The meanest Flood (9 page)

The difference was Kitty herself. She had brought something intangible to his life. She would have laughed if he’d said that to her. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she’d have said. ‘Everything you are was already in place when we met. All I did was help you find something that was part of you.’

She had natural modesty. Ruben had never met that before. Not like Kitty’s. Most people you met, they were falling over themselves to prove how great they were. Among guys it was direct competition, the strut or the curled lip, the way they’d show off their women or their biceps or the length of their schlongs. Women were subtle sometimes but even the quiet ones with no equipment weren’t modest, not really. They just drew attention to themselves without all the hullabaloo. They shouted as loud as the leggy blondes but they used a  different language.

Kitty was different because she was
interested
in Ruben Parkins. She caught a glimpse of something in him that, from time to time, he’d suspected might be there but had I never found the courage to believe in. ‘You complete me,’ j she’d said. ‘All the other men I’ve known were aliens. 1 Some of them were nice and some of them were shite but: either way you could take them or leave them. They were wallpaper, didn’t really touch me. But with you it’s like finding a key. You open me up; you make me grow.’

‘It’s the same for me,’ he’d told her. ‘I’m a different man, someone I didn’t know I could be. Weird.’

She’d smiled. ‘It’s not weird, it’s love. That’s what it does to people. I love you.’

And it was like a jolt going through his body. Because women had said that to him before but it had been an act, one of the things you said when you were into a heavy sweat. And he’d said it back a couple of times and it hadn’t meant a thing. It was convention, manners, like -saying thank you to your aunties when they gave you a present for your birthday. Even when the present was something naff like a colouring book.

But when Kitty said it to him and he said it back to her, that was something else. That was closer to religion or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or a fuckin’ space rocket. Ruben didn’t know what exactly.

It was like discovering that an obvious and blatant lie was the only truth in the world. That everything you’d given credence to in the past was false, full of holes, designed to lead you into corruption and despair. The truth was what the world said it was and all your fighting and opposition to it hadn’t made one jot of difference. There was a rock there, beneath all the chaos and confusion. There was nothing to worry about or to kick against. There was certainty.

Kitty.

Kitty and Ruben.

Together they could conquer the world.

He went down to the Skoda but it wasn’t in its usual parking space. It would still be outside Kitty’s house. He could picture it there, up against the kerb, after they’d put her body in the ambulance and hustled him into the patrol car.

He walked, letting the re-runs play over inside his head. The water splashing down the side of the bath, the sodden carpet, the blood-soaked bedclothes. He’d clasped her to his chest and refused to part with her when the two cops arrived. They’d held his arms while the paramedics prised her from his grasp.

The neighbours had come out of their houses and formed a circle around him. Ruben and his dead lover pacing the tarmac; she a rag doll in his arms, he howling at the bright day which had promised so much. And Kitty was weightless in his arms, as if her physical substance had departed together with her life. That fracture of her spine in the crook of his arm. Her body telling him how the murderer’s knife had plunged through her chest and pierced her heart, but as if that wasn’t enough he had thrust deeper still, smashing through the fibrous cartilage of the discs and vertebrae and rupturing the spinal cord.

Why?

Why would anyone do that to Kitty? There were fifty other houses in the street and they had all been left untouched. This killing seemed so personal: the overflowing bath, the intimacy of the bedroom setting. This was no random killing, not a lone psychopath on the nighttime streets of Nottingham. This was a planned crime, Kitty had been targeted. But by whom? And what had she done to bring out such wanton violence in the murderer?

The Skoda was where he had left it. The front of Kitty’s house had been sealed off from the road and the constable on duty refused to let Ruben through.

‘But I know the house,’ he explained. ‘I might see something you would miss. A clue?’

‘You’ll have to talk to the governor,’ the cop said. ‘I can’t let you go inside. I’m not allowed in myself. SOCOs only allowed in there.’

Ruben eyeballed the guy but he was never going to shift. He looked straight ahead as if he was part of the Queen’s guard; should’ve had a busby on his head.

They kept him waiting for an hour in the police station. Even then he didn’t get to see the Detective Chief Inspector who had interviewed him the previous day. A Detective Sergeant with a permanent smirk on his face took Ruben into a small interview room behind the front desk. ‘We don’t have any news,’ he said.

‘Who’s the chief suspect?’

‘Earlier we thought there might be a connection with her ex-husband. But we can’t prove he was in Nottingham. He has witnesses who place him in York.’

‘But you think he did it?’

‘We’re following several leads at the moment, sir.’ j They had nothing. If they were following several leads that meant they didn’t have a clue. Ruben would have to find the killer himself. He’d talk to everyone who knew Kitty and somehow he’d track the murderer down. He pushed his chair away from the table and got to his feet.

‘You should have some counselling, son,’ the Detective Sergeant said. ‘See your doctor and set something up. Or ring these people, they’re there to help you.’ He handed over a card with the telephone number of Victim Support. Logo in the top corner of a dark cloud and a yellow sun rising over it.

‘Thanks for seeing me,’ Ruben said. He turned and left the room and walked into the city. Something had changed in him. He felt no sense of urgency but in that tiny room in the police station he had committed himself to avenging Kitty’s death. His own life held no joy for him now. With splendid clarity he knew that there was only one thing left for him to accomplish. Everything else was dross.

Back in his flat he wrote down the name of every person he could think of who had known Kitty. He racked his brain to recall everyone she had ever mentioned, however distant. When he’d finished he sat back in the chair and looked at the wall. He was like Superman, as if he had X-ray eyes and could pierce through bricks and mortar with his vision. But beyond the walls there was only Kitty mothballed in his memory. Kitty as she had been in life. Her hair and fair skin, her bright eyes and the brilliant promises she could no longer deliver.

