Headhunters

18 WHITE QUEEN

I SAT IN the wreckage of the car gazing at the electric shaver. We have bizarre thoughts. The white queen was broken. She whom I had used to keep my father, my background, yes, the whole of my life in check. She who had said she loved me, and to whom I had vowed, even if it was a lie, that a part of me would always love her merely for saying that. She whom I had called my better half because I had really believed she was my Janus face: the good part. But I had been mistaken. And I hated her. No, not even that; Diana Strom-Eliassen no longer existed for me. Yet I was sitting in a wrecked car with four corpses around me, an electric shaver in hand and one single thought in my head:

Would Diana have loved me without my hair?

We have – as I said – bizarre thoughts. Then I dismissed the thought and pressed the on button. The shaver – which had belonged to Sunded, the man with the prophetic name that sounded like soon dead – vibrated in my hand.

I would change. I wanted to change. The old Roger no longer existed anyway. I set to work.

A quarter of an hour later I examined myself in the fragment that was left of the mirror. It was – as I had feared – not a pretty sight. My head looked like a peanut with the shell on, oblong with a slight kink in the middle. The shaven skull glistened, white and pale, above the more tanned skin of my face. But I was me: the new Roger Brown.

My hair lay between my legs. I swept it into the transparent plastic bag, which I then stuffed into the back pocket of Eskild Monsen’s uniform trousers. There I also found a wallet. Which contained some money and a credit card. And since I had no intention of allowing myself to be traced after using Kjikerud’s card, I decided to take the wallet with me. I had already found a lighter in the pocket of the black nylon jacket belonging to Pimples and once again I considered whether to set fire to the petrol-marinated wreck. It would delay the job of identifying the bodies and perhaps give me a day’s respite. On the other hand, the smoke would trigger the alarm before I had a chance to get out of the area, whereas without the smoke and with a bit of luck several hours could pass before anyone found the car. I eyed the meat-like surface where Pimples’ face had been and made my decision. I spent almost twenty minutes getting his trousers and jacket off and then dressing him in my green jogging outfit. And it is strange how quickly you get used to cutting people up. When I snipped the skin off both of his index fingers (I couldn’t remember whether fingerprints were taken from the left or the right hand) it was with the concentrated efficiency of a surgeon. Finally, I snipped at the thumb too so that the damage to his hands looked more random. I took two steps back from the wreck and studied the result. Blood, death, silence. Even the brown river beside the copse seemed frozen in mute immobility. It was worthy of a Morten Viskum installation. If I’d had a camera I would have taken a picture, sent it to Diana and suggested she hang it in the gallery. As an augury of what was to come. For what was it Greve had said? It’s the fear, not the pain, that makes you malleable.

I walked along the main road. Of course I ran the risk of being seen by Greve if he drove this way. But I was not concerned. First of all, he wouldn’t have recognised the bald-headed guy in a black nylon jacket with ELVERUM KO-DAW-YING CLUB on the back. Secondly, this person walked differently from the Roger Brown he had met; with a more erect back and at a slower pace. Thirdly, the GPS tracker would show in all its clarity that I was still in the wreck and hadn’t moved a metre. Obviously. After all, I was dead.

I passed a farm, but continued on my way. A car passed me, braked, wondering perhaps who I was, but accelerated again and disappeared into the sharp autumn light.

It smelt good out here. Earth and grass, coniferous forest and cow muck. My neck wounds ached a little, but the stiffness in my body was receding. I strode out, taking deep breaths, deep and life-affirming.

After half an hour’s walking I was still on the same endless road, but I saw a blue sign and a hut in the distance. A bus stop.

A quarter of an hour later I got onto a grey country bus, paid cash from Eskild Monsen’s wallet and was told that the bus went to Elverum, from where there was a train connection to Oslo. I sat down opposite two platinum blondes in their thirties. Neither of them graced me with a glance.

I dozed off, but woke up to the sound of a siren and the bus slowing down and pulling in. A police car with a blue light flashing passed us. Patrol car zero two, I mused, noticing one of the blondes look at me. Meeting her gaze, I noted that she instinctively wanted to avert her eyes – I was too direct; she thought I was ugly. But she couldn’t do it. I sent her a wry smile and turned to the window.

The sun was also shining on the old Roger Brown’s home town when the new one alighted from the train at ten minutes past three. But an icy cold wind was blowing into the snarling mouths of the disfigured tiger sculptures in front of Oslo Central Station as I crossed the square and continued towards Skippergata.

The dope dealers and whores in Tollbugata looked at me, but didn’t yell after me with their offers as they had done for the old Roger Brown. I stopped in front of the entrance to Hotel Leon and glanced up at the facade where the plaster had crumbled, leaving white sores. Beneath one of the windows hung a poster promising a room for four hundred kroner a night.

I went inside to the reception desk. Or RESEPTION as the sign hanging above the man behind the counter said.

‘Yes?’ he said instead of the usual warm welcome I was used to from the hotels the old Roger Brown frequented. The receptionist’s face was covered in a veneer of sweat as though he had been working hard. Had drunk too much coffee. Or was just nervous by nature. The roaming eyes suggested the latter.

‘Have you got a single room?’ I asked.

‘Yes. How long for?’

‘Twenty-four hours.’

‘All of them?’

I had never been to a hotel like the Leon before, but I had driven past a few times, and I had an inkling they offered rooms on an hourly basis for those who made love on a professional basis. In other words, those women who didn’t have the beauty or the wit to use their bodies to acquire a house designed by Ove Bang and their own gallery in Frogner.

I nodded.

‘Four hundred,’ said the man. ‘Payment in advance.’ He had a kind of Swedish accent, the kind preferred by dance band vocalists and preachers for some reason.

I threw Eskild Monsen’s credit card on the desk. I know from experience that hotels don’t give a damn whether the signature is a match or not, but to be on the safe side I had been working on a passable imitation on the train. The problem was the photograph. It showed a round-jowled man with long, curly hair and a black beard. Not even under-exposure could hide the fact that he bore absolutely no resemblance to the person standing in front of him with a thin face and a recently shaven skull. The receptionist studied the card.

‘You don’t look like the guy in the photo,’ he said without looking up from the card.

I waited. Until he raised his eyes and they met mine.

‘Cancer,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Cytotoxin.’

