Knife

40

Dagny Jensen looked out at the schoolyard, at the rectangle of sunlight that had started over by the caretaker’s house that morning, but that now — towards the end of the school day — had moved to right below the staffroom. A wagtail was hopping across the road. The large oak tree was in bud. What was it that had suddenly made her notice buds everywhere? She looked across the classroom, where the students were hunched over their English coursework and the only sound breaking the silence was the rhythmic scratch of pencils and pens. It was actually their homework, but Dagny’s stomach had been hurting so badly that she hadn’t felt up to doing what she had been looking forward to, a study of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. About Charlotte, who had worked as a teacher and had preferred an independent life to entering into a socially acceptable marriage with a man whose intellect she didn’t respect, an almost unheard-of idea in Victorian England. About the orphaned Jane Eyre, who falls in love with the master of the house where she works as a governess, the apparently brusque and misanthropic Mr. Rochester. About how they declared their love for each other but that she — when they were about to get married — discovered that he was still bound to his wife. Jane leaves and meets another man who falls in love with her, but to Jane he is no more than a mediocre surrogate for Mr. Rochester. And the tragic, happy ending where Mrs. Rochester is killed so that Jane and Mr. Rochester can finally be together again. The famous exchange where Mr. Rochester, defaced by the fire that destroyed the house, asks: “Am I hideous, Jane?” And she replies: “Very, sir; you always were, you know.”

And right at the end, the tear-jerking chapter in which Jane gives birth to their child.

Dagny felt sweat break out on her forehead when another jolt of pain cut through her stomach. The pains had been coming and going over the past couple of days, and the indigestion pills she had been taking hadn’t helped. She had made an appointment to see her doctor, but that wasn’t until next week, and the thought of having to spend a week in this much pain was anything but appealing.

“I’m just popping out for a couple of minutes,” she said, and stood up.

A few faces looked up and nodded, then concentrated on their schoolwork again. They were good, industrious students. A couple of them were genuinely talented. And sometimes Dagny couldn’t help herself dreaming about one day, after she had retired from teaching, when one of them — one of them would be enough — called to thank her. Thank her for showing them a world that was about more than vocabulary, grammar and the most basic nutrients of the linguistic world. Someone who had found and been inspired by something during her English lessons. Something that put them on the track to creating something themselves.

When Dagny came out into the corridor outside the classroom a policeman got up from his chair and followed her. His name was Ralf, and he had taken over guard duty from Kari Beal.

“Toilet,” Dagny said.

Katrine Bratt had assured Dagny that she would have a bodyguard with her for as long as they thought Svein Finne was a threat to her. Katrine and Dagny hadn’t spoken about the reality: that it wasn’t a question of how long Finne was free, or alive, but how long Bratt’s budget or Dagny’s patience could last.

The school corridors had a peculiar silence when lessons were taking place, as if they were resting between the bursts of frantic activity that occurred whenever there was a break. Like the periodical cicadas that swarm around Lake Michigan precisely every seventeen years. She had been invited to the next swarm by an uncle over there who said you just had to experience it, both the intense music of billions of insects, and the taste. The cicadas were apparently related to prawns and other shellfish, and he had told her during a meal of prawns on his visit to Norway that they could be eaten the same way: hold the hard shell tightly, remove the feet and head, and pull out the soft, protein-rich parts. It didn’t sound particularly appetising, though, and she never took invitations from Americans seriously, especially when they were — if she had calculated correctly — for 2024.

“I’ll wait here,” the policeman said, stopping outside the girls’ bathroom.

She walked in. Empty. She went into the last of the eight cubicles.

She pulled down her trousers and underwear, sat down on the toilet, leaned forward, then pushed the door to lock it. She discovered that it wouldn’t close properly. She looked up.

There was a hand sticking between the door and the frame, four large fingers, one of them with a ring in the shape of a snake. And in the palm of the hand she could see one edge of a hole that went right through.

Dagny just managed to take a deep breath before the door was thrown open and Finne’s hand shot forward, grabbing her by the throat. He held the snake-like knife up in front of her face, and his voice whispered right next to her ear:

“So, Dagny? Morning sickness? Stomach ache? Weak bladder? Tender breasts?”

Dagny closed her eyes.

“We can soon find out,” Finne said, then slipped down onto his knees in front of her and, putting the knife into a sheath inside his jacket without taking his hand from her throat, pulled something that looked like a pen from his pocket and stuck it between her thighs. Dagny waited for it to touch her, penetrate her, but it didn’t happen.

“Be a good girl and pee for Daddy, will you?”

Dagny swallowed.

“What’s wrong? That is what you came in here for, isn’t it?”

Dagny wanted to do as he said, but it was as if all her bodily functions had frozen, she didn’t even know if she’d be able to scream if he loosened his grip.

“If you don’t pee before I count to three, I’ll stick the knife in you, then into the idiot standing out in the corridor.” His whispered voice made every word, every syllable, sound like an obscenity. She tried. She really did try.

“One,” Finne whispered. “Two. Three... There, that’s right! Clever girl...”

She heard the trickle hit the porcelain, then the water.

Finne pulled the hand holding the pen towards him and put it on the floor. He wiped his hand on the toilet roll hanging from the wall.

“In two minutes we’ll know if we’re pregnant,” he said. “Isn’t that wonderful, darling? Pens like this, they didn’t exist, we couldn’t even dream of things like this the last time I was free. And just imagine all the wonderful things the future is going to bring. Is it any wonder that we want to bring a child into this world?”

Dagny closed her eyes. Two minutes. Then what?

She heard voices outside. A short conversation before the door opened, running steps, a girl whose teacher had allowed her to go to the toilet went into the cubicle closest to the corridor, finished, washed her hands and ran out again.

Finne let out a deep sigh as he stared at the pen. “I’m looking for a plus on here, Dagny, but I’m afraid it shows a minus. Which means...”

He stood up in front of her, started to undo his trousers with his free hand. Dagny jerked her head back and pulled free of his other hand.

“I’ve got my period,” she said.

Finne looked down at her. His face was in shadow. And casting a shadow. His whole being cast a shadow, like a bird of prey circling in front of the sun. He pulled the knife from its sheath again. She heard the door creak, then the policeman’s voice:

“Everything OK, Dagny?”

Finne pointed at her with the knife as if it were a magic wand that forced her to do whatever he wanted.

“Just coming,” she said, without taking her eyes off Finne’s.

She stood up, pulled up her pants and trousers, standing so close to him that she breathed in the smell of sweat and something else, something rank and nauseating. Sickness. Pain.

“I’ll be back,” he said, holding the door open for her.

Dagny didn’t run, but walked quickly past the other cubicles, past the washbasins, out into the corridor. She let the door close behind her. “He’s in there.”

“What?”

“Svein Finne. He’s got a knife.”

The policeman stared at her for a moment before he unfastened the holster on his hip and drew his pistol. He inserted an earpiece with his free hand, then pulled off the radio that was attached to his chest.

“Zero-one,” he said. “I need backup.”

“He’s escaping,” Dagny said. “You have to get him.”

The policeman looked at her. Opened his mouth as if to explain that his prime objective was to protect her, not take offensive action.

“Otherwise he’ll come back,” Dagny said.

Maybe it was something about her voice, or the expression on her face, but he closed his mouth. He took a step towards the door, put his head next to it and listened for a few seconds, with both hands round the pistol, which was pointing at the floor. Then he shoved the door open. “Police! Hands above your head!” He disappeared into the bathroom.

Dagny waited.

She heard the cubicle doors being thrown open.

All eight of them.

The policeman came back out.

Dagny took a trembling breath. “The bird has flown?”

“God knows how,” the policeman said, reaching for his radio again. “He must have climbed up the bare wall and out through the window right up by the ceiling.”

“Flown,” Dagny repeated quietly while the policeman called 01, central command, again.

“What?”

“Not climbed. Flown.”

41

“Twenty metres, you said?” asked Kripos detective Sung-min Larsen.

He gazed up towards the top of Norafossen, where the torrent of water was gushing out. He wiped his face, which was wet from the spray the westerly wind carried all the way to the bank of the river. The roar of the falls drowned out the traffic on the main road that ran along the top of the slope they had scrambled down to reach the river.

“Twenty metres,” the police officer confirmed. He had a bulldog face, and had introduced himself as Jan from Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. “It only takes a couple of seconds, but by the time you hit the ground you’re already going at seventy kilometres an hour. You don’t stand a chance.” He pointed one of his short, slightly protruding arms at the compressed wreckage of a white Ford Escort that was perched on top of a large, black rock that the water had worn smooth as it struck it and sprayed out in all directions. Like an art installation, Sung-min Larsen thought. An imitation of Lord, Marquez and Michels’s ten half-buried Cadillacs in the desert at Amarillo in Texas, where he had driven with his father when he was fourteen. His father was a pilot, and had wanted to show his son the wonderful country where he had learned to fly the Starfighter, a plane that his father claimed was more of a danger to its pilot than the enemy, a joke that his father had repeated many times on that trip, between coughing fits. Lung cancer.

“There’s no question at all,” Jan from Sigdal said, pushing his police cap farther back on his head. “The driver shot out through the windshield, hit the rocks and died instantly. The body’s been carried downstream in the river. The water’s so high right now that it probably won’t have stopped until it reached Solevatn. And that’s still frozen, so we won’t see any sign of him for a while.”

“What did the truck driver say?” Sung-min Larsen asked.

“He said the Escort veered across into his lane, the driver must have been looking for something in the glove compartment, something like that, then suddenly realised what was about to happen and lurched back onto the right side of the road in the nick of time. The driver said it all happened so fast that he didn’t really have time to see what happened, but when he looked in the mirror the car was gone. But, seeing as the road was straight, he should have been able to see it. So he stopped and called us. There’s rubber on the road, white paint on the crash barrier and a hole in the ice where the Escort went through.”

“What do you think?” Larsen asked. There was another gust of wind and he automatically put his hand over his tie, even if it was held in place with a tie clip with the Pan-Am logo on it. “Dangerous driving or attempted suicide?”

“Attempted? He’s dead, I tell you.”

“Do you think he intended to drive into the truck and lost his nerve at the last moment?”

The policeman stamped the mixture of mud and snow from his knee-length boots. Looked down at Sung-min Larsen’s smartly polished Loake shoes. Shook his head. “They don’t usually.”

“They?”

“People who come here to the green mile. They’ve made their minds up. They’re...” He took a deep breath. “Motivated.”

Larsen heard a branch snap behind them and turned round to see the head of the Crime Squad Unit, Katrine Bratt, making her way down the slope in stages, bracing herself against the trees. When she reached them she wiped her hands on her black jeans. Sung-min studied her face as she held her freshly dried hand out to the local police officer and introduced herself.

Pale. Newly applied make-up. Did that mean she’d been crying on the way from Oslo and had put more on before she got out of the car? Obviously, she knew Harry Hole well.

“Have you found the body?” she asked, and nodded when Jan from Sigdal shook his head. Sung-min guessed her next question would be if there was any chance Hole might be alive.

“So we don’t actually know that he’s dead?”

Jan let out a deep sigh and adopted his tragic expression again. “When a car falls twenty metres, it reaches a speed of seventy kilometres an—”

“They’re sure he’s dead,” Sung-min said.

“And presumably you’re here because you think there’s a connection to the murder of Rakel Fauke,” Bratt said without looking at Sung-min, focusing instead on the grotesque sculpture of the wrecked car.

Aren’t you? Sung-min was about to ask, but realised that it probably wasn’t that strange for a head of department to visit the location where one of her colleagues had died. Maybe. Almost two hours’ driving, fresh make-up. Maybe it was more than just a professional relationship?

“Shall we go back up to my car?” he asked. “I’ve got some coffee.”

Katrine nodded, and Sung-min cast a quick glance at Jan as if to let him know that no, he wasn’t invited as well.

Sung-min and Katrine got in the front seats of his BMW Gran Coupé. Even if he got a decent petrol allowance, he was still taking a loss by driving his own car instead of one of Kripos’s, but as his father used to say: life’s too short not to drive a good car.

“Hello,” Bratt said, reaching her hand back between the seats to pat the dog lying on the back seat with its head on its front paws, looking up at them sadly.

“Kasparov’s a retired police dog,” Sung-min said as he poured coffee from a flask into two paper cups. “But he outlived his owner so I’ve taken him in.”

“You like dogs?”

“Not especially, but he didn’t have anyone else.” Sung-min handed her one of the cups. “To get to the point. I was at the point of arresting Harry Hole.”

Katrine Bratt spilled some of the coffee as she was about to take her first sip. And Sung-min knew it wasn’t because the coffee was too hot.

“Arrest him?” she said, accepting the handkerchief he offered her. “Based on what?”

“We got a phone call. From a guy called Freund. Sigurd Freund, in fact. A specialist in 3-D analysis of film and photographs. We’ve used him before, as have you. He wanted to check the formalities regarding a job he’d done for Detective Inspector Harry Hole.”

“Why did he call you? Hole works for us.”

“Maybe that’s why. Freund said Hole had asked him to send the invoice to his private address, which is obviously highly irregular. Freund just wanted to make sure it was all above board. He had also found out rather late that Harry Hole is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five tall, the same as the man in the footage in question. Then Freund checked with Police Headquarters to see if Hole drives a Ford Escort, the same as in the recording. He sent us the files. They were taken using a so-called wildlife camera outside Rakel Fauke’s house. The time matches the presumed time of the murder. The camera has been removed, presumably by the only person who knew it was there.”

“The only person?”

“When people install cameras like that in built-up areas, they’re usually used to spy on people. Their partner, for instance. So we sent Hole’s photograph to the people who sell wildlife cameras in Oslo, and Harry Hole was recognised by an elderly man who used to own Simensen Hunting and Fishing.”

“Why would Har... Hole request analysis of the footage if he knew it would incriminate himself?”

“Why would he request analysis without anyone in the police knowing about it?”

“Hole is suspended. If he was going to investigate the murder of his wife, it would have to be in secret.”

“In which case the brilliant Harry Hole has just achieved his greatest triumph by uncovering the brilliant Harry Hole.”

