Authors: John Baker
She was sitting behind the doctor’s desk. Slim woman, stylish, short brown hair, thirty-five, forty, silver choker round her neck, black round-necked top with long sleeves. A smile on her face, but not too wide.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Have a seat.’
There was no choice about seats. There was the one she had which was obviously taken, and then there was the one this side of the desk. Wooden job with arms, no padding. Ruben sat on the edge of it. He waited.
‘My name’s Sarah Murphy,’ she said. ‘I’m not a doctor. The doctors in the practice retain me to talk to some of their patients. I don’t have access to medical records.’ She paused to make sure she had his attention. Held his eyes without blinking.
‘Sometimes people come to the doctor with a problem that isn’t strictly medical. Maybe it falls somewhere between a medical definition and what we call a life problem. When the doctor thinks that is the case she suggests the patient comes to see me, and she thought that in your case which is why we are meeting here now.
‘We can meet six times, and usually the client feels better about things after that time. If it’s necessary we can then arrange a further six meetings. If there has been no change in the client’s condition then the doctor could prescribe medication, or she might want to get a second opinion.
‘Do you want to ask me any questions?’
‘She thought I was inhabited by depression,’ Ruben said.
‘And what do you think?’
‘If the police had found the guy, I wouldn’t be here.’
‘The police?’
Ruben took a deep breath. ‘Kitty was my girlfriend. She was killed in her own bed. Somebody came in and knifed her. I found her the next morning and the police think it was her ex-husband. He’s on the run.’
‘Is this the same case I’ve been reading about in the newspapers? The private detective?’
‘Yeah. He killed another woman in Leeds. Now he’s gone missing. But the police had him when he killed Kitty and they let him go.’
‘You’re telling me that you’re depressed because the police let the murderer go.’
‘Yeah. They shoulda kept him. Banged him up. Then the other woman would still be alive.’
‘You knew the other woman, the one in Leeds?’
‘No, I was just saying.’
‘Because it seems to me that the main reason you’re depressed is because of your girlfriend’s death. Would you agree with that? It could be that facing up to that is too painful, so you’re transferring your feelings of pain on to the murderer, looking for revenge.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you understand what I mean, Mr Parkins?’
‘I wanna kill the guy.’
‘That’s a normal response. In the same circumstances almost everyone would react in the same way.’
Ruben didn’t reply. He knew what she meant but she didn’t know what he meant. She thought that was something to say, that he wanted to kill the guy. But Ruben didn’t care whether he said it or not, he wanted to kill the guy, and if he got half a chance he would do it. He didn’t care if they banged him away for life. They could do what they wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference. He didn’t have a life, anyway, so how could they take it away from him?
‘What happens,’ he told her, ‘I go to sleep. I was delivering milk but it didn’t get delivered. I loaded up the van and sat behind the wheel for two hours, never moved. Today I thought I’d go for a walk, keep myself fit. But I got to the corner of my street and stood there for fifty minutes. I couldn’t go for the walk and I couldn’t turn round and go back home. It was like I was paralysed.’
‘Those are classic symptoms of depression.’
‘And I’m crying all the time. Sometimes I’m wiping my eyes because I can’t see properly. Maybe I’m watching a match on the telly, whatever, I can’t see it and it’s like I’ve got something in my eye. But there’s nothing there. It’s tears. I’m sitting there crying my eyes out and I don’t even know I’m doing it. This’s me, I don’t cry. Supposed to be a man.’
‘I think we should talk about Kitty if you feel up to it. How you feel about losing her.’
Ruben closed his eyes. ‘Kitty was the best friend I ever lost. All she wanted was good things for everybody, especially me. I’m confused. My heart hurts. Every time I take a drink I know it’s gonna end up as tears. I think about the last moments. What she was thinking of. Did she call out my name? I’m not sure she’s not still alive and every day of my life is some terrible joke. Someone’s fooling me. I want to kill the man who stole away our future.
