The meanest Flood (24 page)

‘Well, he’s out of it, isn’t he? Hasn’t been to the office for years. If he walked in today I don’t know if I’d recognize him. He’s got that disease... turns you into an old codger. Mrs S has someone come in at home to see to him while she’s running the business.’

‘Did you know Katherine Turner well?’

‘Well as anyone, I should think. We saw more of her before the accident than we did of Mrs S.’

‘Why do you call it an accident?’

‘It sounds nicer, don’t you think? The other word’s more violent.’

‘Murder. She
was
murdered.’

‘I don’t like saying it. Neither does Saul, do you, Saul?’ He swallowed some air but the fly-trap remained open. Marie saw him ten years down the line, a captain of industry, a magnate in the tradition of Robert Maxwell, Nick Leeson, Jonathan Aitken and Lord Archer. Perhaps he was Mrs S’s nephew or the son of a friend? Another instance of the old school tie and nepotism saving British industry from any form of change or innovation. Vesuvius threw out a fine spray of lava when he shook his head.

‘Did she talk about boyfriends?’ Marie asked.

‘She talked about Ruben all the time. Ruben this, Ruben that. You would’ve thought he was Prince Charming to hear her go on about him. But he came to collect her from the office a couple of times and he was, well, you know.’

‘No,’ Marie told her. ‘I don’t know. What was he?’

‘Common,’ said the receptionist. ‘You wouldn’t’ve given him a job. He looked like a criminal.’

Dear God, Marie said to herself. What kind of work is this, where you have to talk to morons all day long?

‘I was thinking about other boyfriends,’ she said. ‘Did she ever mention a dancer or a waiter?’

‘Tell you the truth,’ the receptionist said, ‘she liked them rougher than that. I don’t usually talk ill of the dead, Saul will bear me out about that, but Katherine was the type who wouldn’t look twice at a decent man. Always went for the
exotic.'

‘A dancer?’

She shook her head. ‘No, Katherine had two left feet. She liked films and she bought CDs. Rock ’n’ roll. But she didn’t go dancing.’

‘What about a waiter?’

‘I don’t remember her talking about any waiter. She might have... someone who worked in a cafe, some kind of greasy spoon place. But if you’re thinking of a posh waiter in a proper restaurant, she probably wouldn’t.’

‘What I’m thinking of,’ Marie said, ‘is someone who wears trousers with braid down the seam of the leg.’

‘Oh, no, not Katherine. She’d never look twice at someone like that. What do you say, Saul?’

Saul performed something approximating to a smile followed by a grunt which moved a body of viscous fluid from his lungs to his tonsils.

Back at the car Marie tried to put a list together. Who wears braid on his trousers? If we dismiss the military there are people who wear it as part of the uniform for their job, like waiters or professional dancers. There are a whole group of other men who might have been to some kind of formal function, a wedding or a posh dinner party. And after that there are entertainers, singers perhaps, a compere at a cabaret, or someone in the theatre.

Then there was the question of the trilby. Who wears a trilby? Sam Turner did sometimes, but not a lot of men, not these days. It was a kind of affectation.

In itself a trilby would be something to think about, but in combination with dress trousers it was decidedly odd. With dress trousers you would expect a top hat, white gloves and a cane. And the overcoat was odd as well. With trousers like that it would be more fitting to wear a cape.

Did the man who was in Katherine Turner’s garden that night have these other clothes? If so, what had he done with them? In the full rig he would have looked like a professional gambler or a vampire. A roue. Where had he been before checking out Katherine’s house?

The other explanation, of course, was that he didn’t have the rest of the clothes. He’d bought the trousers at a second-hand or charity shop at the same time as he bought the trilby and the black overcoat. They were a working disguise, something to throw would-be pursuers off the scent. And to throw away once the deed was done.

But Marie was not here to make guesses. Not in the age of the CCTV camera.