He blinked three times.

‘Three courses of treatment,’ I said.

His Adam’s apple gave a jump as he swallowed. I could see he had severe doubts. Come on! I had to lie down soon, my throat was hurting like hell. I didn’t relinquish his gaze. But he relinquished mine.

‘Sorry,’ he said, holding the credit card out to me. ‘I can’t afford to get into trouble. They’re keeping an eye on me. Have you got any cash?’

I shook my head. A two-hundred-krone note and a ten-krone coin was all I had left after the train ticket.

‘Sorry,’ he repeated, stretching out his arm – as if begging – so that the card was touching my chest.

I took it and marched out.

There was no point trying other hotels; if they wouldn’t take the card at the Leon, they wouldn’t anywhere else either. And in the worst-case scenario they would sound the alarm.

I switched to plan B.

I was a new person, a stranger in town. Without money, without friends, without a past or an identity. The facades, the streets and the people who walked in them, appeared different to me from how they had to Roger Brown. A thin strip of cloud had glided in front of the sun and the temperature had sunk another few degrees.

At Oslo Central Station I had to ask which bus went to Tonsenhagen, and as I got onto the bus, for some reason the driver spoke English to me.

From the bus stop to Ove’s house there were a couple of steep hills, yet I was still frozen when I finally passed his place. I circled round the area for a few minutes to make sure there were no policemen in the vicinity. Then I went up to the door and let myself in.

It was warm inside. Time- and thermostat-controlled radiators.

I tapped in Natasha to deactivate the alarm and walked into the sitting room-cum-bedroom. It smelt as it had before. Washing-up not done, unwashed bedlinen, gun oil and sulphur. Ove was lying on the bed as I had left him. It felt like it was a week ago.

I found the remote control, got into bed beside Ove and switched on the TV. Flicked through teletext, but there was nothing about missing patrol cars or dead policemen. The Elverum police must have had their suspicions for some time and must have launched a search, but they would probably wait for as long as possible before announcing that a patrol car had gone missing in case the whole thing was down to a banal misunderstanding. However, sooner or later they would find it. How long from then until they discovered that the body without fingertips in the green tracksuit was not the detainee, Ove Kjikerud? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight max.

These were matters, of course, which I was not qualified to judge. I didn’t have the vaguest notion of the process. And the new Roger Brown knew no more about police procedures, but he did at least realise that the situation demanded firm decisions based on uncertain information, risky action instead of hesitation, and toleration of enough fear for the senses to be sharpened, but not so much that you were paralysed.

For that reason I closed my eyes and slept.

When I awoke, the clock on teletext showed 20:03. And beneath it a line about at least four people, of whom three were police officers, killed in a traffic accident outside Elverum. The patrol car had been reported missing in the morning and was located in the afternoon next to a copse by the River Trekk. A fifth person, also a policeman, was missing. The police thought he may have been hurled out of the car into the river and a search had been mounted. The police asked the public for information about the driver of a stolen Sigdal Kitchens lorry that had been found parked on a woodland road twenty kilometres from the accident scene.

When they knew that Kjikerud was the missing person they would sooner or later come here. I had to find myself somewhere else to sleep tonight.

I took a deep breath. Then I leaned across Ove’s body, picked up the phone on the bedside table and dialled the only number I knew by heart.

She answered on the third ring.

Instead of her usual shy but warm ‘Hi’, Lotte answered with an almost inaudible ‘Yes?’

I put down the phone immediately. All I wanted to know was that she was at home. I hoped she would be later that night as well.

I switched off the TV and got up.

After searching for two minutes I had found two guns: one in the bathroom and one squeezed behind the TV. I chose the small black one from behind the TV and went to the kitchen drawer, took out two boxes, one with live ammunition and one labelled ‘blanks’, filled the magazine with live cartridges, loaded the gun and engaged the safety catch. Then I stuffed the gun into my waistband as I had seen Greve do. I went into the bathroom and put the first gun back. After closing the cabinet door, I stood inspecting myself in the mirror. The fine shape of the face and the deep lines, the head’s brutal nakedness, the intense gaze, the almost feverish skin and mouth; relaxed and determined, silent and expressive.

Wherever I woke up tomorrow morning, it would be with murder on my conscience. Premeditated murder.

19 PREMEDITATED MURDER

YOU WALK ALONG your own street. You stand in the evening gloom under a cluster of trees looking up at your own house, at the lights in the window, at a movement by the curtains which might be your wife. A neighbour out walking his English setter passes by and sees you, sees a stranger in a street where most people know each other. The man is suspicious, and the setter lets out a low growl; they can both smell that you hate dogs. Animals, like humans, stick together against intruders and trespassers up here on the mountainside where they have entrenched themselves, raised high above the confusion of the town and the chaotic jumble of interests and agendas. Up here they just want things to continue as they are, for things are good, everything’s fine, the cards should not be re-dealt. No, let the aces and kings remain in the hands they are in now: uncertainty damages investor confidence, stable economic conditions ensure productivity, which in turn serves the community. You have to create something before you can distribute it.

It is odd to think that the most conservative person I have ever met was a chauffeur who drove people earning four times as much as he did and addressed him with the condescension that only the most painfully correct politeness can express.

Dad once said that if I became a socialist I would no longer be welcome in his house, and the same applied to my mother. He was, it is true, not sober when he made that threat, but that was all the more reason to assume that he meant quite literally what he said. He thought that the caste system in India had a lot to recommend it, that we were born into our station in life in accordance with God’s will and it was our damned duty to spend our wretched lives there. Or as the sexton says in Johan Falkberget’s The Fourth Night Watch: ‘Sextons are sextons. And priests are priests.’

My rebellion, a chauffeur’s son’s rebellion, had therefore been: education, a rich man’s daughter, Ferner Jacobsen-branded suits and a house on Voksenkollen. It had gone wrong. Dad had had the impudence to forgive me; he had even been so crafty as to act proud. And I knew, when I sobbed like a baby at their funeral, that I was not grieving over my mother; I was furious at my father.

The setter and the neighbour (strange that I could no longer remember what his name was) were swallowed up by the darkness and I crossed the road. There had been no unfamiliar cars in the street, and, pressing my face against the garage window, I could see that it too was empty.

