The meanest Flood

out with a few questions but had seemed to accept his mother’s vague answers. Alex had also been inquisitive during the first weeks and months of their relationship, but during the last ten years he had never breached those areas again.
    And Sam? Sam was so out of it in those days he wouldn’t have remembered that they’d done it. He’d assumed that Dominic was the result of an encounter after Alice had left him, which was true. And at the same time it wasn’t true at all.
    She couldn’t have told Sam at the time. He wouldn’t have been interested. He would have been incapable of processing the information. If it didn’t lead to a drink in those days he wouldn’t bother taking it on board. But the real reason that Alice didn’t tell Sam was because it might have forced them back together. It had been bad enough living with the guy by herself, she couldn’t imagine taking a baby into the situation.
    And so she’d become the bearer of the secret. The only one to know of the connection between this now almost respectable man and her lanky teenage son feeling his way to maturity and adulthood. She fantasized that she would tell them both one day, introduce them casually to each other. Dominic, this is Sam, your father; and Sam, this is Dominic, your son. One day, when they’d both grown up, when she was sure they could handle it. The biology, the connection, the length of time that they’d been kept from the truth. She’d dreamed it a hundred times. Half the time the dream turned into a nightmare. The other half it felt good, warm, like being part of a second family.
    And now Sam was in trouble again. Maybe the worst trouble he’d ever seen. The women he’d left behind or who had left him in the past were turning up dead. It must seem to him almost as though they had never happened. And the people who didn’t know Sam Turner, the police and the media, the authorities generally, who had always been his enemies, seemed intent on laying the blame at his door.
    Now, they seemed to think he was in Oslo when Holly Andersen died. There was a witness who found him with the body, and one of his staff was hospitalized in Oslo. It seemed like someone’s outlandish plot. And Sam, in his bungling way, was playing into their hands.
    Because she would never believe he was a murderer. Not Sam Turner, the father of her eldest son. Not in a million years.
    But you can never he entirely sure, she heard Alex saying inside her head. Sometimes people go over the top. They crack, turn into somebody else. Something that you, they, nobody ever expected.
     

30
     
    When he left the flat Sam made his way to the Internet cafe and sent a message to Janet, copies to Celia and Marie and Angeles, make sure she had some support. He told them Geordie was in the Ulleval Hospital and that he was injured but that he wasn’t going to die. He told Angeles in a separate note to expect a call from him.
    Sam took a tram up to Holmenkollen and looked out over the Oslo fjord from under the shadow of the ski jump. He didn’t have time to climb to the top of the jump. He’d never been much of a tourist anyway and he wasn’t in Holmenkollen for the view or as a visitor to the ski museum. It was part of his route back to England.
    Before leaving the town he’d got together some kit and he was wearing a pair of new Norwegian boots in soft brown leather, a dark blue Finnish suit, neat little hat -kind of cross between pork-pie and Borsalino - and a Burberry coat which he left unbuttoned so it flapped in the wind. He still had JD’s glasses perched on his nose but he’d had his hair cut so short you couldn’t tell if he had any until he took the hat off.
    As the moon rose he found a silver Volvo V70 estate with Swedish plates sitting outside a timbered villa. With all the skill of a seasoned car-thief and working only with a pen-knife and a multi-purpose screw-driver set which he kept in a pouch in his rucksack, he had the thing unlocked and rolling down the hill within thirty minutes.
    He needed a few hours and the signs were favourable that he’d get them. Through the windows of the villa it seemed as though the car’s owners were settled for the night. Their hostess was serving up a large pink trout on a silver platter. The centrepiece was accompanied by small copper dishes of melted butter, marinaded cucumber and white potatoes that had been graded for size. The red wine was flowing into crystal glasses as big as melons. There was a