Katrine Bratt didn’t answer. She hid her mouth behind the paper cup, turning it in her hand as she stared out through the windshield at the dwindling daylight.

“I actually think it was the other way around,” Sung-min said. “He wanted to check with an expert if it was technically possible to see that it was him being filmed on his way in and out of Rakel Fauke’s home right in the middle of the presumed time of the murder. If Sigurd Freund hadn’t been able to tell that it was Hole, Hole could have safely handed the footage over to us, because it proves that someone was in Rakel Fauke’s house at the time when Hole apparently had an alibi. His alibi would have been strengthened because the images confirm the medical officer’s conclusion that Rakel Fauke was murdered sometime between ten o’clock and two o’clock, more precisely after 23:21, which is when the person caught on film arrives.”

“But he does have an alibi!”

Sung-min was about to state the obvious, that the alibi was reliant on a single witness, and that experience shows that witness statements couldn’t always be relied upon. Not because witnesses are unreliable by nature, but because our memories play tricks and our senses are less reliable than we think. But he had heard the despair in her voice, seen the naked pain in her eyes.

“One of our detectives has gone to see Gule, Hole’s neighbour,” he said. “They’re reconstructing the circumstances in which he gave Hole his alibi.”

“Bjørn says Harry was dead drunk when he left him in his flat, that Harry couldn’t possibly have...”

“Appeared to be dead drunk,” Sung-min said. “I’m assuming an alcoholic is more than capable of acting intoxicated. But it’s possible he overplayed it.”

“Oh?”

“According to Peter Ringdal, the owner of—”

“I know who he is.”

“Ringdal says he’s seen Hole drunk before, but never in such a state that he had to be dragged out. Hole can handle his drink better than most, and Ringdal says he hadn’t drunk that much more than he had seen him drink before. It may be that Hole wanted to look more incapacitated than he was.”

“I haven’t heard any of this before.”

“Because it was assumed that Hole had an alibi, no one looked into it particularly thoroughly. But I paid a visit to Peter Ringdal this morning, after I’d spoken to Freund. It turns out that he’d just had a visit from Harry Hole, and from what Ringdal says, I get the impression Hole realised that the net was starting to close in around him, and was searching desperately for a scapegoat. But once he realised that Ringdal was no use, he’d run out of options, and...” Sung-min gestured towards the road in front of them, leaving Bratt to finish the sentence for herself if she wanted to.

Katrine Bratt raised her chin, the way men of a certain age do to pull the skin of their necks from shirt collars that are too tight, but here it made Sung-min think of an athlete trying to motivate herself mentally, shake off a lost point before launching into battle for the next. “What other lines of inquiry are Kripos looking into?”

Sung-min looked at her. Had he expressed himself imprecisely? Didn’t she realise that this wasn’t a line of inquiry, but a well-lit four-lane highway where even Ole Winter couldn’t get lost, where they — apart from the fact that they weren’t in possession of the culprit’s earthly remains — had already reached their goal?

“There aren’t any other lines of inquiry now,” he said.

Katrine Bratt nodded and nodded as she alternated between closing her eyes and staring ahead of her, as if this simple fact was something that took a lot of brain power to process.

“But if Harry Hole is dead,” she said, “there isn’t really any rush to go public with the fact that he’s Kripos’s prime suspect.”

Sung-min began to nod too. Not because he was promising anything, but because he realised why she was asking.

“The local police have issued a press statement saying something along the lines of ‘man missing after a car ended up in the river next to Highway 287,’ ” Sung-min said, pretending he didn’t know it was an exact quote, because experience had taught him that it made people nervous and less communicative if you let them see too much of your good memory, your ability to read people, your deductive brain. “I can’t see any pressing reason for Kripos to issue any more information to the public, but of course that’s a decision for my bosses.”

“Winter, you mean?”

Sung-min looked at Bratt, wondering why she had felt it necessary to mention his boss by name. Her face revealed no ulterior motive, and there was no reason to suspect she knew how uncomfortable it made Sung-min every time he was reminded of the fact that Ole Winter was still his superior. Sung-min had never told a soul that he considered Ole Winter a mediocre detective and a distinctly weak leader. Not weak in the sense that he was too soft, quite the reverse, he was old-fashioned, authoritarian and stubborn. Winter lacked the confidence to admit when he was wrong, and to accept that he ought to delegate more of the management to younger colleagues with younger ideas. And, truth be told, sharper detectives. But Sung-min had kept all of this to himself because he assumed he was alone in these opinions within Kripos.

“I’ll talk to Winter,” Katrine Bratt said. “And Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. They won’t want to go public with the name of the missing man until his family have been informed, and if I undertake to inform them, that puts me in control of when the local police can identify Harry Hole.”

“Good thinking,” Sung-min said. “But sooner or later his name’s going to get out, and neither you nor I can stop the public and media speculating when they find out that the dead man—”

“Missing man.”

“...is the husband of the woman who was murdered recently.”

He saw a shiver run through Bratt. Was she going to start crying again? No. But when she was alone in her own car, almost certainly.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she said, feeling for the door handle. “Let’s keep in touch.”

At Solevatn, Katrine Bratt pulled off the road into an empty lay-by. She parked and looked out across the large, ice-covered lake as she concentrated on her breathing. When she had got her pulse down she took out her phone and saw that she had received a text from Kari Beal, Dagny Jensen’s bodyguard, but that could wait. She called Oleg. Told him about the car, the river, the accident.

There was silence at the other end. A long silence. And when Oleg spoke again, his voice sounded surprisingly calm, as if it wasn’t as much of a shock to him as Katrine had anticipated.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Oleg said. “He’s committed suicide.”

Katrine was about to reply that she didn’t know, then realised that it wasn’t a question.

“It might take a while to find him,” she said. “There’s still ice on the lake.”

“I’ll come down,” Oleg said. “I’ve got a diving certificate. I used to be afraid of water, but...”

Another silence, and for a moment she thought the line had been broken. Then she heard a deep, shaky breath, and when he went on, it was in a voice that was fighting back tears.

“...he taught me how to swim.”

She waited. And when he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I’ll contact Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and ask if I can join the diving team. And I’ll talk to Sis.”

Katrine told him to get in touch if there was anything she could do, gave him her direct office number, then hung up. There. It was done. No reason to fight it anymore, she was alone in her own car.

She leaned her head back and burst into tears.

42

It was half past four. The last client. Erland Madsen had recently had a discussion with a psychiatrist about the conceptual boundary between a client and a patient. Was it dependent upon the professional’s own title, whether they were a psychologist or a psychiatrist? Or did the distinction run between medicated patients and non-medicated clients? As a psychologist, it sometimes felt like a disadvantage not to be able to prescribe medication when he knew exactly what his client needed but still had to refer them to a psychiatrist who knew less about post-traumatic stress disorder than he did, for instance.

Madsen clasped his hands together. He usually did that when he and the client were done with the pleasantries and were about to start what they were there for. He did it without thinking, but when he became aware of the ritual, he had done a bit of research and found a religious historian who claimed it dated back to the time when a prisoner’s hands were tied with rope, so that clasped hands came to be seen as a symbol of submission. In the Roman Empire, a defeated soldier could surrender and plead for mercy by showing his clasped hands. Christians’ prayers for mercy from an omnipotent God were presumably another aspect of the same thing. So when Erland Madsen clasped his hands together, did that mean he was subordinating himself to his client? Hardly. It was more likely that the psychologist, on behalf of his client as well as himself, was subordinating himself to the questionable authority and shifting dogma of psychology, the way priests, the weathervanes of theology, asked their congregations to cast off the eternal truths of the past in favour of those of today. But while priests clasped their hands together and said “Let us pray,” Madsen’s opening line was: “Let’s start where we left off last time.”

He waited until Roar Bohr nodded before he went on.

“Let’s talk about when you killed someone. You said you were...” — Madsen checked his notes — “a freak. Why is that?”

Bohr cleared his throat, and Madsen noted that he too had clasped his hands together. Unconscious mirroring, that was fairly common. “I realised fairly early that I was a freak,” Bohr said. “Because I wanted to kill someone so badly...”

Erland Madsen tried to keep his face neutral, and not show that he was keen to hear the rest, just that he was open, receptive, safe, non-judgemental. Not curious, not eager to hear anything sensational, not keen to hear an entertaining story. But Madsen couldn’t help but admit that he had been looking forward to this appointment, this session, this conversation. But who was to say that there couldn’t be a confluence between a key experience for the client and an entertaining story for the therapist? Yes, after thinking it through, Madsen had concluded that whatever was good for the client ought automatically to trigger curiosity in any serious psychologist who had his client’s best interests at heart. The fact that Madsen was curious depended upon the fact that these questions were important for his client, because of course he was a conscientious psychologist. And now that he had figured out which order cause and effect came in, he not only knitted his fingers, but pressed his palms together.

“I wanted to kill someone so badly,” Roar Bohr repeated. “But I couldn’t. That’s why I was a freak.”

He stopped. Madsen had to count in his head to stop himself intervening too quickly. Four, five, six.

“You couldn’t?”

“No. I thought I could, but I was wrong. In the Army there are psychologists whose job is to teach soldiers to kill. But specialist units like Special Forces don’t use them. Experience indicates that the people who apply to units like that are already so supremely motivated to kill that it would be a waste of time and money to employ psychologists. And I felt motivated. Nothing I thought or felt when we trained to kill suggested I would ever encounter any resistance. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

“When did you discover that you were unable to kill another person?”

Bohr took a deep breath. “In Basra, in Iraq, during a raid with an American specialist unit. We’d used the snake tactic, had blown our way into the building where the lookouts said the shots had come from. Inside was a young girl of fourteen or fifteen. She was wearing a blue dress, her face was grey from the dust of the blast, and she was holding a Kalashnikov that was as big as she was. It was aimed at me. I tried to shoot her, but froze. I ordered my finger to pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t do it. It was as if the problem wasn’t in my head, but in my muscles. The girl started firing, but luckily she was still blinded by the dust, and the bullets hit the wall behind me. I remember feeling fragments of brick hit my back. And still I just stood there. One of the Americans shot her. Her little body fell backwards onto a sofa covered with colourful blankets, and a small table with a couple of photographs on it, they looked like her grandparents.”

He paused.

“What did that make you feel?”

“Nothing,” Bohr said. “I felt nothing for the next few years. Apart from abject panic at the thought of finding myself in the same situation and messing up again. Like I said, there was nothing wrong with my motivation. There was just something inside my head that wouldn’t work. Or was working too well. So I focused on leadership instead of active duty, I thought I was better suited to that. And I was.”

“But you didn’t feel anything?”

“No. Apart from those panic attacks. And seeing as they were the alternative to not feeling anything, it felt fine not to feel anything.”

“ ‘Comfortably Numb.’ ”

“What?”

“Sorry. Go on.”

“When I was first made aware that I was showing signs of PTSD — insomnia, irritability, rapid heart rate, lots of little things — it didn’t really bother me much. Everyone in Special Forces knew about PTSD, obviously, but even if the official version is that we take it very seriously, it wasn’t something we ever spoke about much. No one said out loud that PTSD was for weaklings, but Special Forces troops are pretty self-aware, we know perfectly well that we have higher NPY levels and all that.”

Madsen nodded. There was research that suggested the way soldiers were recruited to specialist units like Special Forces filtered out those with average or low levels of neuropeptide Y, or NPY, a neurotransmitter that lowers stress levels. Some Special Forces troops believed that this genetic disposition, together with their training and strong camaraderie, made them immune to PTSD.

“It was OK to admit you’d had a few nightmares,” Bohr said. “That proved you weren’t a complete psychopath. But apart from that I think we regarded PTSD a bit like our parents regarded smoking: as long as almost everyone had a go, it couldn’t be that dangerous. But then it got worse...”

“Yes,” Madsen said, leafing back through his notes. “We talked about that. But you also said that it got better at one point.”

“Yes. It got better when I finally managed to kill someone.”

Erland Madsen looked up. He took his glasses off, without it being a particularly dramatic gesture.

“Who did you kill?” Madsen could have bitten his tongue. What sort of question was that for a professional therapist? And did he really want to know the answer?

“A rapist. It doesn’t really make much difference who he was, but he raped and killed a woman named Hala. She was my interpreter in Afghanistan.”

A pause.

“Why do you say ‘rapist’?”

“What?”

“You say he killed your interpreter. Isn’t that worse than rape? Wouldn’t it be more natural to say that you’d killed a murderer?”

Bohr looked at Madsen as if the psychologist had said something he’d never thought of himself. He moistened his lips as if he was about to say something. Then he did it again.

“I’m searching,” he said. “I’m searching for the man who raped Bianca.”

“Your younger sister?”

“He needs to make amends for what he did. We all need to make amends for what we’ve done.”

“Do you need to make amends for what you’ve done?”

“I need to make amends for the fact that I didn’t manage to protect her. The way she protected me.”

“How did your sister protect you?”

“By holding on to her secret.” Bohr took a deep, shaky breath. “Bianca was ill when she finally told me that she’d been raped when she was seventeen years old, but I knew it was true, it all fitted. She told me because she was convinced she was pregnant, even though it was several years later. She said she could feel it, it was growing very slowly, that it was like a swelling, a stone, and that it would kill her in order to get out. We were at the cabin, and I said I would help her to get rid of it, but she said that then he — the rapist — would come and kill her, like he’d promised. So I gave her a sleeping pill, and the next morning I told her it was an abortion pill, that she was no longer pregnant. She became hysterical. Later, when she was in hospital again and I went to visit her, the psychiatrist showed me a sheet of paper where she’d drawn an eagle calling my name, and told me she’d said something about an abortion and that she and I had killed me. I chose to keep our secret. I don’t know if it made any difference. Either way, Bianca would rather die herself than let me, her big brother, die.”

“And you were unable to prevent that. So you had to make amends?”

“Yes. And I could only do that by avenging her. By stopping men who rape. That was why I joined the Army, why I applied to Special Forces. I wanted to be prepared. And then Hala was raped as well...”

“And you killed the man who did the same thing to Hala that had been done to your sister?”

