by Baker, John
‘Yeah.’
‘From a shark?’
‘Yeah, the genuine article. We import them from California. They’re from dead sharks. The exporters guarantee that no animals have been hurt or damaged in any way.’
Ruben laughed.
‘You think I’m kidding you?’ the assistant asked.
‘Hell, no,’ Ruben told him. ‘I knew it wasn’t from a live shark. I didn’t think there was squads of dentists going down there in frogmen’s suits looking for sharks to do a quick job on.’
The assistant didn’t think it was funny. He must’ve got out the wrong side of the bed. ‘They’re supposed to bring you luck,’ he said. ‘Shark’s teeth.’
Ruben looked at the price tag. ‘Thirty quid?’ he said.
‘Used to be twenty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence,’ the assistant said. ‘But the boss doesn’t like pennies.’
‘Put it in a bag,’ Ruben said, reaching for his wallet.
He walked up the path of the High Willows Guesthouse, obviously though erroneously named after the two stunted willow trees in the garden. A double-bay-windowed house with a recently added wooden porch obscuring the original front door. He rang the bell and listened to the distant chimes emulating ‘It’s Now Or Never’ somewhere towards the rear of the house. Ruben hummed along with it and when the chimes died he carried on. Elvis Presley was already dying before Ruben heard him but the guy had left some great songs behind. He liked that soaring voice, the way it took hold of you. Should’ve been in the opera like Pavarotti. Probably would’ve been, too, if he’d been Italian instead of a truck driver.
But if the world was divided into Elvis Presleys and Luciano Pavarottis the woman who came to the door would have been much closer to Tupelo, Mississippi than the little town of Modena in Italy.
Must be a blonde wig, he thought, the kind of hair that Dolly Parton would choose for a Saturday night fling. Carefully powdered breasts like globular light shades, each wrapped in its own half of a cream-coloured frilly blouse with the top three buttons unused. A short frilly apron hid an even shorter skirt and stiletto heels forced the woman’s calf muscles to bulge, giving form and definition to her legs but contracting the Achilles tendons.
Before he’d blinked twice Ruben had interpreted the message that the proprietress of the High Willows Guesthouse was sending out into the world, and the adrenalin pumping into his bloodstream reinforced the conviction that he’d be able to run faster than her.
‘Can you spare a moment?’ Ruben asked. He showed her the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘We’re trying to trace this man and have reason to believe he stayed in this area recently. Have you seen him before?’
The proprietress didn’t look at the photograph. She licked her lips and blinked her false eyelashes to tip Ruben off she was intelligent. She smoothed her hands over her stomach and looking deeply into his eyes, she said: ‘You don’t want a room, then?’
The voice was perfect for the blonde wig and false eyelashes. There was a million cigarettes behind it, a quantity of gin or vodka and a whole world of small disappointments.
‘No, sorry,’ Ruben explained. ‘I don’t want a room. I’m making enquiries about the man in the photograph.’ He waved it towards her but she still didn’t look.
‘You’re not the Old Bill, are you,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. ‘Come in, I’ve got the kettle on.’
He followed her into the house. Wall lights with tartan shades. Pile carpets. Ornaments of dogs. Photographs of a beauty queen from long ago; Miss Cleethorpes, Miss Lincoln, Miss Barrow-in-Furness. Real blonde hair probably, tightly fitting swim-suits, looking quaintly old-fashioned, as she still did today.
The kitchen was Formica and steel. A large modern clock on the wall with false eyelashes and a pink ribbon tied in a bow underneath its chin. Magnetic letters stuck on the fridge door spelling out the words Wil You Stil Love Me Tomoro. Not so much a sign of illiteracy as a dearth of magnetic consonants.
‘That’s how you can spot poverty,’ Kitty had told him once. ‘People who surround themselves with too much of everything.’ She didn’t mean lack of money, she was talking about poverty of imagination, poverty of spirit. ‘Coffee or tea, Mr...?’
‘Parkins,’ he said. ‘Ruben Parkins. Coffee, please.’
