The meanest Flood

astonished. The police and the newspapers, the television people and the man’s neighbours, they were spinning round in disbelief. Where could he have gone? Where could he be?
    Sam Turner was like a rag doll. Diamond Danny’s magical powers had lifted him up in a flash and deposited him in the capital city of another country. The spectators, even the subject himself, were only aware of the movement of the wand and the accompanying flash. They didn’t realize that everything was in the preparation, that everything had been arranged weeks in advance.
    Danny finished moving his bowels and collected the breakfast tray. Jody was lying on the rug in front of the couch, one of her legs behind her neck in a parody of some yoga position. As he washed his bowl and cup at the kitchen sink he smiled to himself. It was the best trick he’d ever devised, no doubt about it. Elegant. But at the same time it carried enormous risks. The research had been rigorous and that was certainly one of the factors that had led to its success. Turner had a logical way of thinking and he rarely panicked. Danny had always known that the man would follow the sequence and take himself off to Oslo. He had to be there, after all, in order to be implicated in the crime.
    If Turner wasn’t by her side the woman couldn’t die. The dominoes were carefully placed. If one of them remained standing the illusion would fail.
    ‘The symmetry is captivating,’ he told Jody. ‘Beguiling.’
    As a teenager, Danny had gone to the National Gallery of Art in Washington with his mother and stood before Picasso’s Tragedy. The painting had brought the young Danny Mann to tears. Perhaps that was symmetry, too? Danny didn’t know what it was. The painting was blue. There were three figures on a beach, thin, emaciated, a man, a woman and a boy. They appeared to be a group but they didn’t communicate; there was no eye-contact. The man and woman looked down at their bare feet and the young boy weighed imponderables in the palms of his hands. Danny thought they were poor but that didn’t explain the title of the painting. It felt as though a death had taken place, that they had lost someone and the loss had fractured their existence as a family. But there was no real story. Only a conclusion.
    Danny had stood before the large wooden panel and let the tears stream down his face. His mother had returned and put her arms around him but he was inconsolable. She had led him from the gallery into the sunshine and eventually he’d stopped crying and agreed to go back for another look. Danny believed that in the whole of his life nothing had touched him more deeply than that painting.
    The attendant had told them that Picasso had painted two other pictures underneath Tragedy. There was a thickly painted action scene from the bullring, and another bullfight painting, showing a dead horse being dragged from the ring. Danny thought that that might be a clue to the tragedy, but he wasn’t sure what the clue meant.
    After his mother died, Danny would wake in the night or in the early morning enfeebled and debilitated, weak in spirit and his physical body. And he would recall the picture of the three blue figures and think of the young Picasso labouring away in Barcelona in 1903.
    Symmetry, perfection. It made you weep because the parts fitted so neatly together. It was a rare thing in the world when that could be conjured up. That moment of harmony when the spinning and exploding atoms of chaos fall into a trance of blueness.
     
    To the south of York, on the outskirts of Selby, Diamond Danny parked outside an old gabled house set back from the road and surrounded by a line of conifers and waterlogged fields. There was a white canvas kitbag on the passenger seat of the car, held in place by the seatbelt. Danny struggled with the release mechanism of the seatbelt but it was faulty and would not open for some time. He swore quietly under his breath as he tried to locate the exact angle at which he had to press the release button. A ridiculous situation for a magician. He could open any door, make solid objects pass through brick walls, and here he was struggling with a seatbelt. Tomorrow, no, today he would get it fixed. The mechanism finally gave way and Danny tucked the kitbag under his arm. Leaving the car unlocked, he approached the front door of the house and gave three thumps with the heavy brass knocker. A small plaque on the wall declared the occupier to be J. C.