The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  But the vision wouldn’t hold, the fine features of Angeles kept slipping away into the skeletal characteristics of Nicole. Sam had always been haunted by the way Nicole had shed weight while they were together. When they’d met she’d been an unresisting, bright and healthy woman, her eyes set firmly and innocently on the future. Eyes you’d never forget, dark perforations that reflected so deep inside you you’d begin to shiver. She gave everything to Sam, her body, her money, her energy, her innocence and her health. For however long it took he accepted her lifeblood and watched her fade away, first her expectations and her hope and then her physical health. He gave grief in return. And he blamed her for the warm soup of guilt and self-loathing that became his everyday habitat.

  When she left, after she took off down the hallway towards the street to meet her phenomenologist lover, Rolf Day, Sam turned up the volume on Dylan’s ‘St Augustine’ and poured alcohol down his throat until a million pus-encrusted devils came for him straight out of Hell. When he came back to consciousness the following day he was lying in a flood of his own piss and vomit. He staggered to his feet and made for the door to the bathroom, but he couldn’t manage it. The door wouldn’t keep still and the mechanics of balance had shifted; the only way he could keep upright was if his head was on the carpet. When he crashed into the frame around the bathroom door he was already spinning back into oblivion, just had a moment to remind himself of Nicole’s plum-coloured silk blouse and that she had managed to get away in the nick of time.

  Nicole had had a thing about hygiene, hated dust and dirt with a passion. Sam trashed the house, took an obscene pleasure in tramping the garden through the living room, watching the bright kitchen as it dissolved into an ocean of stale grease.

  And then there was Holly. She appeared like magic a few days before the bailiffs arrived to reclaim what was left of the house. Took him away from all that. For a time.

  Another good woman with a mission. Save Sam Turner, show him he’s not alone. All she’d need was love.

  She had a thing about hygiene. Nicole. She was back there in the frame, her skeletal features as if freshly resurrected from the grave. She had a thing about hygiene. Of course, the pubic hair couldn’t have lain on Nicole’s carpet for more than twenty-four hours. Nicole got withdrawal symptoms if she didn’t get her hands on the Hoover once a day. That pubic hair, that blonde vaginal hair, had definitely been left behind by Nicole’s killer.

  Sam tried to think it through. There was a clue here, in this hair with a plastic residue around the root. Someone had taken a single hair and tried to embed it in a plastic substance. But there was no sense in that, unless it was one of many. As in the reproduction of a vaginal bush. But Marie had already checked with the teaching hospitals and the local universities and there was no department that had such a thing or could think of the need for one.

  Some product of the porn industry, then? A love doll? There was a market in life-size dolls, usually cheaply made inflatables. But at the upper end of the market there were companies offering dolls with real hair, lifelike breasts and up to three multi-speed vibrating orifices. You bought the kit, a lube smelling of taramasalata and a couple of AA batteries.

  Sam was doubtful. He hadn’t thought they were dealing with a sex freak. Neither Katherine nor Nicole had been raped or sexually abused. Maybe because the guy’s doll kept him satisfied? But was it possible that he took a love doll with him when he was out on a killing spree? And if so, why? Was he trying to impress her?

  Preoccupied with a single pubic hair and where it might lead, Sam was slow and dulled when Geordie came around the corner from Calmeyers gate. He registered the figure, that it was a young male, but it took time to see that it was Geordie and that he was looking up at Sam in the window of the flat.

  The kid seemed to be drunk, swaying from side to side on the narrow pavement, at one time stepping off the curb and reeling into the street, his arms flailing around to keep his balance. Sam had no time for drunks, having been one himself for half his life. But Geordie wouldn’t get drunk on the job, not in the middle of the day. He watched as his friend struggled back on to the pavement. Geordie put his back against the stone wall and let himself sink to the ground. His eyes were locked on Sam’s face. Sam didn’t come alive and move for the stairs until he saw the trickle of blood ooze from Geordie’s sleeve and run in a crimson line towards the gutter.

  He carried Geordie up the stairs, two at a time, and laid him on the kitchen floor. Geordie was mumbling incoherently, his pupils floating upwards as if he was trying to peer under his own forehead. His face and lips were pale and his skin cold and clammy. He was gasping for air.

  ‘What happened?’ Sam said. ‘Geordie, try to hold it together. I don’t want you dying on me.’ As he spoke he pulled off Geordie’s coat and sweater. His shirt was soaked with blood and there was a deep slash in the kid’s shoulder. Sam couldn’t tell if an artery had been severed, but he applied pressure to the wound and dragged Geordie over to the telephone so he could tend to him with one hand while he phoned an ambulance with the other. He pressed each side of the wound gently but firmly together.

  During the fifteen minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive Geordie regained consciousness twice. The first time he complained of cold, asked where his coat was. Sam reached for the coat and covered him with it, at the same time maintaining pressure on the gash of his shoulder. The second time he came around he wanted to vomit.

