Shooting in the Dark

said. ‘And I thought I’d moved on from there.’
    This remark elicited another Sam Turner chuckle, followed by a line of angst. ‘Sex and death, Marie. It keeps on coming back.’
    ‘If it’s not obvious, you know it’s always there, hidden deep in the kernel of every case.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘You don’t sound convinced.’
    ‘No, I’m convinced,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about Isabel. There was no sexual interference. No obvious signs of sexual violence. She was drugged and her back was broken. None of her clothes were removed.’
    ‘I see where you’re going,’ Marie said. ‘We’re looking for someone who keeps a more or less constant watch on two sisters, obsessive, he kills, he’s into soft-porn mags and chastity.’
    ‘And there’s the thing about ice skating, been in the back of my mind all day. You think anything about that?’
    ‘No, Sam. I’d forgotten all about it. The missing piece. Maybe it was just one of the words that got to her. “Ice” or “skating”? What about the accident that killed her parents? Black ice on the road? It doesn’t have to be connected with the case.’
    ‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothing. But it makes me itch.
    ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘The case doesn’t hold together. Every time we get a new piece of info we lose some cohesion. I still don’t have a handle on the guy who’s calling the shots.’
    ‘It makes sense if you think about there being two of them,’ Sam said. ‘Two guys from different ends of the street.’
    ‘Working together?’
    ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Too early to say. Maybe they’re working together, that would account for the different signals we’re getting. But it could be they’re in competition, a couple of psychopaths working the same patch.’
    ‘You mean they don’t know each other? What’s going to happen when they come face to face?’
    ‘Interesting,’ said Sam, leaning heavily on the word. ‘I don’t suppose it’s covered in the textbooks. Makes me think about a couple of express trains heading towards each other on the same track.’
    ‘Nasty.’
    ‘Yeah, specially for the folks who just happen to be in the neighbourhood.’
     

34
     
    There was a woman once, back in the days Sam first landed in York, made a profession out of green fingers. Must’ve been one of the first organic gardeners in the world. Betty? Yeah, Betty Carter, could dig a twenty-metre plot before breakfast, cook up ham steaks with eggs and mushrooms and around a gallon of coffee, then go back outside and lift half a ton of carrots while dinner stewed gently in the oven.
    Betty thought good sex, good home-cooking, hard work and the smells of the earth would work miracles on Sam Turner. And she was right in a way. He got fit and tanned and lean living with her. Spent every penny he had on booze, and when he’d emptied his pockets he’d reach for Betty’s purse. Didn’t matter where she hid it. Found it once buried under the compost heap. A man gets to know a woman’s ways.
    When he’d taken her to the verge of bankruptcy, and there was no more money for him to drink, he’d started chasing other women. Sam could always summon a charming smile if it was paving the road to a bottle. And he didn’t understand at all when Betty showed him the door. Called it betrayal. He stood on one side of the door and Betty stood on the other, and for the length of a long black night he howled chaos as grey worms invaded his brain and his thick, beached tongue sponged industrial alcohol from a gallon can.
    Must’ve been Betty who rang for the ambulance, but she didn’t visit him in the hospital, and when he was discharged she’d changed all the locks, put shutters up at the windows.
    ‘Fuck ’em,’ he’d said at the time. He’d turned around and changed direction but kept on going down the same old rutted track of self-deception, perpetrating mindless violence on himself and everyone who came into contact with him.
    ‘I must’ve been a real prize in those days,’ he said to himself. When it didn’t matter how much he drank; when whisky was equal to blood and he saw the world through a combination of them both. And there were still women prepared to take him on. Young and old, women whose self-esteem had fallen so low that the only redemption was through the resurrection of another. Women who would only be able to face themselves if they could wrench Sam Turner from the jaws of Hell.
    ‘Betty,’ he