The meanest Flood (41 page)

And the beauty of it was that she still came across real good. She’d definitely had lipstick on in the fantasy and the fact that she didn’t wear any now didn’t diminish the memory for a second. If anything it enhanced it. He couldn’t think why. He just knew that he wasn’t disappointed.

‘I’ve been good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been paralysed. I’ve done what I need to do. The grief s still there, but I understand that. I know grief, how it’s good for you. Like a natural process, something I have to go through. And I’ve been sad, a
leetle
bit depressed. But before it was incapacitating me, I couldn’t work. Now it’s more like sadness. I think I’m over the hump.’

Her smile got wider. ‘It’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘But sometimes these things get better before they get worse. There might be a reaction.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Maybe not. But it’s as well to be aware that it could happen.’

‘What I thought,’ he told her, ‘because I’m so much better and because mostly it’s to do with you and the talk we had, I wondered if we should shut up shop here and go for a drink?’

She took her hands off the desk and put them under it, maybe on her lap, he couldn’t see where they went. She was lost for words for a moment or two. The smile disappeared but she kept the eye contact. Seemed to be drilling right through him, like nobody had ever asked her to have a drink before. But he couldn’t believe that. She was a good-looking woman.

‘Somewhere in the town,’ he said. ‘You choose the place. We don’t have to talk about me. We can talk about you. Be more democratic. Get to know each other.’

‘That would be rather unprofessional of me, Mr Parkins.’

‘Come on, call me Ruben.’

‘When someone has been through a traumatic event, like you, with losing Kitty, there are a number of possible reactions. One of the best known is what we call transference. The subject becomes fixated on the therapist or the counsellor. It might feel like affection or love or a strong attraction but in reality it’s gratitude. I can only help you, Mr Parkins, if I remain at a distance, retain some objectivity. It wouldn’t be helpful for our relationship to go further than the bounds of professional decorum.’

‘That’s OK,’ Ruben told her. ‘You don’t have to give me an answer now. Think about it for a couple of days. I don’t want the professional stuff anyway. I want to get to know you. I’ve got a feeling about it. I think we could be good. Sometimes I’m wrong and if I’m wrong about it I won’t keep you on a string. I’ll walk away from it. Kitty taught me that. She taught me how to live better and just because she’s dead I’m not gonna go back to the old ways.

‘This is not transference or whatever you called it. I’m just asking you to have a drink with me, swap a few stories, see where it leads. That’s a normal thing to do. I’m a guy and I like the look of you and you’re a woman and you’re interested in me.’

‘I’m what? Now I know you’re deluded.’

Ruben opened his eyes wider. ‘Hey, I think we’re getting somewhere.’

Sarah Murphy smiled and shook her head. ‘You’re very direct.’

Ruben gave her a grin. ‘I don’t hear you denying it. The chemistry.’

‘And you don’t hear me confirming it either.’

‘No?’ Ruben said. ‘Not with your voice.’

He left her there, sitting behind her desk with a bemused smile on her face, his mobile number, scribbled on a slip of the doctor’s stationery, clutched in her hand.

On the stairs he passed her next customer, a young man as sleek as a wet seal.

It was one of those lucky days. Ruben had known it before he got out of bed. Maybe it was in the stars, if you believed in stuff like that, horoscopes, astrology. What Ruben believed and what he used to tell Kitty was that you made your own luck. If he’d been out trying to make his own luck when he was younger, instead of wanting to fight everybody, rob everybody he saw walking down the street, maybe he’d never’ve ended up in prison. If there was something in the astrology stuff then all the guys born on the same day as him would’ve ended up stashed away in Long Lartin. They’d’ve had their own wing.

As he walked back towards the car park where he’d left the Skoda he looked at the people on the pavement and realized that it never crossed his mind to rob them. Guy there with the business suit, probably had notes stuffed in every pocket, but he wasn’t a mark. Just somebody on the street. And it wasn’t Ruben’s prison sentence, the time he’d spent in Long Lartin that had brought about the change. It was Kitty. And it wasn’t the threat of going back in there, spending another chunk of his life behind bars that kept him out. It was the thought of Sarah Murphy with her short brown hair and the scent of her and the feeling that before too long he’d be getting together with her and they’d be swapping stories and lending each other books and be living like normal people lived.