I sneaked quickly into the raw, almost palpably black night of the garden and took up position under the apple trees where I knew it was impossible to see anyone from the living room.

But I could see her.

Diana was pacing the floor. The impatient movements combined with the Prada phone pressed to her ear led me to infer that she was trying to ring someone who was not answering. She was wearing jeans. No one could wear jeans the way Diana did. Despite the white woollen jumper, she walked with her free arm across her chest as though she were freezing. A big house built in the 1930s takes time to warm up after a plunge in temperature, however many radiators you turn on.

I waited until I was quite sure she was alone. Felt for my gun lodged in my waistband. Took a deep breath. This would be the most difficult thing I had ever done. But I knew I would succeed. The new man would succeed. That was perhaps why the tears flowed, because the outcome was already a given. I did nothing to restrain the tears. They ran like hot caresses down my cheeks while I concentrated on being still, not losing control of my breathing, and not sobbing. After five minutes I was empty and dried my cheeks. Then I walked to the door with rapid strides and let myself in as quietly as I could. Inside, in the corridor, I stood listening. It was as though the house was holding its breath: the silence was broken only by the click of her footsteps on the parquet floor upstairs in the living room. And soon they would stop, too.

It was ten o’clock in the evening, and behind the barely open door I glimpsed a pale face and a pair of brown eyes.

‘Could I sleep here?’ I asked.

Lotte didn’t answer. She didn’t usually. But she was staring as if I were a ghost. She didn’t usually stare or look frightened, either.

I smirked and ran a hand across my smooth scalp.

‘I’ve shaved off…’ I searched for the word. ‘… the lot.’

She blinked twice. Then she pulled back the door and I slipped in.

20 RESURRECTION

I AWOKE AND glanced at my watch. Eight. It was time to begin. I had what they call a big day in front of me. Lotte lay on her side with her back to me, swathed in the sheets that she preferred to a duvet. I slid out on my side of the bed and dressed at top speed. It was bitterly cold, and I was frozen to the marrow. I crept into the hall, put on my jacket, hat and gloves and went into the kitchen. In one of the drawers I found a plastic bag which I shoved into my trouser pocket. Then I opened the fridge, thinking it was the first day I had woken up as a murderer. A man who had shot a woman. It sounded like something from the newspaper, the kind of case I ignored because criminal cases were always so painful and banal. I grabbed a carton of grapefruit juice and was about to put it to my mouth. But changed my mind and fetched a glass from the overhead cabinet. You don’t need to let all your standards decline just because you have become a murderer. After finishing the juice, rinsing the glass and putting the carton back, I went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The small black gun in my jacket pocket poked me in the stomach, and I took it out. It still smelt, and I knew the smell would come to remind me of the murder for ever. The execution. One shot had been sufficient. At point-blank range, as she was about to embrace me. I had shot during the embrace and hit her in the left eye. Was it intentional? Maybe. Maybe I had wanted to take something from her in the same way that she had tried to take everything from me. And the lying traitor had embraced the lead, the phallic bullet had penetrated her as I had once done. Never again. Now she was dead. Thoughts came like that, in short sentences confirming facts. Good. I would have to continue thinking like that, maintaining the chill, not letting my emotions have a chance. I still had something to lose.

I raised the remote control and switched on the TV. There was nothing new on teletext; the editors weren’t in the office that early, I supposed. It still said the four bodies would be identified in the course of the following day, today in other words, and that one person was still missing.

One person. They had changed that from ‘one policeman’, hadn’t they? Did that mean then that they now knew that the missing person was the detainee? Maybe, maybe not; there was no mention of them searching for anyone.

I leaned over the armrest and picked up the receiver from her yellow landline phone, the one I always visualised by Lotte’s red lips when I rang. The tip of her tongue was next to my ear as she was wetting them. I dialled 1881, asked for two numbers and interrupted her when she said an automated voice would give them to me.

‘I would like to hear them from you personally in case the speech is unclear and I have any problems understanding,’ I said.

I was given the two numbers, memorised them and asked her to put me through to the first. The central switchboard at Kripos answered on the second ring.

I introduced myself as Runar Bratli and said I was a relative of Endride and Eskild Monsen and that I had been asked by the family to collect their clothes. But no one had told me where to go or who to see.

‘Just a moment,’ said the switchboard lady, putting me on hold.

I listened to a surprisingly good pan-pipe version of ‘Wonderwall’ and thought about Runar Bratli. He was a candidate I had once decided not to recommend for a top management job even though he had been the best qualified by far. And tall. So tall that during the final interview he had complained that he had to sit doubled up in his Ferrari, an investment he had conceded with a boyish smile that had been a childish caprice; more like a midlife crisis I thought. And I had jotted down: Open, enough self-assurance to expose own foolishness. Everything had been, in other words, textbook stuff. Just not the comment he had followed up with: ‘When I think about how I hit my head on the roof of the car, I almost env-’

He had cut off the sentence there, shifted his gaze away from me and on to one of the customer’s representatives and chatted about exchanging the Ferrari for a SUV, the kind you allow your wife drive. Everyone round the table had laughed. I had, too. And not so much as a twitch revealed that I had completed the sentence for him: ‘… envy you for being so small.’ And that I had just put a line through his name as a contender. Unfortunately, he didn’t possess any interesting art.

‘They’re in the Pathology Unit.’ It was the switchboard again. ‘At Rikshospital in Oslo.’

‘Oh?’ I said, trying not to overdo my naivety. ‘Why’s that?’

‘It’s a routine procedure when there’s a suspicion that a crime may have been committed. It looks like the car was rammed by this truck.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s why they asked me to help them. I live in Oslo, you see.’

The lady didn’t answer. I could visualise her rolling eyes and long, carefully painted nails drumming on the table with impatience. But I might have been wrong, of course. Being a headhunter doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good judge of character or particularly empathetic. To get to the top in this business I think the opposite is true, that it can be a disadvantage.

‘Could you inform the relevant person that I’m on my way to the Pathology Unit now?’ I asked.

I could hear her hesitate. This task apparently didn’t come under her job description. Job descriptions in public service are a mess, as a rule, believe me, I still read them.

‘I don’t have anything to do with this. I’m just trying to help out,’ I said. ‘So I hope to be in and out quickly.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said.

I put down the receiver and dialled the second number. He answered on the fifth ring.