“Yes.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Like I said. Better. Killing someone made me feel better. I’m no longer a freak.”

Madsen looked down at the blank page in his notebook. He had stopped writing. He cleared his throat.

“So... have you made amends now?”

“No.”

“No?”

“I haven’t found the man who took Bianca. And there are others.”

“Other rapists who have to be stopped, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“And you’d like to stop them?”

“Yes.”

“Kill them?”

“Looks like it. It makes me feel better.”

Erland Madsen hesitated. Here was a situation that needed to be dealt with, from both a therapeutic and a judicial perspective.

“These killings, are they something you mostly just like to think about, or are they something you’re actively planning to carry out?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Would you like someone to stop you?”

“No.”

“What would you like, then?”

“I’d like you to tell me if you think it will help next time as well.”

“Killing someone?”

“Yes.”

Madsen looked at Roar Bohr. But all his experience told him that you could never find answers in faces, expressions, body language, too much of that is learned behaviour. It was in people’s words that you found the answers. And now he had been asked a question that he couldn’t answer. Not openly. Not honestly. Madsen looked at his watch.

“Time’s up,” he said. “Let’s continue with this on Thursday.”

“I’m going now,” a woman’s voice said from the doorway.

Erland Madsen looked up from the folder he had found in his clients’ archive that was now lying on his desk. It was Torill, the receptionist shared by the six psychologists in the practice. She had her coat on, and was looking at Erland with an expression he knew meant there was something he needed to remember, but that she was too tactful to broach directly.

Erland Madsen looked at the time. Six o’clock. He remembered what it was. He was supposed to be putting the children to bed that evening; his wife was helping her mother clear out her loft.

But first he needed to figure this out.

Two clients. There were several points of contact. They had both worked in Kabul, partly overlapping there. Both had been referred to him because they had shown signs of PTSD. And now he had found it in the notes: they had both had a close relationship with someone called Hala. Obviously it could be a common woman’s name in Afghanistan, but the chance that there could be more than one Hala working as an interpreter for Norwegian forces in Kabul struck him as unlikely.

With Bohr it had been the usual thing when it came to his relationships with women who were either his subordinates or younger than him: he felt responsible for them, in the same way he had for his younger sister, a responsibility that bordered on the obsessive, a form of paranoia.

The other client had had an even closer relationship to Hala. They had been lovers.

Erland Madsen had taken detailed notes, and read that they had both got the same tattoo. Not their names, because that would have been dangerous if it had been discovered by the Taliban or anyone else with a strict faith. Instead they’d had the word “friend” tattooed on their bodies, something that would bind them together for the rest of their lives.

But none of this was the most important point of connection.

Madsen ran his finger down the page and found what he was looking for, just as he thought he’d remembered it: both Bohr and the other client had said that they had felt better after killing someone. At the bottom of the page he had made a note for future reference: NB! Dig deeper into this next time. What does “better after killing someone” mean?

Erland Madsen looked at his watch. He would have to take the notes home and read the rest after the children were asleep. He closed the folder and put a red rubber band around it. The band ended up running across the name written on the folder.

Kaja Solness.

43

Three months earlier

Erland Madsen snuck a glance at his watch. The hour was almost over. That was a shame, because even if it was only their second therapy session, there was no doubt that the client, Kaja Solness, was an interesting case. She was responsible for security in the Red Cross, a post that shouldn’t necessarily have exposed her to the traumas that triggered PTSD in soldiers. All the same, she had told him how she had experienced acts of war and the daily horrors that only soldiers on active duty usually experience, and that sooner or later end up damaging their psyche. It was interesting — but not unusual — that she didn’t seem to recognise that she had not only ended up in these dangerous situations, but that she herself had more or less consciously sought them out. It was also interesting that she hadn’t shown any symptoms of PTSD during her debriefing in Tallinn, but had taken the initiative to seek therapy herself. Most soldiers who came were referrals, they were more or less forced to have counselling. And most of them didn’t want to talk, some of them came straight out and said they thought therapy was for sissies, and became irritable when they realised Madsen couldn’t prescribe the sleeping pills they had come for. “I just want to sleep!” they said, unaware of how ill they actually were until the day they sat with their mouth over the end of the rifle and tears streaming down their cheeks. Those who refused to have therapy got their pills, of course, their antidepressants and sleeping tablets. But Madsen’s experience told him that what he was engaged in, trauma-based cognitive therapy, helped. It wasn’t the acute crisis therapy that had been so popular until research showed that it didn’t work at all, but long-term treatment in which the client worked through the trauma and gradually learned to tackle and live with their physical responses. Because believing that there was a quick fix, that you could heal those wounds overnight, was naive and, at worst, dangerous.

But that seemed to be what Kaja Solness was after. She wanted to talk about it. Quickly, and a lot. So quickly, and so much, that he’d had to try to slow her down. But it felt like she didn’t have time, she wanted answers straightaway.

“Anton was Swiss,” Kaja Solness said. “A doctor, working for the ICRC, the Swiss branch of the Red Cross. I was deeply in love with him. And he loved me. I thought he did, anyway.”

“Do you think you were wrong?” Madsen asked as he took notes.

“No. I don’t know. He left me. Well, ‘left’ probably isn’t the right word. When you work together in a war zone, it’s difficult to physically leave someone — we live and work in close proximity. But he told me he’d met someone else.” She let out a short laugh. “ ‘Met’ isn’t the right word either. Sonia was a nurse in the Red Cross. We literally ate, slept and worked together. She was also Swiss. Anton prefers beautiful women, so it goes without saying that she was beautiful. Intelligent. Perfect manners. From a good family. Switzerland’s still the sort of country where that kind of thing matters. But the worst thing was that she was nice. A genuinely likeable person who threw herself into her work with energy, courage and love. I used to hear her crying in her sleep on days when they’d had to deal with a lot of dead and serious injuries. And she was nice to me. She gave the impression that I was the one who was being nice to her. Merci vilmal, she used to say. I don’t know if that’s German, French or both, but she said it all the time. Thank you, thank you, thank you. As far as I know, she never knew that Anton and I had been together before she came into the picture. He was married, so we’d kept it quiet. And then it was Sonia’s turn to keep their relationship secret. Ironically, I was the only person she confided in. She was frustrated, said he’d promised to leave his wife, but that he kept putting it off. I listened and comforted her and hated her more and more. Not because she was a bad person, but because she was a good person. Don’t you think that’s odd, Madsen?”

Erland Madsen started slightly at the mention of his name. “Do you think it’s odd?” he asked.

“No,” Kaja Solness said, after thinking for a few moments. “It was Sonia — not Anton’s chronically ill, wealthy wife — who was standing between me and Anton. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“It sounds logical. Go on.”

“It was outside Basra. Have you ever been to Basra?”

“No.”

“The hottest city on earth, you have to drink or die, as the journalists in the hotel bar at the Sultan Palace used to say. At night, huge, carnivorous honey badgers would come in from the desert and roam the streets, eating whatever they could find. People were terrified of them; farmers outside the city said the badgers had started eating their cows. You can get great dates in Basra, though.”

“At least that’s something.”

“Well, we got called to a farm where some cows had trampled the badly maintained fence around a minefield. The farmer and his son had run after them to get them out. Afterwards we found out that they thought there were only anti-personnel mines there. They look like flowerpots with spikes sticking out of them, and are easy to see and avoid. But there were PROM-1s there as well, and they’re much harder to spot. And PROM-1s are also called Bouncing Betties.”

Madsen nodded. Most landmines hit their victims’ legs and groins, but these bounced up when you triggered them and exploded at chest height.

“Almost all the animals had emerged unscathed, I don’t know if that was by luck or instinct. The father had almost managed to get out of the minefield when he triggered a PROM-1 right next to the fence. It flew up and peppered him with shrapnel. But because these mines fly up, the shrapnel often hits people a long way away. The son had run thirty or forty metres into the minefield to rescue the last cow, but he still got hit by a piece of shrapnel. We’d managed to get the father out and were trying to save his life, but the boy was lying in the minefield screaming. Those screams were unbearable, but the sun was going down and we couldn’t go into a field of PROM-1s without metal detectors; we had to wait for backup. Then one of the ICRC’s vehicles turned up. Sonia jumped out. She heard the screams, ran over to me and asked what sort of mines they were. She put her hand on my arm the way she always did, and I saw she was wearing a ring that hadn’t been there before. An engagement ring. And I knew he’d done it, that Anton had finally left his wife. We were standing a little way from the others, and I told her there were anti-personnel mines. And as I took a breath and was about to say there were PROM-1s as well, she was already on her way into the minefield. I called after her, obviously not loud enough, the boy’s screams must have drowned me out.”

Kaja picked up the cup of tea Erland had given her. She looked at him, and he saw her realise that he was waiting for the end of the story.

“Sonia died. The father too. But the boy survived.”

Erland drew three vertical lines on his notepad. Struck through two of them.

“Did you feel guilty?” he asked.

“Obviously.” Her face looked surprised. Was that a trace of irritation in her voice?

“Why is it obvious, Kaja?”

“Because I killed her. I killed someone who didn’t have an ounce of malice in her.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on yourself now? Like you say, you tried to warn her.”

“Don’t you get paid enough to think you have to listen carefully, Madsen?”

Erland noted the aggression in her voice, but also that there was no trace of it in the mild expression on her face.

“What do you think I didn’t hear, Kaja?”

“It doesn’t take so long to breathe in and shout ‘PROM-1’ that someone has time to turn away from you, jump over a fence and stand on one of those fuckers. Your voice doesn’t get drowned out by a boy lying half a football pitch away, Madsen.”

Silence settled on the office for a few moments.

“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?”

“No. Like I said, Sonia and I kept to ourselves. I told the others I had warned her about both types of mine. They didn’t think it odd, they knew how selfless Sonia was. During the memorial service in the camp, Anton told me he thought that Sonia’s desire to be accepted, to be loved, had led to her demise. I’ve thought about that since then, how dangerous it can be for us, this longing to be loved. I’m the only person who knows what really happened. And now you.” Kaja smiled. With small, pointed teeth. As if they were two teenagers sharing a secret, Erland thought.

“What consequences did Sonia’s death have for you?”

“I got Anton back.”

“You got Anton back. Was that all?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think you got back together with someone who had betrayed you like that?”

“I wanted him close so I could see him suffer. See him mourn his loss, devoured by it the way I had been. I held on to him for a while, then I told him I didn’t love him anymore and left him.”

“You’d got your revenge?”

“Yes. And it had also dawned on me why I had actually wanted him in the first place.”

“And that was?”

“Because he was married and unavailable. And because he was tall and fair-haired. He reminded me of someone I used to love.”

Erland noted that this was evidently also important, but it was something they would have to come back to at a later stage of the therapy.

“Let’s get back to the trauma, Kaja. You said you felt guilty. Can I ask what might sound like the same question, even though it isn’t: Do you regret it?”

Kaja put one finger under her chin, as if to show him she was thinking about it.

“Yes,” she said. “But at the same time it gave me a strange sense of relief. I felt better.”

“You felt better after Sonia died?”

“I felt better after I’d killed Sonia.”

Erland Madsen made a note. Felt better after killing. “Can you describe what you mean by that?”

“Free. I felt free. Killing someone was like crossing some sort of border. You think there’s a fence, some sort of wall, but when you cross it you realise that it’s just a line someone’s drawn on a map. Sonia and I, we had both crossed a boundary. She was dead, and I was free. But first and foremost, I felt better because the man who had betrayed me was suffering.”

“You’re talking about Anton?”

“Yes. He was suffering, so I didn’t have to. Anton was my Jesus. My personal Jesus.”

“In what way?”

“I crucified him so he could take on my suffering, the way we did with Jesus. Because Jesus didn’t put himself on the cross, we hung him up there, that’s the whole point. We achieved salvation and eternal life by killing Jesus. God couldn’t do much, God didn’t sacrifice his son. If it’s true that God gave us free will, then we killed Jesus against God’s will. And the day we realise that, that we defied God’s will, that’s the day we set ourselves free, Madsen. And then everything can happen.”

Kaja Solness laughed, and Erland Madsen tried in vain to formulate a question. Instead he sat there looking at the peculiar glint in her eyes.

“My question is,” she said, “if it was so liberating last time, should I try it again? Should I crucify the real Jesus? Or am I just mad?”

Erland Madsen moistened his lips. “Who’s the real Jesus?”

“You didn’t answer my question. Have you got an answer for me, Doctor?”

“That depends what you’re really asking.”

Kaja smiled and let out a deep sigh. “Quite true,” she said, then looked at the watch on her slender wrist. “Looks like we’re out of time.”

After she had gone, Erland Madsen sat there looking at his notes. He wrote at the bottom of the page: NB! Dig deeper into this next time. What does “better after killing someone” mean?

Two days later Torill passed on a phone message she had received at the reception desk. A Kaja Solness had said they could cancel her next appointment, that she wouldn’t be coming back, and that she’d found a solution to her problem.

44

Alexandra Sturdza was sitting at one of the window tables in the empty canteen at the Rikshospital. In front of her lay a cup of black coffee and another long day at work. She had worked until midnight the previous day, slept for five hours, and needed all the stimulants she could get.

The sun was on its way up. This city was like the sort of woman who could be dazzlingly beautiful in the right light, only to look so ordinary a moment later that she becomes utterly unremarkable, even ugly. But right now, at this early hour of the morning, before the average Norwegian got to work, Oslo was hers, like a secret lover she was sharing a stolen hour with. And it was a rendezvous with someone who was still unfamiliar and exciting.

