The meanest Flood (17 page)

Ruben took a couple of steps to the side of the bed. He grabbed the blanket and pulled it off the bed.

‘Aaaagh,’ said the guy, lying there naked with his eyes screwed shut. His hands patted around the bed for the missing blanket. ‘Oh, aaaagh.’

Not at all like Scrooge, Ruben thought. He was skinny, it was true, but he was young, still in his twenties, and he had long blond hair and a choker of coloured glass beads around his neck. He was unconscious, his morning hard-on the only thing about him that wasn’t sleeping.

‘What are you doing?’ the girl said, raising her voice as Ruben took hold of the guy’s foot and walked towards the door. The guy came awake but not quick enough to stop his head cracking against the floorboards. Ruben walked around the room. The guy’s free leg was crumpled under him and his bare back was scraping along the floor. He was spitting profanities, trying his best to wriggle free, but Ruben kept a tight grip of him. The girl was hysterical. She’d done a couple of ear-splitting screams and jumped up and down for a minute. Now she’d abandoned her blanket, which was the only thing that covered her, and was throwing herself at Ruben in a valiant and fearless attempt to rescue her man. Ruben brushed her aside but he was conscious of her talons which were intent on raking the flesh from his face.

Her final attack was so ferocious he had to let go of the guy’s foot. He grabbed both of her wrists and held them behind her, pushed her face-down on the bed. ‘OK, it’s over,’ he said.

The girl didn’t hear or didn’t want to hear. She carried on flailing her legs, twisting her neck and showing her teeth as if she’d been attacked by termites. ‘OK,’ Ruben roared close to her ear. ‘It’s over. Shut the fuck up.’

That got through. She quietened down, looked around the room and saw that Pete Lewis was sitting on his hands in the corner by the door, his knees drawn up under his chin. Ruben released her wrists and she rolled herself up in a sheet, still muttering under her breath. She said something about muscle-bound tossers, didn’t sound like a compliment. Then there was a reference to testosterone and macho posturing. Kind of things that Kitty might have said, only not about Ruben because he didn’t do macho posturing around Kitty. Or when he did do it he dipped it in a bath of irony first, which seemed to make it acceptable.

They were both sobbing, the girl on the bed and the guy in the corner by the door. Ruben looked around for someone to blame but he was the only one there. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to ask you some questions. I drove out from Nottingham and you don’t even get out of bed.’

‘It’s the middle of the night,’ the girl shouted at him through her tears. ‘I thought you was gonna kill us.’

‘My head’s bleeding,’ Pete Lewis said.

The girl scrambled off the bed and crawled over to him. The sheet didn’t cover her ass but no one seemed to mind. Ruben didn’t think it was erotic. It could have been if there hadn’t been all that tension in the air or if he didn’t feel guilty or if he was the kind of guy got turned on by a bony ass.

The girl was ministering to her man’s wounds, whispering sympathetically and dabbing away at the back of his head with a corner of the sheet. His face was white.

‘Listen, I wanna apologize for my behaviour,’ Ruben said. ‘I was out of order back there.’ Pete Lewis and his girlfriend looked at him with big eyes. Ruben couldn’t tell if his apology had the effect of calming them or putting them on red-alert. The guy was shaking, his mouth was open and he was wringing his hands like a bereaved mother. He said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Ruben took a step towards them but the guy shrank away, tried to push himself through the wall. ‘He’s in shock,’ Ruben said.

‘What do you expect?’ the girl asked.

‘It’s my fault,’ Ruben acknowledged. ‘I already apologized. I shouldn’t’ve lost it.’ He watched them together for a moment, remembering what you did about shock. ‘I’m gonna make tea,’ he said. ‘You see if you can get him into bed. Keep him warm.’

He went through to the kitchen and found a kettle and filled it with water. Lit the flame on an ancient gas stove. He emptied the teapot of a mash of cold leaves and flushed them down the sink. ‘Where do you keep the tea?’ he shouted. Then he saw it on the shelf. ‘It’s all right, I’ve got it.’

