The meanest Flood

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