The meanest Flood

They were like leaves in the wind.’
    ‘So you don’t think it was a boyfriend?’
    ‘No. They didn’t hang around, anyway. She wouldn’t play them off against each other. Since she’d been going with Ruben Parkins she hadn’t seen anyone else.’
    ‘And Ruben, what was he like?’
    ‘At first I thought he was the same. He’d been in prison and he had that machismo thing. Flashy type. He’d wear shades at night, know what I mean? Tattoos, big shoulders, ear-ring, chemical blue suits, chewing gum, hair-gel. It was like he didn’t want to be left out of anything. I’ve seen him wearing Day-Glo socks and decorative chains on his shoes.’ She laughed. ‘Imagine! He was a fashion nightmare. There was so much going on with him you couldn’t focus on who he was.’
    ‘But Katherine liked him?’
    ‘Yes. She saw through all that stuff immediately. She saw his vulnerability. Sounds corny, but she saw the good in him. And he responded to her, listened to her. He modified his opinions, dropped some of his masks. He took her shopping with him when he wanted a new sweater. He was turning into Mr Nice Guy.’
    ‘He sounds a bit flaky, though,’ Marie said. ‘A man who would let a woman take over his personality like that.’
    Jade shook her head. ‘He wasn’t flaky. It happened slowly. Ruben had never learned how to live. When he met Katherine he realized she could teach him. For her part she’d never met a man who loved her for herself. They were good for each other. Each of them allowed the other one to grow. It was something to see. Something special.’
    ‘So Ruben’s not a suspect?’
    ‘No, he never was. He brought her body out of the house and round to my door. He was making noises like an animal. No one could have acted that. He was a man who had had his heart ripped out. She was everything to him.’
    Marie kept quiet. She didn’t know if she believed that a woman could be everything to a man. No man had ever been everything to her. Oh, way back when she was sixteen it might have seemed like that. When her hormones were leaping and dancing around like a chorus from SwanLake. Or even later, when she and Gus were planning a family and it seemed like they’d be together for the rest of their lives. But she hadn’t been in touch with reality on either of those occasions.
    ‘Did you like Katherine Turner?’
    Jade Chandler looked at her and smiled. ‘Yes, I liked her. She was a good neighbour.’
    ‘Not a friend?’
    Jade shook her head. ‘She was older than me. We weren’t friends. But we could have been if we’d spent more time together.’
    Marie gave her a few seconds to digest her own words. ‘So who do you think killed her? You must have a theory.’
    ‘I can’t tell you,’ Jade said, ‘because I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what we told the police.’
    ‘We?’
    ‘My partner Ben and I. He’s at work at the moment. It was a few months ago. I’d lost my ring. We’d been up late with the children and it must have been one-thirty, two o’clock in the morning.’ She looked down at the sleeping child. ‘This one had just gone off to sleep and the other two were finally settled. I said I’d put the kettle on, make us a nightcap, and Ben went outside with a torch to see if he could find the ring.’
    ‘In the middle of the night? In the dark?’
    ‘You lose your marbles when you’ve got three kids under five. Now you mention it, it was a weird thing to do, but at the time I didn’t give it a second thought. And he didn’t find the ring because it wasn’t out there. It turned up a couple of days later in the bathroom. But that’s another story. Anyway there was a man outside -Ben didn’t see his face. He got an impression of his size, about average height and weight, and the man was wearing a black overcoat and a trilby. It was something to see anyone down the street at that time in the morning but the funny thing was Ben said he’d looked up and down the street a couple of seconds before and there’d been no one there then.
    ‘He hadn’t heard anyone either. But when he turned the torch on at the gate the beam fell on the man’s feet. Highly polished shoes, that’s what Ben remembered, and the man was wearing those trousers with braid down the outside seam. You could see them as he walked off down the street.’
    ‘Braid?’ Marie said. ‘As in a uniform?’
    ‘No, not like that. More like the trousers you see when someone is in full evening