The meanest Flood

by Baker, John

  But depression was something else. He couldn’t manage that on his own. They were related, these two, grief and depression, but they weren’t the same thing. Grief was somewhere he had to dwell for a time before he came back to the idea of getting on with his life. Depression wasn’t like that. It was a prison cell.

  Which makes her into some kind of key, he thought. Sarah Murphy, the counsellor, working away to open him up.

  28

  Danny’s internal slave-driver had been hard at it since the unfortunate incident in Calmeyers gate. He didn’t know if he’d killed the young man or not. He’d seen the ambulance take him away and he’d watched Sam Turner make his escape from the police. There hadn’t been time to hang around. He’d stopped the kid, that was certain. He’d felt the blade of the axe cut into the flesh and, for a moment, he’d seen the shock in the young man’s eyes as the blood drained from his face.

  Danny hadn’t slept through the night and as he put his bag on the conveyor belt at Gardermoen he reflected that it didn’t really matter if the young man was still alive. It didn’t matter if he had seen Danny’s face and could identify him. Who would believe him? The police in two countries would now be looking for Sam Turner. The illusion was coming to its conclusion. The authorities would be under pressure to find the detective and bring him to justice.

  The plane taxied along the runway and waited in the queue for takeoff. The pilot apologized for the delay, assured all the passengers that they would be airborne within a few minutes. The magician eased his safety belt, rolled his left hip where it had pinched him. He turned and smiled reassuringly at the Asian woman in the window seat next to him.

  He had accomplished what he had come to do. The Oslo section of the illusion had been completed successfully, or nearly so.

  Until the incident with the boy it had been a doddle. The doors to the flat had opened easily enough, causing Danny no trouble at all. Once inside he had put on two pairs of latex gloves and removed his clothes as usual. It was a pity he couldn’t use the bayonet, but he’d never have been able to take it on the plane. Aesthetically it troubled him that he’d had to purchase the hatchet, though when he thought about it it was a more practical weapon.

  Intellectually Danny agreed with Nietzsche: ‘You only need to start thinking of culture as something useful and all too soon you’ll be confusing what is useful with culture.’ Still, needs must In the same situation, Danny consoled himself, the Übermensch would have considered a hatchet beyond good and evil.

  He had expected both of the women to return together. He would wait for them to remove their outdoor clothes and act quickly. He had already unplugged the phones, drawn the curtains to the street.

  But Holly Andersen arrived alone. Through a chink in the kitchen door he watched her close the outer door behind her and remove her Lapp hat and quilted jacket. She was humming something from a show, an old tune. As she moved to hang up her clothes Danny came for her. She didn’t reach the peg. Her jacket and hat fell to the floor as he brought the hatchet down on her head. She didn’t say anything. No sound came from her lips. She stood on one leg for a moment, her long skirt somehow entangled in her arm, and then she went over heavily.

  Danny watched for a minute as her body went through the shaking and shuddering. There was no real life there, only a mess of nerves and tissue in convulsion over the loss of central command. When she was still he dropped the latch on the door and went to the bathroom. There were splatters of blood on his forearms and another on his forehead and his right thigh. He washed himself clean and got back into his clothes. He placed the Norwegian cap on his head and pushed it forward from the back. Reminded him of Bogey in The African Queen, one of his mother’s favourites.

  He washed the hatchet and placed it in the inside pocket of his overcoat.

  He put the plugs in the bath and the wash-basin, blocked the overflows and turned on the taps. He turned on the shower as an after-thought.

  He stepped over Holly Andersen’s body on his way out and took the steps down to the street. He was sure it was all over. He would go back to the hotel and make arrangements to check out. Go back to England and normality. Back to Jody.

  When Sam Turner’s lackey had attacked him, flinging him back against the wall of a building, Danny had acted instinctively. There was no time for premeditation. He had reached for the hatchet and used it. He’d seen the young man rolling over on the pavement and grabbed his binoculars and made his getaway as quickly as possible.

  Couldn’t resist returning later, though, in time to catch the detective scrambling over the rooftops like the insect? he was.

  The plane taxied forward, hesitated as though gathering enough will-power and courage before flinging itself down the runway like a charging rhino. Danny closed his eyes. He loved planes. Had always been fascinated by flying. The trip to Thailand had been one of the high spots of his life. He had relished flying there and back almost as much as he had delighted in his experiences in Bangkok and the Chao Phraya River basin. Danny couldn’t understand people who were frightened of flying. He had been amazed to discover that there were psychologists who specialized in aerophobia and acrophobia, actually made a living out of it. In reality the sky was a safer place to be than the roads or the high seas. If he wasn’t a man he would choose to be a bird, an eagle or an albatross with all the power and soaring majesty of wingspan and speed. A solitary predator with the ability to spot a trembling whisker from a mile in the sky and the dexterity and velocity to take it with talon and beak before the creature could sigh.

  There was a young man towards the front of the cabin who had tried to drink himself senseless and failed. He was big, broad-shouldered and bearded, and was wearing an orange shirt and baggy trousers. His voice, when he spoke to himself or one of the stewardesses, was a few decibels above the acceptable and his sentences were liberally laced with expletives.

