The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  Under other circumstances, Danny thought, he would answer the door to this man, talk to him about the significance of his shark’s tooth, get engaged with another practitioner. Because it didn’t matter that the man dressed the way he did, that he was obviously from a different class of people. He was another magician, perhaps not a professional like Danny, but he’d heard the music, no doubt about that.

  Danny Mann remained frozen until the man moved away from the window. There was another knock on the door, but it had no heart in it and a few moments later Danny heard the man’s footsteps receding along the street. The magician breathed a sigh of relief.

  His heart was racing and he pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat on it. He increased the tempo of his breathing, letting the ‘hoo-haa’ sounds come from his throat as he hyperventilated, keeping the image of what he had to do clearly before him in his mind’s eye. He squatted on the floor and continued the rapid breathing until a thin film of sweat spread over his forehead.

  There was another knock on the door and Danny saw from the window that it was the woman. He took a few moments to compose himself and went to the door and pulled it open. She was pale. She had on her green wellingtons and a black duffel-coat, a long lamb’s wool scarf wrapped around her neck. She was smaller than Danny remembered. She looked vulnerable standing there on the street.

  She took a step back. ‘Have I got the right house?’ she said.

  Danny gave her his professional smile. ‘Are you Alice? Come in. Sam’s upstairs.’

  She stepped over the threshold and removed her boots. She picked them up in one hand and placed them against the wall. ‘Will they be all right there?’

  ‘No one’s going to run off with them,’ Danny said. He chuckled. ‘Do you want to go up?’

  The woman hesitated as some intimation of danger crossed her mind. She was already trapped and in a fleeting moment became conscious of the fact.

  The magician spoke quietly and clearly. ‘He’s with Conn. I think the boy will be all right.’

  Magic words.

  Danny watched them work on her. All thought of danger instantly vanished. ‘Conn?’ she said. ‘He’s with Sam?’ She brought one hand to her mouth. She walked to the stairs and began the ascent. ‘Sam?’ she called. ‘It’s Alice. I’m on my way up.’

  The magician took his bayonet from the desk and followed her up the stairs.

  For a moment the backs of her knees whisked him away into childhood. He was a boy again following his mother up the stairs. He could smell the scent of her clothes in their ancient wardrobe, the warm dampness that constantly pervaded the upper rooms of their house.

  Danny’s mother would nap during the weekends and school holidays. Danny thought she napped every day, when he was at school, but he didn’t always tell her what he thought. I’m going to take an hour, she’d say, and she’d go to the stairs. He would follow behind and go to his own room or sometimes stay with her in her big bedroom. He would watch her undress and he would sit on the edge of her bed while she slept. He remembered sitting there with Robert-Houdin’s book, King of the Conjurors, the words on the page invading his mind with a French accent while his mother muttered and whimpered in her sleep. In his fancy the sleeping woman was a link back to the dead French magician. When he touched her bare arm on the counterpane it was as if he was sitting next to a nineteenth-century legend.

  When she reached the top of the stairs Alice glanced back at him, wondering which of the three rooms she should enter. Her eyes took in the shape and form of the bayonet and in a moment her countenance was endowed with the knowledge of good and evil. She hesitated long enough for Danny to throw her through the door of the bedroom. She tripped as she went over the threshold and twisted her body around to break her fall. The magician was on top of her immediately. He dropped the bayonet and pulled on both ends of the scarf watching her eyes bulge as she struggled for a breath of oxygen to soothe the fire in her lungs.

  Danny choked the woman until he felt her body sag. Her eyes flickered and her lips faded to blue. Her head fell over to the right. He unwound the scarf from her neck and lifted her on to the bed. He unfastened the toggles on her duffel-coat and with the heel of his hand applied measured pressure towards the bottom of her ribcage. Her breathing was shallow but regular.

  The magician passed the rope over her body and under the bed several times. He tied it tightly. He had intended to gag her but didn’t bother. She was semi-conscious and he couldn’t imagine her shouting for help after the punishment he had given her vocal cords.

  Her eyes focused on him and he smiled. ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said. ‘Diamond Danny Mann.’ He bowed, stooping low so that his fingertips brushed the carpet. ‘Welcome to the last act of an illusion, my dear.’ He reached for the bayonet and ran his finger along its sharpened edge. She wasn’t quite the last act. There was still Turner and the blind woman. ‘There is nothing you or anyone else can do to alter the shape of this day. The spell has been cast. We are all of us ciphers in the closing stages of a tale of woe.’

  When he first trod the boards as a teenager, Danny had perfected a fiendish laugh based on Vincent Price’s portrayal of Don Nicholas Medina in The Pit and the Pendulum. He hadn’t done it for years, but he had a stab at it now, while the woman on the bed was watching him. It rose from his chest like a flight of bats and as he threw his head back and gave it throat, the echoes tumbled around the room like dry bones.

  40

  Marilyn couldn’t work it out. When she’d finally opened the boot of Danny’s car on the outskirts of Whitby there’d been a child in there. A boy, couldn’t have been more than about seven or eight years old.