The hills to the east lay in shadow, while those to the west were bathed in soft light. The buildings in the city centre down by the fjord were black silhouettes behind black silhouettes, like a cemetery at sunrise. Just a few glass buildings were lit up, like silver-coloured fish beneath the dark surface of the water. And the sea glinted between islands and skerries that would soon be green. How she longed for spring! They called March the first month of spring here, even if everyone knew it was still winter. Washed-out, cold, with isolated, sudden bursts of warm passion. April was at best a deceitful flirt. May was the first month you could rely on. May. Alexandra wanted a May. She knew that on the occasions when she had had a man like that, a warm, gentle man who gave her all she could ask for, even in suitable doses, she just became spoiled and demanding and ended up betraying him with June or, even worse, July, who was completely unreliable. How about a good, grown-up man like August next time, one with a bit of grey in his hair and a marriage and family behind him? Yes, she would have welcomed someone like that. So how come she had ended up falling in love with November? A gloomy, dark, rain-drenched man with prospects of getting even darker, who was either so quiet that you couldn’t even hear any birds, or felt like he was going to tear the roof off your house with his crazy, rumbling autumn gales. Sure, he rewarded you with sunny days of unexpected warmth that you valued all the more as a result, revealing a strangely beautiful, ruined, ravaged landscape where a few buildings were still standing. Solid and unshakeable, like the bedrock itself, which you knew would still be standing on the last day of the month, and where Alexandra — in the absence of anything better — had sought refuge from time to time. But something better would surely have to come along soon. She stretched and tried to yawn the tiredness out of her body. It must be spring soon. May.

“Miss Sturdza?”

She spun round in surprise. It wasn’t just the time of the encounter that was un-Norwegian, but the mode of address. And, sure enough, the man standing there wasn’t quite Norwegian. Or rather, he didn’t look Norwegian. Not only did he have Asiatic features, but his outfit — suit, crisp white shirt and a tie with a tie clip — definitely wasn’t usual work attire for a Norwegian. Unless the Norwegian in question was one of those overconfident idiots with a job description ending in “agent” or “broker,” which was usually one of the first things they told you if you met them in a bar, where they tried to look like they’d just come from the office because they had to work so hard. That, at least, was the signal they hoped to give off. And when they “revealed” their job after discreetly maneuvering the conversation to a place where it wasn’t utterly ridiculous to mention it, they did so with feigned embarrassment, as if she had just uncovered some fucking crown prince in disguise.

“Sung-min Larsen,” the man said. “I’m a detective at Kripos. Can I sit down?”

Well. Alexandra studied him. Tall. He went to the gym. Not too much, everything in proportion, he was aware of the cosmetic value, but enjoyed the exercise itself. Like her. Brown eyes, of course. A little over thirty? No ring. Kripos. Yes, she’d heard a couple of the girls mention his name, that odd combination of Asian and Norwegian. Strange that she’d never met him before. At that moment the sun reached the canteen window of the Rikshospital, lit up Sung-min Larsen’s face and warmed one of Alexandra’s cheeks with surprising intensity. Miss Sturdza. Perhaps spring was coming early this year? Without putting her cup down she pushed a chair out with her foot.

“Be my guest.”

“Thanks.”

As he leaned forward to sit down, he instinctively put his hand over his tie, even though he was wearing a tie clip. There was something familiar about the clip, something that reminded her of her childhood. She remembered what it was. The bird-like logo of the Romanian airline, TAROM.

“Are you a pilot, Larsen?”

“My father was,” he said.

“My uncle was too,” she said. “He flew IAR-93 fighters.”

“Really? Produced in Romania.”

“You know the plane?”

“No, I just remember that they were the only Communist planes that weren’t made in the Soviet Union in the seventies.”

“Communist planes?”

Larsen gave a wry smile. “The sort my father was supposed to shoot down if they came too close.”

“The Cold War. So you dreamed of becoming a pilot yourself?”

He looked surprised. Something about him told her that didn’t happen very often.

“It’s fairly unusual to know about IAR-93s and wear a TAROM tie clip,” she added.

“I applied to the Air Force,” he admitted.

“But didn’t get in?”

“I would have got in,” he said with such natural confidence that she didn’t doubt it. “But my back was too long. I couldn’t fit in the cockpit of the fighters.”

“You could have flown other things. Transport planes, helicopters.”

“I suppose so,” he said.

Your father, she thought. He flew fighters. You couldn’t be happy being a lesser version of him, someone lower down on the uncomplicated pilots’ hierarchy than your father. Sooner something else altogether. So he was an alpha male. Someone who might not have got to where he was going, but was on the way. Like her.

“I’m investigating a murder...” he said, and she realised from his quick glance that the introduction was intended as a warning. “I’ve got some questions about a Harry Hole.”

It felt like the sun outside had gone behind a cloud, as if Alexandra’s heart had stopped.

“From the call log on his phone I see that the two of you have called each other several times in the past few weeks, the past few days.”

“Hole?” she said, as if she needed to dig the name out, and saw from the look on his face how fake it sounded. “Yes, we’ve talked on the phone. He’s a detective.”

“Maybe you’ve done more than talked?”

“More?” She tried to raise an eyebrow, but wasn’t sure if she managed it, it felt like all the muscles in her face were out of control. “What makes you think that?”

“Two things,” Larsen said. “That you instinctively pretended not to remember his name even though you’ve spoken to him six times and called his number twelve times in the past three weeks, two of them on the evening before Rakel Fauke was found murdered. And that during those same three weeks, his phone has been tracked to base stations that overlap with your home address.”

He said this without aggression, suspicion or anything else that gave her any sense of manipulation or game-playing. Or rather, he said it as if the game was already over, like a croupier who had no stake in the game reading out the number before raking in the chips.

“We’re... we were lovers,” she said. And realised when she heard herself say it that that’s exactly how it was. That they had been lovers, no more, no less. And that it was over.

But the second implication only dawned on her when Sung-min Larsen said: “Before we go on, I ought to advise you to consider if you’d like a lawyer present.”

She must have looked aghast, because Larsen hurried to add: “You’re not suspected of anything, this isn’t an official interview, and I’m primarily trying to get information about Harry Hole, not you.”

“So why would I need a lawyer?”

“For advice not to talk to me, seeing as your close relationship to Harry Hole could potentially connect you to a murder.”

“You mean I might have murdered his wife?”

“No.”

“Ah! You think I murdered her out of jealousy.”

“Like I said, no.”

“I told you we weren’t seeing each other anymore.”

“I don’t think you’ve killed anyone. But I’m cautioning you because the answers you give could lead to you being suspected of having helped him to avoid being charged with the murder of his wife.”

Alexandra realised that she had made the most classic of all drama-queen gestures, and had clutched the string of pearls that she was actually wearing.

“So,” Sung-min Larsen said, lowering his voice when the first of the Norwegian early birds entered the canteen. “Shall we continue this conversation?”

He had informed her that she could have a lawyer present, even if it would make his job more complicated. He would have lowered his voice out of consideration to her even if they’d been alone in the room. Maybe he could be trusted. Alexandra looked into his warm brown eyes. She let her hand fall. Straightened her back, pushing — perhaps unconsciously — her breasts forward.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” she said.

Again, that half-smile of his. She realised she was already looking forward to seeing the rest of it.

Sung-min looked at the time. Four o’clock. He needed to take Kasparov to an appointment at the vet’s, so this summons to Winter’s office was doubly inconvenient.

But he was finished with the investigation. He didn’t have absolutely everything, but he had all he needed.

Firstly, he had proved that Hole’s alibi — provided by his neighbour, Gule — was worthless. The reconstruction had proved that he couldn’t possibly have heard if Hole was in his flat, or if he had arrived or then left. Hole had evidently also thought about this, because Gule had said he had been there asking exactly the same questions.

Secondly, the 3-D expert, Freund, had completed his analysis. There wasn’t much to be gleaned from the hunched figure who had stumbled into Rakel’s house at almost half past eleven on the night of the murder. The figure looked twice as fat as Harry Hole, but Freund said that was probably because he was leaning forward and his coat was hanging down in front of him. His posture also made it impossible to determine his height. But when he came out again three hours later, at half past two in the morning, he was clearly more sober, was standing upright in the doorway, showing his true, slim self, and he was the same height as Harry Hole, around 1.92 metres. He had got into a Ford Escort before remembering to remove his wildlife camera, then he drove away.

Thirdly, he had got hold of a final, decisive piece of evidence from Alexandra Sturdza.

There had been a look of quiet despair on that hard but lively face when he told her about the evidence they had against Harry Hole. And gradually a look of resignation. In the end he had seen her let go of the man she claimed to have already given up. Then he had gently prepared her for some even worse news. And told her that Hole was dead. That he had taken his own life. That — looking at the situation as a whole — perhaps it was for the best. At that point there had been tears in her dark eyes, and he had considered putting his hand on hers as it lay motionless and dead on the table. Just a gentle, comforting touch, then take his hand away again. But he hadn’t. Perhaps she sensed his half-intention, because the next time she lifted her coffee cup, she did so with her left hand, leaving her right motionless, like an invitation.

Then she had told him — as far as he could judge — everything. And that reinforced Sung-min’s suspicion that Hole had committed the murder when he was drunk and lost his temper, and that he had forgotten large parts of it and had spent the last days of his life investigating himself, hence the business with Gule.

A tear had trickled down one of Alexandra’s cheeks, and Sung-min had passed her his handkerchief. He had seen her surprise, presumably because she wasn’t used to Norwegian men carrying freshly ironed handkerchiefs.

They had left the canteen, which was starting to fill up, and went to the Forensic Medical Institute laboratory, where she showed him the bloodstained trousers Hole had given her. She told him that the analysis was almost finished, and that there was a more than 90 percent probability that the blood was Rakel Fauke’s. She had repeated Harry’s explanation as to how the blood had got there, that he had knelt down beside the body after Rakel had been found, and that his trousers had come into contact with the pool of blood.

“That’s not correct,” Sung-min had said. “He wasn’t wearing those trousers when he was at the scene.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was there. I spoke to him.”

“And you remember what sort of trousers he was wearing?”

Sung-min suppressed a spontaneous “of course” and made do with a simple “yes.”

So he had all he needed. Motive, opportunity, and forensic evidence that placed the suspect at the scene at the time of the crime. He had considered contacting someone else who, according to Harry Hole’s call log, he had spoken to several times, a Kaja Solness, but decided it wasn’t a priority seeing as their interaction hadn’t started until after the murder. The important thing now was to find one of the pieces that were missing. Because even if he had everything he needed, he didn’t have everything. He didn’t have the murder weapon.

With so much concrete evidence, the police lawyer had had no hesitation in granting Larsen a warrant to search Harry Hole’s flat, but they hadn’t found the murder weapon or anything else of interest there. Except for that fact in itself: that they hadn’t found anything of interest. Such a striking absence of incriminating evidence suggested one of two things. That the person living in the flat was a robot. Or that he knew his home would be searched and had removed anything potentially incriminating.

“Interesting,” lead investigator Ole Winter said, leaning back behind his desk as he listened to Sung-min Larsen’s minutely detailed report.

Not impressive, then, Sung-min thought. Not astonishing, not brilliant, not even so much as good police work.

Just interesting.

“So interesting that it surprises me that you haven’t reported any of this to me before now, Larsen. And that I probably wouldn’t have this information now either if I hadn’t, as lead detective, asked for it. When were you planning to share this with the rest of us who have been working on this case?”

Sung-min ran one hand over his tie and moistened his lips.

He felt like saying that here he was, serving up Harry Hole, the biggest fish around, to Kripos, neatly wrapped up with a bow. That he had single-handedly outmaneuvered the legendary detective in his own field: murder. And that was all Winter had to say, that he could have reported a bit earlier?

There were three reasons why Sung-min decided not to say this.

The first was that there were only the two of them in Winter’s office, so there was no third person whose common sense he could appeal to.

The second was that as a rule there’s nothing to be gained by contradicting your boss, whether or not there’s a third person present.

Thirdly, and most important, Winter was right.

Sung-min had delayed reporting on developments in the case. Who wouldn’t have done, when they’d got the fish on the hook, had reeled it back in close to the shore and all that remained was to get it in the net? When you knew that the murder of the decade, to be known in perpetuity as the Harry Hole case, would bear your name, and yours alone. It was the police lawyer who had mentioned it to Winter, when he congratulated him on having caught Harry Hole himself. Yes, Sung-min had to admit that he was selfish, and no, he hadn’t stood in front of an open goal looking around for a Messi he could pass the ball and the goal to, because there was no Messi on this team. If there was, it was probably him. It certainly wasn’t Winter, who was sitting there with veins throbbing in his temples and eyebrows like thunderclouds over his eyes.

Sung-min chose this response instead:

“It all happened so quickly, one thing kept leading to another, and I didn’t want to risk any delay. There wasn’t really any time to pause for breath.”

“Until now?” Winter said, leaning back in his chair and looking as if he were using the ridge of his nose to take aim at Sung-min.

“The case is solved now,” Sung-min said.

Winter let out a short, hard laugh, like a go-kart braking suddenly. “If it’s OK with you, let’s agree that it’s the lead detective who decides when the case is solved. What do you say, Larsen?”

“Of course, Winter.” Sung-min had intended to signal his submission, but realised that the older man had seen through him and decided to take offence at the fact the younger man had returned the sarcastic, drawn-out pronunciation of his surname.

“Seeing as you consider the case solved, Laaar-sen, I assume you have no objection to me taking it away from you while we tie up a few loose ends.”

“As you wish.”

Sung-min could have bitten his tongue when he saw how Winter took this arrogantly submissive, bourgeois “as you wish.”

Winter smiled. “Right now we need good heads like yours on another murder. The Lysaker case.” It was a mean, thin smile, as if his mouth wasn’t flexible enough to manage anything more expressive.

The Lysaker murder, Sung-min thought. A drug-related killing. Clearly an internal conflict between junkies. Those involved would talk at the slightest mention of a reduced sentence out of fear of being denied access to drugs. It was the lowest form of murder case, the sort of thing you left to new recruits and those of limited abilities. Winter couldn’t be serious, saying he was going to take him, the lead investigator, off the case now, right in front of the line, snatching all the honour and glory away, and for what? For playing his cards a bit too close to his chest for a little too long?

“I want a written report with all the details, Larsen. In the meantime, the others will carry on working on the lines of inquiry you’ve uncovered. Then I’ll have to see when we go public with what we’ve found out.”

Lines of inquiry you’ve uncovered? He had solved the case, for fuck’s sake!