He put his mobile and camera on the passenger seat and filled the Skoda’s tank with petrol, headed out towards the Ml and took the slip-road to join the north carriageway. Kitty hadn’t talked much about her ex, Sam Turner, and she’d never said anything to indicate she was frightened of the man. In fact, there had been a wistfulness about her when she’d remembered her marriage, not enough to make Ruben actively jealous because Kitty always let him know that he was number one, but there had been times late at night when Ruben had definitely seen the ex-husband as a threat.

Could be him. Ruben remembered someone in the joint telling him that most murders were domestic. Either the guy tops his missis with an axe or a broken bottle or she finally gets it together and feeds him Warfarin for breakfast - the point being that the statistics about murders are misleading. There’s all these little old ladies scared to go out of the house because the murder rate’s going up every year. They sit at home and watch killings on the box instead. But they’ve got nothing to worry about really; they could walk around all night and nobody’d bother them because the guy most likely to blow them away is the one they go visit in the cemetery on a Sunday morning.

This life, Ruben thought, it hasn’t got anything going for it. You start with demons on all sides and they chip away at you until you’re on your knees. Then you’re given Kitty and you fall on your feet again. Least, you think you’ve fallen on your feet. That’s what it feels like, you’re so up you’d have to be psychic to remember that there’s no substance under you. The devil’s got you by the tail and he’s shifting the parts of the universe around all the time so you can’t see where anything fits. You think you’re set up with a woman by your side and the woman is telling you there’s nothing to worry about and she’s the one you were looking for and you’re the one she’s been looking for and now you’ve found each other. It’s like the whole world is a fairy story and you two’ve got the starring parts.

So you arrive where she lives to take her out for the day and she’s drained of blood and there’s a hole in her chest where someone tried to cut her heart out. The fairy story is a nightmare, the demons never went away, you’re back on your knees and nothing fits. It was all illusion.

Some prick in a Jaguar honked his horn, telling Ruben to get out of the fast lane, pulled up to within a metre of the Skoda’s rear end. Ruben stayed in the lane, slowed his speed a little, gave the guy the finger. The driver of the Jag waited for a gap in the traffic and overtook him on the inside. Ruben gritted his teeth and took off after him, pumping the Skoda for everything it could give. No contest. The Jag pulled ahead with ease and when they came to the junction with the M18 Ruben turned off and let it go- He wasn’t here to play around with guys in fast cars.

On the A1 he pulled into a Little Chef and got himself a cup of coffee and a full breakfast with extra bacon. For a moment there he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. There’d been a tuna sandwich in the police station the previous day, a couple of biscuits in the saucer every time they gave him a cup of tea.

He sat back .for a time when he’d finished eating, thought about his world. He should keep the milk-round going. It got him out of bed in the mornings and provided readies. He didn’t want to go back on benefits, the hassle of all that. And after he’d finished work there was still a good chunk of the day left for him to track down the bastard who’d wasted Kitty.

He’d have lost some of his customers already. You can’t leave people for two days without milk before they start looking for another supplier. But there were plenty of them who’d sign up again if he delivered tomorrow. There were a lot of them owed him money anyway, women who couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. That was economics. It wasn’t so much to do with supply and demand like they taught you on the small business startup course. The real key to economics was market share, getting rid of the competition, buying them out or making it so difficult for them that they threw in the towel. When Ruben had started the milk-round he was going to take over the world, corner the market, become king of milk distribution, maybe expand horizontally into Production. Corner that market as well.

Kitty never understood that. She was a woman. For her the world was about sharing and fair-play, even arguing that he should give milk away if his customers had children and couldn’t afford to pay. That was another reason Ruben liked her so much, because she had compassion and thought that everyone should have humanitarian principles, even the government. Ruben ‘ had never given milk away but he could see it as a possibility. Something to work towards. Once he got the market share, he argued, then he’d be in a position to be generous.

Something else nagging away at the back of his brain. If he didn’t have a job at all he’d start brooding and before he knew what was happening he’d be knocking back too much drink, end up taking it all out on some schmuck down the boozer. On one level that would work for him, like it always had in the past. You ignore the real crap that is fucking up your life and find someone you can slap around, maybe break a few bones. Therapy. You end up back in the can and blame the system for being unfair, blame your folks for not giving you a good start in life.

But if he did that now, whoever had killed Kitty would go free. Ruben had never come across justice. When the word came up in conversation there was a part of him that wanted to laugh. Justice? What’s that?

Only now there was a chance for justice, because it wasn’t going to be meted out by the cops or the courts, it was going to be administered by Ruben Parkins. In fact Ruben
was
justice. He was the thing itself, the concept, and he was also its executor.

Justice should be about justness. Making sure that everyone got what they deserved. The world didn’t understand that. They only understood the statue, that goddess with her scales and her sword. But the scales and the sword weren’t reality, or they hadn’t been up to now. With Ruben in charge the scales would weigh out how much Kitty’s life was worth and the sword would chop mercilessly into the flesh of the man who’d sent her to her maker. Ruben would be just, impartial, he would ensure that everyone received their due.

He paid for his breakfast and got back behind the wheel of the Skoda. At junction 45 he left the motorway and followed the signs to York, watching his speed on the A64. He pulled into the park-and-ride centre on the outskirts of town and took a bus into the city. Had a seat behind a couple of German tourists wrapped in waterproof clothing. In the seat opposite was a woman who looked like Kitty might have looked when she was twenty, only she couldn’t smile, not even with her eyes.