The meanest Flood (6 page)

That was why Marilyn was like she was. Part of her a true Scot with a fierce independence and a natural appreciation of beauty and truth; and another part, inherited from her father, which was forever diagonally parked in an unremittingly parallel universe.

When Ellen had finished her cigarette she returned to the kitchen and watched her daughter eating cornflakes from a bowl. Marilyn was wearing a long wrap-around skirt. She had put on a pair of black tights and a top that her mother had starched and ironed the previous day.

Ellen pulled a chair up to the table and said, ‘Marilyn, I don’t want us to get into another one of these fixes.’

‘What fixes?’ Marilyn asked through a mouthful of cereal.

‘Like the footballer. You followed him around. In the end he got the police on to us.’

Marilyn stopped eating. ‘No,’ she said, thinking. ‘I don’t believe that is what happened. It was his manager got the police out. He was spending too much time thinking about me. He couldn’t concentrate on his game.’

‘I don’t want you making a nuisance of yourself over this magician.’

‘Danny?’ She smiled. ‘He wouldn’t call me a nuisance. He didn’t think I was a nuisance last night. Not when he was holding my hand.’

‘We shouldn’t have gone last night,’ Ellen said. ‘I should’ve known better when you said you’d got the tickets. All the way to Nottingham when we could have seen him here.’

‘Oh, I’m going to see him here as well,’ Marilyn said. ‘You can count on that. Danny and me, we’ll probably end up working together.’

‘Look,’ Ellen said, ‘I don’t ask for much, Marilyn. But I want you to leave this man alone. I can see it’s going to get you into trouble, and if you’re in trouble I’m in trouble as well. What happened last night - it didn’t mean anything.’

‘It didn’t mean anything to you, Mother. But it meant a lot to me and it meant a lot to Danny. You’re an old woman, you’ve had your life. But Danny and me, we’re still young. We’re in love and our whole future is waiting.’

‘He doesn’t know you,’ Ellen said. ‘This is just like the others. You’re going to hound the life out of that poor man, drive him to distraction. I’m asking you, please, Marilyn, leave him alone. Let him go.

Marilyn continued eating her cornflakes. She added more milk and sugar. She said, ‘Do you want to put some bread in the toaster and bring the strawberry jam over to the table? Danny likes a girl with some meat on her. He can’t stand those anorexic types, bloody stick insects.’

6

‘You think I killed her?’ Sam said.

Delaney shook his head, a snide grin on his face. ‘No one said you killed her. We’re trying to establish why someone wanted her dead.’

‘These things are usually domestic,’ Sam said. ‘What about the guy who found her? The boyfriend?’

The Chief Inspector touched his nose. ‘The local police say he’s not bright enough. He took her body into the street, laid it out on the road. There’s no sign of the murder weapon.’

‘He could have dropped it down the drain.’

George Forester, the solicitor, touched Sam’s arm. ‘Just answer the questions,’ he said.

‘They say he’s really cut up about it,’ Delaney said. ‘They don’t think he could put on such a convincing act if he’d killed her. He loved her.’

‘It’s good to know somebody did.’

‘Which means you didn’t?’

Sam looked across the desk at the policeman. He didn’t mask his hostility. There were times when he believed he simply hated the uniform, the institution, but in clearer moments he realized that he hated the individuals, the people who were drawn to the profession. ‘I didn’t know her any more,’ Sam said quietly. He looked at his solicitor
^a
nd shook his head. ‘I’m sorry she’s dead. I’m sorry she died like that. But I haven’t seen her, haven’t thought about her, for years.’

‘What about the boyfriend? Did you know him?’

Sam raised his palms. ‘No.’

‘Ruben Parkins? Mean anything?’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘He did a stretch in Long Lartin. GBH.’

‘Your guys in Nottingham’ll get a confession. Pull his; finger-nails out; that usually does the trick.’