Give me a bollocking, Sung-min thought. A reprimand. Winter couldn’t just decapitate one of his detectives like this. Until he realised that Winter not only could do it, but wanted to and was going to do it. Because it had just dawned on Sung-min what this was all about. Winter was also aware that Sung-min was the only Messi they had on the team. And that meant he was a threat to Winter as leader, now and in the future. Winter was the alpha male who had spotted that a rival was on the move. Sung-min’s solo performance had shown he was ready to challenge Winter’s authority. So Winter had decided it was best to dispatch the younger man now, before he grew any bigger and stronger.

45

Johan Krohn and his wife, Frida, had met while they were studying law at the University of Oslo. He would never know what it was about him that she had fallen for. Maybe he had just presented his own case so well that she eventually had to give in. There weren’t many other people back then who understood why pretty, sweet Frida Andresen had picked a socially inept nerd who showed little interest in anything much apart from law and chess. Johan Krohn, who was more aware than anyone that he had managed to get a girlfriend who was at least one division above him in the attractiveness league, courted her, watched over her, chased away potential rivals. In short, he clung on to her with everything he had. Even so, everyone thought it was only a matter of time until she found herself someone more exciting. But Johan was a brilliant student, and a brilliant lawyer. He became the youngest lawyer since John Christian Elden to earn the right to practise in the Supreme Court, and was offered work others his age could only dream about. His social confidence rose in line with his status and income. Suddenly new doors were open to him, and Krohn — after due consideration — walked through most of them. One of them led to a life he had missed out on in his youth, and could be summarised by the words “women,” “wine” and “song.” More precisely: women who actually became more amenable when you introduced yourself as a partner at a well-known law firm. Wine in the form of exclusive whisky from windswept places like the Hebrides and Shetland Islands, as well as cigars and — in ever greater quantity — cigarettes. He never quite got the hang of song, but there were exonerated criminals who claimed that his defense statements were more beautiful than anything that had ever come out of Frank Sinatra’s mouth.

Frida looked after the children, and managed the family’s social circle, which wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for her, and she worked part-time as a lawyer for two cultural foundations. If Johan Krohn had gone past her in the attractiveness league table, it didn’t alter the balance in their relationship. Because that balance had always been so unequal, he so grateful for his luck, she so used to being courted, that it had become part of the DNA of their relationship, the only way they knew how to relate to each other. They showed each other respect and love, and outwardly were comfortable letting it look like it was Johan who was steering the ship. But at home neither of them was in any doubt about who decided what went where. Or where Johan Krohn should smoke his cigarettes now that he — and he was secretly rather proud of this — was addicted to nicotine.

So when darkness had fallen, the children were in bed and the television news had told him what was going on in Norway and the U.S.A., he would take his cigarettes, go upstairs and out onto the terrace, which looked out upon Mærradalen and Ullern.

He leaned against the railing. The view included Hegnar Media’s office complex and part of Smestaddammen that lay just beyond. He was thinking about Alise. And how he was going to solve the matter. It had become too intense, had gone on too long, it couldn’t continue, they were going to be found out. Well, they had actually been found out long ago, the wry smiles from the other partners in the firm when they were sitting in meetings and Alise came in with a file or an important phone message for him left no room for doubt. But Frida didn’t know, and that was what he meant by being found out, as he had explained to Alise. She had taken it with almost irritating pragmatism and said he shouldn’t worry.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” she had said.

And perhaps it was this very statement that worried him.

Your secret, not ours (she was single), and with me, as if it were a legal document stored in her bank vault. Where it was safe, but only as long as she kept the vault locked. Not that he suspected that her choice of words was meant as a threat, but it still struck home. That she was protecting him. The way she might expect him to offer a protective hand to her. There was stiff competition between young, recently qualified lawyers, and the rewards for those who rose to the top were considerable, with a correspondingly merciless demise for those who sank to the bottom. Getting help to float could have a decisive effect.

“A lot on your mind?”

Johan Krohn started and dropped his cigarette, which fell like a falling star through the darkness down towards the orchard below him. It’s one thing to hear a voice behind you when you think you’re alone and unobserved. It’s something else entirely when that voice belongs to someone who doesn’t belong there, and the only way that person could have got onto the terrace on the second floor was either by flying or teleportation. The fact that the person in question is a brutal criminal who has been convicted of more assaults than anyone else in Oslo in the past thirty years only makes the situation more unexpected.

Krohn turned and saw the man leaning against the wall in the darkness on the other side of the terrace door. In the choice between “What are you doing here?” and “How did you get here?”, he found himself asking the former.

“Rolling a cigarette,” Svein Finne said, raising his hands to his mouth, and a grey tongue slipped out between his thick lips to lick the cigarette paper.

“Wh... what do you want?”

“A light,” Finne said, sticking the cigarette between his lips and looking expectantly at Krohn.

The lawyer hesitated before holding out his hand and clicking his lighter. He saw the flame tremble. Saw it get sucked into the cigarette, as the glowing strands of tobacco curled up.

“Nice house,” Finne said. “Nice view too. I used to hang out in this neighbourhood a lot, many years ago.”

For a moment Krohn imagined his client literally hanging out, floating in the air.

Finne pointed towards Mærradalen with his cigarette. “I occasionally slept in that bit of forest, along with the other homeless. And I remember one particular girl who used to walk through there, she lived on the Huseby side. Old enough for sex, obviously, but no older than fifteen, sixteen. One day I gave her a crash course in how to make love.” Finne laughed gruffly. “She was so frightened I had to comfort her afterwards, poor thing. She cried and cried, saying her father, who was a bishop, and her big brother would come and get me. I told her I wasn’t afraid of bishops or big brothers, and that she didn’t have to be either, because now she had a man of her own. And possibly a child on the way. And then I let her go. I let them go, you see. Catch and release, isn’t that what anglers call it?”

“I’m not an angler,” Krohn found himself saying.

“I’ve never killed an innocent person in my entire life,” Finne said. “You need to respect innocence in nature. Abortion...” Finne sucked so hard on his cigarette that Krohn heard the paper crackle. “Tell me, you know all about the law, is there anything that’s a worse crime against the laws of nature? Killing your own innocent offspring. Can you think of anything more perverse?”

“Can we get to the point, Finne? My wife’s waiting for me inside.”

“Of course she’s waiting for you. We’re all waiting for something. Love. Intimacy. Human contact. I waited for Dagny Jensen yesterday. No love, I’m afraid. And now it’s going to be difficult for me to get close to her again. We get lonely, don’t we? And we all need something...” He looked at his cigarette. “Something warm.”

“If you need my help, I suggest we talk about it at the office tomorrow.” Krohn realised he hadn’t struck the authoritative tone he was aiming at. “I... I’ll find time to see you whenever you like.”

“You’ll find time?” Finne let out a short laugh. “After all I’ve done for you, that feather you’ve got in your hat now, that’s all you’ve got to offer me? Your time?”

“What is it you want, Finne?”

His client took a step forward, and the light from the window fell across half his face. He ran his right hand over the red-painted railing. Krohn shuddered when he saw the red paint through the large hole in the back of Finne’s hand.

“Your wife,” Finne said. “I want her.”

Krohn felt his throat tighten.

Finne flashed him a grotesque grin. “Relax, Krohn. Even if I have to admit that I’ve thought a lot about Frida in the past few days, I’m not going to touch her. Because I don’t touch other men’s women, I want my own. As long as she’s yours, she’s safe, Krohn. But obviously you could hardly hold on to a proud, financially independent woman like Frida if she got to hear about the pretty little assistant you had with you when I was questioned. Alise. That was her name, wasn’t it?”

Johan Krohn stared. Alise? He knew about Alise?

Krohn cleared his throat. It sounded like windshield wipers on dry glass. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Finne pointed one finger towards his eye. “Eagle eyes. I’ve seen you. Watching you fucking is like watching a couple of baboons. Fast, efficient, without any great emotion. It won’t last, but you don’t want to go without it, do you? We all need warmth.”

Where? Krohn wondered. At the office? In the hotel room he sometimes booked for them? In Barcelona in October? It was impossible. When they made love it was always high up, where they knew they couldn’t be seen from the other side of the street.

“What will last, on the other hand, unless someone tells Frida about Alise, is this.” Finne jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the house. “Family. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it, Krohn?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about or what you want,” Krohn said. He had put both elbows on the railing behind him. It was supposed to convey relaxed ambivalence, but he knew he probably looked more like a boxer who was already on the ropes.

“I’ll leave Frida alone if I can have Alise,” Finne said, flicking his cigarette into the air. Its glowing tip curved through the darkness like Krohn’s a short while ago before going out in the darkness. “The police are looking for me, I can’t move as freely as I’d like. I need a little...” — he grinned again — “assistance in order to get some warmth. I want you to arrange for me to have the young lady to myself, somewhere safe.”

Krohn blinked in disbelief. “You want me to try to persuade Alise to see you alone? So you can... assault her?”

“Forget ‘try’ and ‘assault.’ You will persuade her, Krohn. And I’m going to seduce her, not assault her. I’ve never assaulted anyone, that’s all a big misunderstanding. The girls don’t always understand what’s best for them, or the task nature has set them, that’s all. But they come to their senses soon enough. Just as Alise will too. She’ll come to realise that if she threatens this family, for instance, she’ll have me to answer to. Hey, don’t look so glum, Krohn, you’re getting two for the price of one here: my silence, as well as the girl’s.”

Krohn stared at Finne. The words were echoing through his head. Your secret’s safe with me.

“Johan?”

Frida’s voice came from inside the house, and he heard her steps on the stairs. Then a voice whispered close to his ear, accompanied by the smell of tobacco and something rancid, bestial. “There’s a grave in Vår Frelsers Cemetery. Valentin Gjertsen. I’ll expect to hear from you within two days.”

Frida reached the top of the stairs and started to walk towards the terrace, but stopped in the light inside the door.

“Brr, it’s cold,” she said, folding her arms. “I heard voices.”

“Psychiatrists say that’s a bad sign.” Johan Krohn smiled, and began to walk towards her, but wasn’t quick enough. She had already stuck her head out of the door and was looking in both directions.

She looked up at him. “Were you talking to yourself?”

Krohn looked around the terrace. Empty. Gone.

“I was practising a defence statement,” he said. He breathed out and walked back in through the terrace door, into the warmth, into their house, into his wife’s arms. When he noticed her let go to look up at him, he kept hold of her so she couldn’t read his face, see that something was wrong. Because Johan Krohn knew that the defense speech he was thinking about would never win the case, not this one. He knew Frida and her thoughts about infidelity too well, she’d condemn him to a lifetime of loneliness, with access to the children but not to her. The fact that Svein Finne also appeared to know Frida so well only made the matter even more unsettling.

Katrine heard the baby crying in the stairwell. It made her quicken her steps, even though she knew the child was in the best of hands. Bjørn’s hands. Pale hands with soft skin and thick, stubby fingers that could do everything that needed doing. No more, no less. She shouldn’t complain. So she tried not to. She had seen what happened to some women when they became mothers, they became despots who thought the sun and all the planets orbited around mother and child. Who suddenly treated their husbands with resigned derision when they didn’t demonstrate lightning-fast reactions and ideally a telepathic understanding of the needs of mother and child. Or, to be more accurate, what the mother decided were the needs of the child.

No, Katrine definitely didn’t want to be one of those. But was that somewhere inside her anyway? Hadn’t she occasionally felt like slapping Bjørn, watching him curl up and submit, humiliate himself? She had no idea why. Nor how on earth it could ever happen, seeing as Bjørn was always one step ahead of her and had already sorted out anything she might be able to base any criticism on. And obviously there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who’s better than you, who constantly holds up a mirror that makes you hate yourself.

No, she didn’t hate herself. That was an exaggeration. She just thought Bjørn was too good for her from time to time. Not “too good” as in too attractive, but too nice, as in annoyingly nice. That they could both have had a slightly better life if he had chosen someone more like himself, a stable, gentle, down-to-earth, kind, slightly plump farmer’s daughter from Østre Toten.

The crying stopped as she was putting the key in the lock. She opened the door.

Bjørn was standing in the hallway with Gert on his arm. The boy looked at her with big, blue, tear-moistened eyes from under those laughably long blond curls that stood out like coiled springs around his head. Gert was named after Katrine’s father, even if it had been Bjørn’s suggestion. And now the child’s face lit up in a smile that was so wonderful that it made Katrine’s heart ache and brought a lump to her throat. She let her coat fall to the floor and walked towards them. Bjørn kissed her cheek before handing her the child. She pressed the little body to her and inhaled the smell of milk, vomit, warm skin and something sweet, irresistible, something that was her child alone. She closed her eyes and was home. Completely at home.

She was wrong. They couldn’t have it any better than this. It was the three of them, now and forever, that was just how it was.

“You’re crying,” Bjørn said.

Katrine thought he was saying it to Gert until she realised he meant her, and that he was right.

“It’s Harry,” she said.

Bjørn looked at her with a frown as she gave him some time. The time an airbag takes to deploy and hopefully muffle some of the impact. Obviously it’s pointless when things really have gone to hell, because then an airbag can’t save anyone, it’s just left hanging in shreds like a deflated balloon out of the front windshield of a Ford Escort that’s standing on end and looks like it tried to dive through the rock, bury itself, wipe itself out.

“No,” Bjørn said, in an equally vain protest against what her silence was telling him. “No,” he repeated in a whisper.

Katrine waited a little longer, still holding Gert, who was tickling her neck with his tiny hands. Then she told Bjørn about the car. About the truck on Highway 287, about the hole in the ice, about the waterfall, about the car. As she spoke, he put one of those pale hands with those stubby fingers to his mouth, and his eyes filled with tears that hung on his thin, colourless eyelashes before falling, one by one, like icicles dripping in the spring sun.

She had never seen Bjørn Holm like this, never seen the big, solid man from Toten lose it so completely. He cried, sobbed, shaking with a force as if something inside him was fighting to get out.

Katrine took Gert into the living room. It was a reflex, to protect the child from his father’s dark grief. He would inherit enough darkness as it was.

An hour later she had put Gert to bed, and now he was asleep in their bedroom.

