Authors: John Baker
By early afternoon Ruben was on the south side of the river a couple of streets from Kitty’s house. He rang the bell on the door of the Greenwood Guesthouse and waited until the lady of the house answered. She was one of those women who had a smile that was a wince in disguise. If he’d been looking for somewhere to stay Ruben would have had serious misgivings. But that wasn’t why he was here.
He showed her the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘I’m trying to trace this man,’ he said. ‘He might have stayed here in the last week or so.’
The woman looked at Ruben for a long time without glancing at the photograph. Her face betrayed nothing of her thoughts.
‘It’s a serious matter,’ he told her. ‘Do you recognize him?’
The woman looked at the photograph. She shook her head. ‘Never seen him before.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘If he’d stayed here, I’d remember. I don’t forget faces.’
‘Thanks,’ Ruben said. ‘Sorry to bother you.’
He left the house and closed the gate. If necessary he’d visit every guesthouse and hotel in the city. If he could find someone who recognized Sam Turner, someone who could prove that he was in Nottingham when Kitty was killed, then he’d have the bastard.
Simple proof, that’s all he needed. And the way to get it was down to leg-work. That’s how the police solved crimes, they didn’t follow up clues and solve puzzles except in books and films. They used leg-work.
And that’s what Ruben would do. And when he found the place where the detective stayed, he’d go back to York and kill him, hang him out to dry.
17
It was raining when he left Newcastle but by the time his plane circled Gardermoen, Oslo’s airport, the sky was pastel blue and the landscape shimmered in an extraordinary early-evening light. It made Geordie think about those filters that photographers use to bathe everything in red or blue. It was as if someone had invented a filter that simply made everything clearer, undermined the blurring effects of distance and pasted them into the windows of the plane.
He’d got himself a book called
Welcome to Norway
and had read it from cover to cover during the flight, probably knew more now about the country than the people who lived there. He knew they’d been occupied by the Nazis during the war and that they liked to think of themselves as progressive even though they had a king. This airport, if they ever got to stop circling round it and land, levied a surcharge on all flights operating between midnight and six in the morning. This was so people who lived close by could get a better night’s sleep. Keep the decibel count down. Cool. Government for the people by the people. Nearly like communism.
Geordie knew about Ibsen and another one of their writers but he couldn’t remember his name. Would come later, on the tip of his tongue. Guy who didn’t write plays like Ibsen but novels like JD. He knew about the painter, Munch, madman who had people screaming and merging into each other, except that one called
The Kiss
which reminded Geordie of him and Janet. There was the composer as well, Grieg, who’d written the
Peer Gynt
tune which Celia had played for him. Made you think of fairies.
That was history, all those people. There were probably people writing and painting and composing now in Norway who were just as good as those old guys, maybe even better. But countries liked to have a history so they remembered the old guys for as long as they could. Governments would do anything to keep you from living in the present. Geordie had seen a play by Ibsen at the Leeds Playhouse,
A Doll’s House,
something like that. He’d thought it would be old-fashioned and full of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ but it wasn’t. Really exciting, kept you on the edge of your seat for two hours. Made you think all the way home. Made you question your attitudes.
The woman at passport control looked more like a waitress than a government official. She barely glanced at Geordie’s passport. The customs guy eyed him suspiciously and Geordie was expecting a strip search when the man nodded him through.
Geordie was lost in a foreign country. He stopped a tall fair man dressed in a new lightweight suit with matching shirt and practised the words from his Norwegian phrasebook.
‘Kan de fortelle Meg hvor tog stasjonen er?’
‘The railway station?’ the Norwegian said. ‘Yeah. Take the escalator down and keep walking. You can’t miss it.’
Geordie had brought a novel to read but hadn’t got very far with it. Le Carré’s
The Constant Gardener,
about the murder of a woman in northern Kenya. Janet had given him it at York station when he’d got on the train to Newcastle. He’d kissed Echo and then he’d held Janet and kissed her for a long time. She’d whispered love to him and the old words started an echo that lasted more than a thousand kilometres.
He watched Norway go by through the windows of the train. Red barns and wooden houses. Seemed like whichever way you framed the view through the window you’d end up with something like a postcard. Geordie would have liked to watch the view, see how this new landscape was different from England or Holland, the only other country he’d visited. Either that or he’d have liked to read more of the le Carre, try to understand how Lake Turkana, where the woman in the story was killed, was the birthplace of mankind. Far as Geordie could remember, the birthplace of mankind was somewhere in India. But who was he to argue with le Carre?
But he couldn’t do either of those things because he didn’t know why he was here and he didn’t understand the events that had led him here. Geordie was disoriented. Not only that, he was probably alienated as well because events in the outer world were spinning in directions he had never envisaged. One, Sam’s ex-wife Katherine had been killed in Nottingham when Sam just happened to be visiting the city. Two, another woman, one of Sam’s old girlfriends, Nicole Day, and her husband Rolf, had been killed in Leeds when Sam was knocking on the doors of houses in the same street. Three, Sam had split. He had packed a bag well quick and disappeared without trace. Four, the police were after him. There was a manhunt on, with pictures in the newspapers and captions telling people not to approach this man because he was dangerous. And the man was Sam Turner.
No word for three days, then last night the telephone rang. Geordie was sitting by the window looking out at the dark and he could hear Janet singing upstairs, trying to settle Echo for the night. Barney was curled in front of the wood-burning stove, sleeping as usual. Geordie was worried that Barney was getting near the end of his life. Well, worried wasn’t the right word. Barney and Geordie had been together since the dog was a pup. They’d been on the street together, looked after each other when there was nobody else to care, before Sam came along and offered them a job. And if Barney gave up the ghost some day soon it would be the end of a friendship. More than that, it would mark the end of a whole stage in Geordie’s life.
