The meanest Flood (33 page)

As he turned and got to his feet, exposing Holly’s prostrate body, Inge Berit took a step backwards down the stairs. She lost her footing and for a moment Sam thought she would go over and crack her head on the steps. But she grabbed for the handrail and saved herself, pulling herself back on to the landing.

Later, he couldn’t remember when she had started screaming. It could have been at that point, when she pulled herself back, but it could have been a long time before. She may already have been screaming when he turned and saw her for the first time.

He took a step towards her but she grabbed the straps of her bag and wielded it like a weapon. ‘Keep away,’ she said. She screamed for help in Norwegian:
‘Hjelp meg, hjelp meg. Mord. Morder.’
Her voice cracking with rage and frustration. ‘Holly... ahhh.’

The door to the flat opposite opened and a barefoot teenage boy looked out. Sam ran before it was too late. He brushed past Inge Berit and ducked as she swung her bag at his head. Must’ve been a bottle in there because it cracked against the wall. He hesitated at the turn and looked back, desperate to explain, to comfort and quieten her. But her face was a mask of outrage and hatred. Behind her Holly’s body was prostrate in the doorway to the flat, a lake of water spreading from the bathroom and flooding the hall where she lay.

Sam took the steps fast, Inge Berit’s accusations darting after him like the tail of a kite.

He stopped at the flat in Osterhaus gate to collect his coat and rucksack. He was checking that the wad of twenties he’d brought from England was safe in the side pocket when he heard a car come rapidly along the street. He glanced out of the window as the police left the car blocking the road and headed for the entrance to the flat.

Sam locked the door and went out to the rear balcony as footsteps thundered on the stairs.

‘Politi. Open up,’ a voice shouted through the door. Sam looked down at the cobblestones in the courtyard, tried to convince himself he could take the fall, land on his feet and live to tell the tale. But he rarely believed his own stories.

The roof was an easier option.

‘Politi. Open the door,’ the cops shouted. They hammered on the wood with their fists.

Sam stood on the balustrade and hoisted himself on to an area of coping around the perimeter of the roof. A magpie trying to grab forty winks tottered off along the tiles sideways before taking to the skies.

Sam let himself fall into the gap between the coping and the roof tiles as the noise from the flat door rose to a climax. The cops must have smashed it off its hinges and he could hear them running around in there, inspecting the loo to see if he’d got out that way. A couple of them came on to the balcony and spoke to a third who was down in the courtyard. Sam’s grasp of the language wasn’t perfect but good enough to work out that they thought he’d be far away by now. ‘Down by the docks,’ the cop in the courtyard was saying. ‘We should be watching the ships.’

He could hear them ransacking the flat, collecting the things he’d left behind, one of his shirts and a couple of books that Geordie had left by his bed. A photograph of Janet and Echo.

Two of them carried the loot down the stairs to their car, while one of the others shouted a racist joke after them that was not made funnier by the change of language. But the fourth one came back to the balcony. He lit a cigarette and Sam watched the tiny clouds of smoke rise above the level of the roof. The man’s shoes scuffed on the floor as he paced back and forth.

When he was joined by his friend the first man said something that Sam couldn’t understand. There was a period of quiet which was unnerving. Sam wanted to lift his head and look over the coping, see what the two of them were up to. But he didn’t move. He held his breath and kept low.

There was a scraping sound followed by a release of breath which was far too close and as Sam watched a man’s face came over the coping like a rising moon. It was less than a metre away. A large square face with a square jaw. Brown eyes and even teeth. He had the dark blue jowls of a man who shaved more than once a day. He looked at Sam and smiled and then turned back to his friend on the balcony. ‘Bjorn,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve earned ourselves some promotion.’

Sam scrambled to his feet and moved away along the rooftop as the cop heaved his considerable bulk over the coping. Sam moved on to the tiles, slowly ascending towards the peak of the pitch. It was slow going until he learned to use the edge of his shoes to stop himself slipping back. The cop behind him was gaining ground, all the time talking in a low guttural mutter, something like a shepherd might use on a frightened animal. It was a reassuring sound, intended to slow the heartbeat, keep panic at bay. Sam shut it out.

He concentrated on picking his way, testing the reliability of each tile before transferring his weight. He knew that back on the balcony the other cops would be radioing for reinforcements, making sure they had the building surrounded. The time he had available to make his escape was strictly limited.

As he continued to ascend the pitch Sam could see the outline of a metal cage on the end of the roof, way over to his left. Looked like an exterior fire-escape and represented his only chance of evading capture. He glanced back at his pursuer, who was still too low on the pitch to see Sam’s escape route, though the guy was now little more than a metre below him, still gaining ground.

Sam changed direction, picking his way crab-like over towards the left. The cop did the same, though not entirely abandoning the incline, so that he remained underneath Sam on the pitch but continued to come closer to his feet.

They travelled another ten or fifteen feet in this way before the cop felt able to make a grab for Sam’s shoe. He kicked out, but at the same time he lost his grip on the tiles and felt himself begin to slide down the pitch of the roof. The cop let out a yell as one of Sam’s feet collided with his neck and the two of them clattered down the pitch, bringing several of the tiles with them.

The cop went over the coping and disappeared and Sam banged his head and felt himself trapped in the area between the coping and the beginning of the pitch. He was nauseous and couldn’t work out if it was because of the blow to his head or the fact that he’d just watched a man fall to his certain death.

He got to his knees and peered over the coping. The cop was still there, hanging in space. He was clinging to the guttering with both hands, the toes of his shoes bearing some of his weight by digging into the mortar between two bricks. And underneath him there was nothing for three storeys until the hard cobblestones of the courtyard.