What it was, shock, it was to do with the lack of blood supply. The vital functions of the body couldn’t get working properly. ‘How’s he doing?’ Ruben shouted through to the bedroom.

There was no reply.

‘What’s his skin like? Is it clammy?’

‘Yeah,’ she shouted back. ‘He’s cold and he’s sweating.’ Ruben made the tea and poured it into a mug. He added a couple of spoons of sugar and a good dollop of milk. He carried it through to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Pete Lewis was lying on his back, the eiderdown close up against his chin. His eyes followed Ruben’s every move. His breathing was shallow and rapid.

‘Make him sip this,’ Ruben said, handing the mug to the girl. He looked at the guy long and hard. There was no way he could have killed Kitty. It wasn’t even worth asking. ‘Maybe you should ring the doctor,’ he said. ‘No.’ Pete Lewis shook his head.

‘There’s no phone here,’ the girl said.

‘I’ve got a mobile in the car,’ Ruben told them.

‘No, I’ll be all right,’ Lewis said. He reached for the mug and took a sip. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘Kitty Turner,’ Ruben told him.

His already large eyes almost popped out of his head. ‘Kitty Turner? You mean Katherine? She was murdered.’

‘The woman who was knifed in Nottingham?’ said the girlfriend. ‘In her own bed. What about her?’

‘It was me who found her,’ Ruben said. ‘We were... We had a relationship.’ He gritted his teeth for a moment, nearly lost it for some reason. The thought of Kitty and what they’d had going. The image of her broken body and the sound of her name on his lips. The police had offered him counselling and he’d turned it down. But maybe he shouldn’t have done. There might be some comfort there.

Grief counselling. How to live out the rest of your life without betraying your devastation.

‘But why come here?’ Lewis said. ‘Why the violence?’

‘I already apologized for that,’ Ruben told him. ‘That wasn’t in the plan. I know she went out with you a while back. I wanted to check if you were the one.’

‘If I was the one what? If I killed her? Jesus.’

‘And I can see you didn’t do it. You haven’t got that, whatever it takes. But I didn’t know that before I met you.’

‘Met him?’ the girlfriend said. ‘You call this meeting people?’

‘It’s not how I planned it. When I thought about coming here, even driving over this morning, in my head it was all calmer. I just had some questions.’

‘Well, ask away,’ Lewis said. ‘But I didn’t kill Katherine and I don’t know who did. I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. That she was dead.’

‘You might know someone who was around, someone who could have done it.’

Lewis shook his head. ‘I met one of her neighbours,’ he said. ‘An old guy who brought cuttings over from his garden. But there was nobody else.’

‘She didn’t talk about anyone else?’

‘Not that I remember. I can’t think of anyone.’

‘Shouldn’t you leave this to the police?’ the girlfriend asked.

‘I wanna make sure the guy doesn’t get away with it,’ Ruben told her.

But Pete Lewis didn’t know anything. Ruben would have to call it quits for now, look up some of the other people on his list. Explore different avenues, like they said in the movies.

‘Keep him in bed a few hours,’ he told the girl. ‘He’ll be OK tomorrow.’

‘If I was you,’ Lewis said as Ruben was stepping out of the door, ‘I’d look up the guy she was married to. Sam Turner. He runs some outfit in York, security, private detection, that kind of thing. He might have some ideas. In fact, come to think of it, he could be the one.’

Back in Nottingham Ruben collected his snaps from Prontaprint. He sat in a newly opened coffee house and looked at the images. Liverpool in late-summer. Kitty with the Catholic Cathedral behind her, laughing at the joke he’d told her.
‘Doctor, when my broken arm is better will I be able to play the piano?’

‘Of course you will.’

‘How strange, I could never play it before.’

Not even funny. But to see and to remember how she’d laughed, Ruben would have gone on telling Kitty jokes for the rest of his life. He’d never have run out. He would have bought joke books.

