The meanest Flood (30 page)

Geordie laughed. ‘Limping down the street. I ask you? Who does the guy think I am? He might as well be dressed in a clown’s costume.’

‘I don’t understand how you can be so sure,’ Inge Berit said. ‘Some people do have a limp. The height and weight could be a coincidence.’

‘You’re right,’ Sam said. ‘But we work with statistics. In this situation if we see somebody with a limp and the right height and weight, we can be fairly sure he’s our guy. It’s circumstantial evidence, but we’re sure he’s watching Holly, waiting to see if I make contact. If there was another guy with the right height and weight, we’d put him on the list as well.’

‘And there was,’ Geordie said. ‘Somebody dressed like a sailor. But when he came up close he was the same guy. The limping guy without the limp and a different hat.’

‘Then why didn’t you stop him?’ Holly asked.

‘On what grounds?’ said Geordie. ‘Pretending to limp? What we have to do is find where he’s based, then we can watch his every move. And we can stay one step ahead of him.’

‘We’ll take him tomorrow,’ Sam said. ‘Once we know you two’re out of the way, doing some shopping on the Champs Elysees, I’ll take a walk along your street, maybe even go into your flat. You’ll have to leave us a key. Then, when our man makes his move, we’ll be waiting for him.’

‘Be careful, Sam,’ Holly said.

He shrugged. ‘I can look after myself. Once we know you two are out of the country everything’ll go like clockwork.’

‘I hope so,’ Inge Berit said.

‘Relax,’ Geordie told them. ‘We’re professionals. We know what we’re doing.’

‘You OK?’ Sam asked.

They’d stopped for a sandwich in a small cafe overlooking the harbour. Geordie had put away a baguette full of shrimps and mayonnaise without a word. He’d demolished a slice of cake covered in marzipan and was dropping irregularly shaped sugar lumps into his second cup of coffee.

‘Fine,’ he said.

‘Liar.’

‘I’m fine. I’m working, earning money. I’m eating and I’m sleeping. I’ve got good health and I’m young and I’m away from home in a foreign country which I haven’t been to before, and it’s great. I’m grateful to the master of the universe for giving me these privileges.’

‘But?’

‘But nothing. I’m having the time of my life.’

‘You’re missing Janet and Echo and you’re depressed.’

‘What about you?’ Geordie asked. ‘I suppose you aren’t missing Angeles.’

‘Yeah, I’m missing her, Geordie. But I’m admitting it.’

‘OK, I’m missing them. I’m not sleeping too good, thinking about them, worrying.’ He laughed. ‘A game of football would be good. You know what I mean? That’s what I usually do at home, works every time. All that aggression and sweat, the one thing in the universe makes you forget who you are.’

Sam was quiet. He traced his finger through a spill of cold coffee on the wooden table. ‘I could use some of that,’ he said. ‘This guy is ravaging my past, picking out the good bits, the parts worth remembering, and laying them to waste.’

He looked out over the water, fixing his eyes on the horizon. ‘I could hardly bear to look at Holly this morning. I kept seeing this spectre over her shoulder. Death as a dark shadow, a ravenous spirit searching her blood and her body for somewhere to be.’

‘Jesus, Sam. She’ll be out of the country tomorrow. We’ve done everything we can.’

‘Yeah, I know. I just hope it’s enough. With a guy like this, someone who believes passionately, you can never be sure how they’re gonna react. To kill these women just to set me up takes a really weird mindset. He’ll have everything stacked in his favour: God, morality, justice, truth. Because of something I did to him, or something he imagines I did to him.’

‘You should know who he is, Sam. Someone you’ve hurt so bad that he’s prepared to kill innocent people to get back at you.’

‘Yeah, there’s that as well,’ he said. ‘I think I should know who it is, too. I can’t come up with an answer, though. One thing I keep thinking is the guy must be nursing something from his childhood. It must’ve been traumatic. Something a young mind couldn’t cope with.’

