The meanest Flood

held it firm. Nicole didn’t want to scuffle. He wasn’t pushing down on it. She could still breathe perfectly well.
    She fought for the memory. She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her knees. Replaced the plastic sandal that had come off when she caught the Frisbee and fell. She brushed the hair from her eyes. Her hair was long that year, so she was eleven because she had it cut short for her twelfth birthday. She took the Frisbee and flicked it towards her father, watched it rise away from her, somehow capturing the air and using it to propel itself in the perfect arc that would take it to his hands.
    The sheer flawlessness of its flight took her breath. The beauty of it was like a pain in her heart.
     
    Diamond Danny Mann stood back. He cleaned the bayonet on a corner of the sheet. A flash vision of a barber’s pole. Figaro, Figaro... Rossini’s control of the strings. The deep startled hush of the audience. His mother’s voice, frail, distant: ‘Danny? Danny, have you run my bath?’
    He untied the woman’s hands and feet and collected the rope. There would be odd fibres left behind and some overworked and ambitious genius in the forensic lab would eventually discover that the rope was purchased from a branch of Woolworth’s sometime during the last five years. But they’d have nothing else. Nothing to connect him to the scene. And their eyes would be averted anyway; the circumstantial evidence and his appearance in the street at the exact time of the killing would focus their attention on Sam Turner.
    In the bathroom he washed himself and replaced his clothes. He blocked the overflow on the bath and the hand-basin and left both taps running. In the kitchen downstairs he blocked the sink and watched for a moment as the water splashed into it.
    Symmetry again. Life begins in a womb, the developing foetus swims in a bath of amniotic fluid, it knows only liquid and is swept along, unknowingly, towards the hard realities of life. How fitting, then, how indescribably beautiful, that these beginnings should find their echo in death. Symmetry had informed Danny’s own life and it seemed natural to him to want to share its magic with others.
    He left by the back door and after a short walk was safely sitting behind the steering wheel of his car clutching a twig of privet that someone had tucked under his windscreen wiper. He glanced at the seatbelt on the passenger side and remembered that he still had to get it fixed. He removed the two pairs of latex gloves from his hands and put them into a paper bag with the rope. He started the car and drove along the A64 to York.
    Jody would be waiting for him in his empty house. Lying still and cold and naked in the double bed. His darling Jody, his life companion since the departure of his mother.
    His compensation was the knowledge of a job well done. And that was how it should be. He was, after all, a professional magician. Danny wondered if he should worry about the twig of privet. But for some reason it didn’t seem threatening.
     

15
     
    Sam got to the office a little before ten in the morning. Geordie was talking to Janet on the telephone. Barney, Geordie’s dog, got up from his sprawl on the floor and wagged around Sam’s legs for a minute. Sam patted him, tickled his ears. He walked over to his desk and sat in the swivel chair. He thumbed through the morning post, putting most of the circulars and envelopes into his waste bin without opening them.
    At the end of the office, in the dark section away from the windows, there was a sink and a draining board, the makings for tea and coffee and a single power point with a kettle attached. Sam filled the kettle and switched it on. He spooned four measures of ground Italian coffee into a small cafetière and fished a carton of milk from the smallest fridge in the world. While he waited for the water to boil he found the first Biograph CD and played ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ so loud that the cups rattled.
    ‘Just a minute,’ Geordie said into the mouthpiece of the phone. He cupped his hand over it and shouted at Sam, ‘It’s too loud.’
    Sam said, ‘I need comfort.’
    ‘I’ll have to go,’ Geordie shouted down the telephone to Janet. ‘The boss’s having a nervous breakdown. He thinks it’s 1963.’
    Sam watched the kettle. The man and his guitar somehow contrived to evoke bagpipes, a Highland silhouette of a mountain with a stag, though there was nothing in the lyric to suggest either.