‘You can call me Eileen,’ she told him. ‘Eileen Dover.’ She cackled long and loud. ‘No, it’s Eileen Smith, after the bloke I married. I got rid of him but I’ve hung on to the name.’ She pouted and blinked her false eyelashes again in case he’d missed it the first time.
She gave him a mug of coffee and pushed a milk jug towards him. She took the photograph from his hand and walked over to the window with it. He watched her smile and nod down at it.
‘You know him?’ Ruben asked.
‘I don’t know him,’ she said. ‘We didn’t get that far. Not from lack of trying, mind. But he was here, stayed a couple of nights. The front bedroom, all alone.’
‘You sure?’
Eileen looked at the photograph again. ‘Yeah.’ She gazed out of the window and closed her eyes. ‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Sam Turner. Am I right or am I right?’
‘That’s his name,’ Ruben said, thinking that Eileen Smith suddenly looked good. ‘Can you remember when he was here? The date? D’you keep a guest book?’
‘He’ll be in the register,’ Eileen said. She went for the register in the hall and brought it back with her. ‘But I can tell you now it was the night of the murder. That woman over Clifton way. He was here the night before and the night of the murder. He left the next day.’
‘Did you tell the police?’ Ruben asked.
Eileen Smith shook her head, thumbing through the register. ‘Here it is,’ she said, ‘Sam Turner.’ She handed the book to Ruben and he looked at the detective’s signature, memorized the guy’s home address.
‘Did you know her?’ Eileen asked. ‘The woman who was killed?’
‘Kitty,’ Ruben said. ‘It was me who found her.’
‘Kitty? Katherine something. I remember now. That must’ve been terrible. But it wasn’t Sam Turner did it, he was here all night.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘He was out all day but he came back for his evening meal. He was in his room for a while and then he came down and watched a film on the telly. Prizzi’s Honor. I sat with him for the last hour. When the movie was over we had a drink. Well, I had a drink and he watched me and we talked until after midnight. Then he went to bed and didn’t stir until breakfast.’
‘He could’ve gone out after you’d gone to bed,’ Ruben said. ‘Kitty was killed in the middle of the night.’
‘He didn’t go out,’ Eileen Smith said. ‘I lock up at night, and I sleep like a bird. I’ve had people try to slip out in the middle of the night, get away without paying. I would know if he’d gone out.’
‘Tell me this, then,’ Ruben said. ‘If he was here that night why did he tell the police he wasn’t?’
‘I don’t know, love,’ Eileen Smith said. ‘People’s motives are never simple. And who trusts the police, anyway? Perhaps he didn’t want to hand them a rope to hang him with?’
Ruben wasn’t convinced that Eileen Smith’s version of events was true. Sam Turner was clever. He could’ve pulled the wool over her eyes. But one thing was clear now. Turner was here, in Nottingham, on the night that Kitty was killed. He was on the spot. Ruben hadn’t heard the police or the media speculate that it was someone else who took Kitty’s life. There was only him. No one else could have done it.
34
Danny Mann came out of his front door and stepped along the path to the street. He looked one way and then the other. There was no sign of Marilyn Eccles. Thank God. She’d rung his bell once this morning, twice last night. He had been firm. ‘Go away,’ he told her. ‘Take your medication. I’m not who you think I am.’
‘It’s no good,’ she’d said this morning. ‘I can’t deal with rejection.’ Standing there in her leather jacket and metal chai
ns, dangly earrings. Why would she think he found that kind of thing attractive? The truth was quite the opposite. Danny didn’t like loud women, that’s why he’d gone to the expense of Jody, considered the Orientals. The universe lived in the tension between the active and the passive and the magician was active and therefore attracted to the passive.
The last thing he needed was a leather-and-steel-clad erotomaniac. Earlier, when he’d pulled back the curtains and seen her on the step, his scrotum had shrivelled to the size of a walnut.
But she wasn’t around. It seemed that even nymphomaniac stalkers had to go home and eat occasionally, take a shower and change their clothes.