‘Yes?’ His voice sounded impatient, almost irritated.

I tried to work out from the background noise where he was. In my house or in his own apartment.

‘Boo,’ I said and rang off.

Clas Greve was hereby warned.

I didn’t know what he would do, but he was bound to switch on the GPS and check where the ghost was.

I returned to the opened door. In the dark of the bedroom I could just make out the contours of her body under the sheet. I resisted a sudden impulse: to get undressed, slip back into the bed and snuggle up to her. Instead I felt an odd sensation that everything that had happened had not been about Diana, but about me. I closed the bedroom door softly and left. Just as when I had arrived, there was no one on the staircase to greet. Nor when I got out onto the street did I meet anyone who would respond to my friendly nods; no one looked at me or acknowledged my existence in any other way. Now it had dawned on me what the sensation was: I didn’t exist.

It was time to find myself again.

Rikshospital is situated on one of Oslo’s many sloping ridges, raised high above the town. Before it was built there had been a small madhouse here. A name that was changed to an institute for the insane. And then to asylum, and finally to psychiatric hospital. And so on as the general population caught on to the fact that the new phrase just meant quite ordinary mental derangement, too. Personally, I have never understood this word game, although those in charge must believe the general public are a bunch of prejudiced idiots who have to be wrapped in cotton wool. They might be right, but it was nevertheless refreshing to hear the woman behind the glass partition say: ‘Corpses are on the lower ground floor, Bratli.’

Being a corpse is apparently alright. No one highlights the outrage of calling a person who is dead a corpse, or says that, in spite of everything, there is more merit in being a dead person than there is in being dead, or that the word ‘corpse’ reduces people to being a lump of flesh in which the heart happens to beat no longer. And so what? Or perhaps it is all down to the fact that corpses cannot plead minority status; after all, they are in the woeful majority.

‘Down the staircase over there,’ she said, pointing. ‘I’ll ring down and tell them you’re on your way.’

I did as instructed. My footsteps resounded through the bare white walls; otherwise it was very quiet here. At the far end of a long, narrow, white corridor on the floor below, with one foot inside an open door, stood a man dressed in a green hospital uniform. He could have been a surgeon, but something about his exaggeratedly relaxed posture, or perhaps it was his moustache, told me he was lower down the hierarchy.

‘Bratli?’ he shouted, so loud that it seemed like a conscious insult to those sleeping on this floor. The echo rolled menacingly backwards and forwards in the corridor.

‘Yes,’ I said, hurrying towards him so that we wouldn’t have to take any more of this shouting.

He held the door open for me, and I stepped in. It was a kind of locker room. The man walked ahead of me to a locker, which he opened.

‘Kripos rang to say you would be coming to pick up the Monsen boys’ things,’ he said, still with this exaggeratedly powerful voice.

I nodded. My pulse was racing faster than I had liked. But not as fast as I had feared. This was, after all, a critical phase, the weak point in the plan.

‘And so who are you?’

‘Third cousin,’ I said airily. ‘The next of kin asked me to pick up their clothes. Just the clothes, no valuables.’

I had decided on ‘next of kin’ with care. It might indeed sound conspicuously formal, but as I didn’t know whether the Monsen twins had been married or their parents were still alive, I had to choose words which covered all eventualities.

‘Why doesn’t fru Monsen come and collect them herself?’ the man said. ‘She’s coming here at twelve anyway.’

I gulped. ‘I suppose she can’t bear the thought of all that blood.’

He grinned. ‘But you can?’

‘Yes,’ I said simply, hoping with a passion that there would be no more questions.

The man shrugged and passed over a sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘Sign here to confirm receipt.’

I scribbled an R with a wavy line followed by a B with a corresponding squiggle and a final dot over the ‘I’.

The porter scrutinised the signature thoughtfully. ‘Have you got any ID, Bratli?’

The plan was creaking at the joints.

I patted my trouser pockets and put on an apologetic smile. ‘Must have left my wallet in the car down in the car park.’

‘Up in the car park, don’t you mean?’

‘No, down. I parked in the Research Car Park.’

‘All the way down there?’

I could see his hesitation. Naturally, I had thought this scenario through beforehand. In the event that I was sent off to fetch ID, I would just leave without returning. It wouldn’t be a disaster, but I wouldn’t have achieved what I had come for. I waited. And from the two first words knew that the decision had gone against me.

‘Sorry, Bratli, but we have to be on the safe side. Don’t take this the wrong way but murder cases attract a huge number of weird individuals. With extremely weird interests.’

I acted astonished. ‘Do you mean to say that… people collect murder victims’ clothing?’

‘You wouldn’t believe what some get up to,’ he said. ‘For all I know you may never have met the Monsen boys, just read about them in the papers. Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s the way it is.’

‘Fine, I’ll be back in a bit,’ I said, moving towards the door. Where I paused as though I had remembered something and played my last card. To be precise: the credit card.

‘Now I think about it,’ I said, plunging my hand into my back pocket, ‘the last time Endride was at my place, he left his credit card. Perhaps you could give it to his mother when she comes…’

I passed it to the porter, who held it and studied the name and photo of the bearded young man. I bided my time but was already halfway out of the door when I finally heard his voice behind me.

‘That’s good enough for me, Bratli. Here, take the togs.’

Relieved, I turned back. Took out the plastic bag I had stuffed into my trouser pocket and shoved the clothes in.

‘Got everything?’

I fingered the back pockets of Endride’s uniform trousers. Could feel it was still there, the plastic bag with my shorn hair. I nodded.

I had to stop myself from running as I left. I was resurrected, I existed once more, and inside me this created a strange exultation. The wheels were spinning again, my heart was beating, my blood was circulating and my fortunes turning. I hurried up the stairs two at a time, passed the woman behind the glass partition at a more sedate pace and was almost at the door when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

‘Hello there, mister! Hold on a minute.’

Of course. It had been too easy.

I turned slowly. A man, familiar too, came towards me. He was holding up an ID card. Diana’s secret love. And the heretical thought flashed through my mind: I’ve had it.

‘Kripos,’ said the man in a deep pilot’s voice. Atmospheric noise, specks of outage. ‘May I have a few words with you, mis-er?’ Like a typewriter with a worn letter.