The solicitor held up his hand. ‘OK, Sam.’ He turned to Chief Inspector Delaney. ‘Are you going to charge Mr Turner?’ he asked. ‘If not, I think we should take a break. My client is doing his best to help but your line of questioning is somewhat provocative.’

Delaney said, ‘We’re breaking for five minutes.’ He: switched off the tape recorder and got to his feet.

They finally stepped out of the station at 10.15. The moon was up and a light drizzle colluded with the store signs and the car headlights to give Fulford Road the Monet treatment.

‘Home? Or shall I drop you somewhere else?’ George Forester asked.

‘Angeles’ house,’ Sam told him. ‘I need to talk my way through this one.’

He phoned Celia and Geordie on his mobile, spoke to each of them for a few seconds. ‘I’m out,’ he said. ‘Going to see Angeles. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.’

Angeles answered his knock and stood back to allow him into the house. She closed the door and stood still while he put his arms around her. ‘There’s an institutional scent to you,’ she said. ‘If I didn’t know you’d been to the police station I’d guess the tax office or an army barracks. You smell of fixed ideas and intimidation. Good dollop of fear mixed in as well.’

She was a couple of inches shorter than him, slim and straight. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a sleeveless white blouse. Her feet were bare and her hair was mussed on one side, as though she’d been lying on it. There was Scotch on her breath, one of the Island malts. Laphroaig? When they’d first met Sam had thought she might be a soak but, unlike him, she was one of those people who can walk the line without falling into the vat.

Angeles had a hereditary eye condition, Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), which was degenerative and incurable and which had now consumed most of her visual experience. During daylight hours she was aware of shadowy outlines, misty silhouettes, and at night she was utterly blind.

He took her by the hand and led her to the couch. ‘That Coltrane?’ he asked, nodding towards the speakers. Angeles didn’t reply, waiting for him to answer his own question. He smiled as he recognized Bill Evans’ fingers dancing over the piano keys. ‘“Kind of Blue”. That how you’re feeling?’

‘I thought they’d locked you up.’

‘Not this time. It was close, though.’

‘Why didn’t you tell them you were in Nottingham?’ He shook his head. ‘Cops don’t believe in coincidence.
I
don’t believe in coincidence. I didn’t want to give them an excuse to fit me up. If I’d come clean I’d be spending the night in a cell. When the cops haven’t got a main suspect they get desperate.’

‘Do they have anything? A motive?’

‘Not a thing,’ Sam said. ‘She was knifed in her bed. As far as they can tell nothing was taken from the house. She was living a quiet life. She had a boyfriend with a shady past, but they reckon he’s reformed. He’s not in the frame.’

Angeles shuddered. ‘So a complete stranger comes in the middle of the night, kills her and then fades away? Is that credible?’

‘No. The police don’t believe that either. They’re looking for someone with an old grudge. Someone out of her past.’

‘Like you?’

‘Yes, exactly like me.’

‘But you didn’t know she was in Nottingham. You were there to do a job.’

‘Tell it to the judge,’ Sam said. ‘I already know it wasn’t me.’

Angeles moved closer to him. She drew her legs up under her on the couch and placed her head on Sam’s shoulder. ‘What was she like?’

He squinted down at her, stroked her cheek with two fingers. ‘We were both wild. I’d do anything for a drink in those days — steal, cheat, lie. Katherine was the same, or I thought she was for a while. But she was stronger than me. She wanted conventional things; a family, some kind of regular income. We mauled each other, we were each of us someone the other could blame.’

‘There must have been more at the beginning,’ Angeles said. ‘When you met, when you decided to get married? A bond of some sort? Love?’

Sam shook his head. ‘Maybe. There’s a period of several years when I wasn’t available. I would drink myself into a coma and when I came round go looking for another drink. Katherine was one of the things that happened during that time. She was there, we lived together, but I can’t remember who she was. I don’t have a memory of tenderness, or even of us being on the same wavelength. We were always daggers drawn. Then one day she got up and left, stopped drinking and started rebuilding a life. Not long after that we lost touch.’ He smiled ironically. ‘Language is strange,’ he said. ‘We never had any touch to lose.’