Not that he’d forget Kitty. He’d never do that. She’d always be there for him, somewhere close by, and he’d never forget the way she’d died. Though it was true the last couple of nights the images of Kitty had blurred into an image of Sarah. Ruben had fought that for a while, coming awake in his bed and shaking his head, trying to keep them separate. But in the early hours of the morning he’d surrendered to his subconscious, if that’s what it was, something older and wiser than his conscious brain. They weren’t the same person, he knew that and didn’t want to pretend they were. But there was something about each of them that included the other, something beyond manners and class and physical similarities. And Ruben would discover what it was, that evasive quality. It might take him the rest of his life, but he didn’t mind. He had time and the subject was fascinating. Must be like that for people who get Nobel prizes; they find a little thing that interests them and they study it for years and years and they don’t ever get bored.

It was like a jeweller’s shop but a small place, not one of those with big windows where everything glitters. Ruben went in because he thought he might find something for Sarah, when she came round to the inevitability of them being together. He didn’t have a real idea, a ring or a bracelet, maybe, something like that.

When he looked around there was nothing that would suit her. He’d imagined something fine, tiny links made in soft metal, something so smooth you’d hardly notice it. But what they had in the shop was chunky stuff, kind of things that biker chicks went for. A bangle with a couple of skulls on it. Ankle chains looked more like leg-irons.

As he was going out of the door he noticed a cabinet with a selection of teeth in it and stopped to look. They wouldn’t do for Sarah, there was nothing in the place that would be good enough for her. But there was one long tooth there, shiny white, mounted in a gold cap and dangling from the end of a chain, that Ruben fancied for himself. He called the assistant over, a short youth with wide trousers two inches too long for his legs. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

‘Shark’s tooth. The chain’s twenty-four-carat gold.’ He opened the cabinet with a key and took out the chain with the tooth and handed it to Ruben.

‘There’s no marks on it,’ he said. ‘If it’s gold it should be stamped.’

‘Indian gold,’ the assistant said. ‘If it was British gold it’d cost an arm and a leg.’ Ruben turned his attention to the tooth. ‘Shark’s tooth?’

‘Yeah.’

‘From a shark?’

‘Yeah, the genuine article. We import them from California. They’re from dead sharks. The exporters guarantee that no animals have been hurt or damaged in any way.’

Ruben laughed.

‘You think I’m kidding you?’ the assistant asked.

‘Hell, no,’ Ruben told him. ‘I knew it wasn’t from a
live
shark. I didn’t think there was squads of dentists going down there in frogmen’s suits looking for sharks to do a quick job on.’

The assistant didn’t think it was funny. He must’ve got out the wrong side of the bed. ‘They’re supposed to bring you luck,’ he said. ‘Shark’s teeth.’

Ruben looked at the price tag. ‘Thirty quid?’ he said.

‘Used to be twenty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence,’ the assistant said. ‘But the boss doesn’t like pennies.’

‘Put it in a bag,’ Ruben said, reaching for his wallet.

He walked up the path of the High Willows Guesthouse, obviously though erroneously named after the two stunted willow trees in the garden. A double-bay-windowed house with a recently added wooden porch obscuring the original front door. He rang the bell and listened to the distant chimes emulating ‘It’s Now Or Never’ somewhere towards the rear of the house. Ruben hummed along with it and when the chimes died he carried on. Elvis Presley was already dying before Ruben heard him but the guy had left some great songs behind. He liked that soaring voice, the way it took hold of you. Should’ve been in the opera like Pavarotti. Probably would’ve been, too, if he’d been Italian instead of a truck driver.

But if the world was divided into Elvis Presleys and Luciano Pavarottis the woman who came to the door would have been much closer to Tupelo, Mississippi than the little town of Modena in Italy.