The clouds had disappeared and the wind dropped to a gentle breeze. There was extensive flooding in the area and a danger of the Ouse breaking its banks in the town centre, putting thousands of homes at risk. People were kayaking and windsurfing on the racecourse. Armageddon was around the corner.
The media had nothing to say about anything but the floods. It didn’t matter if it rained here or not because the water was coming down from the hills and the town would be swamped because of weather conditions forty or fifty miles to the north. This was God’s sleight of hand, Danny thought. Give the place a few days of bright sunshine and not a hint of rain while up in the hills, out of sight, you pour so much water into the river channels that the banks are washed away.
Danny left his car behind. So many roads were impassable and the police or the army were liable to direct you in the opposite direction to your destination. Drivers were being told not to come to the city. The police had enough on their hands without traffic problems. He still hadn’t got that damned seatbelt fixed.
He walked towards the centre and crossed Skeldergate Bridge. People were lining both sides of it, leaning over to watch the volume of black water thundering past. On the banks teams of squaddies were humping sandbags, lining them up precisely under the watchful eyes of their officers. There had been nothing like this in living memory. A strange and unwanted visitor had come to town and the people had left their houses to come and gape.
When he was a young boy people had gaped at Danny and his mother.
When she’d been bewitched by Sam Turner, pulled out of her marriage and her sanity by the illusion of the man’s easy-going nature. Sam Turner had been young Danny’s first introduction to magic. The overwhelming power of an art that could collect an entire and harmonious family into its arms and scatter it to the winds. And this from a man like Sam Turner, a naive practitioner without the aid of study or practice, with no knowledge or experience of the culture from which he was working. A wild man of the woods with a talismanic charm of a smile and a roving eye and the gall to use it to his own advantage whatever the cost.
He was the reason that Danny’s mother and father argued into the night, why his father shouted and bawled with such urgency that the boy thought the walls of the house would crumble and fall.
A few days after Danny’s father walked out Great-uncle Matthew had gone to bed in the small cottage in Nathan’s Yard by the harbour in Whitby and never woken from his sleep. Danny went with his mother to arrange the funeral. They stood in a howling wind of angry spirits in the graveyard at the top of the cliffs and delivered Great-uncle Matthew into the bitter pains of eternal death. It blew so hard the coffin bearers had to stop every step or so to regain their balance and the black sky was jammed with witches and harpies and the souls of the damned whipped from the centre of Hell.
The cottage in Nathan’s Yard was sold to a small man with bulging eyes, red trousers and a fistful of notes because they needed the money now. He’d get rid of the furniture for them, the man said, might come in for firewood.
And when they got back to York she was on the telephone to him before she’d got her coat off, the man who had brought it all down on them, Sam Turner.
It didn’t last long. She saw him once or twice during the day when Danny was at school, but then it was over. She came home with her black eye and neither she nor Danny mentioned it. She cried through the night for what seemed like months. She became obsessive and Danny also developed small compulsions. For a year or more he washed his hands so many times each day that they became sore and chapped. But Turner had gone. He’d found somebody who could keep him in whisky and spent his time with her instead.
And Danny was glad. He had grown and he took up magic and plotted his revenge.
Terry Avenue was blocked. There were soldiers in a boat with a couple of old folks clutching photograph albums and blankets. Since his mother had died the magician had looked twice at old men when he saw them in the street,, hoping against hope that he would find his father. But he didn’t really believe that it would happen. He imagined his father was dead now, that he had no parents left at all, that he was an orphan.
Orphan Danny. If he played with the concept late at night he could work up a crack in his voice, bring himself to the verge of tears at the way the world had treated him. But he wouldn’t allow himself to cry. He had to be strong. His mission was not tied to personal vengeance. He was Diamond Danny Mann and the honour of his family was at stake.
He walked along Bishopthorpe Road and cut into the street where Alice Richardson lived with her husband Alex and their three children, Conn, Hannah and Dominic. There were sandbags at the doorways and the lower end of the street, where the Richardsons lived, was flooded.
