The meanest Flood

hallway towards the street to meet her phenomenologist lover, Rolf Day, Sam turned up the volume on Dylan’s ‘St Augustine’ and poured alcohol down his throat until a million pus-encrusted devils came for him straight out of Hell. When he came back to consciousness the following day he was lying in a flood of his own piss and vomit. He staggered to his feet and made for the door to the bathroom, but he couldn’t manage it. The door wouldn’t keep still and the mechanics of balance had shifted; the only way he could keep upright was if his head was on the carpet. When he crashed into the frame around the bathroom door he was already spinning back into oblivion, just had a moment to remind himself of Nicole’s plum-coloured silk blouse and that she had managed to get away in the nick of time.
    Nicole had had a thing about hygiene, hated dust and dirt with a passion. Sam trashed the house, took an obscene pleasure in tramping the garden through the living room, watching the bright kitchen as it dissolved into an ocean of stale grease.
    And then there was Holly. She appeared like magic a few days before the bailiffs arrived to reclaim what was left of the house. Took him away from all that. For a time.
    Another good woman with a mission. Save Sam Turner, show him he’s not alone. All she’d need was love.
    She had a thing about hygiene. Nicole. She was back there in the frame, her skeletal features as if freshly resurrected from the grave. She had a thing about hygiene. Of course, the pubic hair couldn’t have lain on Nicole’s carpet for more than twenty-four hours. Nicole got withdrawal symptoms if she didn’t get her hands on the Hoover once a day. That pubic hair, that blonde vaginal hair, had definitely been left behind by Nicole’s killer.
    Sam tried to think it through. There was a clue here, in this hair with a plastic residue around the root. Someone had taken a single hair and tried to embed it in a plastic substance. But there was no sense in that, unless it was one of many. As in the reproduction of a vaginal bush. But Marie had already checked with the teaching hospitals and the local universities and there was no department that had such a thing or could think of the need for one.
    Some product of the porn industry, then? A love doll? There was a market in life-size dolls, usually cheaply made inflatables. But at the upper end of the market there were companies offering dolls with real hair, lifelike breasts and up to three multi-speed vibrating orifices. You bought the kit, a lube smelling of taramasalata and a couple of AA batteries.
    Sam was doubtful. He hadn’t thought they were dealing with a sex freak. Neither Katherine nor Nicole had been raped or sexually abused. Maybe because the guy’s doll kept him satisfied? But was it possible that he took a love doll with him when he was out on a killing spree? And if so, why? Was he trying to impress her?
    Preoccupied with a single pubic hair and where it might lead, Sam was slow and dulled when Geordie came around the corner from Calmeyers gate. He registered the figure, that it was a young male, but it took time to see that it was Geordie and that he was looking up at Sam in the window of the flat.
    The kid seemed to be drunk, swaying from side to side on the narrow pavement, at one time stepping off the curb and reeling into the street, his arms flailing around to keep his balance. Sam had no time for drunks, having been one himself for half his life. But Geordie wouldn’t get drunk on the job, not in the middle of the day. He watched as his friend struggled back on to the pavement. Geordie put his back against the stone wall and let himself sink to the ground. His eyes were locked on Sam’s face. Sam didn’t come alive and move for the stairs until he saw the trickle of blood ooze from Geordie’s sleeve and run in a crimson line towards the gutter.
     
    He carried Geordie up the stairs, two at a time, and laid him on the kitchen floor. Geordie was mumbling incoherently, his pupils floating upwards as if he was trying to peer under his own forehead. His face and lips were pale and his skin cold and clammy. He was gasping for air.
    ‘What happened?’ Sam said. ‘Geordie, try to hold it together. I don’t want you dying on me.’ As he spoke he pulled off Geordie’s coat and sweater. His shirt was soaked with blood and there was a deep slash in the kid’s shoulder. Sam couldn’t tell if an artery had been severed, but he applied