The meanest Flood

the body couldn’t get working properly. ‘How’s he doing?’ Ruben shouted through to the bedroom.
    There was no reply.
    ‘What’s his skin like? Is it clammy?’
    ‘Yeah,’ she shouted back. ‘He’s cold and he’s sweating.’ Ruben made the tea and poured it into a mug. He added a couple of spoons of sugar and a good dollop of milk. He carried it through to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Pete Lewis was lying on his back, the eiderdown close up against his chin. His eyes followed Ruben’s every move. His breathing was shallow and rapid.
    ‘Make him sip this,’ Ruben said, handing the mug to the girl. He looked at the guy long and hard. There was no way he could have killed Kitty. It wasn’t even worth asking. ‘Maybe you should ring the doctor,’ he said. ‘No.’ Pete Lewis shook his head.
    ‘There’s no phone here,’ the girl said.
    ‘I’ve got a mobile in the car,’ Ruben told them.
    ‘No, I’ll be all right,’ Lewis said. He reached for the mug and took a sip. ‘What’s this all about?’
    ‘Kitty Turner,’ Ruben told him.
    His already large eyes almost popped out of his head. ‘Kitty Turner? You mean Katherine? She was murdered.’
    ‘The woman who was knifed in Nottingham?’ said the girlfriend. ‘In her own bed. What about her?’
    ‘It was me who found her,’ Ruben said. ‘We were... We had a relationship.’ He gritted his teeth for a moment, nearly lost it for some reason. The thought of Kitty and what they’d had going. The image of her broken body and the sound of her name on his lips. The police had offered him counselling and he’d turned it down. But maybe he shouldn’t have done. There might be some comfort there.
    Grief counselling. How to live out the rest of your life without betraying your devastation.
    ‘But why come here?’ Lewis said. ‘Why the violence?’
    ‘I already apologized for that,’ Ruben told him. ‘That wasn’t in the plan. I know she went out with you a while back. I wanted to check if you were the one.’
    ‘If I was the one what? If I killed her? Jesus.’
    ‘And I can see you didn’t do it. You haven’t got that, whatever it takes. But I didn’t know that before I met you.’
    ‘Met him?’ the girlfriend said. ‘You call this meeting people?’
    ‘It’s not how I planned it. When I thought about coming here, even driving over this morning, in my head it was all calmer. I just had some questions.’
    ‘Well, ask away,’ Lewis said. ‘But I didn’t kill Katherine and I don’t know who did. I couldn’t believe it when I read it in the paper. That she was dead.’
    ‘You might know someone who was around, someone who could have done it.’
    Lewis shook his head. ‘I met one of her neighbours,’ he said. ‘An old guy who brought cuttings over from his garden. But there was nobody else.’
    ‘She didn’t talk about anyone else?’
    ‘Not that I remember. I can’t think of anyone.’
    ‘Shouldn’t you leave this to the police?’ the girlfriend asked.
    ‘I wanna make sure the guy doesn’t get away with it,’ Ruben told her.
    But Pete Lewis didn’t know anything. Ruben would have to call it quits for now, look up some of the other people on his list. Explore different avenues, like they said in the movies.
    ‘Keep him in bed a few hours,’ he told the girl. ‘He’ll be OK tomorrow.’
    ‘If I was you,’ Lewis said as Ruben was stepping out of the door, ‘I’d look up the guy she was married to. Sam Turner. He runs some outfit in York, security, private detection, that kind of thing. He might have some ideas. In fact, come to think of it, he could be the one.’
     
    Back in Nottingham Ruben collected his snaps from Prontaprint. He sat in a newly opened coffee house and looked at the images. Liverpool in late-summer. Kitty with the Catholic Cathedral behind her, laughing at the joke he’d told her. ‘Doctor, when my broken arm is better will I be able to play the piano?’
    ‘Of course you will.’
    ‘How strange, I could never play it before.’
    Not even funny. But to see and to remember how she’d laughed, Ruben would have gone on telling Kitty jokes for the rest of his life. He’d never have run out. He would have bought joke books.
    To live with that laugh.
    There was another one, the two of them together outside The Beatles Story on Albert Dock, a yellow submarine over to the right of the entrance. Ruben had given his camera to a woman from Munich, asked her to point and