The meanest Flood (31 page)

‘Top and bottom of it is that the police need to nail him because if he didn’t do it they don’t have a clue where to look for the killer. But people at the Coroner’s Office aren’t too sure, and the forensic people, they can’t find a sign that he was in the house.’

‘Do they have any evidence at all?’

Steve shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Nicole was the kind of woman, she’d Hoover the house every day, disinfect the toilets, wipe down the work-surfaces in the kitchen. You never saw her without a duster in her hand. There’s some threads, look like they might be from a black overcoat, they found them snagged on a spell inside the back door. And they found a single pubic hair, blonde, female variety. Nicole was brunette.’

‘Female?’

‘Yeah. Vaginal hair, the stem with some kind of plastic coating.’

‘Not a real hair?’

‘Yes, a real female vaginal hair, blonde, but the stem of it had some kind of plastic residue as though it had been stuck in something.’

‘Plastic surgery?’

Steve shrugged his shoulders. ‘They don’t know what to make of it. Might’ve been some kind of model, a teaching aid. They have things like that at the hospital, also the university. And Rolf was connected to the university.’

‘They don’t think it was connected to the killer?’

‘No. It doesn’t fit.’

‘Where was it found, in Rolfs bedroom?’

‘No. The sitting room. On the carpet in the bay window. Could’ve been there for weeks.’

It was after ten and Marie was alone in the office in York. She composed an e-mail to Sam’s Hotmail account, told him about her day. It was dark in the town, no moon, only a few tourists and residents watching the flood waters licking their way towards the centre of the city.

Marie stopped and listened, thinking she’d heard a footfall on the stairs. But no one would come to the office at this time of night. Perhaps one of the other tenants leaving after a spot of overtime?

She finished the e-mail and hit the
Send
button. She switched off the computer and fastened the top button of her coat, feeling a chill go through her body. She checked the keys to the outside door were in her pocket and was about to leave when she heard another movement on the stairs.

Scraping sound. Not the kind of noise you’d make if you were on legitimate business, on your way home after a long day at a desk.

Marie opened the office door softly and moved through the vestibule to the top of the staircase. It was unlit but the upper steps were dimly illuminated by the reflected light from Marie’s desk lamp.

She peered down into the gloom, feeling tension tightening her stomach. Those tiny hairs rising on the back of her neck. She strained her ears, listening for a movement or the sound of breathing.

‘Is someone there?’ she asked, keeping her voice steady. Appearances can be critical at a time like this. If there’s someone there and he detects fear in your voice he’s liable to be more confident. And that’s the last thing you want, a guy who is sure of himself. If there’s a guy there at all, you want him to be a wimp, someone who thought he might be able to follow through but has already got doubts.

When there was no reply she backed away and returned to the office. She stood with her hand on the telephone, wondering if she should ring the police. Wondering if she could take their derision when they found no one in the building but a hysterical female private eye.

She controlled her breathing. Shook her head and gave herself a sharp talking-to. Working on a murder case was never pleasant but it could get to you when it was close up. And Sam being away, out of the country, didn’t help. At least when he was around he’d manage to put things in perspective. It’s no wonder you’re in a state, she told herself. Your house is flooded, your boss is on the run, Celia sounds as though she might be terminally ill and there’s a madman running around killing off Sam’s ex-lady-friends. Last week everything was running along in semi-boring mode, there was order surrounding most of the things in life. Now there’s nothing but chaos and it looks as though it’ll get worse before it gets better.

She lifted her hand from the telephone handset and decided to go home. Celia would be waiting for her. She wouldn’t think about the stairs to the street door. She’d just waltz down them and get outside the way other super-heroes do. Heroines, too.

So resolved, loins girded, Marie strode out of the office and was halfway across the vestibule before she stopped dead. The man standing at the top of the stairs was precisely the kind she’d worried about when her imagination had taken off a few minutes earlier. No, longer than that; his archetype had hovered on the fringes of her perception since she was a small girl. Whenever she’d had the willies or the heebie-jeebies they were inevitably connected with a picture of this kind of primitive.

The first thing was the beer on his breath, though he was still several feet away from her. He was big, broad as well as tall, and he wore tight black jeans with a leather belt and a brown suede jacket. On his feet he had black slip-ons with ornamental chains across the top and between the black of the shoes and the black of the jeans there was a flash of sky-blue socks.

It was only when he stepped towards her and she backed into the office that Marie noticed the growth of hair on the back of his hands. She moved towards the phone but he was watching every move and came quickly across the room to cut her off. He took the phone and ripped it from its socket on the wall. There was a moment when he was going to throw it across the room but he thought again and placed it on the desk.

‘Don’t try anything like that,’ he said. He spoke quietly, a note of weariness in his words. His tone gave the lie to his appearance. Marie had expected him to be loud, overbearing, bullying, but he was none of these things. On the other hand his jaded control was in itself unnerving, giving the man’s suppressed violence a sharper and perhaps more jagged edge. Marie suspected a cocktail of alcohol and steroids running through his bloodstream. This was a situation which could go very badly wrong.

‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘There’s no money here.’

‘Turner. The detective.’

‘Sam’s gone away. He’s out of the country. We don’t know where.’

The man shook his head slowly. He came towards her and took her by the wrist. He walked around the office, taking Marie with him. His hand was so large that his fingers wrapped almost twice around her wrist. He peered into Celia’s small cubby-hole and opened the broom cupboard to make sure Sam wasn’t hiding in there.

