The meanest Flood (13 page)

When he came up the path to the house the magician froze. Dai Evans was on the other side of the glass and the net curtain, perhaps a metre away. Danny could pick out the stray hairs in his eyebrows and a couple of tiny strands sticking out of his nostrils and ears. He placed one red-topped bottle on the step, semi-skimmed for health-conscious people. The couple who lived in the house and who didn’t want to take too many chances with their cholesterol levels.

The milkman waited a moment, adopting the listening position, as if he could hear the steady rise and fall of the magician’s respiratory system or the stillness of death on the mattress in the spare room. But there was nothing tangible or audible for the man to connect with, just an uneasy feeling, the sense that all was not right with the world. Too much for a milkman to handle in the early morning. He shrugged his shoulders and continued with his round.

The magician didn’t move. He sat like a Buddha, naked behind the window, and watched his own body and his own reactions to everything that happened in his immediate environment. The milk reminded him of his mother and how she hadn’t been able to eat at the end. It had begun with her avoiding olives or anything spicy. She’d stopped eating meat, saying that it was indigestible, then fish and beans. For the last couple of months she’d eat only a couple of spoons of cauliflower cheese, a glass of milk, a poached egg and pasta alphabet shapes. Her body had gradually lost the power to transmute food to flesh and bone, to transform protein and vitamins and minerals into consciousness. This would happen to Danny as well; one day, like everyone else, he would lose his individual magic and become part of the wider magic of the cosmos. He would become food for worms, contribute selflessly to the regeneration of the earth.

But not yet. In the present there was work to be done. Ego work. There were runes to be rhymed and charms to be chanted. There were thunderbolts to be fashioned and hurled at the sun and there was a dreadful noise of water in his ears and sights of ugly death within his eyes.

Danny felt a smile crease his face. Outside the window the rain was coming down again. In Nottingham there had been a group of creationists outside the theatre, their placards predicting the end of the world. Well, anything was possible. But Danny believed that the flood in Genesis was a homily, a local flood like any other, and the ‘world’ that was flooded merely the world that was known to Noah.

When the metallic-coloured Montego entered the street the magician got to his feet. He watched as Sam Turner left the car and walked tentatively up the path of the house opposite, number thirty-seven, where Danny Mann, alias Mr Bonner (his mother’s maiden name), had arranged to meet him. A good-looking man in a tracksuit and trainers answered the door and stood with his hands on his hips. He listened to Turner then shook his head.

Turner fished in his pocket and brought out a scrap of paper. He said something to the owner of the house and the other man shook his head again. Danny could almost hear his words.
There’s no Bonner lives here. No, I don’t know anyone of that name. Not in this street.

The good-looking man closed the door and Sam Turner returned to his car. He stood by the side of it in the rain and looked up and down the street, unable or unwilling to admit that his journey had been in vain.

He unlocked the driver’s door of the Montego and then locked it again. He walked along the street, tentatively, as though his trousers were too tight for him, though they looked like a perfect fit. He crossed over, rang the bell of house number seventy-three to make sure he hadn’t become aphasic. No one answered his ring. Back at his car he stopped a young black woman with an umbrella and must have asked her if she knew of anyone called Bonner. He showed her his scrap of paper with the name and address scribbled on it. But it wasn’t his lucky day.

When Sam Turner got back into his car and drove away Danny went upstairs and entered the woman’s bedroom. She was tied to the bed as he had left her. The gag, which consisted of her own face-flannel and two-inch-wide masking tape, gave her an eastern appearance, as if she was wearing a yashmak, just the eyes staring out at the world.

Black silk pyjamas like the man, but without the
Heidegger
crest. In place of it she had embroidered the words
Hi, Guys.
Her hair was cut short and brushed forward, one or two strands of grey in there, but her face was unlined apart from the crow’s feet around her eyes. Danny might have ended up with a woman like her if he’d managed to maintain any of his relationships. If everything hadn’t gone wrong in his life at such an early age. It didn’t matter now, of course, it was just something to think about.

There had been a student of Bakhtin in his group at university; she was fascinated by dialogical and monological language, the former characterized by a person speaking towards at least one other person in response or anticipation with living language. Dead language was monological like that of the medieval church or any religious state that admits of the existence of no other voice. They had been an item for a while and Danny had discussed Bakhtin’s theories with her, agreeing that poetry was monologic and the novel dialogic. But eventually she had walked off hand in hand with a poststructuralist critic who couldn’t tell the difference between a novel and the Highway Code.

Nicole Day was no longer terrified. She was frightened of the man but that initial terror had been partially replaced by rage. When he’d taken Rolf away she’d listened to the sounds coming from the spare bedroom and had expected the man to come back and rape her. But that had been hours ago. Her hands and feet had long since gone numb from the tight rope that bound them. For a while she had thought she would choke to death, that she would swallow the flannel that the man had stuffed into her mouth. But she was still alive, alive and resolved.

At the first opportunity she would tear at his eyes. If he gave her one moment of freedom she would hurl all of her strength at him. Claw her way to his obscene balls, hanging there like a sack of old coins. His silence, the way he came to the door of her room from time to time and hovered there in the shadows, was calculated to undermine her. He knew that if he did nothing, said nothing, but kept her tied and confined and in ignorance of what had happened to Rolf she would go to pieces. He thought that if he wore her down like this then she’d be pliable when the time came for him to assault her.

When the time came! My God, the time had been here all night. Nicole had been assaulted over and over again simply by having this naked maniac in her house. Rolf was assaulted when the man slapped him across the head with that huge dagger.

