The meanest Flood (25 page)

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 left. 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.’

Sam was ready to cook. He drizzled olive oil into the pan.

‘What’s that?’ Geordie asked.

‘Read the label.’

‘I read the label. It’s olive oil.’

Sam turned up the heat and tipped the pan to move the oil around its base. ‘Why’d you ask me what it is when you already know what it is?’

‘I wanted to be sure. Just because it says olive oil on the label, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s olive oil in the bottle.’

‘Nitro-glycerine,’ Sam said. ‘I can’t cook bacon without something highly explosive in the pan. But it’s illegal so I keep it in an olive oil bottle. Saves me going to jail.’

‘Y’know what I think?’ Geordie said. ‘I think you must’ve had a real fucked-up childhood. That’s why you’re so defensive all the time. I asked you a simple question, like what’s that in the olive oil bottle, and you have to give me a hard time. You should see a therapist, Sam, I mean it. A good therapist would turn you around in no time. Jungian, somebody like that, he’d find out where the blockage was and set you free. There’s this childhood trauma backed up in your psyche, could be you were jealous of your father because he slept with your mother or you were frightened of his dick.

‘What these Jungians do, they’re trained to see what type of trauma it is and they get you to say it and once you’ve said it, admitted it to yourself, you’re cured.’ Sam put the sausages in the pan and peeled the mushrooms. ‘Sounds like an AA meeting,’ he said. ‘My name is Sam Turner and I’m an alcoholic. Doesn’t cure you, though. What it does, it helps you stay in touch with reality.’

‘That’s important,’ Geordie said. ‘If you lose touch with reality, where are you?’

Sam continued peeling the mushrooms. After he’d peeled one he chopped it in half and went on to the next one.

‘Is that a real question?’ he asked. ‘If you lose touch with reality, where are you?’

‘It’s a real question,’ Geordie told him. ‘Why would you think it wasn’t a real question?’

‘It’s like the olive oil question over again, that’s why. “What’s that?” when I’m pouring olive oil out of an olive oil bottle. “If you lose touch with reality, where are you?” when it’s obvious if you lose touch with reality you’re lost, out of sync. I can’t believe this is happening sometimes. I’m locked in a flat with you and you’re asking me these questions that don’t make any sense. I think it might be a dream or I’ve ended up on a mental ward. I keep looking round for big nurse.’

He turned the sausages and added the mushrooms and the bacon. He reached for the olive oil and added a little more to the pan.

‘This’s exactly what I’m getting at,’ Geordie told him. ‘It’s this defensiveness. What you should do, you should ask yourself why you get so worked up in response to a couple of questions.’

‘I’m
not
worked up,’ Sam said. He cracked the eggs on the side of the pan and dropped them into the hot oil. ‘You got some plates ready?’

Geordie walked around the kitchen, opening cupboard doors, on the hunt. ‘This is typical of suppressed schizophrenia,’ he said. ‘You think you aren’t worked up because you’ve discovered the best way of handling it is to appear calm. Anytime you get worked up you worry that people’ll think you’re worked up so you slow yourself down and talk calmly to make them think you’re not worked up. That’s understandable, you want everyone to think you’re normal.’

Sam watched the eggs. He said, ‘You know this breakfast I’m cooking here? Your half of the sausages and the bacon and the mushrooms, one of the eggs, and the bread I’m gonna fry in the olive oil that’s left over?’

‘My half?’

‘What I’m thinking at the moment is, I don’t have to give it to you. Long as it’s in the pan and I cooked it, it still belongs to me. I could eat it all, or I could pour half of it down the John and eat my half by myself at the table.’

‘There you go again,’ Geordie said. ‘It starts off and you’re defensive, like someone’s attacking you when they’re only asking questions. And now we’re moving on to the next stage, which it always comes to, and that’s where the defensiveness stops and you get outright aggressive.’

‘Stop!’ Sam told him, taking the frying pan off the cooker and holding it with two hands.

‘Is that a threatening gesture?’ Geordie said. ‘Or is that a threatening gesture.’

‘I’m taking it to the John,’ Sam said.

‘If you could see yourself objectively, Sam, really, this is ridiculous.’

Sam set off down the narrow corridor, taking the frying pan with him.

‘OK, I’ve stopped,’ Geordie called.

Sam turned. ‘Am I worked up?’

‘Not at all. No.’

‘Do I need to see a Jungian therapist?’

‘Would be a waste of time and money,’ Geordie said. ‘Therapists - what do they know?’

‘Have you got the plates ready?’ Sam said, arriving back in the kitchen with a grin on his face.

‘Yeah,’ Geordie said, sitting at the table. ‘Oh, the smell. Can’t remember when food smelled so good.’

After the food Sam poured the coffee and sat back in his chair. ‘You know what he makes me feel, this guy?’

‘The killer?’

‘He makes me feel numb. I can’t stand far enough back from it to get a handle. I want to be able to say, “OK, the guy is killing these women because of their involvement with me.” But as soon as I start to think about it, I see their faces, I remember when we were young and together. All those memories come flooding in and then I can’t see the wood for the trees.’

‘Mixed metaphor,’ Geordie said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a mixed metaphor. You start off with a flood and end up with woods and trees.’

Sam’s mouth fell open. ‘Are you listening to what I’m saying?’

‘Yeah, I hear you. I just pointed something out.’

‘I’m trying to stay calm, here, Geordie. I don’t want an English lesson right now.’

‘OK, I’m listening. All those memories come flooding in and you’re swamped. It’s like you want to concentrate on the foundation of the crime, get to the guy’s motivation. But the flood of memories rises so high you can’t see the foundations any more.’

‘Right. Which is one of the reasons I brought you here. I need somebody who can be objective, somebody who can keep me objective.’

‘Thank you. I appreciate that,’ Geordie said. ‘I appreciate that you appreciate my objectivity. That’s one thing. And the other thing is that it’s Scandinavia. Which means I’ve really been abroad, not just to Amsterdam.’

‘Tell me what you know about the killer.’

‘It’s probably a guy,’ Geordie said. ‘There are women serial killers but not many of them so almost certain to be a man. He’s killing women who have been married to you or who you’ve lived with and he’s arranging it to look as though you’ve done it. First he murdered Katherine Turner when you were in Nottingham, then he arranged for you to be in the same street as Nicole Day in Leeds at the exact time she was killed. What I get from that, the guy has got a real boner for you.