Bjørn had gone to sit in the office that would eventually become Gert’s bedroom. She could still hear him crying in there. She was standing at the door, wondering if she should go in, when her phone rang.

She went into the living room and answered it.

It was Ole Winter.

“I know you’d prefer to postpone the announcement that Harry Hole is the dead man,” he said.

“Missing,” she said.

“The divers have found a smashed mobile phone and a pistol in the river below the falls. My team have just confirmed that both belonged to Harry Hole. We’re putting together the last pieces that mean we have a watertight case, and that means we can’t wait, Bratt, I’m sorry. But seeing as this was a personal wish...”

“Not personal, Winter, I’m thinking about the force. We need to be as well prepared as possible when it comes to presenting this to the public.”

“As things stand, it will be Kripos presenting the results of Kripos’s work, not the Oslo Police. But I can see your dilemma — the press will obviously want to ask you, as Hole’s employer, a number of detailed questions, and I can appreciate that you all need some time to discuss among yourselves how to answer those. In order to meet you halfway, Kripos won’t be calling a press conference tomorrow morning, as originally planned, but will delay it until tomorrow evening, at 19:00.”

“Thanks,” Katrine said.

“Assuming you can manage to stop Sigdal Sheriff’s Office from publishing the name of the deceased...”

Katrine took a deep breath and managed to stop herself saying anything.

“...until after we at Kripos have made our own announcement.”

You want breaking news with your name on it, Katrine thought. If Sigdal goes public with the name of the deceased, the public will put two and two together, feel that they’ve solved the case themselves, and that Kripos have been slow, so slow that Hole managed to make a quick exit from life. But if you get your way, Winter, you’ll make it look like it was your team’s incisive detective work that outsmarted master detective Harry Hole, got him on the run and finally drove him to take his own life.

But she said none of this either.

Just a quick “OK.” And: “I’ll inform the Chief of Police.”

They ended the call.

Katrine crept into the bedroom. Leaned over the worn, blue crib Bjørn’s parents had given them, the crib all the family’s children and grandchildren had slept in when they were little.

Through the thin wall she could still hear Bjørn crying in the office. Quieter now, but still with the same despair. And as she looked down at Gert’s sleeping face, she thought that Bjørn’s grief was, in a peculiar way, making hers easier to bear. Now she had to be the strong one, the one who couldn’t allow herself the luxury of reflection and sentimentality. Because life went on, and they had a child to take care of.

A child who suddenly opened his eyes.

Blinked, looked around, trying to find something to focus on.

She ran her hand over those strange blond curls.

“Who would have thought that a black-haired girl from the west and a red-headed lad from Toten would have a blond Viking,” Bjørn’s grandmother had said when they took Gert to see her in her nursing home in Skreia.

Then the boy found his mother’s eyes, and Katrine smiled. Smiled, stroked his hair and sang quietly until the child’s eyes closed again. Only then did she shiver. Because the look in those eyes had been like someone looking up at her from the other side of death.

46

Johan Krohn had shut himself away in the bathroom. He was tapping on his phone. He and Harry Hole had communicated enough over the years that he must have his number tucked away somewhere. There it was! In an old email about Silje Gravseng, the police student who tried to get revenge on Hole by accusing him of rape. She had turned to Krohn, wanted him to take the case, but he had seen the charges and managed to stop her. So even if he and Hole had had their disagreements since then, surely Hole owed him a favour when it came down to it? He hoped so. There were other people he could call, police officers who owed him more than Hole, but there were two reasons to ask him specifically. Firstly, Hole was guaranteed to devote all his energy to finding and arresting a man who had recently tricked and humiliated him. And secondly, Harry Hole was the only person in the police who had managed to catch Finne. Yes, Hole was the only person who could help him. Then he would just have to see how long he could keep Finne locked away for threatening behaviour and blackmail. It would obviously be one man’s word against another’s, but he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

“Leave a message if you must,” a gravelly voice said, followed by a bleep.

Krohn was so bemused that he almost hung up. But there was something about that turn of phrase. If you must. He had to, didn’t he? Yes, he had to, and he had to say enough to be sure that Hole would call him back. He swallowed.

“This is Johan Krohn. I need to ask you to keep this message between the two of us. Svein Finne is engaged in blackmail.” He swallowed again. “Of me. And my family. I... er, please, get back to me. Thanks.”

He hung up. Had he said too much? And was he doing the right thing, was asking a police officer for help the right solution? Oh, it was impossible to be sure! Well, until Hole called back, he could still change his mind, tell Hole it was the result of a misunderstanding with his client.

Krohn went into the bedroom, slipped under the covers, picked up his copy of TfR, the Norwegian legal periodical, from the bedside table and started to read.

“You said something out on the terrace,” Frida said beside him. “That you were practising a defense statement.”

“Yes,” Johan said, and saw that she had put her book down on the covers and was looking at him over her reading glasses.

“Who for?” she said. “I didn’t think you were working on a case at the moment.”

Krohn adjusted his pillow. “The defense of a decent man who’s got himself into a bit of a mess.” He let his eyes rest on his own article about double jeopardy. Obviously he knew the article backwards, but he had found that he was able to pretend he’d never read it, and could enjoy its complex but lucid legal reasoning over and over again. “It’s only a potential case at the moment. He’s being blackmailed by a bastard who wants to get hold of his mistress. If he doesn’t give in, his whole family will be taken from him.”

“Hmm,” Frida murmured. “That sounds more like a work of fiction than an actual case.”

“Let’s say it is fiction,” Krohn said. “What would you do if you were him, and you knew that a defense statement wasn’t going to save him?”

“A mistress in exchange for an entire family? That’s fairly straightforward, surely?”

“No. Because if the good guy lets the bastard rape his mistress, the bastard would have even more on him. And then the bastard would come back, demanding more and more.”

“OK,” Frida said with a slight smile. “Then I’d pay a hitman to get rid of the bastard.”

“A bit of realism, maybe?”

“I thought you said it was fiction?”

“Yes, but...”

“The mistress,” Frida said. “I’d let the bastard have the mistress.”

“Thanks,” Krohn said, staring down at the page, fully aware that even the most ingenious formulations about double jeopardy wouldn’t be able to take his mind off Svein Finne tonight. Or Alise. And when he thought of her, on her knees, looking beseechingly up at Johan Krohn with eyes full of tears because he was so big but she was still trying to fit him in her mouth, he knew that option was out of the question. Wasn’t it? What if Harry Hole couldn’t help him? No, even then, he couldn’t do that to Alise. Not only was it morally repugnant, but he loved her! Didn’t he? And now Krohn felt more of a swelling in his heart than his groin. Because what did you do if you loved someone? You took the consequences. You paid the price. If you loved someone, it didn’t matter what it cost. Those were the rules of love, and there was no room for reinterpretation. He could see it so clearly now. So clearly that he had to hurry up before doubt took hold of him again, he had to hurry to tell his wife everything. Absolutely everything about Alise. Alea iacta est. The die is cast. Krohn put the journal down and took a deep breath as he formulated the opening phrases in his head.

“I forgot to say that I caught Simon red-handed today,” Frida said. “He was sitting in his room looking at... well, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Simon?” Krohn said, seeing their firstborn in front of him. “A porn magazine?”

“Almost,” Frida laughed. “Norway’s Laws. Your copy.”

“Oh dear,” Krohn said, as lightheartedly as he could, and swallowed. He looked at his wife as Alise’s image faded away, like in a film. Frida Andresen, now Frida Krohn. Her face was still as pure, as pretty as the first time he had seen it in the lecture hall. Her body was a bit plumper, but the extra kilos had really only given it a more feminine shape.

“I was thinking of making Thai tomorrow, the kids would like that. They’re still going on about Ko Samui. Maybe we could go back there sometime? Sun, warm weather and...” She smiled and let the rest hang in the air.

“Yes,” Johan Krohn said, and swallowed. “Maybe.”

He picked up the journal again and began to read. About double jeopardy.

47

“It was David,” the man said, in a thin, faltering junkie voice. “He hit Birger in the head with an iron bar.”

“Because Birger has stolen his heroin,” Sung-min said, and tried to stifle a yawn. “And the reason your fingerprints are on the bar is because you took it off Birger, but by then it was already too late.”

“Exactly,” the man said, looking at Sung-min as if he’d just solved a third-grade maths problem. “Can I go now?”

“You can go whenever you like, Kasko.” Sung-min gestured with one hand.

The man, who was known as Kasko because he had once sold car insurance, stood up, his legs swaying as if the floor of the Stargate bar was the lurching deck of a ship, and maneuvered towards the door where there was a newspaper cutting announcing where the cheapest beer in Oslo could be found.

“What are you doing?” Marcussen, another Kripos detective, hissed in alarm. “We could have got the whole story, all the details! We had him, damn it! Next time he might change his story. They do that, these smackheads.”

“All the more reason to let him go now,” Sung-min said, switching off the tape recorder. “Right now we’ve got a simple explanation. If we get more details, he’ll either have forgotten them, or changed them by the time he gets to the witness stand. And that’s exactly what a defense lawyer needs to sow doubt on the rest of the explanation. Shall we go?”

“No reason to hang around here,” Marcussen said, getting to his feet. Sung-min nodded and let his gaze roam over the clientele of drinkers who had been queuing up outside when he and Marcussen arrived at the bar with the earliest opening time in Oslo, seven o’clock.

“Actually, I think I’ll stay,” Sung-min said. “I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

“You want to eat here?”

Sung-min knew what his colleague meant. He and Stargate didn’t really go together. They hadn’t done, anyway. But who knew, maybe he’d have to lower his standards? Downgrade his expectations. This was as good a place to start as any.

Once Marcussen had gone, Sung-min picked up the newspaper that was lying on the next table.

Nothing on the front page about the Rakel Fauke case.

And nothing about the accident on Highway 287.

Which must mean that neither Ole Winter nor Katrine Bratt had gone public with the news that Harry Hole was involved.

In Ole Winter’s case, that was presumably because he wanted time to add a sheen of teamwork to what had been Sung-min’s deductions. Trivial double-checking that would only confirm what Sung-min had already ascertained, but that Winter could later claim was a team victory under his wise leadership.

Sung-min had read Machiavelli’s The Prince when he realised he didn’t understand political game-playing and power strategies. One of Machiavelli’s pieces of advice to a ruler who wanted to stay in power was to ally himself to and give support to weaker players in the country, those who weren’t in a position to threaten him and who would therefore be happy with the status quo. But any stronger potential opponents had to be weakened by all means available. What applied in Italian city states in the 1500s evidently also applied within Kripos.

When it came to Katrine Bratt’s motive for wanting to delay the announcement, Sung-min was in more doubt. She’d had twenty-four hours, Hole’s family must have been informed by now, and she’d had time to prepare the news that one of their own colleagues was suspected of murder. The fact that she may have personal feelings for Hole didn’t explain the fact that she was prepared to expose herself and the Crime Squad Unit to criticism and accusations of special treatment for police officers by protecting him from publicity in this way. It was as if there had to be something else, some consideration that ran deeper than that of a lover. But what could that be?

Sung-min brushed it aside. Perhaps it was something else. A desperate hope for a miracle. That Harry Hole was still alive. Sung-min took a sip of his coffee and looked out at the Akerselva, where the morning sun was starting to shine on the tops of the grey buildings on the other side. If Harry Hole was sharing any of this, it was because he was sitting on a cloud with a halo round his head, listening to the angels singing and watching it all from above.

He looked down at the cloud below him.

Held up the fragment of mirror and looked at his face. He had a white band round his head. He could hear singing.

He looked down at the cloud again.

Ever since it had got light, that little clump of cloud had been lying down in the valley, obscuring the view of the frozen river, colouring the forest grey. But as the sun rose higher it started to burn off the cloud, improving the visibility. And hopefully the intense birdsong around him would calm down a bit.

He was freezing. That was OK. It made it easier to see.

He looked in the piece of mirror again.

The halo or bandage he had found in one of the drawers in the cabin had a red stain where the blood had seeped through. He was probably going to end up with another scar, in addition to the one running from the corner of his mouth to his ear.

He stood up from the chair that was leaning against the wall of the cabin and went inside.

Past the newspaper cuttings on the wall, one of them bearing the same face he had just seen in the mirror.

He went into the bedroom where he had spent the night. Pulled off the bloody sheets and duvet cover, just as he had pulled off the bloody duvet cover two weeks ago in his own flat. But this time it was his blood, and his alone.

He sat down on the sofa.

Looked at the High Standard pistol lying beside the Yahtzee game. Bohr had said E14 had got hold of them without them being registered. He turned the pistol over in his hand.

Was he likely to need it?

Maybe, maybe not.

Harry Hole looked at the time. Thirty-six hours had passed since he had stumbled out of the forest towards the cabin, to the broken window, and let himself in. He had got out of his wet clothes, cleaned himself off, found clean clothes, a sweater, long johns, a camouflage uniform, thick woollen socks. He’d put everything on and laid down under a blanket on the bunk bed, and stayed there until the worst of the shivering stopped. He had considered lighting the stove but decided against it; someone might see the smoke from the chimney and get it into their head to investigate. He had looked through the cupboards until he found a first-aid kit, and managed to staunch the bleeding from the wound on his forehead. He wrapped a bandage around his head, then used the remainder to cover his knee, which was already so swollen it looked like it had eaten an ostrich egg. He breathed in and out, and tried to figure out if the pain meant his ribs were broken, or if he was just badly bruised. Otherwise he was in one piece. Some would doubtless call it a miracle, but it was really just simple physics and a bit of luck.

Harry breathed in again, heard it whistle and felt a stab of pain in his side.

OK, more than a bit of luck.

He had tried to avoid thinking about what had happened. That was the new advice for police officers who had suffered serious trauma: not to talk about it, not to think about it until at least six hours had passed. Recent research showed — in marked contrast to previous assumptions — that “talking things through” directly after a traumatic experience didn’t reduce the probability of developing PTSD, but the opposite.