To live with that laugh.

There was another one, the two of them together outside The Beatles Story on Albert Dock, a yellow submarine over to the right of the entrance. Ruben had given his camera to a woman from Munich, asked her to point and click, but she couldn’t do it. Then he’d found a Frenchman who took the photograph sweet as you like, no problems. He had his arm around Kitty’s waist and she was looking up at him and about to plant her lips on his cheek when the guy pressed the shutter. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the kiss.

It came back easily. There was nothing about Kitty he could forget. He imagined a time in the future, a hundred years from now, when he would still be alive and still remembering. He’d be a mass of leathery wrinkles and memories. When he looked back at the photograph in his hand his knuckles were white.

The next photograph showed Sam Turner in York. There were four or five of them where the guy was too far away, side on so you could see his profile, get some idea of his bearing but not close enough to see what he looked like. Then there was another, much closer, but he was looking surprised, not clear if he was having his photograph taken or if he was accidentally being caught in a photograph of somebody else. It wasn’t a perfect photograph but it was the best of the bunch. The last two were close-ups and you could see his features clearly but he had realized what was happening by then and was pissed off. If the pictures had been able to talk you would have heard the guy yelling.

Ruben swilled the remains of his coffee in the bottom of the cup and drank it down. He went back to Prontaprint and ordered six photocopies of the Sam Turner print and asked them to enlarge the ones of Kitty.

‘When do you want them, sir?’

‘I want them now. I’ll wait.’

The assistant did the thing where they stop writing on the form and let the pen hover for a moment, deciding if they’ll do you a favour or turn themselves into an obstacle. Ruben kept his cool. He’d already put two people into shock this morning and split open the head of one of them. He didn’t want to go through that again. He hoped this broad with the big hair and the pen would make the right decision.

She looked at him and smiled. ‘The technician’s busy at the moment but if you come back in half an hour, I’ll have them ready for you.’

Ruben said, ‘Thanks.’ He said, ‘You’ve got a nice smile, you know that. You should use it more.’

He tucked the ticket she gave him into his top pocket and made his way back to the coffee house. He took a copy of the
Sun
out of the rack and read it while he waited for his double espresso. There was an article about a priest with a mistress, and a soldier somewhere had borrowed a gun from the army to shoot a teenager. An obituary for some surgeon who had performed more than three thousand mastectomies. Strange, the different jobs in the world. Ruben always thought delivering milk was an odd way to make a living, but there were weirder jobs. Pleading with an imaginary God to care for someone’s soul. Shooting rubber bullets at Ulstermen. Sticking knives into the breasts of women with cancer.

But there had been something about the girl behind the counter at Prontaprint. The typeface of the
Sun
swam before his eyes when he thought about her. It was the smile, it reminded him of Kitty. Not that they had the same smile, or the smile of the counter assistant resurrected any smile that Kitty had ever given him, the connection was more distant and proved something that Ruben had suspected for the last couple of days. That anything could remind him of Kitty. Anything in the world. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes,’ he had told her. He didn’t know where the words came from. They weren’t part of a song or a poem and he’d never heard anyone else say them, not even in a film. He’d invented them in order to tell her how he felt. ‘I love you until it comes out of my eyes.’ He hadn’t needed to sit down to think up the words in that particular order. He’d just opened his mouth one night when they were sitting on opposite sides of the table in Kitty’s house and the words had come out like that, as a complete sentence.

A couple of times he’d tried to do it again but the words never fell out of him so naturally when he forced them. He wasn’t a poet. They’d worked that once, though, and that was enough. They’d shown her something about him that he wasn’t sure of himself. Something that had been born in him when he met Kitty Turner.

There’d be another time, Ruben thought. He’d have Sam Turner at his mercy again. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, they’d find themselves in the same position. The detective would be on the tarmac and Ruben would be standing above him. But that time Ruben wouldn’t walk away. He’d stomp the life out of the bastard.