But she also knew that if she was going to survive this intrusion into her house she would have to be clever. The man was clearly mad. She would need to talk to him, to win him over, to show him understanding. She would have to pretend to be his friend, even his lover.

She spoke to him through the flannel and the masking tape. She said, ‘Hello, I wondered when you would come back.’

The words didn’t get through the obstructions in and around her mouth. She heard the sounds that resulted, what amounted to a long modulated moan. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please take this thing out of my mouth so we can talk properly.’

He shook his head, an arrogant smile around his lips. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He had the heavy dagger with him, hanging from his right hand. So long that the tip of it brushed the floor.

He took another step towards her. ‘Remember Sam Turner?’ he asked. ‘The detective? He was here a moment ago. Over the street.’

Nicole wanted to cry. ‘Sam? Here?’ Why would Sam be here? What had this man got to do with Sam Turner? She hadn’t seen Sam in years, hadn’t thought about him for months. She couldn’t imagine any way in which Sam Turner could be mixed up with this madman.

Sam had been a mess and he’d treated her badly towards the end of their relationship. His drinking and his lack of self-esteem had led him to an attitude of contempt for almost everyone else in the world, and being his woman had meant that she was in the front line of his derision and loathing.

But he’d let her go. When the crunch had come and he’d eventually transformed her love to a cynical despair, he hadn’t gone into battle. He’d fought against it for an instant and then shaken his head, walked away. Left her with her freedom. Surely he hadn’t come back after all these years to torture her like this, to leave her in the hands of a deranged nutcase with an antique bayonet?

Nicole felt a whispering breeze pass over her forehead. She was calm. The man with the weapon was outside of her. Perhaps he was close, in the same room, or perhaps he was a figment of her imagination, a dream figure. Either way it didn’t matter. Sam Turner may be in the street or not, he might have been here to save her or to destroy her. He was in the past. Something, someone, she had known. Another of those relationships that had held eternal promise but had resulted only in tears.

Even her husband, Rolf, with his phenomenological theories, seemed part of another and distant universe. What seemed real was an image from her childhood, a long and empty beach, her mother huddled in a deckchair and her father downwind arcing a Frisbee across the painted sky towards her.

The picture was like an early video. The colours were not quite true but every detail was known and recorded for posterity. It was something that had already happened and could not be undone. Her mother was reading a medical dictionary, trying to discover if heliotherapy would cure her dermatitis. She was wearing a short flowered skirt with a bikini top and dark glasses.

Her father was wearing long shorts and open sandals with knee-length brown socks. He’d grown a paunch and accentuated it by wearing his short-sleeved shirt tucked into the elastic top of the shorts. He was still handsome, though. Dashing with his green eyes and dark moustache.

The Frisbee curved around the sun. It rose and disappeared from sight for a moment before falling, looking for all the world as if it would not reach her. Nicole took a step towards it and at the last moment saw that its trajectory would bring it down in front of her. She dived with her arms outstretched, saw the missile come towards her and grasped it with both hands. Her father laughed and cheered and her mother looked up from her book of miracle cures.

The man with the weapon took Rolfs pillow and placed it over her face and chest. She tried to shake it off but he held it firm. Nicole didn’t want to scuffle. He wasn’t pushing down on it. She could still breathe perfectly well.

She fought for the memory. She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her knees. Replaced the plastic sandal that had come off when she caught the Frisbee and fell. She brushed the hair from her eyes. Her hair was long that year, so she was eleven because she had it cut short for her twelfth birthday. She took the Frisbee and flicked it towards her father, watched it rise away from her, somehow capturing the air and using it to propel itself in the perfect arc that would take it to his hands.

The sheer flawlessness of its flight took her breath. The beauty of it was like a pain in her heart.

Diamond Danny Mann stood back. He cleaned the bayonet on a corner of the sheet. A flash vision of a barber’s pole.
Figaro, Figaro...
Rossini’s control of the strings. The deep startled hush of the audience. His mother’s voice, frail, distant: ‘Danny? Danny, have you run my bath?’

He untied the woman’s hands and feet and collected the rope. There would be odd fibres left behind and some overworked and ambitious genius in the forensic lab would eventually discover that the rope was purchased from a branch of Woolworth’s sometime during the last five years. But they’d have nothing else. Nothing to connect him to the scene. And their eyes would be averted anyway; the circumstantial evidence and his appearance in the street at the exact time of the killing would focus their attention on Sam Turner.

In the bathroom he washed himself and replaced his clothes. He blocked the overflow on the bath and the hand-basin and left both taps running. In the kitchen downstairs he blocked the sink and watched for a moment as the water splashed into it.

Symmetry again. Life begins in a womb, the developing foetus swims in a bath of amniotic fluid, it knows only liquid and is swept along, unknowingly, towards the hard realities of life. How fitting, then, how indescribably beautiful, that these beginnings should find their echo in death. Symmetry had informed Danny’s own life and it seemed natural to him to want to share its magic with others.

He left by the back door and after a short walk was safely sitting behind the steering wheel of his car clutching a twig of privet that someone had tucked under his windscreen wiper. He glanced at the seatbelt on the passenger side and remembered that he still had to get it fixed. He removed the two pairs of latex gloves from his hands and put them into a paper bag with the rope. He started the car and drove along the A64 to York.

Jody would be waiting for him in his empty house. Lying still and cold and naked in the double bed. His darling Jody, his life companion since the departure of his mother.

His compensation was the knowledge of a job well done. And that was how it should be. He was, after all, a professional magician. Danny wondered if he should worry about the twig of privet. But for some reason it didn’t seem threatening.