Must be a blonde wig, he thought, the kind of hair that Dolly Parton would choose for a Saturday night fling. Carefully powdered breasts like globular light shades, each wrapped in its own half of a cream-coloured frilly blouse with the top three buttons unused. A short frilly apron hid an even shorter skirt and stiletto heels forced the woman’s calf muscles to bulge, giving form and definition to her legs but contracting the Achilles tendons.

Before he’d blinked twice Ruben had interpreted the message that the proprietress of the High Willows Guesthouse was sending out into the world, and the adrenalin pumping into his bloodstream reinforced the conviction that he’d be able to run faster than her.

‘Can you spare a moment?’ Ruben asked. He showed her the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘We’re trying to trace this man and have reason to believe he stayed in this area recently. Have you seen him before?’

The proprietress didn’t look at the photograph. She licked her lips and blinked her false eyelashes to tip Ruben off she was intelligent. She smoothed her hands over her stomach and looking deeply into his eyes, she said: ‘You don’t want a room, then?’

The voice was perfect for the blonde wig and false eyelashes. There was a million cigarettes behind it, a quantity of gin or vodka and a whole world of small disappointments.

‘No, sorry,’ Ruben explained. ‘I don’t want a room. I’m making enquiries about the man in the photograph.’ He waved it towards her but she still didn’t look.

‘You’re not the Old Bill, are you,’ she said. It wasn’t a question. ‘Come in, I’ve got the kettle on.’

He followed her into the house. Wall lights with tartan shades. Pile carpets. Ornaments of dogs. Photographs of a beauty queen from long ago;
Miss Cleethorpes, Miss Lincoln, Miss Barrow-in-Furness.
Real blonde hair probably, tightly fitting swim-suits, looking quaintly old-fashioned, as she still did today.

The kitchen was Formica and steel. A large modern clock on the wall with false eyelashes and a pink ribbon tied in a bow underneath its chin. Magnetic letters stuck on the fridge door spelling out the words
Wil You Stil Love Me Tomoro.
Not so much a sign of illiteracy as a dearth of magnetic consonants.

‘That’s how you can spot poverty,’ Kitty had told him once. ‘People who surround themselves with too much of everything.’ She didn’t mean lack of money, she was talking about poverty of imagination, poverty of spirit. ‘Coffee or tea, Mr...?’

‘Parkins,’ he said. ‘Ruben Parkins. Coffee, please.’

‘You can call me Eileen,’ she told him. ‘Eileen Dover.’ She cackled long and loud. ‘No, it’s Eileen Smith, after the bloke I married. I got rid of him but I’ve hung on to the name.’ She pouted and blinked her false eyelashes again in case he’d missed it the first time.

She gave him a mug of coffee and pushed a milk jug towards him. She took the photograph from his hand and walked over to the window with it. He watched her smile and nod down at it.

‘You know him?’ Ruben asked.

‘I don’t know him,’ she said. ‘We didn’t get that far. Not from lack of trying, mind. But he was here, stayed a couple of nights. The front bedroom, all alone.’

‘You sure?’

Eileen looked at the photograph again. ‘Yeah.’ She gazed out of the window and closed her eyes. ‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Sam Turner. Am I right or am I right?’

‘That’s his name,’ Ruben said, thinking that Eileen Smith suddenly looked good. ‘Can you remember when he was here? The date? D’you keep a guest book?’

‘He’ll be in the register,’ Eileen said. She went for the register in the hall and brought it back with her. ‘But I can tell you now it was the night of the murder. That woman over Clifton way. He was here the night before and the night of the murder. He left the next day.’

‘Did you tell the police?’ Ruben asked.

Eileen Smith shook her head, thumbing through the register. ‘Here it is,’ she said, ‘Sam Turner.’ She handed the book to Ruben and he looked at the detective’s signature, memorized the guy’s home address.

‘Did you know her?’ Eileen asked. ‘The woman who was killed?’

‘Kitty,’ Ruben said. ‘It was me who found her.’