Read Online The meanest Flood by John Baker - Free Book Online Page A

‘Another couple of inches and it’ll be over the towpath. I might have to move out of my house.’
    ‘Come and stay with me,’ he said. ‘Be it ever so humble it’ll be nice and dry.’
    Marie smiled. ‘Celia’s already offered me a room at her place. Thanks.’ She joined him at the window, looked down on scurrying figures with umbrellas, a middle-aged woman in a tartan plastic raincoat and a street person standing outside the Mansion House with a tin whistle and a dripping nose. The sky was padded with black cloud. It was as if the divinity had gone into clinical depression and His system had developed an immunity to all the usual drugs. He wasn’t interested any more.
    Marie was wearing a loosely knitted jumper from French Connection with a pair of trousers in shiny black cotton and new laced boots of Spanish leather. She was a large-boned woman, above average weight but well capable of carrying it. She wore her hair short and was conscious of an overbite which gave her face an interest that eclipsed mere prettiness.
    ‘Do we have any work?’ she asked.
    Sam shook his head. ‘Not a lot. There’s routine stuff that keeps Geordie busy. And there was the Nottingham job last week, but the telephone doesn’t ring. I keep thinking they’ve disconnected us.’
    ‘I suppose it gives me more time to work at the Centre, but if I don’t earn money the bills don’t get paid.’
    The Centre was a women’s refuge where Marie helped out whenever the detective business was in the doldrums. She’d been a nurse and had the ability to listen as well as a well-honed social conscience, and there were times when she was utterly convinced that she could live without men.
    ‘If you need money...’ Sam said.
    ‘Thanks.’ She smiled. ‘I’d just ask. You’d be the first person I thought of, you being so rich. But I’m not broke, there’s money in the bank. And tomorrow or the next day or next week, whenever, some time soon you’ll be telling me we’ve got so much work we can’t manage. Celia’ll be going out on surveillance and you’ll be bringing in the part-timers like JD and Janet.’
    ‘This is true,’ Sam said. ‘Whatever goes around comes around. We’ve got a million customers, it’s just a marketing problem. You busy at the Centre?’
    ‘Always. Why is it that a young mother with a baby attracts a guy with shit for brains and fists the size of lump hammers?’
    ‘Sometimes seems like understanding or tenderness are too much to hope for,’ he said. ‘The culture these guys move in regards reason as unacceptably intelligent.’
    ‘You blame the culture?’
    The government if you like, the way we’ve let ourselves be organized. I don’t have those kinds of answers, Marie. I’m a PI not a medic. My job’s to blow the bad guys away.’
    ‘You don’t believe that.’
    ‘Belief isn’t any kind of answer.’
    ‘Neither is violence.’
    ‘Not in the long run,’ he said.
    ‘Have you ever hit a woman, Sam?’
    He didn’t answer.
    ‘Does that mean you have?’
    He pursed his lips. ‘Could mean I have but I’ve opted to forget it.’
    ‘Yes or no?’
    ‘Only in self-defence, m’lawd.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘I shot her,’ Sam said. ‘You know that. It’s not my best memory but I’d do it again in the same circumstances, it kept me alive to fight another day.’
    ‘What about Katherine?’
    ‘Did I hit her? Or did I kill her?’
    ‘I know you didn’t kill her.’
    ‘What’s the question, Marie?’
    ‘Who was she? Did I meet her?’
    ‘No, she was before your time. We were both drinkers. She got out. In a way her getting out was an encouragement to me. I found a way around it myself later, a few years later, but if someone else gets free it gives you strength. You don’t resent them, you appreciate the lesson. It’s good to know that something’s possible.’ Marie nodded encouragement.
    ‘We were young,’ he said. ‘I met her in a bar. It was opening time and she was more