The meanest Flood

huge, twice her weight, and that element of intelligence which allows us to obey the rules of civilization seemed to have abandoned him. She’d fight if she had to, go for his eyes and his balls, she’d try, but there was no way she’d be able to beat him.
    His hands encircled both her wrists and he stretched her arms apart as if he were crucifying her in the air. She came out of the chair and watched as he brought his large face up against hers. His broad forehead set itself against hers.
    ‘Talk,’ he said. Marie thought her arms would come out of their sockets and she realized that she was still making those small cries. She fought to regain some control over her voice.
    ‘You’re hurting me,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anything.’ The man released her arms and pulled a chair over from Geordie’s desk and stamped on it. The legs broke away and splintered like kindling. He kicked it and the remains scattered around the office, the solid circular seat banging against a small table and sending that rolling over against the far wall.
    ‘Oslo,’ Marie said. She hadn’t meant to say it or thought of saying it. The two syllables had somehow come together inside her brain and been catapulted out of her mouth.
    ‘Now you’re talking. Where’s that?’
    ‘Norway. We don’t have an address.’
    He picked up one of the chair legs and held it in both hands like a baseball bat.
    She closed her eyes and waited for him to shatter her skull. In the space of a few seconds her throat dried up and she fully expected to die. ‘You can threaten all you like,’ she said with her eyes closed, but finding and riding her courage, ‘I don’t know where he is in Oslo.’
    Marie opened her eyes and they stared at each other, neither of them blinking. The man was the one who finally cut the eye contact. He looked away and flung the chair leg on the floor. ‘You work for the guy, right?’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You should get a different job. This guy Turner, he’s a slimeball. You should do a proper job for somebody who’s a genuine employer.’
    He walked to the door. When he stopped and turned around Marie thought he was coming back for her. Her heart began racing again. ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you,’ he said. ‘It’s important to me. And I’m sorry about the chair. There was no need for it. You’re not the one. It’s the detective I want.’
    Marie listened to his footsteps receding down the stairs. She heard the street door slam and she listened to the silence. She reached in her coat pocket and took out her mobile. But she didn’t ring the police. The guy had gone now and the thought of staying up half the night giving statements to the boys in blue was more than she could face.
    She booted the computer again and sent another note to Sam, told him he’d need to buy a new chair for the office.
    She walked down the stairs and locked the outer door, turned in the direction of Celia’s house and a warm bed. The job had its good moments too, she told herself, as well as the bad. And anyway, you can’t have everything, where would you put it?
     

26
     
    Geordie had gone back to the surveillance of Holly and Inge Berit’s flat in Calmeyers gate and Sam was sitting in the window of his own flat in Osterhaus gate. He’d stopped by the Internet cafe in Storgata to pick up his messages. One long one from JD, cogitating on the nature of capital punishment, and two shorter notes from Marie about a pubic hair and a guy who’d muscled his way into the office late at night.
    People who want the death penalty are often idealists, JD said in his e-mail. They envision and imagine a world cleansed and purified of crime and evil. They want a moral and ordered world in which everything ugly, everything unseemly, is banished. The ritual of the state killing a criminal by hanging or electrification or lethal injection is not envisioned as ugly or even violent; it is seen as a cleansing act, it is seen as considerate. Justice. An eye was taken and now an eye is being taken in return.
    Another problem with capital punishment is that when they have it, the people who believe in it want it not only for the murderers of policemen, but for the murderer of anyone; they want it for rapists and child molesters; and they want it for burglars and car thieves, especially when it is their own house that has been robbed or their own car that has been trashed.
    Sam didn’t know what he would do when he finally came face to