  The other passengers were quieter than normal, each of them wondering if the man was going to cause real trouble, perhaps degenerate into air-rage.

  ‘Gimme a drink,’ he said to the stewardess.

  ‘In a moment, sir.’ She went forward, through first-class.

  ‘Bitch!’ he shouted after her. ‘Give a man a drink.’ He got to his feet and twisted around, looking towards the rear of the plane. ‘Fucking drink, here,’ he said, before collapsing back into his seat.

  Mancunian accent, Danny decided. And the man was older than he’d first thought. Thirty-five, thirty-six, with a liver maybe fifteen years older.

  The stewardess returned and the man was on his feet again. He lurched over his fellow passenger to grab her but she leaped out of reach. ‘Where’s my drink?’ he said.

  ‘If you wait a minute the Captain will come and talk to you,’ she told him.

  ‘Don’t wanna Capt’n, need a fucking drink.’ He extricated himself from the man he had fallen over and followed the stewardess towards the rear of the plane. She stood her ground a couple of seats in front of Danny.

  ‘I think it would be better if you returned to your seat, sir,’ she said. ‘You’re disturbing the other passengers.’

  ‘To hell with them - Southern slapheads. Open the door, let ’em all get sucked out.’ He made another grab for her but she took a couple of steps back.

  ‘I really can’t serve you anything at all if you’re not in your seat, sir.’

  ‘Lying bitch! I was in my seat to start with.’ He appealed to Danny and the Asian woman sitting next to him. ‘Did I get a drink when I was in my seat?’

  The Asian woman said he should do what the stewardess told him and go back to his seat.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘I only want a drink. ’S’not unreasonable.’ Then he stood with his legs apart and screamed at the top of his voice, ‘GET ME A FUCKING DRINK.’ The stewardess lost it at that point. She turned and ran for the rear of the plane. The man in the orange shirt went after her. Some woman screamed and a couple of men got out of their seats. As the big man went past Da
nny the magician stuck out his foot and tripped him, bringing him crashing down in the aisle. He stayed on his face for a couple of seconds and then raised himself on to his knees.

  Danny waited no longer. He unfastened his safety belt and got to his feet. He stepped into the aisle behind the drunk and pushed him down on to his face. Then he stood on the man’s back and shouted for the stewardess to help him.

  She came down the aisle with a couple of towels and another stewardess followed with more linen. Together, while Danny kept the man down, the two women managed to tie his hands behind his back. Every time he protested the second stewardess gave his hair a yank and banged his head on the floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said each time. ‘Oops, sorry again.’

  They tied a towel around his ankles and another around his knees. When they’d finished, the first stewardess told Danny he could return to his seat. ‘We’ll sit on him until we get to Newcastle.’ She gave Danny a big smile. ‘Thank you very much for your help,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t have managed without you.’

  Admiring glances from the other passengers, especially the women. The Asian woman sitting next to him melted in her seat. She had each of her tiny hands on the edge of the armrests and sank back into the upholstery with her eyes closed and her lips parted. From time to time she would turn to him and stare until she got his attention. ‘Thank you,’ she’d say. ‘Thank you very much.’

  The plane approached Newcastle International Airport, the River Tyne and Hadrian’s Wall both visible in twisted outline as the airliner dropped below the level of the clouds. Danny waited for the touch of landing, that bounce as the great metal bird fought against its compulsory grounding and then the rapid deceleration, pushing him forward into his straining seatbelt.

  ‘Can I ask passengers to remain seated for a few minutes?’ the Captain’s voice said over the intercom. ‘The local police will be removing the individual who attacked one of our flight attendants.’

  Two police officers entered the plane from the rear and two more from the front of the plane. They unceremoniously bundled the drunk along the center aisle and out on to the tarmac where they had a dog and a van waiting.

  ‘The Captain wants a word with you,’ the flight attendant said to Danny. ‘If you don’t mind waiting?’ He stayed in his seat, nodding at the passengers who left the plane as they smiled at him and thanked him again for his bravery. When they’d all left the plane the Captain came along the aisle with hand outstretched. ‘You are a very brave man,’ he said. ‘I wanted to let you know how much my crew and I appreciate your actions back there. Without you the whole situation could have got very ugly.’

  ‘Really,’ Danny said, ‘I only did what anyone...’

  ‘No, that’s not true. No one else intervened. I want you to know that my report will strongly recommend your bravery is officially recognized.’

  ‘I’m sure there’s no need for that,’ Danny told him. ‘I only did what I had to do.’

  ‘And thank God you did, sir,’ the Captain told him. ‘I really don’t want any fuss,’ Danny said. ‘I lead a quiet life and I like it that way.’

  They left the plane together and walked towards the waiting bus, through the ranks of passengers who applauded as Danny passed them by. At the entrance to the bus the first stewardess, the one who had been harassed by the man in the orange shirt, took a step forward and kissed the magician on the cheek. The Asian woman who had been sitting next to him on the plane also came forward with a kiss of her own. A news photographer caught Danny receiving the kiss, the light from the flash causing him to blink. And they all waited until Danny was on the bus before following him aboard.