The Riverside Student House was not on the side of the river. It was a quarter of a mile away from Katherine Turner’s house and constructed of redbrick with a black pantiled roof. A small plaque under the name of the house informed Marie that it was built in the year 1815, but some modernization had occurred since then, the double-glazing for example and the high-mounted camera that scanned the street outside.

The manager of the house, Jurgen Grimes, was a technophile and only too happy to show off his system. ‘Do you know about digital imaging?’ he asked Marie.

‘Not a lot,’ she said. ‘I know the quality’s good.’

He sat her in front of a bank of screens in one of the upper rooms. ‘I’ve got eight cameras at this house,’ he said. ‘Another eight at Warwick House further along the street. There’s eight at Windermere, which is closer to the main campus, and there’s still room on the system for more when I need them.’

Most of the screens, some of which were split, showed internal scenes, halls and stairways, but others showed front and rear views from the various houses and tracked images of people and vehicles approaching from either direction.

‘Do you keep archived material?’ she asked.

‘How far back?’

Marie mentioned the date of Katherine Turner’s death.

‘That’s not archived,’ Jurgen said. ‘That’s still current. The system is set to compress stretches of time when nothing happens but any movement in the camera area is saved to the hard disk.’ He used the keyboard to enter the date. ‘What time of day?’

‘Night,’ Marie told him. ‘Try between midnight and around two in the morning.’

Jurgen pointed to the monitor to her right and Marie watched it change from a four-part split screen to a fullscreen view of the street outside the house. The digital clock in the lower right-hand corner of the screen showed 12.01 a.m. but quickly changed to 12.17 when the camera locked on to a couple of girls swaying along the street with their arms around each other. They were around twenty years old and had been drinking. One of them was crying. The camera followed them until they drew level with the house and then switched and followed them along the street until they turned the corner and disappeared.

The digital clock leapt forward again, 12.51 a.m.

At the far end of the street was a figure with a hat. As he drew closer to the house it was apparent that the hat was a trilby and that the man was wearing a neat black overcoat. ‘Can you zoom in?’ Marie asked.

‘We’ll lose quality.’

‘That’s OK.’

Jurgen operated a mouse and the camera zoomed in on the area of the man’s face. But there was nothing recognizable there, only a mass of pixels. The camera pulled back fractionally but the man kept his head down, his eyes on the pavement, so that his features were hidden in shadows.

‘Damn!’ Marie said.

‘He’s avoiding the camera,’ Jurgen said. ‘But he’s white, we can see that.’ He entered something on the keyboard and the man’s height and weight flashed up on the screen. ‘He’s one metre seventy-eight and around sixty-eight kilos.’

‘That’s neat,’ Marie said. ‘Will it give us his name and address?’

Jurgen laughed. ‘The way the technology’s progressing it might be able to do that one day.’

‘Can you go down to his feet?’ Marie said. ‘His shoes.’ Jurgen moved the mouse down the length of the man’s body.

‘A little higher,’ Marie said. ‘I want to see the bottom of his trousers.’

The man was wearing grey trousers with a sharp crease. There was no braid on them.

‘Highly polished shoes, though,’ Jurgen said. ‘Shows someone who’s fastidious.’

‘Or he lives with someone who is,’ Marie said. ‘Maybe his mother?’

Jurgen let the image run and they watched the man pass the house and the camera switch to his rear view until he turned out of the street in the direction of the quiet avenue where Katherine Turner, unknowingly, waited for him.

‘Can you give me a copy of that?’ Marie asked.

‘If you give me an e-mail address I’ll send it as an attachment,’ he said. ‘You might lose quality but you can always come back here for a better view.’

Marie left the house and followed in the footsteps of the man in the trilby hat. She could feel Jurgen tracking her from his terminal as she walked the length of the street.

20

Sam watched an Oslo dawn through the windows of the flat in Osterhaus gate. He’d turned in around halfmidnight and gone deep for a couple of hours. Dreamed of the Christmas Eve that Holly walked out on him. It was all there in his mind, the tinsel and the whisky on his breath. Kind of dream if it was a play you’d say,
Great set, but I couldn’t believe the characters, especially the guy.

