The meanest Flood

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