‘Some kid you’ve wronged?’

‘I dunno, Geordie. And if it is that, some kid with a twisted mind because of me, then I don’t want to know. But I have to, because if I don’t he’ll go on working his way through everyone in my life.’

25

Quarry House, the building which houses the Department of Social Security HQ in Leeds, is like something out of the Third Reich. Designed and built in the dying days of the Thatcher era, it imposes itself on the city’s skyline with the authority of a jackboot.

Coming in from York and travelling the Leeds urban motorway towards the centre of the city, Marie passed under the shadow of the building with mixed feelings of disgust and fascination. ‘You’d need a really good reason to go inside,’ she said to Celia, sitting next to her in the passenger seat. With its heavy rectangular design and the mystic symbolism of its central, star-like, rooftop emblem it could have been a fitting monument to Albert Speer.

Celia glanced back at the edifice. ‘I can’t believe someone has designed a Social Security building in such a way that it puts people off going inside. It seems so perverse. Surely it would be better to abandon the concept of Social Security altogether?’

‘Buildings like that come out of the gap between reality and dreams,’ Marie said, ‘out of that space between what people believe they want and what they really want. The man who designed it probably sees himself as a liberal humanitarian.’

‘You don’t think it could have been a woman?’

‘No way,’ Marie said. ‘The bricks are held together with testosterone. If you half-close your eyes you can picture Mussolini or Hitler standing in the doorway.’

She pulled into a parking space opposite the Grand Arcade and switched off the engine.

Celia opened the car door and stepped on to the pavement. ‘Will you pick me up from here?’

‘Yes.’ Marie glanced at her watch. ‘Five o’clock OK?’

‘That’ll give me three hours,’ Celia said. ‘Plenty of time to buy a few old clothes.’

Marie left her spinning round on the pavement. She caught her in the rear-view mirror crossing towards the Grand Arcade, an ancient figure on her spindly legs, black beret pulled down over one eye, Marlene Dietrich-style.

She drove out to North Lane in Headingley, parked the car and went into the Taps. The landlord was a burly man with a clipped white beard and moustache and a smile that continued past his face and reached deep down into the depths of his brown eyes.

Marie told him a long, complicated lie about how she was writing a book around the Rolf and Nicole Day killing and that she’d like to meet some of their neighbours and friends.

‘I didn’t know her,’ he said. ‘Nicole Day. Wouldn’t have recognized her. She was in here once or twice according to a couple of the locals, but I don’t remember her. Him I did know, Rolf. Called in from time to time. He’d prop the bar up and make a pint last forty minutes. Thin wrists, like a woman. Glasses. Not much hair. Guys in here called him the Professor.’

‘Is there anyone else I could talk to?’ Marie asked. ‘Someone who knew them both?’

The landlord looked around the bar. ‘Not at the moment,’ he said. ‘But Steve’ll be in soon. He lives at number thirty-seven, actually talked to Sam Turner before he killed the woman, or maybe it was just after. I’ll introduce you.’

Marie got herself a large glass of cold red wine and tried to warm it between her hands while she watched the regulars at the Taps. There’d been no doubt in the landlord’s mind that it was Sam who did the killings. The police and the press had done a real job on him. He’d been tried and found guilty. The hangman was checking his rope, oiling the hinges on his trapdoor. Sam had always been a survivor but his future was looking increasingly bleak in the face of the evidence in this case.

Maybe that was how it would end? A long and charmed life, forever lived on the edge and brought to a sudden ironic end by a series of events in which he was implicated but never actually involved. Sam would recognize the scenario. She could see him grinning as he said, ‘Just remember... if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.’

The outer door of the pub opened and Marie watched a pink and golden youth carrying the best part of fifty years walk up to the bar. He ordered a drink and exchanged a few words with the landlord. He glanced over his right shoulder at her while his host was pulling the pint. Attempted a long-distance smile.