He brought her back to the computer desk and sat her down on the chair. He stood in front of her. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m not the kind of guy who hits women. But I’m not good at the moment. The other day I hurt a guy for no reason at all. Dragged him out of his bed and opened up the back of his skull.

‘Where I am at the moment, I don’t have no plans to hurt you. But if I don’t get the right answers I could lose it. You hearing what I’m saying?’

Marie could hear him clearly. No problem at all. She began shaking. Her teeth were chattering in her head and she lost the natural rhythm of her breathing. Small breaths caught at her vocal cords, forcing her to come out with tiny cries that seemed to unsettle the man and add to her own distraction. But she couldn’t regain control of herself. The man was saying he wasn’t going to hurt her but he was also saying that he might crack her head open.

He was so volatile, so out of it, that he didn’t know himself what was going to happen next. As he grappled with the competing emotions within him small flecks of spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth.

‘First, I’m gonna ask you again,’ the man said, ‘where’s Turner? And don’t tell me you don’t know.’

Marie couldn’t speak. Her mouth and throat had dried up and she was convinced that this man was going to turn on her. She only hoped that he wouldn’t inflict as much damage as he was capable of.

‘You gonna answer me?’ he said. He used the back of his hand to wipe his mouth.

Marie moved her lips. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. She shook her head, clenched her fists. There was no way of defending herself against him. He was huge, twice her weight, and that element of intelligence which allows us to obey the rules of civilization seemed to have abandoned him. She’d fight if she had to, go for his eyes and his balls, she’d
try,
but there was no way she’d be able to beat him.

His hands encircled both her wrists and he stretched her arms apart as if he were crucifying her in the air. She came out of the chair and watched as he brought his large face up against hers. His broad forehead set itself against hers.

‘Talk,’ he said. Marie thought her arms would come out of their sockets and she realized that she was still making those small cries. She fought to regain some control over her voice.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything.’ The man released her arms and pulled a chair over from Geordie’s desk and stamped on it. The legs broke away and splintered like kindling. He kicked it and the remains scattered around the office, the solid circular seat banging against a small table and sending that rolling over against the far wall.

‘Oslo,’ Marie said. She hadn’t meant to say it or thought of saying it. The two syllables had somehow come together inside her brain and been catapulted out of her mouth.

‘Now you’re talking. Where’s that?’

‘Norway. We don’t have an address.’

He picked up one of the chair legs and held it in both hands like a baseball bat.

She closed her eyes and waited for him to shatter her skull. In the space of a few seconds her throat dried up and she fully expected to die. ‘You can threaten all you like,’ she said with her eyes closed, but finding and riding her courage, ‘I don’t know where he is in Oslo.’

Marie opened her eyes and they stared at each other, neither of them blinking. The man was the one who finally cut the eye contact. He looked away and flung the chair leg on the floor. ‘You work for the guy, right?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘You should get a different job. This guy Turner, he’s a slimeball. You should do a proper job for somebody who’s a genuine employer.’

He walked to the door. When he stopped and turned around Marie thought he was coming back for her. Her heart began racing again. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you,’ he said. ‘It’s important to me. And I’m sorry about the chair. There was no need for it. You’re not the one. It’s the detective I want.’

Marie listened to his footsteps receding down the stairs. She heard the street door slam and she listened to the silence. She reached in her coat pocket and took out her mobile. But she didn’t ring the police. The guy had gone now and the thought of staying up half the night giving statements to the boys in blue was more than she could face.

She booted the computer again and sent another note to Sam, told him he’d need to buy a new chair for the office.

She walked down the stairs and locked the outer door, turned in the direction of Celia’s house and a warm bed. The job had its good moments too, she told herself, as well as the bad. And anyway, you can’t have everything, where would you put it?

26

Geordie had gone back to the surveillance of Holly and Inge Berit’s flat in Calmeyers gate and Sam was sitting in the window of his own flat in Osterhaus gate. He’d stopped by the Internet cafe in Storgata to pick up his messages. One long one from JD, cogitating on the nature of capital punishment, and two shorter notes from Marie about a pubic hair and a guy who’d muscled his way into the office late at night.

People who want the death penalty are often idealists, JD said in his e-mail. They envision and imagine a world cleansed and purified of crime and evil. They want a moral and ordered world in which everything ugly, everything unseemly, is banished. The ritual of the state killing a criminal by hanging or electrification or lethal injection is not envisioned as ugly or even violent; it is seen as a cleansing act, it is seen as considerate. Justice. An eye was taken and now an eye is being taken in return.

Another problem with capital punishment is that when they have it, the people who believe in it want it not only for the murderers of policemen, but for the murderer of anyone; they want it for rapists and child molesters; and they want it for burglars and car thieves, especially when it is their own house that has been robbed or their own car that has been trashed.

Sam didn’t know what he would do when he finally came face to face with the man who had taken the life of Katherine and Nicole and was now looking to take out Holly. He could imagine killing him, taking him by the throat and squeezing until all sensible life had fled from his body. And Sam Turner didn’t think that would be an inappropriate response. It would be a personal answer and there would be revenge and something like honour involved. There would be no question about whether the death of the murderer would act as a deterrent to other would-be madmen. There would be no question about whether the murderer deserved to live or deserved to die. It would not be a reasonable act because there would be no thought behind it. Sam was enraged by the senseless deaths of these women whose only crime was to have spent a part of their lives with him.

And his rage was cold as ice. He didn’t shout or scream, he didn’t throw things around or make idle threats. He didn’t call for justice. He didn’t need or wish for the help of the state. He pared his finger-nails. He waited to get his hands on the guy.