The meanest Flood

face with the man who had taken the life of Katherine and Nicole and was now looking to take out Holly. He could imagine killing him, taking him by the throat and squeezing until all sensible life had fled from his body. And Sam Turner didn’t think that would be an inappropriate response. It would be a personal answer and there would be revenge and something like honour involved. There would be no question about whether the death of the murderer would act as a deterrent to other would-be madmen. There would be no question about whether the murderer deserved to live or deserved to die. It would not be a reasonable act because there would be no thought behind it. Sam was enraged by the senseless deaths of these women whose only crime was to have spent a part of their lives with him.
    And his rage was cold as ice. He didn’t shout or scream, he didn’t throw things around or make idle threats. He didn’t call for justice. He didn’t need or wish for the help of the state. He pared his finger-nails. He waited to get his hands on the guy.
    Sam Turner wasn’t a violent man. He’d fight to defend his patch. While no one would describe him as a pacifist, he didn’t believe in the death penalty, and in abstract terms he would argue for a more rational and less political attitude towards criminality. But what he was faced with now was not an abstract problem but a human one. Others were suffering and dying because of their association with him. His past relationships and memories were being negated. The people and experiences which had helped to form him were being obliterated. It was as if a mean flood tide had crashed over the aft deck of his life and washed everything away. The tide had receded now, was regrouping, waiting to launch itself at him again. It was a battle for survival.
    He had no argument with the content of JD’s e-mail. The barbarity of state-sponsored execution for whatever reason would not lead to a reduction in crime and Sam would never align himself with those who argued for its reintroduction. But in personal terms whenever he thought about the man with the trilby hat and the braid on his trousers, the man who might have left behind a vaginal pubic hair on Nicole’s carpet, then he would begin to shake and his blood would boil. Something ancient and coiled within him would lift its dark head and run a slithery tongue over fangs dripping in venom.
    He tried to focus on Angeles back home in York, take his mind off the killer. But Angeles and he might be drifting apart as well. They lived in different worlds. It seemed to Sam that he’d been in this position before. Like there was always another woman on her way out of his life.
    And was Angeles safe back in York? With the guy Marie had described hanging around, were any of the people in Sam’s life safe? He sounded like the same guy who had taken Sam’s photograph that day, ended up kneeing him in the balls and leaving him on the pavement. But the guy had raised the stakes since then, coming looking for him in the office late at night, smashing furniture and frightening Marie.
    What was that all about? Were there two of them involved in the killings? Was Sam supposed to be in two places at the same time? If he were to take care of all his friends he’d have to be.
    He held the picture of Angeles in his mind. Kept it there before him for as long as he could. Dark curls lightly gelled. Tanned skin with a hint of a Southern American ancestor. A greed for life and experience which activated her features and her mind and her wit and kept everyone around her thinking that their time on earth was a long cosmic party.
    But the vision wouldn’t hold, the fine features of Angeles kept slipping away into the skeletal characteristics of Nicole. Sam had always been haunted by the way Nicole had shed weight while they were together. When they’d met she’d been an unresisting, bright and healthy woman, her eyes set firmly and innocently on the future. Eyes you’d never forget, dark perforations that reflected so deep inside you you’d begin to shiver. She gave everything to Sam, her body, her money, her energy, her innocence and her health. For however long it took he accepted her lifeblood and watched her fade away, first her expectations and her hope and then her physical health. He gave grief in return. And he blamed her for the warm soup of guilt and self-loathing that became his everyday habitat.
    When she left, after she took off down the