The meanest Flood

corner of the screen showed 12.01 a.m. but quickly changed to 12.17 when the camera locked on to a couple of girls swaying along the street with their arms around each other. They were around twenty years old and had been drinking. One of them was crying. The camera followed them until they drew level with the house and then switched and followed them along the street until they turned the corner and disappeared.
    The digital clock leapt forward again, 12.51 a.m.
    At the far end of the street was a figure with a hat. As he drew closer to the house it was apparent that the hat was a trilby and that the man was wearing a neat black overcoat. ‘Can you zoom in?’ Marie asked.
    ‘We’ll lose quality.’
    ‘That’s OK.’
    Jurgen operated a mouse and the camera zoomed in on the area of the man’s face. But there was nothing recognizable there, only a mass of pixels. The camera pulled back fractionally but the man kept his head down, his eyes on the pavement, so that his features were hidden in shadows.
    ‘Damn!’ Marie said.
    ‘He’s avoiding the camera,’ Jurgen said. ‘But he’s white, we can see that.’ He entered something on the keyboard and the man’s height and weight flashed up on the screen. ‘He’s one metre seventy-eight and around sixty-eight kilos.’
    ‘That’s neat,’ Marie said. ‘Will it give us his name and address?’
    Jurgen laughed. ‘The way the technology’s progressing it might be able to do that one day.’
    ‘Can you go down to his feet?’ Marie said. ‘His shoes.’ Jurgen moved the mouse down the length of the man’s body.
    ‘A little higher,’ Marie said. ‘I want to see the bottom of his trousers.’
    The man was wearing grey trousers with a sharp crease. There was no braid on them.
    ‘Highly polished shoes, though,’ Jurgen said. ‘Shows someone who’s fastidious.’
    ‘Or he lives with someone who is,’ Marie said. ‘Maybe his mother?’
    Jurgen let the image run and they watched the man pass the house and the camera switch to his rear view until he turned out of the street in the direction of the quiet avenue where Katherine Turner, unknowingly, waited for him.
    ‘Can you give me a copy of that?’ Marie asked.
    ‘If you give me an e-mail address I’ll send it as an attachment,’ he said. ‘You might lose quality but you can always come back here for a better view.’
    Marie left the house and followed in the footsteps of the man in the trilby hat. She could feel Jurgen tracking her from his terminal as she walked the length of the street.
     

20
     
    Sam watched an Oslo dawn through the windows of the flat in Osterhaus gate. He’d turned in around halfmidnight and gone deep for a couple of hours. Dreamed of the Christmas Eve that Holly walked out on him. It was all there in his mind, the tinsel and the whisky on his breath. Kind of dream if it was a play you’d say, Great set, but I couldn’t believe the characters, especially the guy.
    He’d gone out and bought a turkey and eight bottles of Scotch in the morning. Brought them back home safely. He’d noticed the van outside the house but didn’t think it was anything to do with him. Blue transit with the rear doors open, straw inside, looked like it’d been used to transport animal feed.
    Holly had the wardrobe door open and was piling her clothes on the bed. ‘I’ve met someone,’ she told him. ‘I’m moving out. We want to spend Christmas together.’ Sam went downstairs, opened one of the bottles and filled a glass. He was truculent but buried it under an avuncular mask. Thought civilized thoughts. He brought the drink upstairs and said. ‘I’m in reasonable mode. I’m not gonna be violent. Who is it? Anyone I know?’
    He didn’t know anyone who would have handled it better under the circumstances.
    Holly was wary, but she answered. ‘No one you know. A doctor. Norwegian.’
    ‘Going up-market,’ he said. She gave him a look that might’ve been imported from the Arctic.
    He told her, ‘I’m trying to be calm but there’s a residue of bitterness in me. And I just bought a turkey.’
    ‘I hope you’ll be happy together,’ Holly said.
    ‘I can’t believe you said that.’
    ‘Sam, most of the things I’ve said these last months, you haven’t heard.’ She collected the clothes in both arms and picked her way down the stairs. She got a cardboard box and flicked her way through the CDs, taking the ones she thought belonged to her. Sam looked over her shoulder, to