The meanest Flood

know. I was lucky. They wanted to give me a blood transfusion but I don’t believe in it.’
    ‘Bit of blood’s not gonna hurt you, Geordie. You looked like you could use some.’
    ‘I’ve cleared it with the doctor. It means I’ve gotta stay here a bit longer, that’s all.’
    ‘But don’t you wanna see Janet, get back home to your family?’
    ‘No need, Sam. They’re coming here. I talked to Janet on the phone.’
    Sam didn’t ask who was paying for Janet and Echo’s flight, he assumed it would be him.
    He didn’t tell Geordie that he was going to find it hard working this case on his own. He made his face grin, hoped it would transmit down the line like that.
    ‘I’m on the road,’ he said. ‘The police are after me. I have to get out of the country.’
    ‘How, Sam? Where’ll you go?’
    ‘I’ll find a way. See you back in York.’
    ‘Is that where the next one is?’
    Sam nodded. ‘Yeah.’
    ‘What’s her name?’
    ‘Alice. Calls herself Alice Richardson now, her maiden name. But for about four months she was called Alice Turner.’
    ‘Another marriage made in heaven?’
    ‘Dunno where it was made. She laughed at everything I said. I thought she loved me, but it was because she had good teeth.’
    Geordie sighed.
    ‘She seemed to think two and two’d come to make five, if she cried and bothered about it enough.’
    ‘But with you it only came to three?’
    ‘She decided to let me go after a while. I wasn’t ready for a relationship.’
    Geordie breathed down the phone.
    Sam shrugged his shoulders. ‘These things happen,’ he said.
     
    He rang home and Angeles picked up the phone. ‘Don’t ask me no questions about where I am,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way from where I’ve been, heading for where this lunatic’s gonna strike next.’
    ‘I’ve been worried.’
    ‘You and me both. You being hassled?’
    ‘Some. The day you left the police had me in the station all day.’
    ‘But you didn’t say nothing.’
    ‘I didn’t know anything, Sam. I still don’t.’
    ‘They’ll have a tap on the phone, be listening in to this.’
    ‘And my other calls?’
    ‘You can bet on it.’
    ‘I miss you, Sam.’
    He whistled through his teeth. Watched another Saab go past at speed, young Swede at the wheel with blond hair in spikes as though he was plugged into the car’s electrical system. ‘Yeah. I miss you in the mornings.’ She laughed down the line. ‘What about the rest of the time?’
    ‘I can take most of it,’ he said. ‘Evening’s bad and during the day, that’s bad too. But mornings are the worst. Waking up there’s a surge of optimism because it’s a new day, you know, just before you open your eyes. Then it all comes back. Bang. Another shit day. I’m still chasing a guy I don’t know who he is. I know what he’s done and what he’s doing. I know where he’s heading. But I don’t know who he is. And you’re not here, and whatever happens during the day you’re still not gonna be here tonight.’
    ‘I’m not going anywhere else,’ she told him. ‘I’m waiting for you.’
    He let the words hang there, trying to imagine her with the phone cradled against her ear. Dark curls and her skin with its hint of Buenos Aires, a genetic inheritance from her Argentine father. And close by there would be the long white cane, a substitute for her eyes.
    ‘I’m signing off,’ he said.
    ‘When will I see you?’
    He shook his head. Reached to switch off the phone. |
    ‘I love you, Sam,’ she managed to say before he broke the connection.
    He mouthed the words back to her though she was gone. They wouldn’t convey what he felt anyway. His life i had been littered with small loves but Angeles was different. And yet each of those small loves had seemed possible at the time. Sam had a genius for wrapping potential in glitzy paper and convincing himself it was reality. He’d taken many a girl off the street under the illusion she was a princess.
    He should be there with her, not tearing from country to country in pursuit of some madman. All the women in his life were in danger. How long would it be before this guy, whoever he was, was turning his attention to Angeles, or to Marie or Celia, the women who were part of Sam’s life now? According to the pattern, the sequence, the next one would be Alice, but what happened after that?
    Sam would have to make sure that he never got to Alice. He didn’t know how, he just knew that he had to do it.
    He crossed the