He’d gone out and bought a turkey and eight bottles of Scotch in the morning. Brought them back home safely. He’d noticed the van outside the house but didn’t think it was anything to do with him. Blue transit with the rear doors open, straw inside, looked like it’d been used to transport animal feed.

Holly had the wardrobe door open and was piling her clothes on the bed. ‘I’ve met someone,’ she told him. ‘I’m moving out. We want to spend Christmas together.’ Sam went downstairs, opened one of the bottles and filled a glass. He was truculent but buried it under an avuncular mask. Thought civilized thoughts. He brought the drink upstairs and said. ‘I’m in reasonable mode. I’m not gonna be violent. Who is it? Anyone I know?’

He didn’t know anyone who would have handled it better under the circumstances.

Holly was wary, but she answered. ‘No one you know. A doctor. Norwegian.’

‘Going up-market,’ he said. She gave him a look that might’ve been imported from the Arctic.

He told her, ‘I’m trying to be calm but there’s a residue of bitterness in me. And I just bought a turkey.’

‘I hope you’ll be happy together,’ Holly said.

‘I can’t believe you said that.’

‘Sam, most of the things I’ve said these last months, you haven’t heard.’ She collected the clothes in both arms and picked her way down the stairs. She got a cardboard box and flicked her way through the CDs, taking the ones she thought belonged to her. Sam looked over her shoulder, to make sure she didn’t take anything important. And there was something strange: they’d definitely been CDs in the dream when in reality they were vinyl, albums, maybe a few audio-tapes in there.

When she went outside to the van he poured himself a refill. Cheap and nasty, he could feel it going to work on his liver.

He sat on a chair in the kitchen and put his head in his hands. He caught glimpses of the world fragmenting around him. ‘It’s fucking Christmas,’ he said when she came back into the house.

‘I know the date, Sam.’

‘Christmas Eve.’ He was going to tell her he’d bought a turkey again but she hadn’t been too impressed the first time.

She looked good, as though she was on the verge of something. Sam hadn’t looked at her for a long time, or if he had he hadn’t seen her. She looked as though she had a life and she looked fired-up, as though she couldn’t wait for it to get going. Didn’t really matter what came, she’d make something of it.

‘You can take half the turkey,’ he said. ‘If there’s room in the van. I’ll get a saw.’

‘Look,’ Holly said, ‘it hasn’t worked, that’s all. We both tried and it didn’t come to anything. You haven’t been happy.’

It was true, he hadn’t been. Not for years, long before Holly came into his life. He didn’t understand what happiness had to do with it. While they were together there was hope, that’s how he’d seen it. He’d known it wasn’t enough, but as long as they had each other...

‘You’ll be all right?’ she asked him. ‘You won’t do anything silly?’

He wanted to laugh at that but why torture the woman? No, he wouldn’t do anything silly, he’d carry on making sensible and rational decisions. Soon as he’d finished these eight bottles he’d stop drinking and get a job. Become respectable, rich, maybe famous.

There was a moment, in real time and in the dream, when he thought of going down on his knees, begging her to stay, at least over Christmas. But he didn’t do it because it might have worked. He saw them stuffing the turkey together and sitting down at the table with it between them. And he knew that what he thought was hope was no hope at all. If he begged long and loud enough it would prolong the nightmare. Perhaps indefinitely. But he saw himself with the possibility of alternative nightmares. A man with the luxury of choice.

It was best that she ran off with her Norwegian doctor. And it was best that Sam stayed behind in the empty house. There was so much of him he didn’t know, so much of himself he had avoided. Sam Turner didn’t need a relationship, he needed time and space.

‘I hope you find what you’re looking for,’ he told her. While he was forming the words he tried to make himself believe them. She didn’t reply and he didn’t have anything to add.