  He’d moved quickly and was out of the boot and legging it along the tree-lined street before Marilyn could take in the fact that he was there in the first place. Such a small boy, and when he’d disappeared around the corner the boot was empty apart from a length of knotted rope and a wadded face-cloth. What it looked like, it was as if the child had been tied up in the boot, that he’d been gagged and somehow wriggled free while she was on the road from York.

  But that didn’t make sense.

  Marilyn got back behind the wheel of Danny’s car and gazed out of the windscreen. She couldn’t arrive at an explanation that did make sense.

  She took an hour. She found a parking place for Danny’s car and wandered around the harbour area looking for the boy. It was a cold day and a thin sun cast pale shadows over the pavements. From the harbour a salty breeze forced the sightseers to hunch their shoulders. There were a few children but most of them were supervised by their parents or elder siblings. The ones who were alone were older than the boy in the boot, in their early-teens, and they seemed to be locals.

  Marilyn didn’t know what to do next. If she had found the boy she would have asked him what he was doing in the boot of Danny’s car. How he had got there, and why he was tied and gagged. Surely Danny didn’t know anything about it? A child bound and stuffed into the boot of his car. No, that was unthinkable. Marilyn had a child of her own. A dead child, but still, no one should be cruel to them.

  Unless it was a magic trick. Could it be that Danny had bound the child as part of an illusion? Was there an audience somewhere waiting for the child to reappear in the theatre? Why couldn’t she find the child in Whitby? Was it because he wasn’t there? Was it because he had never been there, and that she had not seen him in the boot of the car at all, ever?

  When you deal with a master magician you can never be sure even of your own senses, your own instincts.

  There may have been no child, no banging or whimpering coming from the boot. Even now there was probably no rope or face-cloth in the boot of Danny’s car. Perhaps the whole thing was an illusion?

  And if that was the case there was only one person in the world who would have the answers to her questions.

  The magician. Her phantom lover. The man she was prepared, if necessary, to die for. She hurried back to the p
arking space and got behind the wheel of the car. She headed out of Whitby, back along the coast road, later turning inland and nosing her way to York and Diamond Danny Mann.

  Marilyn wondered once or twice during the journey if she was losing her mind. She played with the idea of going back home and taking her medication. But she had a technique for dealing with crisis situations like this. What she would do was simply not think about anything that happened. She would watch and record like in that film where the man thinks he’s a camera.

  Don’t judge anything. Observe it and store it away.

  Don’t make associations. Standing water on the fields and in the streets as she drove into the city. Don’t make the association with rain or flood. Leave it as it is. Standing water in the streets. That’s all.

  Not easy to do, but the doing kept you calm, left your head cool.

  When she got to Danny’s street he had left the house and was walking away. Marilyn didn’t call after him. She put the car in first gear and followed.

  He walked swiftly, a bag gripped in his right hand. He travelled across the edge of town and along Gillygate. Marilyn was stopped at the traffic lights outside the art gallery and thought she might lose him, but as soon as she turned the corner there he was, his purposeful stride marking him out from the other people on the street.

  He crossed over to Clarence Street and took a right into a street lined with terrace houses. He fumbled with the lock on one of the front doors for a moment and then he disappeared inside the house.

  Don’t think about it, Marilyn told herself. Just watch. She reversed into a parking space between two other cars and peered out at the street. It was reasonably quiet. At the top end there was a group of youths outside a corner shop, probably planning burglaries and arson and muggings. A woman with a baby in a pram walked past, and a little later an old-age pensioner with arthritis and a walking stick.

  Marilyn kept her eye on the house where Danny was but there were no movements at the windows. Briefly she thought an upper curtain shifted but when she looked at it long and hard there was no sign of life. Marilyn wanted to ask herself what Danny was doing in there. She wanted to know whose house it was and why he was visiting. But she pushed the questions to the back of her mind. Just watch, she told herself. When he comes out you can ask him yourself.

  She watched the big man come down the street. He was wearing black-leather trousers and shoes with sky-blue socks and a black silk shirt. Over the shirt he wore a brown suede jacket with a belt. He had a shark’s tooth on a chain around his neck.

  He stopped outside the same house that Danny was visiting and knocked on the door. Marilyn craned forward, hoping to catch a glimpse of Danny when he opened the door. But no one answered the man’s knock.

  He knocked again, louder, and then he left the door and looked through the window. Maybe he knocked on the window as well, Marilyn couldn’t be sure. He seemed certain that someone was inside the house, ignoring him. And he was right, of course, because Danny was inside the house. Marilyn had watched him go in only a few minutes earlier. More questions building up inside her head. Soon there would be more questions than space.

  The big man gave up and walked back along the street the way he had come. Marilyn was tempted to go after him, ask him what he wanted, why he was knocking on the door of the house. She could ask him who lived there, at least he would know the answer to that. But she stayed put. She didn’t want to get distracted. While she was doing something else Danny might come out of the house and disappear.

  A few moments after the big man turned the corner into Clarence Street another figure approached the house. A woman.

  Green wellingtons and a black duffel-coat, a long scarf wrapped around her neck. A small woman, white-faced, one of those who look vulnerable but it’s a designer look. Marilyn reckoned she was strong underneath it all, someone who got whatever she wanted.

