they had never happened. And the people who didn’t know Sam Turner, the police and the media, the authorities generally, who had always been his enemies, seemed intent on laying the blame at his door.
Now, they seemed to think he was in Oslo when Holly Andersen died. There was a witness who found him with the body, and one of his staff was hospitalized in Oslo. It seemed like someone’s outlandish plot. And Sam, in his bungling way, was playing into their hands.
Because she would never believe he was a murderer. Not Sam Turner, the father of her eldest son. Not in a million years.
But you can never he entirely sure, she heard Alex saying inside her head. Sometimes people go over the top. They crack, turn into somebody else. Something that you, they, nobody ever expected.
30
When he left the flat Sam made his way to the Internet cafe and sent a message to Janet, copies to Celia and Marie and Angeles, make sure she had some support. He told them Geordie was in the Ulleval Hospital and that he was injured but that he wasn’t going to die. He told Angeles in a separate note to expect a call from him.
Sam took a tram up to Holmenkollen and looked out over the Oslo fjord from under the shadow of the ski jump. He didn’t have time to climb to the top of the jump. He’d never been much of a tourist anyway and he wasn’t in Holmenkollen for the view or as a visitor to the ski museum. It was part of his route back to England.
Before leaving the town he’d got together some kit and he was wearing a pair of new Norwegian boots in soft brown leather, a dark blue Finnish suit, neat little hat -kind of cross between pork-pie and Borsalino - and a Burberry coat which he left unbuttoned so it flapped in the wind. He still had JD’s glasses perched on his nose but he’d had his hair cut so short you couldn’t tell if he had any until he took the hat off.
As the moon rose he found a silver Volvo V70 estate with Swedish plates sitting outside a timbered villa. With all the skill of a seasoned car-thief and working only with a pen-knife and a multi-purpose screw-driver set which he kept in a pouch in his rucksack, he had the thing unlocked and rolling down the hill within thirty minutes.
He needed a few hours and the signs were favourable that he’d get them. Through the windows of the villa it seemed as though the car’s owners were settled for the night. Their hostess was serving up a large pink trout on a silver platter. The centrepiece was accompanied by small copper dishes of melted butter, marinaded cucumber and white potatoes that had been graded for size. The red wine was flowing into crystal glasses as big as melons. There was a log fire blazing in the grate and the women’s decolletage was emphasized by the soft glow of beeswax candles. The men were middle-aged, secreting success and excess through every pore. They wore smiles as wide as the table. Neither of them looked as though they’d miss a silver Volvo estate. They were driving towards oblivion, way past the point of no return.
Sam drove carefully, getting the feel of the right-hand drive and exploring the subtle potency of the five-cylinder engine and power-assisted steering. There was a hands-free GSM telephone, which might come in useful, and a small pop-up menu-driven screen on the dashboard which he could alternate between a map with highlights or as a system of large arrows. Either way it showed him where he was on the map, which route to take and the remaining distance and travel time to his destination. When he stopped to check out the air-conditioning the pop-up screen turned into a television and if he’d had the time and the inclination he could have sat back and watched another showing of Atlantic City.
Sam had always been something of a Luddite and he was pleased with himself that he could manage the V70’s technology. Took a little time to get to grips with the audio system but he sussed it in the end and listened to a Jacques Brel collection. The only other thing he could bear to play was Villa-Lobos but he decided to keep that for later, when he got out of the city. The remainder of the tapes were all by Neil Diamond - twenty-three of them.
He made his way down the hill, through Slemdal and Vinderen. He got lost briefly in Majorstuen, passed the Bislet Stadium and the Munch Museum and eventually left Oslo behind. He tucked in behind another Volvo and stayed within the speed limit on the E6, heading for the border with Sweden. Saabs and BMWs overtook from time to time, leather-clad bikers in groups of four or five, the occasional classic Cadillac pulsing with rockabilly music. Seemed like there were no old cars in this country that weren’t classics. Jacques Brel was ecstatic on the audio system, Mathilde had come back to him again. Sam shrugged and gritted his teeth; some people had all the luck.
He rang Geordie on the hands-free system. Geordie’s voice was tiny but already sounding better than it had when Sam had found him in the street.
