The meanest Flood

would it go wrong, Sam? If there’s two of us on the job we should be able to keep her safe.’
    Sam sighed down the line. ‘Holly doesn’t always do what I tell her,’ he said. ‘In fact, when I speak she turns off, doesn’t listen.’
    Sam hadn’t asked what was happening in York. Maybe he knew the police and the press had painted him as a demented wife-killer. You read the news or you listened to the local radio station and Sam Turner, the neighbourhood good guy, had been transformed into a cynical murderer who stalked the environs of his ex-wives and girlfriends, waiting for the moment when they were most vulnerable. You believed the media and Sam was back on the bottle with a vengeance, often so drunk he couldn’t stand. He sprawled on the threadbare carpet of his flat wearing a string-vest with his flies forever open. He didn’t shave for days and his body was emaciated from lack of food and vitamins, his skin slack and pale as he plotted the evil end of the women whose lives he had already ruined.
    Everybody in the business had been hauled down to the police station. Celia, Marie, they’d called in JD and George Forester. Even Fred Taylor had been questioned, and his only connection to Sam was that he failed to sell him an insurance policy from time to time.
    Geordie had spent seven hours in the Fulford Road nick, helping them with their enquiries. They’d come for him at eight o’clock the evening after Sam disappeared and he’d walked back home again at three o’clock in the morning. Chief Inspector Delaney had all the questions, beginning with: ‘I don’t like Sam Turner, son, and I don’t like the people who do like him.’
    Geordie had told the truth, more or less. Yes, he worked for Sam Turner. No, he didn’t know of any crimes the man had committed. Yes, he had heard that one of Sam’s ex-wives and one of his girlfriends had been murdered recently. No, he didn’t think Sam could have committed the murders. Yes, he was married with a small child. No, he didn’t know where Sam Turner was at the present time. He’d given the same answers the second time he was asked and again the third and fourth time.
    The parting shot had been, ‘Do you want the perpetrator of these crimes to be brought to justice?’ Delaney had said it just like that. He wasn’t the kind of cop to say, ‘Do you want us to catch the murderer?’ He was like a cop out of a fifties movie. He had a confused moral agenda based on his own prejudices and the lessons he remembered from cop school way back in the mists of time, and some Sunday school lessons even before that.
    Chief Inspector Delaney wasn’t a good guy to have as an enemy because he’d find a way of getting you even if it wasn’t legal. On the other hand if he was on your side you’d have to wonder why it was you attracted people with shit for brains.
    ‘Is Sam your only suspect?’ Geordie had asked.
    ‘You think we should be looking for someone else?’
    Geordie had smiled. ‘Yes, I don’t think Sam did it. In fact, I know he didn’t. He couldn’t do something like that.’
    ‘You got any ideas who we should be looking for? I’m not making any promises here, son, but if you can come up with a name maybe we’ll forget that the dead bodies were both connected to your boss and we’ll forget that said boss is on the run and go after your guy instead.’
    ‘I don’t know who did it,’ Geordie had told him. ‘I only know that as long as you chase Sam, the real murderer is getting away with it.’
    Delaney shook his head. ‘You know it’s an offence to harbour a fugitive from the law?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Or to withhold information that might lead to said fugitive’s apprehension?’
    The language was worse than the interrogation. Geordie thought if the guy carried on talking like that he’d have to confess to the killings himself. OK, OK, I did it. But please, no more jaw.
     
    The train pulled into the Sentral Stasjon in Oslo and Geordie got his bag and stepped down to the platform. He followed the crowd. Sam was leaning up against the kiosk outside the barrier with a plastic cup of coffee in his hand, but Geordie walked past him. He clocked the guy with the coffee but didn’t give him a second look, thought he was a Norwegian version of a down-and-out, the kind of guy you looked at him too long, he’d come over and give you some grief.
    It must have been the third time he glanced at the guy propping up the kiosk that something