The meanest Flood

bigger.’
    ‘A few months? That’s a good sign in itself,’ Marie said. Celia smiled. ‘Yes, I suppose it is. They don’t seem to think that death is imminent. But they don’t always tell the truth.’
    ‘I won’t go to Nottingham today,’ Marie said. ‘I’d be worrying about you all the time.’
    ‘You certainly will go,’ Celia told her. ‘If I’d thought you’d be so fussy, I wouldn’t have told you. And don’t say anything to the others. I can’t cope with baleful looks.’
     
    The late Katherine Turner’s house in Nottingham was boarded up. The police and forensic people had obviously finished with it because there was no one on sentry duty. The terrace was one of several that had been put up in the late-forties or early-fifties and the houses had been well maintained and refurbished over the years. The terrible act that had taken place in one of them and the subsequent nailing of chipboard panels over its windows and doors seemed to reflect on the whole terrace. The seemingly senseless and particularly brutal death of Katherine Turner had reverberated throughout the fabric of bricks and mortar, seeping like a stain through party walls and running along shared joists and roof-beams. The perpetrator of the crime had been in one house but he had left his mark on all of them. None of the curtains were fully drawn back and there was a silence about this part of the street that was tangible. It was like walking through the entrance of a great cathedral, the feeling of being in the presence of something unseen. But the cathedral feeling was usually benign, benevolent. Whereas Katherine Turner’s house and the others adjoining it seemed to embrace the aura of something much older and darker. Something, Marie thought, that you wouldn’t want to disturb from its slumbers.
    The woman next door was happy to talk. She introduced herself as Jade Chandler and at twenty-five years old was already a faded beauty. She had a light brown baby, the same colour as herself, in a sling on her stomach. In Jade’s sitting room Marie had to step over half-completed jigsaw-puzzles and wooden trucks and action-man figures. They sat opposite each other at a table piled high with dirty washing, lemonade bottles, an ash-tray and the remains of several tabloid newspapers which had been used for Origami and confetti-making.
    ‘You knew Katherine?’
    Jade Chandler smiled. ‘She was my neighbour. We didn’t live in each other’s pocket but we talked from time to time. She’d baby-sit occasionally and she’d bring me things from the shops if I couldn’t get there.’
    ‘Did she have a job?’
    ‘Yes, she worked for a letting agency. Flats and houses. She made sure people were paying the rent and that the houses were maintained properly. Fought landlords to get fire certificates. She liked to talk about it. I reckon she was good at it.’
    ‘Boyfriends?’
    ‘From time to time. Nobody special until the last one.’
    ‘The guy who found her?’
    ‘Yes, Ruben, she liked him. The others were ships passing in the night. She could take or leave them. But she had no kids and she’d get lonely sometimes. You know what it’s like.’
    Marie nodded. She knew exactly what it was like. Sometimes the desire to be held by a man, to be up close against someone else’s skin or inhale their scent, was so urgent it was like a pain. You lost a certain amount of judgement when loneliness echoed around your being, your standards and values tended to slip.
    ‘Some of the guys she’d bring home, they were just wrong.’
    ‘Any of them wrong enough to kill her?’ Marie asked. Jade thought about it. She ran her hand over the sleeping baby on her stomach. ‘The police asked the same question,’ she said. ‘But who can say? Katherine would hook up with a guy from time to time. He’d be a loner or a married man who was looking for something extra. All of them were inadequate in one way or another. Weasels or opportunists, people who had failed in a hundred other relationships. There was one man who was subnormal, a speech defect and he’d never learned to shave properly, Dennis. Another who was thirty years older than her, an old-age-pensioner.
    ‘Most of them were a waste of time but I couldn’t see them as murderers. Not like that, anyway. So coldblooded. I think any of us could kill in a rage, on the spur of the moment. But whoever killed Katherine planned it. The guys she knew, most of them were incapable of planning.