Obviously it hadn’t been possible to shut it out altogether. It kept playing in his head like a YouTube clip that’s gone viral. The way the car had toppled over the edge of the waterfall, the way he had hunched up in his seat to see out of the windshield; the weightlessness when everything was falling at the same speed, which had made it oddly easy to grip the seat belt with his left hand and the buckle with his right, it just made his movements slower because they were happening underwater. The way he had seen the white foam bursting from the huge black rock that was rushing towards him as he pushed the seat belt into the lock. And then the pressure. And then the noise.

And then he was dangling in the seat belt with his head against the airbag on the steering wheel, and realised he could breathe, that the sound of the waterfall was no longer muffled, but sharp, hissing as it crashed and spat at him through the shattered back window. It took him a few seconds to realise that he wasn’t just alive, but remarkably unharmed.

The car was standing on end, the front and the steering wheel pressed towards the seats, or the other way around, but not so badly that his legs were cut or trapped. All the windows were broken, so the water inside the car must have drained out within a second or two. But the resistance of the dashboard and front windshield had probably stopped the water draining away just long enough for it to act as an extra cushion for Harry’s body, counteracting the crumpling of the chassis. Because water’s strong. The reason deep-sea fish don’t get squashed flat in the depths of the ocean under pressure that would crumple an armoured tank to the size of a tin can is because the fishes’ bodies largely consist of something that can’t be compromised, no matter how much pressure it’s put under: water.

Harry closed his eyes and played the rest of the film.

The way he had hung from his seat, unable either to undo the buckle or slip out of the belt, because both the buckle and the spool mechanism were wrecked. He had looked around, and in the broken wing mirror it looked as if two waterfalls were crashing down on him. He managed to free one piece of the mirror. It was sharp, but his hands were shaking so much that it seemed to take him an eternity to cut through the seat belt. He fell against the steering wheel and what was left of the airbag, tucked the piece of mirror into his jacket pocket in case he needed it again later, then climbed carefully out through the windshield and hoped the car wasn’t going to fall on top of him. Then he swam the short distance from the black rock to the right-hand side of the river, waded ashore, and that was when he realised that his chest and left knee hurt. The adrenaline had probably acted as a painkiller, and the Jim Beam still was, so he knew it was only going to get worse. And as he stood there, so cold that his head was throbbing, he felt something warm running across his cheek and down his neck, pulled out the fragment of mirror and saw that he had a large cut on one side of his forehead.

He looked up at the hillside. Pine trees and snow. He waded one hundred metres down the river before he found somewhere the slope seemed easy enough to climb, and started to make his way upward, but his knee gave way and he slid on a mixture of mud and snow back towards the river again. The pain in his chest was so bad that he felt like screaming, but the air had gone out of him and all that came out was an impotent wheeze, like a puncture. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t know how long he’d been out, ten seconds or several minutes. He couldn’t move. And it dawned on him that he was so cold that his muscles wouldn’t obey him. Harry howled up at the blue, innocent, merciless sky above him. Had he survived all that, only to freeze to death here on dry land?

Like hell he would.

He staggered to his feet, broke a branch off a dead tree that was half lying in the river, and used it as a crutch. After struggling ten metres up the wretched slope, he found a path through the patches of snow. Ignoring the throbbing pain in his knee, he walked north, against the current. Because of the waterfall and the chattering of his own teeth he hadn’t heard any traffic, but when he got a bit higher he saw that the road was on the other side of the river. Highway 287.

He saw a car drive past.

He wasn’t going to freeze to death.

He stood there, breathing as carefully as he could to avoid the pain in his chest.

He could get back down to the river, cross it, stop a car and get back to Oslo. Or, even better, he could call Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and get them to pick him up. Maybe they were already on their way; if the truck driver had seen what happened on 287 he had probably called them. Harry felt for his phone. Then he remembered it had been lying on the passenger seat along with the Jim Beam and his pistol, and was now lying dead and drowned somewhere in the river.

And that was when it struck him.

That he too was dead and drowned.

That he had a choice.

He walked back along the path, and stopped where he had scrambled up the slope. He used his hands and feet to shovel snow back over his tracks. Then he began to limp north again. He knew that the road followed the river, and if the path did the same, it wasn’t far to Roar Bohr’s cabin. As long as his knee held out.

His knee hadn’t held out. It took two and a half hours.

Harry looked down at the swelling bulging out from either side of the tight bandage.

It had had one night’s rest, and could have a few more hours.

Then it would just have to bear his weight.

He pulled on the woolen hat he had found, then took out the fragment of the Escort’s mirror again to see if it covered the bandage. He thought about Roar Bohr, who’d had to make his way from Oslo to Trondheim with just ten kroner. He had no money at all, but the distance was shorter.

Harry closed his eyes. And heard the voice in his head.

Harry had heard the song many times. It wasn’t just about the idea that the truth would come out one day. It was about how the deceitful lived happy lives, while those they had deceived suffered.

48

The driver of the new Eggedal Express to Oslo looked at the tall man who had just climbed up the steps into her bus. The bus stop was situated on a deserted stretch of Highway 287, and the man was wearing camouflage trousers, so she assumed he was one of the hunters who came up from Oslo to shoot their wildlife. There were three things that didn’t quite make sense, though. It wasn’t hunting season. His clothes were at least two sizes too small, and he had a white bandage sticking out from below the edge of his black woolly hat. And he had no money for a ticket.

“I fell in the river, injured myself and lost both my phone and my wallet,” he said. “I’m staying in a cabin, and I have to get into the city. Can you let me have an invoice?”

She looked at him, considering the situation. The bandage and the ill-fitting clothes seemed to fit his story. And the express bus to Oslo hadn’t been an overnight success; people still seemed to prefer taking the local bus to Åmot and changing to the hourly express service there, so there were plenty of free seats. The question was, what was likely to cause more trouble: turning him away from the bus, or letting him come on board?

He may have noticed her hesitation, because he cleared his throat and added: “If I could borrow a phone, I can arrange for my wife to meet me at the bus station with money.”

She looked at his right hand. He had a prosthetic middle finger made of some sort of greyish-blue metal. On the next finger he was wearing a wedding ring. But she had no inclination to let that hand touch her phone.

“Sit down,” she said, then pressed a button and the door closed behind him with a drawn-out hiss.

Harry limped towards the back of the bus. He noticed that the other passengers, or at least those who had overheard his conversation with the driver, averted their gaze. He knew they were praying silently that this slightly disconcerting man who looked like he had come straight from the battlefield wasn’t going to sit down next to them.

He found a free double seat.

He looked out at the forest and landscape gliding past. He looked at his watch, which had confirmed what the advertisements had claimed: it could survive most things, including a waterfall or two. Five minutes to five. He’d be in Oslo just after it got dark. Darkness suited him fine.

Something was sticking into him just beneath his sore rib. He put his hand inside his jacket and moved the barrel of the High Standard pistol he had taken with him from the cabin. He closed his eyes when they passed the lay-by where he had turned the car around before. He felt the bus and his heart rate speed up.

It had come to him in a moment of clarity. The song with the line “We’ll understand it all” hadn’t been a piece of a puzzle, but a door that had swung open in the darkness and shown him the light. Not the whole picture, not the context, but enough for him to know that the story didn’t make sense, that something was missing. Or, to be more accurate, that something had been inserted into it. Enough for him to change his mind and wrench the steering wheel.

He had spent the past twenty-four hours piecing the whole thing together. And he was now reasonably sure that he knew what had happened. It had been relatively easy to imagine how the crime scene could have been manipulated and cleaned by someone with a degree of insight into detection methods. And how the murder weapon with Rakel’s blood had been planted in his record collection, seeing as only two other people had been to his flat since the murder. He just had to prove either the manipulation of the scene or the planting of evidence.

It had been trickier to figure out the motive.

Harry had ransacked his memory for signs, for an explanation. And this morning, when he was lying half awake, half asleep in the bunk bed, when he finally found it — or it found him — he had at first dismissed it as nonsense. That couldn’t be it. He chewed it over. Could it? Could it really be so straightforward that the motive had come out that night he had been lying in bed in Alexandra’s flat?

Sung-min Larsen slipped unseen into a seat at the back of the conference centre in Kripos’s new premises at Nils Hansens vei 25.

In front of him sat an unusually large gathering of journalists and photographers, even though the press conference had been called outside normal working hours. He guessed Ole Winter had made sure someone had leaked the name that had lured them here: Harry Hole. Now Winter was sitting with Landstad — Winter’s latest favourite detective — behind the table on the podium, checking the second hand on his watch. Presumably they wanted to synchronise the start with the news on some television channel or other. Beside Winter and Landstad sat another detective from the team, and the head of the Criminal Forensics Unit, Berna Lien. And, slightly apart from the others, on the far right, sat Katrine Bratt. She looked out of place, and was staring down at some papers in front of her. Sung-min doubted there was anything relevant there, or that she was even reading it.

He saw Ole Winter take a deep breath, literally inflating himself. Winter had swapped his cheap old suit for a new one Sung-min thought he recognised from the Swedish label Tiger. He guessed it had been bought specially after he had conferred with the recently appointed female head of PR, who seemed to have a degree of fashion sense.

“So, welcome to this press conference,” Winter said. “My name is Ole Winter, and as head of the preliminary investigation I’d like to give an account of our work on the murder of Rakel Fauke, in which we have had a number of breakthroughs, and — after a lot of intensive teamwork — are now confident that we have solved.”

Winter should have left a dramatic pause at that point, Sung-min thought, for maximum effect, but the detective ploughed on, and who knows, perhaps that came across as more professional, more credible. You shouldn’t make a spectacle of murder. Sung-min made a mental note, storing it for later use. Because one day he would be the person sitting up there. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it now. He was going to pull that tired, grizzled old monkey down from his perch.

“We hope and believe that this will reassure those directly involved, those around them, and the public in general,” Winter said. “Tragically, it appears that the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fauke’s murder has taken his own life. I shan’t speculate about the motives for that, but obviously we can’t help wondering if it’s connected to the fact that he realised that Kripos were closing in on him.”

Sung-min noted that Winter said “the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fauke’s murder” rather than “the suspect,” “taken his own life” rather than “missing,” and “closing in on” rather than “about to arrest.” And that Winter was churning out speculations in the same sentence as saying he wasn’t going to speculate. Sung-min also noted that a more cautious, professionally sober choice of words would have worked better.

“When I say ‘appears to have taken his own life,’ ” Winter said, “that’s because the person in question is still officially missing. Some of you will be aware that a car drove into the river beside Highway 287 yesterday morning. We can now make public the fact that the car belonged to the suspect, Harry Hole...”

Here Winter didn’t need to leave a dramatic pause, because he was stopped by the loud groans, gasps and exclamations that rose from the crowd of reporters.

Harry was woken by flickering lights and discovered that they were driving through the Lysaker tunnel and would soon be arriving. When they emerged at the other end, Harry noted that, sure enough, it was now dark. The bus climbed to the top of the hill, then headed down towards Sjølyst. He looked down at the armada of small boats in Bestumkilen. OK, not so small. And even if you could afford to buy one of those boats, how much would they cost in administration fees, maintenance and running costs per hour at sea during the mayfly Norwegian boating season? Why not hire a boat on those few decent days instead, then tie up at the end of the day and walk away without any worries? The largely empty bus was quiet, but from the seat in front of him he could hear the insect buzz of music in earphones, and in the gap between the two seats he could see the glow of a screen. They evidently had Wi-Fi on board, because he saw it was showing the news on VG’s website.

He looked out at the boats again. Maybe it wasn’t the number of hours you spent at sea that was the important thing, maybe it was the fact of ownership. The fact that at any hour of the day, you could think that there was a boat out there that was yours. A carefully maintained, expensive boat that you knew people passing by would point at and say your name, say that it was yours. Because of course we aren’t what we do, but what we own. And when we’ve lost everything, we no longer exist. Harry knew where his thoughts were heading, and pulled himself free of them.

He looked at the screen between the seats in front of him. He saw that it must be angled in such a way that it reflected his face, because from where he was sitting it looked like his own ravaged face was filling VG’s website. He looked down at the headline under the reflection.

Harry screwed his eyes shut, both to assure himself he was awake and that he wasn’t seeing things. He read the headline again. Looked at the picture, which wasn’t a reflection, but a photograph taken after the vampirist case.

Harry sat back in his seat and pulled the front of his hat down over his face.

Fuck, fuck.

That picture would be everywhere within the next couple of hours. He’d be recognised in the street, because in the city a limping man in camouflage clothes that were too small for him would be the very opposite of camouflaged. And if he was arrested now, the whole plan would be shot to hell. So the plan needed to change.

Harry tried to think. He couldn’t move about openly, so he would have to get hold of a phone as soon as possible, so he could call the people he needed to talk to. In five or six minutes they would be pulling into the bus station. There was a pedestrian walkway to Central Station. Around the station, in the bustling crowds, among junkies and beggars and the more eccentric elements of the city, he wouldn’t stand out so badly. And, more important, since Telenor had shut down all their public phones in 2016, they had — almost as a curiosity — installed a few old-fashioned coin-operated payphones, one of them at Central Station.

But even if he made it that far, he still had the same problem.

How to get from Oslo to Trondheim.

Without a single krone in his pocket.

“No comment,” Katrine Bratt said. “I can’t comment on that at present.” And: “That’s a question for Kripos.”

Sung-min felt sorry for her as she sat there letting the reporters pepper her with questions. She looked like she was at her own funeral. Was that a good choice of expression, though? What reasons did we really have to assume that death was a worse place? Harry Hole evidently hadn’t thought it was.

Sung-min slipped out from the otherwise-empty row of seats. He had heard enough. Enough to see that Winter had got what he wanted. Enough to see that he might not be able to challenge the alpha male for the foreseeable future. Because this case would strengthen Winter’s position still further, and now that Sung-min had fallen out of favour he would have to ask himself if it was time to seek a transfer to a different club. Katrine Bratt seemed to be the sort of coach he could imagine working for. Working with. He could step into the gap left by Harry Hole. If he was Messi, then Hole had been Maradona. A divinely blessed cheat. And no matter how brightly Messi shone, he would never be as great a legend as Maradona. Because Sung-min knew that even if he faced resistance at the moment, his own story was going to lack the fall from grace, the tragedy of Hole and Maradona. His story was going to be one of boring success.