It is said that unconsciously we create an image of people we see in films or on TV that is bigger than they are in reality. This was not the case with Brede Sperre. He was even bigger than I had imagined. I forced myself to stand still as he walked towards me. Then he towered over me. From on high, under blond, boyish locks, cut so that his hair would seem wild in a trustworthy way, a pair of steel-grey eyes looked down at me. One of the things I had picked up about Sperre was that he was supposed to be having a relationship with a very well-known and very masculine Norwegian politician. Now rumours of homosexuality are, of course, the final proof that you have become a celebrity, the very hallmark so to speak. It was just that the person who’d told me this – one of the male models used by the designer Baron von Bulldog who had begged his way into Diana’s private view – claimed that he had allowed himself to be sodomised by the ‘police god’, as he reverentially called him.

‘Oh, that’s just talk, that is,’ I had said with a rigid smile, hoping the penetration angst did not show in my eyes.

‘Right, mister. I’ve jus-heard that you’re the third cousin of the Monsen boys and know them well. Perhaps you might be so kind as to help us iden-ify the bodies?’

I swallowed. The polite form of address and the semi-jocular ‘mister’ in the same utterance. But Sperre’s eyes were neutral. Was he playing the status game or did he just do that automatically, almost like a professional reflex action? I heard myself repeating ‘identify’ with a stammer as though the concept were totally unfamiliar to me.

‘Their mother will be here in a few hours,’ Sperre said. ‘But any time we could save… We would app-eciate that. It’ll on-y take a couple of se-onds.’

I didn’t want to. My body bristled and my brain insisted I refuse and get the hell out of there. For I had been reawakened. I – that is the plastic bag of hair I was carrying – was now a person who was active again on Greve’s GPS receiver. It was only a question of time before he would resume the hunt; I could already scent the dog in the air, sense the panic mounting. But another part of my brain, the one with the new voice, said that I should not refuse. That it would arouse suspicion. That it would only take a few seconds.

‘Of course,’ I said and was about to smile, until I realised that would be perceived as an inappropriate reaction to having to identify the corpses of your own relatives.

We went back the same way as I had come.

The porter nodded to me with a grin as we went through the locker room.

‘You should prepare yourself. The deceased are in pretty bad shape,’ Sperre said, opening a heavy metal door. We stepped into the mortuary. I shivered. Everything in the room suggested the inside of a fridge: white walls, roof and floor, a few degrees above zero and meat that was past its sell-by date.

The four bodies lay in a line, each on its own metal table. Feet stuck out from under white sheets, and I could see that film conventions were rooted in reality; they did in fact each have a metal tag attached to a big toe.

‘Ready?’ said Sperre.

I nodded.

He whipped back two sheets with a flourish, like a magician. ‘Traffic accidents,’ the policeman said, rocking on his heels. ‘The worst. Hard to identify, as you can see.’ I had the sudden impression Sperre was speaking abnormally slowly. ‘There should have been five people in the car, but we found only these four bodies. The fifth must have landed in the river and floated away.’

I stared, swallowed and breathed heavily through my nose. I was play-acting, of course. For even naked, the Monsen twins looked better now than they had in the wrecked car. Moreover, it didn’t reek in here. No gaseous faeces, no smells of blood and petrol or the stench of human intestines. It occurred to me that visual impressions are overrated, that sound and smell terrorise the sense mechanisms in a much more effective way. Like the crunching sound a woman’s head makes as it hits the parquet floor, after being shot through the eye.

‘It’s the Monsen twins,’ I whispered.

‘Yes, we’ve managed to work that out, too. The question is…’

Sperre paused for a long – a really long – dramatic pause. My God.

‘Which is Endride and which is Eskild?’

Despite the wintry temperature in the room I was soaked with sweat under my clothes. Was he speaking so slowly on purpose? Was it a new interrogation method, of which I knew nothing?

My gaze hovered over the naked bodies and found the mark I had made. The wound running from the ribs down the stomach was still open and had black scabs along the edges.

‘That’s Endride,’ I stated, pointing. ‘The other’s Eskild.’

‘Hm,’ Sperre purred with satisfaction, making a note. ‘You must’ve known the twins very well. Not even their colleagues, who have been here, could tell them apart.’

I answered with a sorrowful nod. ‘The twins and I were very close. Especially of late. Can I go now?’

‘Sure,’ Sperre said, but continued to make notes in a way that did not invite a dismissal.

I looked at the clock behind his head.

‘Identical twins,’ Sperre said, continuing to write. ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ What the hell was he writing? One was Endride, the other Eskild, how many words did you really need to say that?

I knew I ought not to ask, but I couldn’t resist. ‘What’s ironic?’

Sperre stopped writing and looked up. ‘Born in the same second from the same egg. Dead in the same second in the same car.’

‘No irony in that, is there?’

‘None?’

‘None that I can see.’

‘Mm. You’re right. “Paradox” is probably the word I was looking for.’ Sperre smiled.

I felt my blood beginning to bubble. ‘It’s not a paradox, either.’

‘Well, it is strange anyway. There is a sort of cosmic logic to it, don’t you think?’

I lost control, saw my knuckles go white as I squeezed the bag and heard my quivering voice say: ‘No irony, no parody, no cosmic logic.’ The volume increased. ‘Just an arbitrary symmetry of life and death, which is not even that arbitrary since they, like many other identical twins, chose to spend a lot of their time in the immediate vicinity of each other. Lightning struck and they were together. End of story.’

I had almost shouted the last part.

Sperre looked at me with a thoughtful gaze. He had a finger and thumb placed at opposite corners of his mouth and now he ran them down to his chin. I knew that look. He was one of the few. He had the interrogator look, the eyes that could expose lies.

‘Well, Bratli,’ he said, ‘something bothering you, is there?’

‘Sorry,’ I said with a wan smile and knew I had to say something truthful now, something that did not register on the lie detector staring at me. ‘I had a bit of a dis agreement with my wife last night, and now this accident. I’m a bit off-kilter. My deepest apologies. I’ll remove myself this minute.’

I turned on my heel and left.

Sperre said something, perhaps goodbye, but it was drowned by the metal door slamming behind me and a bass tone booming through the mortuary.

