The meanest Flood (10 page)

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 injury. 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.

And this was a guy who had a face like a broken bag. OK, he had the kind eyes and he could make them twinkle, but in a face with so much old leather in it, what wouldn’t twinkle? And he had a good voice, kind of mellow with some of the blues in it, and when you heard it it made you feel safer, closer to a world that only seemed possible when you were young. Come to think of it there was a whole load of things you could say about Sam Turner: he was a good friend, he could be brave, and was often the only guy around who had the right idea.

‘JD thinks it’s karma,’ he said. ‘The universe’s way of telling you to slow down and take time off.’

‘Me and the universe,’ Sam said, ‘we’ve been together a long time. Neither of us works like that. I think the universe needs something, I write a letter to the papers or I get Celia to write it and sign my name at the bottom. The universe thinks I need a lift it’ll send me a ticket to ride, Barcelona or a new Dylan CD. In cases of extreme deprivation I’ll get both. This is how we work together. In our long association the universe has never found it necessary to send a photographer to knee me in the balls. The times I’ve been kneed in the balls it always turned out that the knee that did it belonged to a guy who was out of sync, someone with a universe of his own.’

‘So what are you telling me?’ Geordie asked. Echo was wriggling so he put her on the floor and she toddled over to the bathroom. Barney followed her like a minder.

‘It feels like there’s a connection with Katherine getting herself killed in Nottingham while I was there. I still can’t believe that was a coincidence.’

‘You heard about Plato’s cave?’

‘Is this more of JD’s wisdom?’

‘He mentioned it but I’ve talked to Marie about it, Janet, and I’ve got the book. It’s an allegory so you have to imagine it.’

‘This is just what I need,’ Sam said. ‘Better than Lucozade.’

‘There’s these people in a cave. They’re chained up so they can only kneel down and face one way, towards one of the walls. Way back in the cave there’s a fire burning and between the people in the chains and the fire there’s a walkway, like a stage. You getting this?’

‘I guess. Up to now.’

‘OK. The next thing is that there are figures on this walkway and some of them are carrying things, like animals or different figures, and some of them are talking but not all of them. And because of the fire behind them the wall is lit up and the shadows of these people on the walkway are thrown on to the wall.’

‘It’s like a marionette show, right?’

‘Right,’ Geordie said. ‘Except that the people who’re chained up have been there all their lives so they think it’s reality. It’s the only thing they’ve ever seen. They’ve seen shadows but because they can speak to each other they give the shadows names and don’t think that they’re naming shadows, they think they’re giving names to reality. Also there’s an echo in the cave and when one of the people behind them speaks they hear the echo and think it comes from one of the shadows.’

‘Echo,’ said Echo from the bathroom door.

‘Not you, darlin’,’ Geordie said, laughing. ‘I’m telling Sam a story.’

‘Where we going with this?’ he asked.

‘Imagine what’ll happen if some of these people are unchained. First of all they’re gonna be stiff, right? Disoriented. They’re looking into the light for one thing, so their eyes are gonna hurt. They’ve got stiff necks. They can walk around in the cave and everything is a new experience to them. They see these characters walking on the stage and they see the things they are carrying. But if we go up to them and tell them that everything they saw before was an illusion, and that now they’ve been unchained they can see things clearer, what d’you think they’ll say?’

‘It’s your story, Geordie.’

‘When they look at the people on the stage and the things they’re carrying and we ask for their names, what’d happen would be they’d look back at the shadows and for a while they’d still think that the shadows were the reality. They’d believe that the shadows were more true than the objects.’

Sam took his foot off the table and placed it tentatively on the floor. ‘This is the power of myth and allegory,’ he said. ‘It forces you to get up out of your chair.’