‘I’ve got the mobile on vibrate,’ he explained. ‘I’m not supposed to use it in here. I’ve already spoken to Janet.’
Sam imagined him propped up in bed with the smallest whitest face in Scandinavia.
‘How you doing?’
‘Good. I’m still alive.’ His voice was far off, little more than a whisper. ‘Holly?’
Sam shook his head. ‘She didn’t make it.’
‘Fuck, Sam.’
‘What happened back there?’
‘I was standing on Calmeyers gate, outside that Christian junk shop, a little further down, near the Vietnamesisk Cafe. It was quiet, no one in the street. I’d been there, what? Ten minutes? Not longer. I saw Holly coming down the street on her own. She went into a shop, then she came out with bread, a baguette or a sandwich. She walked to their flat and went inside.
‘I was wide awake, expecting to see the guy. Could be he was following her. So I’m weaving along the street, crossing from side to side, making out like I’m interested in mung beans, sweet potatoes, all that stuff, haricots. But I’m the only one there. There’s a couple of Asian women, and there’s a guy with a van trying to get a table through somebody’s front door.
‘So I turn round and make my way back. I’m maybe fifty metres past the flat when I hear the door slam and there he is, on the street. I have to do a double-take because I can’t believe he’s coming out of Holly’s flat. I never saw him go in there. He must’ve gone in before I was on the street. He’s been inside waiting for her.
‘He’s walking fast down the street now, past that Greek taverna, and I’m standing with my mouth open, catching flies. So I leg it after him. I spin him round on the pavement, his back against the wall. He’s got an axe in his hand, a hatchet. It’s one of those with a blade, like an ordinary axe, but opposite the blade it’s a small pick-axe. You know what I mean?’
‘I know.’
‘He swings at me and gets me in the shoulder. The rest you know.’
‘You’re gonna be OK,’ Sam told him, relief in his voice. ‘You’re still alive, which is more than can be said for other people he’s gone for.’
‘I know. I was lucky. They wanted to give me a blood transfusion but I don’t believe in it.’
‘Bit of blood’s not gonna hurt you, Geordie. You looked like you could use some.’
‘I’ve cleared it with the doctor. It means I’ve gotta stay here a bit longer, that’s all.’
‘But don’t you wanna see Janet, get back home to your family?’
‘No need, Sam. They’re coming here. I talked to Janet on the phone.’
Sam didn’t ask who was paying for Janet and Echo’s flight, he assumed it would be him.
He didn’t tell Geordie that he was going to find it hard working this case on his own. He made his face grin, hoped it would transmit down the line like that.
‘I’m on the road,’ he said. ‘The police are after me. I have to get out of the country.’
‘How,
Sam? Where’ll you go?’
‘I’ll find a way. See you back in York.’
‘Is that where the next one is?’
Sam nodded. ‘Yeah.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Alice. Calls herself Alice Richardson now, her maiden name. But for about four months she was called Alice Turner.’
‘Another marriage made in heaven?’
‘Dunno where it was made. She laughed at everything I said. I thought she loved me, but it was because she had good teeth.’
Geordie sighed.
‘She seemed to think two and two’d come to make five, if she cried and bothered about it enough.’
‘But with you it only came to three?’
‘She decided to let me go after a while. I wasn’t ready for a relationship.’
Geordie breathed down the phone.
Sam shrugged his shoulders. ‘These things happen,’ he said.
He rang home and Angeles picked up the phone. ‘Don’t ask me no questions about where I am,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way from where I’ve been, heading for where this lunatic’s gonna strike next.’
‘I’ve been worried.’
‘You and me both. You being hassled?’
‘Some. The day you left the police had me in the station all day.’
‘But you didn’t say nothing.’
‘I didn’t know anything, Sam. I still don’t.’
‘They’ll have a tap on the phone, be listening in to this.’
‘And my other calls?’
‘You can bet on it.’
‘I miss you, Sam.’
He whistled through his teeth. Watched another Saab go past at speed, young Swede at the wheel with blond hair in spikes as though he was plugged into the car’s electrical system. ‘Yeah. I miss you in the mornings.’ She laughed down the line. ‘What about the rest of the time?’