21 INVITATION

I CAUGHT THE tram at the stop outside Rikshospital, paid the conductor in cash and said, ‘To the centre.’ He smirked as he gave me change, presumably the price was the same wherever I went. I had caught the tram before, of course, as a boy, but I didn’t recall the routine so well. Get out through the back door, have your ticket ready to be checked, press the stop button in good time, don’t disturb the driver. A lot had changed. The noise from the rails was less deafening, the advertising more deafening and extrovert. People on the seats more introvert.

In the centre I switched mode of transport, to a bus which took me north-east. Was told I could travel on the tram ticket. Fantastic. For peanuts I could navigate my way through the town in a way I had never known was possible. I was in motion. A flashing dot on Greve’s GPS thingy. I seemed to be able to sense his confusion: What the fuck is going on? Are they moving the body?

I got off the bus at Årvoll and began to climb the hills towards Tonsenhagen. I could have got off closer to Ove’s place, but everything I was doing now had a point. In these residential areas it was a quiet morning. A stoop-shouldered old lady was tottering along the pavement pulling a shopping trolley behind her with screaming, unlubricated wheels. Nevertheless she smiled at me as if it was a wonderful day, a beautiful world, a lovely life. What was Greve thinking now? That there was a hearse driving Brown to his childhood home or something like that, but it suddenly seemed to be going so slowly – was there a traffic jam?

Two gum-chewing, heavily made-up teenage girls with school bags, tight trousers and muffin tops came towards me. They glared briefly, but didn’t stop talking in loud voices about something that obviously annoyed them. As they passed, I caught a ‘I mean… so unfair!’ I guessed that they were skipping school, were on their way down to a cake shop in Årvoll, and that the unfairness was not directed at the fact that eighty per cent of the earth’s population could not afford the cream buns they were about to tuck away. And it struck me that if Diana and I had had the child, she would – I was convinced it would be a girl even though Diana had already called it Damien – have looked at me one day with the same mascara-heavy eyes, shouted that it was unfair, for Chrisssake, she and her girlfriend wanted to go to Ibiza and after all they were old enough and would soon be leaving school! And that I… I could have managed, I think.

The road passed a park with a large pond in the middle, and I took one of the brown paths leading to a group of trees on the other side. Not because it was a short cut, but to get the dot on Greve’s GPS to move off the street map. Bodies can be moved around in cars, but they don’t move through the landscape. It was confirmation of the suspicion that my wake-up call from Lotte’s place this morning would have planted in the Dutch headhunter’s head: that Roger Brown had risen from the dead. That Brown had not been lying in the mortuary at Rikshospital as it had seemed from the GPS, but presumably in a bed in the same building. But they had said on the news that everyone in the car was dead, so how…?

I may not be particularly empathetic, but I am a good judge of intelligence, so good that I am used to hiring leaders for Norway’s biggest companies. So while I plodded around the pond, I again went through Greve’s probable reasoning at this moment. Which was simple. He would have to come after me, have to exterminate me, even if it involved much greater risk than before. For I was no longer just someone who could put a stop to HOTE’s plans for taking over Pathfinder, I was a witness who could put him in the slammer for the murder of Sindre Aa. If I was allowed to live long enough for the case to come to court.

In short, I had sent him an invitation he could not refuse.

I had arrived at the other side of the park, and as I passed the clump of birch trees, I stroked my fingers along the thin, white, peeling bark, pressed them lightly against the hard trunk, bent my fingers and scraped my nails across the surface. Smelt my fingertips, stopped, closed my eyes and breathed in the aroma as memories of childhood, play, laughter, wonder, gleeful horror and discovery flooded back. All the tiny things I thought I had lost but which were there, of course, encapsulated, they didn’t disappear, they were water children. The old Roger Brown had been unable to recapture them, but the new one could. How long would the new one live? Not much longer now. But it didn’t matter, he would live his last hours more intensely than the old one had lived all his thirty-five years.

I was hot when I finally saw Kjikerud’s place. I walked up into the edge of the forest and sat down on a tree stump where I had a good view of the terraced houses and blocks of flats along the road. And established that people in east Oslo do not have the same wide array of views that those living in west Oslo have. We could all see the Post Giro building and the Plaza Hotel. The town didn’t come across as any uglier or more attractive. The only difference was that basically you could see the western side from here. Which made me think of the story about Gustave Eiffel and the famous tower he had built for the World Expo in Paris in 1889; the critics said the finest view in Paris was from the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place in Paris where you couldn’t see it. And I wondered if perhaps that was what it was like being Clas Greve; that the world for him had to seem a slightly less hideous place. Because he couldn’t see himself through other people’s eyes. Mine for example. I saw him. And I hated him. Hated him with such a surprising intensity and passion that it almost frightened me. But it was not a muddied hatred, quite the contrary, it was a pure, decent, almost innocent hatred, in the same way that the crusaders must have hated the blasphemers. And that was why I could sentence Greve to death with the same measured, naive hatred that allows the devout Christian American to send his death-row neighbour to the execution chamber. And in many ways this hatred was a purifying sensation.

It made me understand, for example, that what I had felt for my father was not hatred. Anger? Yes. Contempt? Maybe. Pity? Definitely. And why? Many reasons, to be sure. But I saw now that my fury originated from my feeling, deep down, that I was like him, that I had it in me to be exactly like him: a drunken, penniless wife-beater who thought east was east and could never be west. And now I had become him, definitively and in full measure.

The laughter bubbled up inside me, and I did nothing to stop it. Not until it resounded among the tree trunks, a bird took off from a branch above me and I saw a car coming down the road.

A silver-grey Lexus GS 430.

He had come faster than I had expected.

I got up instantly and walked down to Kjikerud’s house. Standing on the step, about to insert the key into the lock, I looked at my hand. The shaking was imperceptible, but I saw it.

It was instinct, an ur-fear. Clas Greve was the kind of animal who made other animals afraid.

I found the keyhole at first attempt. Turned the key, opened the door and went quickly into the house. Still no smell. Sat up on the bed, shifted backwards until I was sitting with my back against the headboard and to the window. Checked that the duvet covered Ove lying beside me.

Waited. The seconds were ticking. And my heart was, too. Two heartbeats a second.

Greve was cautious, that went without saying. He wanted to make sure I was alone. And even though I was alone, he knew now that I was not as harmless as he had initially thought. Firstly, I must have had something to do with his dog’s death. Secondly, he must have been there, seen her body and known that I was capable of killing.