‘I can remember the feel of her, her kiss, the scent of her. I can’t believe it when I wake up and find it’s a dream. She’s got me in the palm of her hand. I don’t know what it is, but I’m not all here. Somebody’s put out the light in me. It’s like I’ve been swallowed by a snake. I’m still alive but there’s no point to it.’
‘What about nights?’ she asked. ‘Do you sleep?’
‘I want to sleep all the time,’ Ruben told her. ‘When I’m sleeping it’s like it never happened. Kitty’s still here and everything’s normal. I go to bed at night and I can’t sleep. So I slug back a few beers and then it gets easier. Makes me feel like shit in the morning, though.
‘Sometimes I sleep in the day. I’ll be watching the box in the afternoon and there’s nothing on you wanna watch. There’s these women with the freak-shows, Oprah, Ricki Lake, guys who sleep with their girlfriends’ mothers. I don’t wanna see that so I snooze through it. One minute I’m awake, the next I’m asleep. Then I’m awake again. Like that, maybe a couple of hours I’m floating around. If it wasn’t for the guy, Sam Turner, I’d be thinking seriously about topping myself. Only I can’t afford to leave it to chance he’ll get away with it. I’m keeping myself going so I can take him out.’
She maintained eye contact. She looked as though she didn’t know where to go next, but she pulled something out. ‘OK, let’s look at that for a minute. This is hypothetical but I’d like you to respond if you can. If this man, this detective, is arrested by the police and brought to court and found guilty... if he’s punished by the state, sent to prison... how would you feel about that?’
‘It’s not gonna happen?’
‘I’m not suggesting that it will happen, but if it did? The police are looking for him.’
Ruben thought about it. ‘If it all came out,’ he said eventually. ‘If he admitted it and said why he did it. If they banged him away for the rest of his life. Maybe that would be enough. I don’t really know. It wouldn’t bring Kitty back. She’d still be dead and I’d be walking round wishing she wasn’t.’
‘Have you considered that the detective might not be guilty?’
‘Yeah, I have. And it seems to me he fits the bill. I’ve been in prison myself. That’s not something you do without learning lessons. One of the things I learned was that just because a guy’s in prison it doesn’t mean he committed a crime - it means a judge sent him to prison, that’s all. Sometimes the guy did the crime and sometimes he didn’t. The system isn’t infallible, it’s crap. I want the right guy, the guy who did for Kitty. I’m not looking for a scapegoat. But everything points to Sam Turner.’
‘You see, Mr Parkins, what I believe will happen is that the police will capture this man. And if he’s guilty he’ll go to prison for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life. What I’m trying to discover is how you’ll cope when that happens. I’d like to think that you’ll accept that, that you’ll remember the good times you had with Kitty and be thankful for them. And that you’ll find a way of carrying on with your life. I know that doesn’t seem like a possibility for you right now, but I’d like to think that it will gradually seem more possible as time goes on.’ Ruben shook his head.
‘I don’t expect you to achieve that by yourself, Mr Parkins. I’m here to give you all the help and support I can. And there are other agencies that can help in different ways. Let’s say that that is our goal. Now, it’s usual to meet weekly but I think we ought to try to see each other twice in the next seven days. How does that sound?’
‘Sounds fine,’ Ruben said. ‘I like you. It’s good to talk. But you haven’t heard what I’m saying, not entirely. You heard some of it, but there’s other parts you don’t want to hear.’
‘I’ve been trying to listen,’ she said. She had a genuine smile on her face. ‘This is the first time we’ve met. Maybe next time you can tell me what it is you think I haven’t heard.’
‘I’ll tell you now,’ Ruben said. ‘I wanna strangle the bastard who killed Kitty. I wanna do it with my own hands. That seems like the only thing that makes sense to me.’