He paid for the drink and supped the top off. He hitched up his tracksuit trousers and ambled over to Marie’s table. ‘They tell me you’re writing a book,’ he said.

‘You’re Steve?’

‘The same. The man who met the murderer.’

Marie knew women who would consider him good-looking but she couldn’t understand why. She felt waves of antipathy coursing through her body. There must be a relationship between the chemical reactions that stimulated sexual responses and the muscles that created the cringe.

‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘The murderer?’

‘Good question,’ he said, pulling out a chair and settling himself opposite her. ‘The guy I met was called Sam Turner, a private investigator from York. And he’s the guy the police are looking for. But it might not be him.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I didn’t think this up myself. My sister-in-law works for the Coroner’s Office, so it’s her theory. The woman, Nicole Day, she was killed around the time that I was talking to Sam Turner at my house. He was looking for somebody called Bonner, and this was nine o’clock in the morning. I’d come back from my morning run. I was listening to the news headlines.

‘He had a scrap of paper with the name and address on it. But the address was my house, number thirty-seven, and I’m not Bonner, no one called Bonner lives there, I didn’t need to be a detective to know that.’ Steve smiled knowingly, as though he’d made a joke.

‘Anyway, the guy accepted that he’d got the wrong house and I watched out of the window. He went up the street to number seventy-three, tried there but there was nobody home. I’m still watching him through the curtains. He comes back down the street and he stops this black woman, lives at number twenty, bit tasty, just divorced her husband. And I see her shaking her head so he’s asking her the same question: where does Mr Bonner live? But there’s nobody called Bonner in the street, the police checked everybody. Used to be an Alison Bonner who lived at fifty-four but apparently she died five years back. A widow. Her daughter sold the house to a speculator.

‘After that the guy, the detective, he got back in his car and drove away. And nobody’s seen him since. Me, I’ve gone over it time and time again. This was a guy looking for somebody called Bonner. The police come along and tell me he was the murderer but I can’t put the two things together. First I can’t believe he’d just killed the woman with a knife because he’d be covered in blood or at least be rattled. But he was calm. He was pissed off when he couldn’t find this Bonner guy, but he wasn’t someone who had just killed somebody in her bed.

‘Second I couldn’t buy the other theory, that he was looking for the woman, for where she lived, so he could kill her. That he was knocking on house doors in the street, waiting for her to open the door. That the Bonner thing was just an excuse for him to go knocking on all the doors. If the guy was that stupid he’d never’ve got away with it. He’d be locked up by now. So that whole idea is a no-no.’

‘You don’t believe he did it?’ Marie asked.

‘What I thought for a while, I thought he might’ve gone mad. You know, deranged. He’d killed the woman or he was gonna kill her in a few minutes and the balance of his mind had gone. So he was wandering around with this Bonner thing in his head, and maybe Bonner was just somebody he’d made up or somebody out of his childhood. You know, like a school teacher or something.

‘But I gave up on that theory as well because the guy has been so good at avoiding the police. They don’t have no idea where he is. Which means he’s bright, right? Which means he’s not mad or deranged or doolally but he’s thinking and keeping himself free.’

‘So who did it?’ Marie asked.

Steve put his foot on a stool and tied the lace of his trainer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s the short answer.’

‘What were you saying about your sister-in-law and the Coroner’s Office?’

He took another two inches off the top of his pint and glanced back towards the bar. He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘They’re not convinced the detective did it either. He was in the street round about the time the woman was killed, but her husband, Rolf Day, he was killed at least eight hours earlier.

‘What the police thought, what everybody thought, was that Sam Turner came sailing into the street in the morning, killed both of them and then drove back to York. But because Rolf was killed eight hours earlier than Nicole that theory doesn’t fit.

The police are now saying that Turner was there all night, but that doesn’t fit either because I saw him arrive and park his car in the morning. Could be that he killed the guy the evening before, went home and slept through the night in his own bed then came back in the morning to top the woman. But why would he do that?