I didn’t hear the door open. Didn’t hear his footsteps. Only saw him standing in the doorway in front of me. His voice was gentle and the smile genuinely apologetic.

‘Sorry to burst in on you like this, Roger.’

Greve was dressed in black. Black trousers, black shoes, black roll-neck, black gloves. On his head a black woollen hat. The only thing that was not black was the gleaming silver Glock.

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s visiting time.’

22 SILENT FILM

IT IS SAID that a fly’s perception of time, the reason it experiences the palm of a hand zooming towards it as yawningly slow, is due to the fact that the information it receives through its facet eyes contains such a large amount of data that nature has had to equip it with an extra-fast processor so as to be able to deal with everything in real time.

For several seconds there was total silence in the sitting room. How many I don’t know. I was a fly and the hand was on its way. Kjikerud’s Glock pistol was directed at my chest; Greve’s eyes at my shiny pate.

‘Aha,’ he said at length.

This one word contained everything. Everything about how we humans have been able to conquer the earth, rule over the elements, kill creatures that are greater than ourselves in speed and strength. Processor capacity. Greve’s ‘Aha’ came at the end of an avalanche of thoughts, the search for and filtering of hypotheses, relentless deductive powers that together led to an inevitable conclusion: ‘You’ve shaved off your hair, Roger.’

Greve was – as suggested earlier – an intelligent person. Of course he had done more than state the banal fact that my hair had been removed, but also when, how and why it had happened. Because that cleared up all the confusion, answered all the questions. That was why he added, more as a fact than as a question: ‘In the wrecked car.’

I nodded.

He sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed, rocked it back against the wall, without the barrel of the gun deviating an inch from me.

‘And then? Did you plant the hair on one of the bodies?’

I thrust my hand in the jacket pocket.

‘Freeze!’ he screamed, and I saw the finger pressing the trigger. No cocked hammer. Glock 17. A dame.

‘It’s my left hand,’ I said.

‘OK. Slowly does it.’

I took my hand out slowly and slung the bag of hair on the table. Greve nodded gently without taking his eyes off me.

‘So you knew,’ he said. ‘That the transmitters were in your hair. And that she had put them there for me. That was why you killed her, wasn’t it?’

‘Did it feel like a loss, Clas?’ I asked, leaning back. My heart was pounding, yet I felt remarkably mellow in this, my final hour. The flesh’s mortal dread and the spirit’s serenity.

He didn’t answer.

‘Or was she just – what did you call it? – a means to an end? A necessary expense to acquire income?’

‘Why do you want to know, Roger?’

‘Because I want to know if people like you really exist or whether they’re just fiction.’

‘Like me?’

‘People who are unable to love.’

Greve laughed. ‘If you wanted an answer to that you only needed to look in the mirror, Roger.’

‘I loved someone,’ I said.

‘You might have imitated love,’ Clas said. ‘But did you really love? Do you have any proof of that? I see only proof of the opposite, that you denied Diana the one thing she wanted besides you: a child.’

‘I would’ve given her that.’

He laughed again. ‘So you’ve changed your mind? When did that happen? When did you become the contrite husband? When you discovered that she was fucking another man?’

‘I believe in contrition,’ I said quietly. ‘In contrition. And in forgiveness.’

‘And now it’s too late,’ he said. ‘Diana got neither your forgiveness nor your child.’

‘Not yours either.’

‘It was never my intention to give her a child, Roger.’

‘No, but if you’d wanted it, you’d never have been able to do it, would you?’

‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m impotent?’

He spoke quickly. So quickly that only a fly could have perceived the nanosecond of hesitation. I breathed in. ‘I’ve seen you, Clas Greve. I’ve seen you from… a frog’s-eye view.’

‘What the fuck are you on about now, Brown?’

‘I’ve seen your reproductive organs at a closer range than I would’ve chosen of my own accord.’

I watched his mouth slowly drop, and went on.

‘In an outside toilet near Elverum.’

Greve’s mouth seemed poised to formulate something, but nothing emerged.

‘Was that how they made you talk when you were in the cellar in Suriname? By targeting your testicles? Battering them? A knife? They didn’t take the desire, only the reproductive capacity, didn’t they? What was left of your balls was sewn together with rough thread.’

Greve’s mouth was closed now. A straight line in a stony face.

‘That explains the fanatical hunt for what you yourself said was a pretty insignificant drug smuggler in the jungle, Clas. Sixty-five days, wasn’t it? Because it was him, wasn’t it? He was the one who’d slashed your manhood. Taken from you the ability to make replicas of yourself. He’d taken everything from you. Almost. So you took his life. And I can understand that.’

Yes, indeed, this was Inbau, Reid and Buckley’s sub-point in step two: suggest a morally acceptable motive for the crime. But I no longer needed his confession. Instead he got mine. In advance. ‘I understand, Clas, because I’ve decided to kill you for the same reason. You took everything from me. Almost.’

Greve’s mouth made a sound I interpreted as laughter. ‘Who’s sitting with the gun here, Roger?’

‘I’m going to kill you the way I killed your damned dog.’

I saw his jaw muscles tighten as he clenched his teeth, saw the white of his knuckles.

‘You never saw that, did you, now? It ended its days as crow fodder. Transfixed on the prongs of Aa’s tractor.’

‘You make me sick, Roger Brown. You sit there moralising while you yourself are an animal killer and a child murderer.’

‘You’re right. But wrong about what you said to me at the hospital. That our child had Down’s syndrome. Quite the opposite, all the tests showed that it was healthy. I persuaded Diana to have an abortion simply because I didn’t want to share her with anyone. Have you ever heard anything so childish? Pure, unadulterated jealousy towards an unborn baby. I assume I didn’t get enough love when I was growing up. What do you think? Perhaps it was the same for you, Clas? Or were you evil from birth?’

I don’t think Clas took the questions in because he was staring at me with that gawping expression that showed his brain was working at full capacity again. Reconstructing, following the branches on the tree of decisions back down to its trunk, to the truth, to where it had all started. And found it. One single sentence at the hospital. Something he had said himself: ‘… have an abortion because the baby has Down’s syndrome.’

‘So tell me,’ I said when I saw that he had understood, ‘have you loved anyone else apart from your dog?’