Yeah, worrying about Barney and the phone rang. Geordie moved quickly, not wanting the ringing to disturb Echo who was descending into that whimpering stage which would soon be deep breathing and sleep. And as he picked up the handset he knew it was Sam. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Oslo. Can you come over?’
‘Oslo? That’s in Finland, right?’
‘Norway,’ Sam said.
‘Right, Norway. Just testing. When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘You know those puzzles psychologists use, where there’s a sequence and you have to find what comes next?’
‘There’s a two and a four,’ Geordie said, ‘and you have to decide if the next number is six or eight.’
‘Yeah,’ Sam said. ‘When the marriage to Katherine hit the dust I got myself mixed up with Nicole. And they’ve both been killed in that order.’
‘That’s not much of a link, Sam.’
‘It’s all I’ve got.’
‘So how does that lead to Oslo?’
‘After Nicole dumped me I fell into the arms of Holly.’
‘Holly? What kind of name’s that?’
‘If my bet’s right it’s the third name in the sequence.’
‘But why Oslo, Sam?’
‘Because that’s where Holly lives.’
‘Jesus. Then that’s the place you shouldn’t be. If she’s lulled in Oslo while you’re there you’re never gonna be able to explain it.’
‘Geordie, I’m here to make sure she doesn’t get killed.’
‘You’re the kiss of death to these women, Sam. Why do you want me there?’
‘To help, of course. And...’
‘And? And what?’
‘If it goes wrong and we can’t save Holly, you’ll be my witness.’
‘Why would it go wrong, Sam? If there’s two of us on the job we should be able to keep her safe.’
Sam sighed down the line. ‘Holly doesn’t always do what I tell her,’ he said. ‘In fact, when I speak she turns off, doesn’t listen.’
Sam hadn’t asked what was happening in York. Maybe he knew the police and the press had painted him as a demented wife-killer. You read the news or you listened to the local radio station and Sam Turner, the neighbourhood good guy, had been transformed into a cynical murderer who stalked the environs of his ex-wives and girlfriends, waiting for the moment when they were most vulnerable. You believed the media and Sam was back on the bottle with a vengeance, often so drunk he couldn’t stand. He sprawled on the threadbare carpet of his flat wearing a string-vest with his flies forever open. He didn’t shave for days and his body was emaciated from lack of food and vitamins, his skin slack and pale as he plotted the evil end of the women whose lives he had already ruined.
Everybody in the business had been hauled down to the police station. Celia, Marie, they’d called in JD and George Forester. Even Fred Taylor had been questioned, and his only connection to Sam was that he failed to sell him an insurance policy from time to time.
Geordie had spent seven hours in the Fulford Road nick, helping them with their enquiries. They’d come for him at eight o’clock the evening after Sam disappeared and he’d walked back home again at three o’clock in the morning. Chief Inspector Delaney had all the questions, beginning with: ‘I don’t like Sam Turner, son, and I don’t like the people who do like him.’
Geordie had told the truth, more or less. Yes, he worked for Sam Turner. No, he didn’t know of any crimes the man had committed. Yes, he had heard that one of Sam’s ex-wives and one of his girlfriends had been murdered recently. No, he didn’t think Sam could have committed the murders. Yes, he was married with a small child. No, he didn’t know where Sam Turner was at the present time. He’d given the same answers the second time he was asked and again the third and fourth time.
The parting shot had been, ‘Do you want the perpetrator of these crimes to be brought to justice?’ Delaney had said it just like that. He wasn’t the kind of cop to say, ‘Do you want us to catch the murderer?’ He was like a cop out of a fifties movie. He had a confused moral agenda based on his own prejudices and the lessons he remembered from cop school way back in the mists of time, and some Sunday school lessons even before that.
Chief Inspector Delaney wasn’t a good guy to have as an enemy because he’d find a way of getting you even if it wasn’t legal. On the other hand if he was on your side you’d have to wonder why it was you attracted people with shit for brains.
‘Is Sam your only suspect?’ Geordie had asked.
‘You think we should be looking for someone else?’
Geordie had smiled. ‘Yes, I don’t think Sam did it. In fact, I know he didn’t. He couldn’t do something like that.’
‘You got any ideas who we should be looking for? I’m not making any promises here, son, but if you can come up with a name maybe we’ll forget that the dead bodies were both connected to your boss and we’ll forget that said boss is on the run and go after your guy instead.’
‘I don’t know who did it,’ Geordie had told him. ‘I only know that as long as you chase Sam, the real murderer is getting away with it.’
Delaney shook his head. ‘You know it’s an offence to harbour a fugitive from the law?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Or to withhold information that might lead to said fugitive’s apprehension?’
The language was worse than the interrogation. Geordie thought if the guy carried on talking like that he’d have to confess to the killings himself.
OK, OK, I did it. But please, no more jaw.
The train pulled into the Sentral Stasjon in Oslo and Geordie got his bag and stepped down to the platform. He followed the crowd. Sam was leaning up against the kiosk outside the barrier with a plastic cup of coffee in his hand, but Geordie walked past him. He clocked the guy with the coffee but didn’t give him a second look, thought he was a Norwegian version of a down-and-out, the kind of guy you looked at him too long, he’d come over and give you some grief.
It must have been the third time he glanced at the guy propping up the kiosk that something clicked in his consciousness. First off the guy hadn’t shaved for days. It was way past designer stubble, the beginnings of a beard, except if you were growing a beard you had to trim it, shape it, or it looked like shit. The guy hadn’t shaped it at all so you had to think he didn’t care, that he didn’t have a razor or he was ate up on Alice or Aunt Nora.