The meanest Flood

themselves in the same position. The detective would be on the tarmac and Ruben would be standing above him. But that time Ruben wouldn’t walk away. He’d stomp the life out of the bastard.
     
    By early afternoon Ruben was on the south side of the river a couple of streets from Kitty’s house. He rang the bell on the door of the Greenwood Guesthouse and waited until the lady of the house answered. She was one of those women who had a smile that was a wince in disguise. If he’d been looking for somewhere to stay Ruben would have had serious misgivings. But that wasn’t why he was here.
    He showed her the photograph of Sam Turner. ‘I’m trying to trace this man,’ he said. ‘He might have stayed here in the last week or so.’
    The woman looked at Ruben for a long time without glancing at the photograph. Her face betrayed nothing of her thoughts.
    ‘It’s a serious matter,’ he told her. ‘Do you recognize him?’
    The woman looked at the photograph. She shook her head. ‘Never seen him before.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘If he’d stayed here, I’d remember. I don’t forget faces.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Ruben said. ‘Sorry to bother you.’
    He left the house and closed the gate. If necessary he’d visit every guesthouse and hotel in the city. If he could find someone who recognized Sam Turner, someone who could prove that he was in Nottingham when Kitty was killed, then he’d have the bastard.
    Simple proof, that’s all he needed. And the way to get it was down to leg-work. That’s how the police solved crimes, they didn’t follow up clues and solve puzzles except in books and films. They used leg-work.
    And that’s what Ruben would do. And when he found the place where the detective stayed, he’d go back to York and kill him, hang him out to dry.
     

17
     
    It was raining when he left Newcastle but by the time his plane circled Gardermoen, Oslo’s airport, the sky was pastel blue and the landscape shimmered in an extraordinary early-evening light. It made Geordie think about those filters that photographers use to bathe everything in red or blue. It was as if someone had invented a filter that simply made everything clearer, undermined the blurring effects of distance and pasted them into the windows of the plane.
    He’d got himself a book called Welcome to Norway and had read it from cover to cover during the flight, probably knew more now about the country than the people who lived there. He knew they’d been occupied by the Nazis during the war and that they liked to think of themselves as progressive even though they had a king. This airport, if they ever got to stop circling round it and land, levied a surcharge on all flights operating between midnight and six in the morning. This was so people who lived close by could get a better night’s sleep. Keep the decibel count down. Cool. Government for the people by the people. Nearly like communism.
    Geordie knew about Ibsen and another one of their writers but he couldn’t remember his name. Would come later, on the tip of his tongue. Guy who didn’t write plays like Ibsen but novels like JD. He knew about the painter, Munch, madman who had people screaming and merging into each other, except that one called The Kiss which reminded Geordie of him and Janet. There was the composer as well, Grieg, who’d written the Peer Gynt tune which Celia had played for him. Made you think of fairies.
    That was history, all those people. There were probably people writing and painting and composing now in Norway who were just as good as those old guys, maybe even better. But countries liked to have a history so they remembered the old guys for as long as they could. Governments would do anything to keep you from living in the present. Geordie had seen a play by Ibsen at the Leeds Playhouse, A Doll’s House, something like that. He’d thought it would be old-fashioned and full of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ but it wasn’t. Really exciting, kept you on the edge of your seat for two hours. Made you think all the way home. Made you question your attitudes.
    The woman at passport control looked more like a waitress than a government official. She barely glanced at Geordie’s passport. The customs guy eyed him suspiciously and Geordie was expecting a strip search when the man nodded him through.
    Geordie was lost in a foreign country. He stopped a tall fair man dressed in a new lightweight suit with matching shirt and practised the words from his