He raised the gun. There were only seconds left of the new Roger Brown’s short life. Greve’s ice-blue eyes sparkled and the gentle voice was just a whisper now.

‘I had been thinking of putting a single bullet through your head as a mark of respect for being a prey worthy of a hunter, Roger. But I think I’ll go back to the original plan after all. Shooting you in the stomach. Have I told you about stomach shots? How the bullet bores through your spleen causing the gastric acid to leak out and burn its way through the rest of the intestines? Then I have to wait until you beg me to kill you. And you will, Roger.’

‘Perhaps you ought to cut the chat and shoot, Clas? perhaps you shouldn’t wait as long as you did at the hospital?’

Greve laughed again. ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ve invited the police here, Roger. You’ve killed a woman. You’re a murderer like me. This is between you and me.’

‘Think again, Clas. Why do you reckon I risked going to the Pathology Unit and tricking them into handing over the bag of hair?’

Greve rolled his shoulders. ‘Simple. It’s the DNA evidence. Probably the only thing they had which they could have used against you. They still think the name of the person they’re looking for is Ove Kjikerud. Unless you wanted your beautiful mane back, that is. Make a wig out of it? Diana told me your hair was very important to you. That you used it to compensate for your height?’

‘Correct,’ I said. ‘But incorrect. Sometimes the headhunter forgets that the head he is hunting can think. I don’t know if it thinks better or worse without hair, but in this case it has enticed the hunter into a trap.’

Greve blinked slowly while I observed his body tense up; he sensed mischief.

‘I don’t see a trap, Roger.’

‘It’s here,’ I said, whisking aside the duvet next to me. I saw his eyes fall on the body of Ove Kjikerud. And on the Uzi machine gun that lay on his chest.

He reacted with lightning speed, pointing the pistol at me. ‘Don’t try anything, Brown.’

I moved my hands towards the machine gun.

‘Don’t!’ Greve screamed.

I raised the weapon.

Greve fired. The explosion filled the room.

I pointed my gun at Greve. He had half risen to his feet in the chair and loosened off another round. I pressed the trigger. Pressed it all the way. A hoarse roar of lead tore through the air, Ove’s walls, the chair, Clas Greve’s black trousers, the perfect thigh muscles beneath, tore open his groin and, I hoped, his genitals which had been inside Diana, his well-developed abdominal muscles and the organs they were supposed to protect.

He fell back in the chair and the Glock thudded to the floor. There was an abrupt silence, then the sound of a cartridge rolling over the parquet. I angled my head and peered down at him. He returned the look, his eyes black with shock.

‘Now you won’t pass the medical for Pathfinder, Greve. Sorry about that. You will never steal the technology. However thorough you are. In fact, that bloody thoroughness was your undoing.’

Greve’s groan was barely audible, something Dutch.

‘It was the thoroughness that tempted you here,’ I said. ‘To the final interview. Because do you know what? You’re the man I’ve been seeking for this job. A job for which I not only think but know you are perfect. And that means the job is perfect for you. Believe me, herr Greve.’

Greve didn’t answer, just stared down at himself. The blood had made the black roll-neck even blacker. So I went on.

‘You are hereby appointed as the scapegoat, herr Greve. As the man who killed Ove Kjikerud, the body lying next to me.’ I patted Ove on the stomach.

Greve groaned again and raised his head. ‘What the fuck are you babbling on about?’ His voice sounded desperate and at the same time groggy, sleepy. ‘Ring for an ambulance before you murder someone else, Brown. Think about it, you’re an amateur, you’ll never get away from the police. Ring now, and I’ll save you, too.’

I looked down at Ove. He seemed peaceful where he lay. ‘But it’s not me who will kill you, Greve. It’s Kjikerud here, don’t you understand?’

‘No. Christ, ring for a bloody ambulance now. Can’t you see I’m bleeding to death here!’

‘Sorry, it’s too late.’

‘Too late? Are you going to let me die?’

Something different had crept into his voice. Could it have been tears?

‘Please, Brown. Not here, not like this! I implore you, I beg you.’

It was tears indeed. They streamed down his cheeks. Not that strange perhaps, if what he had said about being shot in the stomach was correct. I could see blood dripping from the inside of his trouser legs onto the polished Prada shoes. He had begged. Had not been able to maintain dignity in death. I have heard it said that no one can, that those who appear to manage it are just emotionless from shock. The most humiliating part for Greve was of course that there were so many witnesses to his breakdown. And there would be more.

Fifteen seconds after I had let myself into Kjikerud’s house and entered the sitting room without tapping in ‘Natasha’ on the alarm, the CCTV cameras would have begun to record as the alarm went off at Tripolis. I formed a mental image of how they would have flocked around the monitor, how they would have stared at the silent film in disbelief, with Greve as the only visible actor, seen him open his mouth but would have been unable to hear what he said. They would have seen him shoot and take a hit, and cursed Ove for not having had a camera that showed the person in bed.

I looked at my watch. Four minutes had passed since the alarm had gone off, and, I presumed, three minutes since they had phoned the police. They, in turn, had rung Delta, the armed unit that was used on stake-outs. And whom it took some time to assemble. Tonsenhagen was also quite some distance from the centre. Assumptions of course, but the first police cars would hardly be here in less than, at best, a quarter of an hour. On the other hand, there was no reason to let this drag on. Greve had fired two of the seventeen shots in the magazine.

‘Alright, Clas,’ I said, opening the window behind the headboard. ‘You can have a last chance. Pick up your gun. If you can shoot me, I suppose you can ring for an ambulance yourself.’

He stared at me with empty eyes. An icy cold wind swept into the room. Winter had arrived, no question.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What have you got to lose?’

The logic of this seemed to penetrate his shock-addled brain. And with a swift movement, much swifter than I had believed possible with the injuries he had, he threw himself sideways to the floor and grabbed the gun. The bullets from the machine gun, plumbum, the soft, heavy, toxic metal, gouged up splinters from the parquet floor between his legs. But before the spray of bullets reached him again, before it swept across his chest, pierced his heart and punctured both lungs, causing him to wheeze his last, he managed to fire one shot. A single shot. The sound quivered between the walls. Then it was quiet again. Deathly quiet. Only the wind sang its low song. The silent film had become a freeze-frame, frozen in the cold temperature that seeped into the room.

It was over.