Sam looked down at the man and did some unconscious calculations. He could lean over the coping and reach the cop’s hand, somehow try to convince the man that he could let go of the guttering and make a wrist-to-wrist link with Sam.

But then what?

The cop was too heavy to lift back on to the roof. After a while Sam would have to let him go or the two of them would be dragged over. He looked down and engaged the man’s eyes. He shook his head and the cop looked away. Sam didn’t have to spell it out.

Down in the courtyard there were two other cops who were shouting for their comrade to hang on. Someone was getting a ladder.

Sam wanted to stay and watch, see if they made it in time or if the cop hanging on to the guttering would fall before they came with the ladder. But there wasn’t time for that.

As the light began to fade he inched his way over the rooftop, making his way to the end of the building. He caught a glimpse of something flashing in the late sunshine over by Calmeyers gate and stopped momentarily to focus on it. There was a single figure, obviously male but too far away to make out any facial features. He was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes, training them on Sam as he made his way along the rooftop. As he watched the man lowered the binoculars and turned away. Sam couldn’t tell if there was a movement of the man’s arm, a salute of recognition. The man walked away and was soon obscured by the rooftops.

Sam didn’t know how he knew that the figure with the binoculars was the man who had murdered Holly and the others, but he knew all the same. And he knew that the man had outclassed him again. This was someone who could make Sam do exactly what he wanted and when he wanted.

And Sam’s own malleability, his seeming inability to refuse the murderer’s wishes and aspirations, had led to another death. There was no doubt that this shadowy figure was a brutal and conscienceless killer, but by the same rule Sam Turner himself was complicit in the deaths of the women whose only sin had been to give themselves to him.

Sam got back to earth via the service ladder attached to the outer wall, all the time expecting the cry to go up and a fresh influx of police to come pouring in and drag him off to the cells. He found himself in a small alley off the cobbled courtyard and, keeping his back to the wall, snatched a moment to watch the police with a ladder, trying to position it below the cop who was still dangling from the guttering.

While they were occupied with that Sam had time to move into the overhang which led to the back entrance of the flats. He tried the first door and found it locked. The second door was the same. The third was unlocked and gave easily. Sam stepped inside. He held his breath and listened.

In another room a dance band was playing and a singer, in a voice filled with emotion, was accentuating the lyrics:

No tiene pretensión,

no quiere ser procaz

se llama tango y nada más.

Made you think of the house where you were born. All the things and people you’d ever known and lost.

He was in a kitchenette. There was cold fish soup in a pan on the cooker. Over in the corner was an antique Norsk cupboard painted with red roses on an ultramarine background, chipped gold-leaf frame defining the limits of each door. Sam took a dishcloth from the sink and wiped the roof-dirt from his hands. He gave his trousers and shoes a rub. If he made it to the street he wanted to look halfway decent.

The kitchen door led him into a hall where the music became louder. In the room to his right a couple were dancing the tango. The man was black and wearing cord trousers with braces and a light blue shirt, two-tone dancing shoes. His woman wore high-heels and a skirt with a hemline cut on the cross, bare breasts and spectacles. Their eyes were locked together.

Any other time, any other circumstances, Sam would’ve stayed to watch.

But he stepped past the opening to the room, took a gabardine raincoat and peaked cap from a hook by the door, and let himself out of the flat, finding himself by an exit a hundred metres further along Osterhaus gate.

The police car was still there but only manned by a solitary cop. The others must still be struggling with the ladder in the courtyard.

Sam had wanted to go to the hospital to see Geordie, find out how the kid was doing, make sure he wasn’t going to die. But he would be mad to go there. The police would be swarming all over the place. The best he could do was to return to the Internet cafe and get word through to Janet. She would be the best tonic for Geordie. A word from her would get him back on his feet quicker than anything else in the world.

Clinging to the shadows, he slowly moved out of the area and a few minutes later hit the anonymity of Henrik Ibsen’s gate, walked past a chrome and glass fashionable cafe and allowed the silent tentacles of the international city to wind their way around him.

27

You had to speak through an intercom because everyone else had gone home and there was only the counsellor in the building. Ruben checked his watch - 7.35 - and hit the intercom button with the index finger of his right hand.

There was a grating sound from the grille. It sounded like a steam train pulling into a station. And her voice, when it came, was distorted. The register was wrong for a human being, too high. It would’ve been all right as special effects, one of those films that have human beings flying over treetops, women who are hybrids, crosses between people and animals.

He pushed his face close to the grille. ‘What did you say?’

The hybrid again. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Ruben Parkins. I’ve got an appointment.’

The grating sound made him pull away. ‘Push the door and come upstairs.’

Weird, seeing the place like this. Every time Ruben had been to the surgery previously the place was buzzing. There were the receptionists in their white coats, old-age pensioners and mothers with babies. One time he’d been here and a guy had a heart attack in the waiting room, clutching his chest and rolling around on the floor. Some of the kids thought it was a circus. Doctors came out of their rooms, running down the stairs to get the receptionists to help. In the end it was one of the single mums who’d called an ambulance on her mobile. Didn’t stop the guy from dying but the paramedics said it could’ve done if she’d rung a minute earlier.

The place was deserted, eerily silent. Ruben walked the length of the hallway and started up the winding staircase. Plush pile carpet, ebony handrail polished as bright as a saint’s foot.

When he got to the upper floor he didn’t know if he should sit in the waiting room or go into the doctor’s surgery. But the counsellor’s voice sang out, saying, ‘Come straight in, Mr Parkins.’ Nothing like it had sounded over the intercom. Fairly good voice, middle-class, like Katherine’s, you could tell she’d been studying somewhere. A woman who understood you had to sound the vowels and the consonants. But there was no edge to it, she didn’t need to put you down.