Around the Lace Market Ruben knocked on the door of another B&B. ‘Can you spare me a moment?’ he asked the man who answered. He showed him 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 man took the photograph into his bony hands. Thin fingers, long, like twigs. ‘What’s he done?’
‘We don’t know that he’s done anything, sir. We need to talk to him because we think he can help with our enquiries into a couple of rather serious incidents.’
‘I don’t know him,’ the man said. ‘Never seen him before.’
Ruben wasn’t convinced about his own impersonation of a policeman. He’d known cops all his life, talked to dozens of them and listened to dozens more while he was waiting for them to decide what to do with him. But his impersonation wasn’t true. It was a cliché. That was because he couldn’t believe in himself as a copper. To be a good impersonator or a good liar you have to believe it yourself, or as near as possible.
Still, it was good enough to get by. One hotelier this afternoon had asked to see his ID and he’d had to admit he wasn’t a cop. He’d told the truth: that Kitty had been killed and he was checking out if the guy had been in Nottingham that day. The man had softened immediately, introduced him to the receptionist and showed her the photograph. But she didn’t recognize the detective.
Ruben used the cop impersonation because it saved explaining everything. When he told people his girlfriend had been murdered, they took a step back. It was as if Kitty’s death marked him out as someone with a curse. People recoiled from him because he’d been visited by tragedy and, like a disease, he might still be carrying it and pass it on to them.
He liked the counsellor, Sarah Murphy, with her silver choker and her middle-class way of explaining everything in words of one syllable, desperate to be understood. Or maybe the desperation was to avoid being misunderstood? She had something of Kitty in her. Not a lot, but it was there. She knew things out of books and from courses she’d attended. But she’d never been on the street and was attracted by and frightened of men like Ruben.
What it was, he recognized her professional manner and the propriety with which she conducted their interview as a veil to hide her own insecurities. And she knew he did. Ruben had managed to tell her so without saying a word.
He smiled as he approached the next B&B. It was more democratic that way. If he hadn’t found some weakness in her he wouldn’t have continued the counselling. Because she’d have had all the power and he’d have been a geek. There would have been no point in seeing her. She would have patronized him and he would have resented her for it. And then he’d have been stuck with the depression.
Ruben hadn’t read any textbooks. In the joint he’d read novels. Cowboys. Cops and robbers. And he hadn’t been on any courses. Unless you counted the small business start-up course. But he knew the difference between grief and depression. Grief was something he had to cope with by himself. It was grief that made him cover his head with the duvet and scream at the top of his voice for an hour at a time. It was grief that made him want to explode.
But depression was something else. He couldn’t manage that on his own. They were related, these two, grief and depression, but they weren’t the same thing. Grief was somewhere he had to dwell for a time before he came back to the idea of getting on with his life. Depression wasn’t like that. It was a prison cell.
Which makes her into some kind of key, he thought. Sarah Murphy, the counsellor, working away to open him up.
28
Danny’s internal slave-driver had been hard at it since the unfortunate incident in Calmeyers gate. He didn’t know if he’d killed the young man or not. He’d seen the ambulance take him away and he’d watched Sam Turner make his escape from the police. There hadn’t been time to hang around. He’d stopped the kid, that was certain. He’d felt the blade of the axe cut into the flesh and, for a moment, he’d seen the shock in the young man’s eyes as the blood drained from his face.
Danny hadn’t slept through the night and as he put his bag on the conveyor belt at Gardermoen he reflected that it didn’t really matter if the young man was still alive. It didn’t matter if he had seen Danny’s face and could identify him. Who would believe him? The police in two countries would now be looking for Sam Turner. The illusion was coming to its conclusion. The authorities would be under pressure to find the detective and bring him to justice.
The plane taxied along the runway and waited in the queue for takeoff. The pilot apologized for the delay, assured all the passengers that they would be airborne within a few minutes. The magician eased his safety belt, rolled his left hip where it had pinched him. He turned and smiled reassuringly at the Asian woman in the window seat next to him.