  The handshakes and the kisses continued inside the airport terminal. And after Danny had been interviewed by the police and got rid of the reporters from the Guardian, the Sun, the Daily Mail and Channel 4 News, there were still a few of the passengers waiting to add their thanks.

  Danny was flattered. He was worried about the attention of the press but he was flattered nonetheless. He hadn’t thought of himself as brave when it was happening but the weight of public opinion was beginning to get to him. Surely these people couldn’t all be wrong.

  29

  Alice Richardson had married Sam Turner shortly after he split from Holly Andersen. She was looking for a father substitute, though at the time she would have denied it. She loved the fact that he was so much older than her, that he had seen life and acquired what she liked to think of as wisdom. And she believed the silly things he said because they seemed to have more authority than the silly things that occurred inside her own head.

  She folded the Guardian and put it on the piano stool. She couldn’t believe that he had murdered those women, or that he was capable of murdering anyone. Alex, her partner for the last fifteen years, had pointed out that people change, and that you never really know another person. We all manage to hide behind the person we imagine ourselves to be.

  But what did Alex know? Not a lot, unfortunately. The main problem with him was that you didn’t have to be bright to know him very well after a few minutes in his company. A man by whom Alice would be severely embarrassed if she ever accepted responsibility for him. He was the centre of his own universe, had analysed himself and was anxious to pass on to the rest of the world the fruit of his discoveries about human nature. ‘I’m a lucky guy,’ he’d tell complete strangers. ‘I can’t help it, I’m just lucky.’ Almost every sentence that left his lips began with the word ‘I’.

  She shook her head. Alice didn’t want to think about Alex. It was thinking about Sam that had brought him into her mind. Contrasts. You defined each person in terms of the others you met. You constructed an invisible and unconscious table in your mind, with the best ones at the top and the worst ones at the bottom, and as you went through your life you added and subtracted different characters, pushing some of the earlier ones towards the bottom or the top, only occasionally completely replacing the top one or two with new names.

  Alice’s list, when she tried to access it, had only a few constant characters, and Sam Turner was one of them. Before they had married, when she was twenty-two, he had been way up at the top of the list. But a week after the ceremony he had begun dropping rapidly. Within two to three months he was at the bottom, and for a year or two after they separated he remained as the anchorman. She didn’t think she’d ever meet anyone as disappointing as him. She didn’t want to. One was enough.

  And then, imperceptibly at first, he’d begun to make a comeback. She’d only really noticed when she found him at the halfway mark, and for the last six or seven years he’d got back in there with the leaders. Not number one, but probably in the first four.

  And yet there was a truth in what her partner, Alex, said about never really being able to know another human being. She didn’t know Sam, not really. What she had responded to in him all those years ago was not something known, something concrete in his character. If she had known him at all it had been in the sense of his potential. She had recognized something in him that was as yet undeveloped, and might never develop. And she had been young enough and naive enough to believe that she could provide the impetus for that spark of potential to develop into a substantial reality.

  She had been unable to face the fact that the Sam Turner she had married was a man in flight from hope. That he recognized no potential in himself or in anyone else. That Sam thought of the whole of humanity, including himself, as food for worms. He was interested only in an all-out escape from his daily reality. He was never so happy as when he was drunk or unconscious. Alice couldn’t understand how she had thought that that was so attractive before the wedding. It was years later that she realized it was because she was also in flight. From adulthood, from responsibility, from the person she feared she might be or was on the way to becoming.

  In the past four or five years she’d seen more of Sam. They weren’t close friends any more but she’d see him on the street and they’d stop and talk. He hadn’t aged much - so
me thickening around the waist, the beginnings of jowls amid his creased face. He’d never been particularly pretty. Always interesting, though; you could look at his face for hours. It was like a story book. And then he’d asked if she had some time, could they go for coffee? Coffee was his staple. Alice couldn’t think about coffee without thinking about Sam.

  She’d taken him up on it a few times, hesitantly at first, not wanting to find herself spiralling back into the mistakes of her youth. But he wasn’t a predator and he didn’t come on to her. He talked about himself, about his relationships with women and his work, and he enquired after her as well, wanting to know more about Alex and her children and about her job as an administrator at the university. He was interested in her, Alice realized, not as a potential sexual partner but as someone who had been a part of his life. And if you’d been part of Sam’s life you would always be part of it. He would never give up on you, not totally.

  For the last couple of years Alice had found herself disappointed, somehow let down if she met Sam in town and he didn’t offer her coffee. He’d occasionally be busy with his blessed detective business, on the way from one job to another or to relieve one of his operatives, and he’d be full of regret about it but there were people dependent on him. Alice remembered the times she had been dependent on him. The hours, sometimes days, she’d sat waiting for him, knowing that he was head down in a gutter somewhere or in the arms of some floozy who’d promised him a drink.

  But it had changed now. He didn’t drink any longer. That spark of potential she had recognized all those years before had kicked in and filled out the man. He wouldn’t harm her. Never. There were many people in her life who might be tempted to injure her, even Alex when he was in one of his moods or if she managed to rouse his temper, but she couldn’t imagine Sam doing anything like that.