Free The meanest Flood by John Baker Page A

were nice and some of them were shite but: either way you could take them or leave them. They were wallpaper, didn’t really touch me. But with you it’s like finding a key. You open me up; you make me grow.’
    ‘It’s the same for me,’ he’d told her. ‘I’m a different man, someone I didn’t know I could be. Weird.’
    She’d smiled. ‘It’s not weird, it’s love. That’s what it does to people. I love you.’
    And it was like a jolt going through his body. Because women had said that to him before but it had been an act, one of the things you said when you were into a heavy sweat. And he’d said it back a couple of times and it hadn’t meant a thing. It was convention, manners, like -saying thank you to your aunties when they gave you a present for your birthday. Even when the present was something naff like a colouring book.
    But when Kitty said it to him and he said it back to her, that was something else. That was closer to religion or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ or a fuckin’ space rocket. Ruben didn’t know what exactly.
    It was like discovering that an obvious and blatant lie was the only truth in the world. That everything you’d given credence to in the past was false, full of holes, designed to lead you into corruption and despair. The truth was what the world said it was and all your fighting and opposition to it hadn’t made one jot of difference. There was a rock there, beneath all the chaos and confusion. There was nothing to worry about or to kick against. There was certainty.
    Kitty.
    Kitty and Ruben.
    Together they could conquer the world.
    He went down to the Skoda but it wasn’t in its usual parking space. It would still be outside Kitty’s house. He could picture it there, up against the kerb, after they’d put her body in the ambulance and hustled him into the patrol car.
    He walked, letting the re-runs play over inside his head. The water splashing down the side of the bath, the sodden carpet, the blood-soaked bedclothes. He’d clasped her to his chest and refused to part with her when the two cops arrived. They’d held his arms while the paramedics prised her from his grasp.
    The neighbours had come out of their houses and formed a circle around him. Ruben and his dead lover pacing the tarmac; she a rag doll in his arms, he howling at the bright day which had promised so much. And Kitty was weightless in his arms, as if her physical substance had departed together with her life. That fracture of her spine in the crook of his arm. Her body telling him how the murderer’s knife had plunged through her chest and pierced her heart, but as if that wasn’t enough he had thrust deeper still, smashing through the fibrous cartilage of the discs and vertebrae and rupturing the spinal cord.
    Why?
    Why would anyone do that to Kitty? There were fifty other houses in the street and they had all been left untouched. This killing seemed so personal: the overflowing bath, the intimacy of the bedroom setting. This was no random killing, not a lone psychopath on the nighttime streets of Nottingham. This was a planned crime, Kitty had been targeted. But by whom? And what had she done to bring out such wanton violence in the murderer?
    The Skoda was where he had left it. The front of Kitty’s house had been sealed off from the road and the constable on duty refused to let Ruben through.
    ‘But I know the house,’ he explained. ‘I might see something you would miss. A clue?’
    ‘You’ll have to talk to the governor,’ the cop said. ‘I can’t let you go inside. I’m not allowed in myself. SOCOs only allowed in there.’
    Ruben eyeballed the guy but he was never going to shift. He looked straight ahead as if he was part of the Queen’s guard; should’ve had a busby on his head.
     
    They kept him waiting for an hour in the police station. Even then he didn’t get to see the Detective Chief Inspector who had interviewed him the previous day. A Detective Sergeant with a permanent smirk