Danny stood at the edge of the water and counted down the odd numbers to the house with the green door. He looked at it for twenty minutes but nothing stirred. No one came out and no one arrived to visit.
He went around the back and looked up at the bedroom windows. It would be simple enough to open the back door and creep inside at the dead of night. But did he really want to take the chance of waking five people? Three of them were children, but the eldest boy was almost fully grown. He and the parents would be enough to overpower the magician. And the smaller children couldn’t be discounted. What if one of them got out of the front door and raised the alarm?
This one was going to take more thought. He couldn’t simply go inside and kill the woman. He would have to find a way of luring her out of the house. And he knew how to do it. If you want to trap a woman who is a mother, you get to her through her children. He wanted Alice Richardson alone. Just her and him and his German bayonet.
35
In a sealed container off the North Sea coast of England Sam Turner sat amidst a flood of seven asylum seekers and thought about his world. The asylum seekers would, of course, give rise to a flood of propaganda from the British government and their media hacks. But no one would mention the flood of armament sales that the same British government sanctioned to the dictators and gang leaders who ruled over much of the third world.
We live under a system that exports Hell to most people on the earth and when a few of them escape and come looking for sanctuary we do our utmost to send them back. Oh, yes, and we send them aid as well, to mask our real intentions. Food parcels and cluster bombs, dropped together and painted the same colour. Foreign aid projects and landmines so a host of juvenile amputees don’t die of thirst.
So long as the profits keep flooding in we must be doing it right. After all, what other system of values have we developed in our two thousand years of civilization?
Sam pulled his rucksack closer and switched his torch over to candle-mode. He took a swig of Evian water and held it in his mouth briefly to wet his lips. He took out the cutting board and hacked off a slice of bread with his new knife. He cut a hunk of sausage and another of cheese and began to eat, chewing slowly and thoughtfully, glad he’d given up all ideas of vegetarianism and macrobiotics well before they’d had time to take root. As a background the other occupants of the container snored and shuffled; from time to time one or the other of them would speak in some strange tongue, a seemingly random selection of vowels and consonants. There were no sounds at all from outside the container. There was the movement of the sea as the Ivan Mazuranic lurche
d fore and aft, but no sound of the waves or of the engines that powered the ship.
Sam kept his frustration at bay by sticking to a routine, eating and drinking at regular intervals. He didn’t want to be where he was. There was a madman out there stalking the women in his life, taking them one by one while Sam was incarcerated in a sealed container. He kept it all inside himself, it would help nobody for him to let it out, start pounding the walls of his temporary prison.
Something flashed and moved over one of the cartons in front of Sam and he picked up the torch and flicked on the beam. It was the eldest of the Bolivian children, a boy of around ten years, black hair, a round face and protruding eyes fixed on the bread in Sam’s hand.
Sam switched the torch back to candle-mode. He took the knife and cut another hunk of bread and cheese. He placed it on the edge of the cutting board and continued to eat his own bread. He chewed until it became liquid in his mouth. After a couple of bites a small hand appeared out of the darkness and took the hunk of bread and cheese. A moment later the food reappeared on the board with one bite taken out of it, small teeth marks clearly visible on the cheese.
Sam shifted the candle, pushed it away from him and illuminated the boy sitting cross-legged opposite him, his cheeks bulging and a wide grin on his face. ‘D’you speak English?’ Sam asked.
‘No,’ the boy replied. ‘Inglaterra restaurante?’
Sam smiled. He thought the boy might have made a joke. ‘Your brother and sister,’ he said. ‘You want to give them something to eat?’
‘Alé, Michael Owen.’
‘Liverpool,’ Sam said. ‘Is that your team?’
The boy nodded. He reached for the bread again and took another bite. He smiled. ‘Favorite,’ he said around the food in his mouth.
There was a footfall and Rachid the Iraqi sat on the edge of one of the cartons. ‘It’s got bad now,’ he said. ‘The hunger.’