  Danny answered her knock almost immediately. He had his charming magician’s smile on his face and held the door open for her while she ducked under his arm. Marilyn reached for the handle of the car door, her impulse to go to the house and confront the two of them. But she held her breath and counted to ten. There could be another explanation. She didn’t immediately have to let her jealousy dictate her next move. She’d never suspected Danny of having an affair with another woman. When she thought about it, she’d never seen him with another woman.

  On the other hand he was a man.

  But today was a day of strange events. Since Danny had called her this morning there had been one thing after another. Now it was late-afternoon and she was no closer to a reasonable explanation for anything. The world became curiouser and curiouser.

  41

  When Marie collected him from Market Weighton that morning they talked about Diamond Danny Mann. When she told him where the magician lived the rusty old cogs that made up Sam’s mind went into action. They began to grind out an image.

  First there was a woman. It was a long time ago, during that period when it seemed to Sam that everything was shrouded in mist. He couldn’t give her a name. He remembered hair parted in the middle and drawn to each side in a Madonna braid. He knew she was married and that she might be good for a drink if he was nice to her. But the woman wanted more than nice. She wanted out of a marriage that had turned her to stone. A lady on the lookout for a knight in shining armour, or any other kind of illusion.

  But what did this woman have to do with obliterating his past partners? She was so far back in time that his memory could not give him a reliable image. What had he done to her to release this avalanche of violence?

  The road into York was passable but on either side of it the fields were deep in water. It was like travelling along an endless jetty, a surreal landscape after being holed up in a container for thirty-six hours. The surface of the standing water reflected the sun and captured the sky and the clouds like a giant mirror. The treetops and the roofs of farm buildings were still and silent in their sodden surroundings, as if in fear of their own engulfment. Or perhaps they were mourning the loss of all around them, everything they had regarded as fixtures in their lives? ‘Nottingham’s a problem,’ Sam said.

  ‘Say again.’

  ‘I understand how he got me to Leeds and to Oslo,’ Sam said. ‘And I can see how he’s got me back to York. But how did he get me to Nottingham?’

  ‘You were working on a case there?’ Marie asked. ‘Yes, I was following a woman. But it’s possible she wasn’t connected with the client. Can you check it out? The records are in the office.’

  ‘Could be,’ Marie said. ‘I mean, if this guy has been watching you, it could be that he waited for you to turn up somewhere he needed you to be. Only after Nottingham did he begin manipulating you.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘I want to check all the possibilities.’

  Marie took him to the Mount Royale Hotel where Angeles was waiting for him. She had booked one of the rooms that overlooked the garden and was standing by the window, staring out as though she could see the wheelbarrow and the late-flowering roses.

  She turned when he entered the room. ‘Sam.’

  ‘How you doing?’

  She took a step towards him but he moved faster and had his arms around her before the door had closed behind him. Her slim white stick fell to the carpet as she searched his body with her hands, reaching under his jacket and into the small of his back.

  They stood together for a few moments, each of them maximizing the area of contact. He could smell her hair and feel the dark curls tickling his face and neck. He was aware of the heat of her thighs against his own, the way her fingers kneaded the discs of his spinal column. She was slim but she was fit and her body was strong and muscular. Her blindness gave her an outer appearance of vulnerability but she was fiercely independent and ever willing to take on whatever the world threw at her.

  He held her at arm’s length and looked at her. She reached out her hand and touched his face, trac
ing the line of his nose and lips with the tip of one finger.

  ‘You look good,’ he said.

  ‘So do you. I’ve missed you.’

  She wore a black satin suit from Paul Smith, a thin cashmere top under the jacket. He wanted to breathe her in, her voice, her mind and body, the dusky tinge to her skin.

  ‘There’s coffee,’ she said. ‘By the bed. And I’ve brought some clean clothes. I put them in the bathroom.’

  He kissed her on the mouth and she put her hand behind his head and returned the kiss forcefully as if afraid it might be the last.

  Sam poured the coffee and splashed cream into Angeles’ cup. He handed it to her. His own he drank black. She asked him about Oslo and what happened to Geordie and he answered all her questions. He watched her constantly, fascinated by the nuances of movement and facial expressions that had attracted him to her when they first met but that he had forgotten about until he started missing her over the last few days. He told her about finding the body of Holly Andersen in the flat at Calmeyers gate and the characters he’d sailed back to England with in the container aboard the Ivan Mazuranic.

  Angeles listened. From time to time as he spoke she reached out and touched his hand, and using that uncanny ability she referred to as facial vision, she always knew exactly where it was.

  After the coffee Sam went into the bathroom and stripped off his clothes while the tub filled with hot water. He trimmed his beard, which had a tendency to grow quicker on the right side, and lowered himself into the water, feeling it close around him until he was immersed up to his chin.

  He closed his eyes and listened to Angeles moving around in the next room; that sharp tapping of her stick as she negotiated unfamiliar territory. She opened the bathroom door and stepped inside, hovering there for a moment as if measuring the room, gauging the spaces that were available to her.