  ‘What happened, Geordie? Did you meet the guy?’ Geordie looked as though he was going to answer but his eyes disappeared into the top of his head. Then he opened them again and said, ‘He was in her flat, Sam. He was waiting for her...

  ‘I went after him down the street and spun him around. He said something. He brought the axe up and I saw he’s gonna open my head with it... I ducked, Sam. I saw it coming and I ducked and tried to roll away over the pavement.’

  Geordie closed his eyes and held his breath for some moments. ‘I was too slow,’ he said. ‘I got my head out of the way but took it in the shoulder. Sounded like a log splitting. I dunno what happened to him. Next time I looked he’d gone. Then I remembered the flat and somehow got back to you.’

  Tears ran down Geordie’s face and Sam wiped them away with the flat of his hand. ‘You’re OK,’ he said. ‘What was it he said when you spun him round?’

  ‘A word, sounded like Katha. Does it mean something?’

  ‘Katha. I think it’s a meditation. Something to do with the Upanishad.’

  ‘Hinduism?’

  Sam shook his head. ‘It’s older than that, connected with Vedic culture. Ancient stuff, mystery religion. You sure that’s what he said?’

  ‘Katha, yes, that’s what he said.’

  ‘We might be looking for a priest. Some kind of holy man.’

  ‘There wasn’t much holy about him, Sam, not with that chopper in his hand.’ Geordie winced with the pain in his shoulder. ‘He took my binoculars.’ The kid closed his eyes and lapsed into oblivion.

  He was still unconscious when the paramedics arrived and strapped him into a stretcher. Sam held his hand while they carried him down to the ambulance.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’ the paramedic asked, one of those ambling men who segue through life without apology or explanation.

  Sam shook his head. ‘I found him in the street. Is he gonna be OK?’

  ‘He’s lost much blood. Are you coming with us?’

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ Sam told him. ‘Where we going?’

  ‘Ulleval Hospital.’

  ‘Look after him.’

  ‘That’s my job, sir.’

  Sam watched as the ambulance turned into Storgata. Then he legged it along Calmeyers gate to the flat where Holly and Inge Berit lived. The street door had a digital lock with an intercom and he leaned on all the buttons until someone buzzed him in.

  There was a brass and chromium lift but Sam took the winding stone staircase with its mosaic of tiny tiles covering the wa
lls. One of the first-floor flats had a pram outside and the strains of a children’s song came from behind the door, something about a train and a station. Sam followed the stairs to the next landing.

  Vague feeling of déjà vu, not enough to stop him in his tracks but enough to make him falter. Flat five had a small framed Russian icon, the Kazan Virgin and Child, pinned to the wall beside the door, which was slightly ajar. There was the sound of running water.

  Sam knocked, expecting no reply. He pulled the door open and she was there at his feet, her quilted jacket on the floor a few feet away in the entrance to the kitchen. Her Lapp hat with the ear-flaps was between her feet. She wore the high boots she had worn in the Coco Chalet; the same full-length skirt, though it was now raised to display one of her thighs.

  Holly’s head was cloven apart. Something had come down with tremendous force across the hairline, splitting the skin and bone almost to the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were like bottle tops, staring in opposite directions. Apart from that one ugly gash there were no other marks. The single blow had done the job.

  You’ve stayed young, Sam, while I’ve grown old. He had spoken to her a couple of hours earlier. Held her in his arms. She would never grow old now. Someone had made sure of that.

  One of her hands was caught in her hair, the fingers entangled there, as if caught in a spider’s web. But the other hand was clenched into a tight fist, down by her side, close to her body. Sam went down on his knees, reached for the fist and held it for a moment, surprised at its warmth.

  He prised open the fingers of the fist, one at a time, hoping that within he would find a Hitchcockian clue. A gold medallion with the killer’s name and address, some irrefutable proof that would lead him directly and instantly to the man who was responsible for this mutilated and broken body.

  Zilch.

  The fist was simply a fist, a reaction to the sight of the killer bearing down on her. There was nothing clutched within Holly’s poor dead fingers, no tell-tale locket screaming identity. Only her hand and her fingers and her mother’s ring, which she had worn since her eighteenth birthday.

  Sam didn’t know if there was life after death. He doubted it. The universe was complex and he was prepared to be wrong. But even if people somehow came back again and again in a succession of reincarnations it wasn’t possible to reclaim the past. Holly’s past would never live again, and neither would Sam Turner’s. There were fewer and fewer witnesses to the fact that he’d had one.

  It was not the sound of a footstep behind him, nothing audible, that made him turn his head. Inge Berit was standing at the top of the stairs. She wore the same black cape she had worn at the Coco Chalet, the long boots with the heels. Her bag was slung over her shoulder and one of her gloves had fallen to the tiled floor. Sam thought her mouth was wide open, but that was before he took in the size of her eyes.

  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 ca
pture. 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.