The meanest Flood

paid for the drink and supped the top off. He hitched up his tracksuit trousers and ambled over to Marie’s table. ‘They tell me you’re writing a book,’ he said.
    ‘You’re Steve?’
    ‘The same. The man who met the murderer.’
    Marie knew women who would consider him good-looking but she couldn’t understand why. She felt waves of antipathy coursing through her body. There must be a relationship between the chemical reactions that stimulated sexual responses and the muscles that created the cringe.
    ‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘The murderer?’
    ‘Good question,’ he said, pulling out a chair and settling himself opposite her. ‘The guy I met was called Sam Turner, a private investigator from York. And he’s the guy the police are looking for. But it might not be him.’
    ‘What makes you think that?’
    ‘I didn’t think this up myself. My sister-in-law works for the Coroner’s Office, so it’s her theory. The woman, Nicole Day, she was killed around the time that I was talking to Sam Turner at my house. He was looking for somebody called Bonner, and this was nine o’clock in the morning. I’d come back from my morning run. I was listening to the news headlines.
    ‘He had a scrap of paper with the name and address on it. But the address was my house, number thirty-seven, and I’m not Bonner, no one called Bonner lives there, I didn’t need to be a detective to know that.’ Steve smiled knowingly, as though he’d made a joke.
    ‘Anyway, the guy accepted that he’d got the wrong house and I watched out of the window. He went up the street to number seventy-three, tried there but there was nobody home. I’m still watching him through the curtains. He comes back down the street and he stops this black woman, lives at number twenty, bit tasty, just divorced her husband. And I see her shaking her head so he’s asking her the same question: where does Mr Bonner live? But there’s nobody called Bonner in the street, the police checked everybody. Used to be an Alison Bonner who lived at fifty-four but apparently she died five years back. A widow. Her daughter sold the house to a speculator.
    ‘After that the guy, the detective, he got back in his car and drove away. And nobody’s seen him since. Me, I’ve gone over it time and time again. This was a guy looking for somebody called Bonner. The police come along and tell me he was the murderer but I can’t put the two things together. First I can’t believe he’d just killed the woman with a knife because he’d be covered in blood or at least be rattled. But he was calm. He was pissed off when he couldn’t find this Bonner guy, but he wasn’t someone who had just killed somebody in her bed.
    ‘Second I couldn’t buy the other theory, that he was looking for the woman, for where she lived, so he could kill her. That he was knocking on house doors in the street, waiting for her to open the door. That the Bonner thing was just an excuse for him to go knocking on all the doors. If the guy was that stupid he’d never’ve got away with it. He’d be locked up by now. So that whole idea is a no-no.’
    ‘You don’t believe he did it?’ Marie asked.
    ‘What I thought for a while, I thought he might’ve gone mad. You know, deranged. He’d killed the woman or he was gonna kill her in a few minutes and the balance of his mind had gone. So he was wandering around with this Bonner thing in his head, and maybe Bonner was just somebody he’d made up or somebody out of his childhood. You know, like a school teacher or something.
    ‘But I gave up on that theory as well because the guy has been so good at avoiding the police. They don’t have no idea where he is. Which means he’s bright, right? Which means he’s not mad or deranged or doolally but he’s thinking and keeping himself free.’
    ‘So who did it?’ Marie asked.
    Steve put his foot on a stool and tied the lace of his trainer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s the short answer.’
    ‘What were you saying about your sister-in-law and the Coroner’s Office?’
    He took another two inches off the top of his pint and glanced back towards the bar. He leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘They’re not convinced the detective did it either. He was in the street round about the time the woman was killed, but her husband, Rolf Day, he was killed at least eight hours earlier.
    ‘What the police thought, what everybody thought, was that Sam Turner came sailing into the