They were quiet for a while. He listened to her heartbeat. Angeles said, ‘What did you think when they told you she was dead?’

‘Strange,’ he said. ‘You go through life and you think you know who you are and all the time there’s parts of you come into view that you never saw before. Katherine was someone I lived with and never knew, and I’m the same. I live with myself but there’s huge areas of me I’ve never managed to negotiate with, never managed to meet or come to terms with.

‘I thought, when they told me, and later in the car when they took me to the police station, I thought it was like discovering that a part of me had been murdered, part of me that I’d never known had been killed and wouldn’t be available to me any more. Felt like a waste. An opportunity squandered. One of those moments when all your good intentions have come to nothing and you can’t do anything about it.’

Sam had intended to stay at Angeles’ house for an hour or so and then go to a midnight AA meeting. A dry alcoholic can get through the everyday but stress leads to an overbearing thirst.

He didn’t get to the meeting, though. Around 11.30 Angeles got to her feet and took him to her bedroom. He felt her cool fingers on his flesh and the warmth of her body next to his and the idea of his meeting evaporated into the night.

Sam wondered if in some strange, metaphoric way he had murdered every woman he had ever known. If he had managed through his own sense of ego to distance, alienate and eventually smother the essence of his relationships. He couldn’t remember how many years he’d been telling himself he was getting better at it, that he was learning from past mistakes and failures. But the women still kept coming and going. When they came they were keen and excited, and invariably, when they went, they were a little greyer, not quite as perky in the life-force department.

Was he in the process of doing the same thing with Angeles? He hoped not. She filled his waking and often his sleeping thoughts. He couldn’t remember who it was but someone had once told him that we can’t exist unless the heart is full - we become dry and crumble away. Sayings, lines from songs, snippets of received wisdom, they lodge somewhere in your brain, never seem to leave.

In the small hours of the morning he came awake with a vision of his ex-wife, Katherine, a knife in her chest and dead staring eyes. He closed his eyes and fitted his body into the curve of Angeles’ back and within a minute or two he was sleeping again, like a man without a conscience.

7

‘How many times has he been married?’ Janet asked.

Geordie looked up and closed his eyes. ‘You don’t wanna know,’ he said. He scooped a teaspoonful of green mush out of the bowl and fed it into the open mouth of Echo, their daughter.

‘Come on, Geordie. How many? Seems like I’ve finally got a grasp of his emotional history and now another wife crops up.’

‘Dunno if you can say she’s cropped up when she’s freshly dead.’

Janet turned her mouth down. ‘That’s bad taste.’

‘Taste
is
bad, the last I heard. It’s part of one-upmanship. One of the ways the middle classes keep ahead of the competition.’

‘OK,’ Janet said. ‘Don’t change the subject. How many wives?’

‘Depends what you mean by wife, how you define marriage.’ Echo had had enough of the green mush and was sitting with her mouth firmly closed. ‘Just two more spoonfuls,’ Geordie said. ‘Then you can have custard.’

‘It’s spoonsful, not spoonfuls.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Geordie said. ‘Strictly, it’ll be spoonful. But I’m talking baby-talk.’

‘Let’s say we define marriage as in people who’ve been through a wedding ceremony.’

‘If I asked Sam he probably wouldn’t know. I think he’s had more than four wives and a lot of girlfriends.’ lanet shook her head. ‘Bluebeard.’

‘He doesn’t kill them. He chooses badly. He can’t discriminate. First he goes for women who’re too young for him, then he’s bored because they don’t understand what he’s talking about.’

‘They’ve got different cultural references,’ Janet said.

‘Yeah. That’s what I said.’ Echo opened her mouth and Geordie slipped another load of mush in there. ‘Also he likes wild women, you know what I mean, over the top?’

‘Indulge me,’ Janet said.

‘You know what I mean, Janet. Too much makeup, skirt up around her ass, deep cleavage, a mouth like a foghorn.’