The meanest Flood

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.’
    ‘Kitty? Katherine something. I remember now. That must’ve been terrible. But it wasn’t Sam Turner did it, he was here all night.’
    ‘How can you be sure?’
    ‘He was out all day but he came back for his evening meal. He was in his room for a while and then he came down and watched a film on the telly. Prizzi’s Honor. I sat with him for the last hour. When the movie was over we had a drink. Well, I had a drink and he watched me and we talked until after midnight. Then he went to bed and didn’t stir until breakfast.’
    ‘He could’ve gone out after you’d gone to bed,’ Ruben said. ‘Kitty was killed in the middle of the night.’
    ‘He didn’t go out,’ Eileen Smith said. ‘I lock up at night, and I sleep like a bird. I’ve had people try to slip out in the middle of the night, get away without paying. I would know if he’d gone out.’
    ‘Tell me this, then,’ Ruben said. ‘If he was here that night why did he tell the police he wasn’t?’
    ‘I don’t know, love,’ Eileen Smith said. ‘People’s motives are never simple. And who trusts the police, anyway? Perhaps he didn’t want to hand them a rope to hang him with?’
     
    Ruben wasn’t convinced that Eileen Smith’s version of events was true. Sam Turner was clever. He could’ve pulled the wool over her eyes. But one thing was clear now. Turner was here, in Nottingham, on the night that Kitty was killed. He was on the spot. Ruben hadn’t heard the police or the media speculate that it was someone else who took Kitty’s life. There was only him. No one else could have done it.
     

34
     
    Danny Mann came out of his front door and stepped along the path to the street. He looked one way and then the other. There was no sign of Marilyn Eccles. Thank God. She’d rung his bell once this morning, twice last night. He had been firm. ‘Go away,’ he told her. ‘Take your medication. I’m not who you think I am.’
    ‘It’s no good,’ she’d said this morning. ‘I can’t deal with rejection.’ Standing there in her leather jacket and metal chains, dangly earrings. Why would she think he found that kind of thing attractive? The truth was quite the opposite. Danny didn’t like loud women, that’s why he’d gone to the expense of Jody, considered the Orientals. The universe lived in the tension between the active and the passive and the magician was active and therefore attracted to the passive.
    The last thing he needed was a leather-and-steel-clad erotomaniac. Earlier, when he’d pulled back the curtains and seen her on the step, his scrotum had shrivelled to the size of a walnut.
    But she wasn’t around. It seemed that even nymphomaniac stalkers had to go home and eat occasionally, take a shower and