Kasko was wearing his Oakley sunglasses.

He had pinched them from the windowsill of a coffee bar he had gone in to get one of the paper cups he used to beg for money for gear. The owner of the sunglasses had put them down to study a girl in the street outside the bar. The sun was glinting off the snow outside, so it seemed a bit odd to be taking the sunglasses off. But presumably he wanted the girl to see that he was looking at her. Well, served the idiot right for being full of the joys of spring.

“Idiot!” Kasko groaned loudly to anyone and everyone.

His thighs and buttocks felt numb beneath him. It took its toll, sitting on your arse all day on a hard, stone floor looking like you were suffering. Well, he was suffering. And it was high time he got his evening fix.

“Thanks!” he sang out when a coin fell into the paper cup. It was important to show you were in good spirits.

Kasko had put the sunglasses on because he thought they made him less recognisable. Not that he was frightened of the police, he had told them what he knew. But they hadn’t found and caught David yet, and if David had found out that Kasko had blabbed to the Chinese detective, there was a good chance he was looking for Kasko now. Which was why it made sense to sit here in the crowd in front of the ticket desk at Central Station, where at least no one could threaten to kill you.

And perhaps the mixture of decent spring weather and fewer delays on the trains had put people in a better mood. They had certainly dropped more money than usual into the paper cup in front of him. Even a couple of kids in the emo gang that usually hung around the steps down to Platform 19 had given him a bit of change. The evening fix was as good as sorted; he wouldn’t have to sell the sunglasses tonight.

Kasko noticed a figure in camouflage uniform. Not because he was limping, had a bandage under his hat and generally looked dishevelled, but because he was walking in a way that broke the pattern, he was walking across everyone else, like a predator fish in a shoal of plankton-eaters. To be more precise, he was heading straight for Kasko. Kasko didn’t like that. The people who gave him money were on their way past him, not towards him. Towards him wasn’t good.

The man stopped in front of him.

“Can I borrow a couple of coins from you?” His voice was as rough as Kasko’s.

“Sorry, mate,” Kasko said. “You’ll have to get your own, I’ve only got enough for myself.”

“I only need twenty, thirty kroner.”

Kasko gave a short laugh. “I can see you need medicine but, like I said, so do I.”

The man crouched down beside him. Pulled something from his inside pocket. It was a police ID. Shit, not again. The man in the picture looked vaguely like the man in front of him.

“I am hereby seizing your takings from illegal begging in a public place,” he said, reaching for the cup.

“Like fuck you are!” Kasko yelled, snatching the cup. He clutched it to his chest.

A couple of passersby glanced at them.

“You’re giving that to me,” the man said. “Or I’ll take you down to the station, have you arrested, then there’ll be no fix for you until sometime later on tomorrow. How does a night like that sound?”

“You’re bluffing, you fucking junkie bastard! At a vote in the City Council on 16 December 2016, both primary and subsidiary proposals to ban fundraising in public, including begging, were chucked out.”

“Mm,” the man said, pretending to think this over. He moved closer to Kasko, screening him from people walking past, and whispered: “You’re right. It was a bluff. But this isn’t.”

Kasko stared. The man had put his hand inside his camouflage jacket, and was now holding a pistol aimed at Kasko. A big, noisy fucking pistol in the middle of evening rush hour at Central Station! The guy must be completely fucking deranged. The bandage around his head and a scary fucking scar from his mouth to his ear. Kasko knew all too well what drug cravings could do to otherwise perfectly normal people — he’d only recently seen what an iron bar could do, and here was this guy with a gun. He would have to sell the sunglasses after all.

“Here,” he groaned, giving the guy the paper cup.

“Thanks.” The man took it and looked inside.

“How much for the shades?”

“Huh?”

“The sunglasses.” The man pulled out all the notes that were in the cup and offered them to him. “Is this enough?”

Then he snatched the shades from Kasko, put them on, stood up and limped across the flow of people, towards the old phone box outside the 7-Eleven.

First Harry called his own voicemail, tapped in the code and checked that Kaja Solness hadn’t left a message to suggest she had tried to answer any of his calls. The only message was from a shaken Johan Krohn: “I need to ask you to keep this message between the two of us. Svein Finne is engaged in blackmail. Of me. And my family. I... er, please, get back to me. Thanks.”

He’ll have to call someone else, I’m dead, Harry thought as he watched the coins drop into the phone.

He called directory inquiries. Got the numbers he asked for, making a note of them on the back of his hand.

The first number he called was Alexandra Sturdza’s.

“Harry!”

“Don’t hang up. I’m innocent. Are you at work?”

“Yes, but—”

“How much do they know?”

He heard her hesitate. Heard her make a decision. She gave him a brief summary of her conversation with Sung-min Larsen. She sounded close to tears by the time she finished.

“I know how it looks,” Harry said. “But you have to believe me. Can you do that?”

Silence.

“Alexandra. If I believed I’d killed Rakel, would I have bothered to rise from the dead?”

Still silence. Then a sigh.

“Thanks,” Harry said. “Do you remember that last evening I was at yours?”

“Yes,” she sniffed. “Or no.”

“We were lying on your bed. You asked me to use a condom because you were sure I didn’t want another kid. There was a woman who rang.”

“Oh yes. Kaja. Nasty name.”

“Right,” Harry said. “Now I need to ask you something I’m sure you don’t want to answer.”

“OK?”

Harry asked a yes/no question. He heard Alexandra pause. That was almost enough of an answer. Then she said yes. He had what he needed.

“Thanks. One more thing. Those trousers with blood on them. Can you run an analysis of it?”

“Rakel’s blood?”

“No. I was bleeding from my knuckles, so there’s my blood on the trousers as well, if you remember.”

“Yes.”

“Good. I want you to analyse my blood.”

“Yours? What for?”

Harry explained what he was after.

“That’s going to take a bit of time,” Alexandra said. “Let’s say an hour. Can I call you somewhere?”

Harry thought for a moment. “Send the results by text to Bjørn Holm.”

He gave her Bjørn’s number, then hung up.

Harry fed more money into the phone, noting that the coins were going faster than his words. He needed to be more efficient.

He knew Oleg’s number.

“Yes?” His voice sounded distant. Either because he was a long way away, or because his thoughts were. Possibly both.

“Oleg, it’s me.”

“Dad?”

Harry had to swallow.

“Yes,” Harry said.

“I’m dreaming,” Oleg said. It didn’t sound like a protest, just a sober statement of fact.

“You’re not,” Harry said. “Unless I’m dreaming too.”

“Katrine Bratt said you’d driven into a river.”

“I survived.”

“You tried to kill yourself.”

Harry could hear his stepson’s astonishment start to give way to rising anger.

“Yes,” Harry said. “Because I thought I had killed your mother. But at the last moment I realised that that’s what I was supposed to think.”

“What are you saying?”

“It’s too much to explain now, I haven’t got enough money. I need you to do something for me.”

A pause.

“Oleg?”

“I’m here.”

“The house is yours now, which means you can check the electricity consumption online. It shows the usage from hour to hour.”

“So?”

Harry explained what he needed, and told him to text the results to Bjørn Holm.

When he was done, he took a deep breath and called Kaja Solness’s number.

The phone rang six times. He was about to hang up, and almost jumped when he heard Kaja’s voice.

“Kaja Solness.”

Harry moistened his mouth. “It’s Harry.”

“Harry? I didn’t recognise the number.” She sounded stressed. Talking quickly.

“I tried calling you several times from my own phone,” Harry said.

“Did you? I haven’t checked. I... I have to go. The Red Cross. I’ve had to drop everything, that’s how it is when you’re on standby.”

“Mm. Where are they sending you?”

“To... it’s all happened so quickly that I don’t even remember the name. Earthquake. A small island in the Pacific, a hell of a long journey. That’s why I haven’t called you back, I’ve basically been sitting in a transport plane.”

“Mm. You sound like you’re nearby.”

“Phones are pretty good these days. Listen, I’m in the middle of something. What did you want?”

“I need somewhere to sleep.”

“Your flat?”

“Too risky. I need somewhere to hide.” Harry could see the amount of money left on the phone shrinking. “I can explain later, but I need to find somewhere else fast.”

“Hang on!”

“What?”

A pause.

“Come to mine,” Kaja said. “To my house, I mean. There’s a key under the doormat.”

“I can sleep at Bjørn’s.”

“No! I insist. I want you to go there. Really.”

“OK. Thanks.”

“Great. See you soon. I hope.”

Harry stood there looking in front of him for a few moments after he hung up. He found himself looking at a television screen above the counter of a café that jutted out into the concourse. It showed a clip of him walking into Oslo Courthouse. From the vampirist case, again. Harry quickly turned back towards the phone. Called Bjørn’s number, which he also knew by heart.

“Holm.”

“Harry.”

“No,” Bjørn said. “He’s dead. Who are you?”

“Don’t you believe in ghosts?”

“I said, who are you?”

“I’m the person you gave Road to Ruin to.”

Silence.

“I still like Ramones and Rocket to Russia better,” Harry said. “But it was a bloody good thought.”

Harry heard a noise. It took him a few moments to realise that it was crying. Not a child’s crying. A grown man’s.

“I’m at Central Station,” Harry said, pretending he hadn’t heard. “They’re looking for me, I’ve got a wounded knee, not a single krone to my name, and I need free transport to Lyder Sagens gate.”

Harry heard heavy breathing. A half-stifled “bloody hell” muttered to himself. Then Bjørn Holm said in a voice so thin and shaky it was as if Harry had never heard it before.

“I’m on my own with the lad. Katrine’s at a press conference up at Kripos. But...”

Harry waited.

“I’ll bring the baby, he needs to get used to cars,” Bjørn said. “Shopping centre entrance in twenty?”

“A couple of people have been looking at me a bit too closely, so if you could manage fifteen?”

“I’ll try. Stand by the tax—”

His voice was cut off by a long bleeping tone. Harry looked up. His last coin was gone. He put his hand inside his jacket and stroked his chest and rib.

Harry was standing in the shade outside the north-side entrance to Oslo Central Station when Bjørn’s red Volvo Amazon slid past the armada of waiting taxis and stopped. A couple of the drivers who were standing talking glanced over suspiciously, as if they thought the vintage car was a black-market taxi or, even worse, Uber.

Harry limped over to the car and got in the passenger seat.

“Hello, ghost,” Bjørn whispered from his usual half-lying position. “To Kaja Solness’s?”

“Yes,” Harry said, realising that the whispering was because of the baby carrier that was strapped to the back seat.

They pulled out onto the roundabout next to Spektrum, where Bjørn had persuaded Harry to go to a Hank Williams tribute concert last summer. Then Bjørn had called Harry on the morning of the concert to say he was at the maternity ward, and that things had started a bit earlier than expected. And that he suspected the little kid was eager to get out so he could go with his dad to hear his first Hank Williams songs.

“Does Miss Solness know you’re on your way?” Bjørn asked.

“Yes. She says she’s left a key under the doormat.”

“No one leaves keys under the doormat, Harry.”

“We’ll see.”

They passed beneath Bispelokket and the government buildings. Past the mural of The Scream and Blitz, past Stensberggata where Bjørn and Harry had driven on the way to Harry’s flat early on the night of the murder. When Harry had been so out of it that he wouldn’t have noticed a bomb going off. Now he was concentrating hard, hearing every change in the sound of the engine, every creak of the seats, and — when they stopped at a red light on Sporveisgata close to Fagerborg Church — the child’s almost silent breathing in the back seat.

“You’ll have to tell me, when you think the time is right,” Bjørn Holm said quietly.

“I will,” Harry said, and heard how odd his voice sounded.

They drove through Norabakken and turned into Lyder Sagens gate.

“Here,” Harry said.

Bjørn stopped. Harry didn’t move.

Bjørn waited a bit, then switched the engine off. They looked at the dark house behind the fence.

“What do you see?” Bjørn asked.

Harry shrugged his shoulders. “I see a woman one-metre-seventy-something tall, but everything else about her is bigger than me. Bigger house. More intelligent. Better morals.”

“Are you talking about Kaja Solness, or the usual?”

“The usual?”

“Rakel.”

Harry didn’t answer. He looked up at the black windows behind the bare witches’ fingers of the branches in the hedge. The house was saying nothing. But it didn’t look like it was asleep. It looked like it was holding its breath.

Three short notes. Don Helms’s steel guitar on “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Bjørn pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. “Text message,” he said, and went to put his phone back.

“Open it,” Harry said. “It’s for me.”

Bjørn did as Harry said.

“I don’t know what this is or who it’s from, but it says benzodiazepine and flunitrazepam.”

“Mm. Familiar substances in rape cases.”

“Yes. Rohypnol.”

“Can be injected into a sleeping man, and if the dose is strong enough he’d be out for at least four or five hours. He wouldn’t even notice if he was being bundled about and carried all over the place.”

“Or raped.”

“Quite. But what makes flunitrazepam such an effective drug for rape is of course that it induces amnesia. Total blackout, the victim doesn’t remember a thing about what happened.”

“Which is presumably why it isn’t manufactured anymore.”

“But it’s sold on the street. And someone who’s worked in the police would know where to get hold of it.”

The three notes rang out again.

“Christ, rush hour,” Bjørn said.

“Open this one too.”

There was a whimper from the back seat and Bjørn turned to look at the baby carrier. Then the breathing settled down again and Harry saw the tension leave Bjørn’s body, and his colleague tapped at his phone.

“It says electricity usage went up by 17.5 kilowatts per hour between 20:00 and 24:00 hours. What does that mean?”

“It means that whoever killed Rakel did it at around 20:15.”

“What?”

“Recently I spoke to a guy who pulled the same trick. He ran over and killed a girl when he was drunk, put her in the car and turned up the heat to keep her body temperature up. He wanted to trick the medical officer into thinking she died later than she did, at a time when he didn’t have an illegal amount of alcohol in his blood.”

“I don’t follow you, Harry.”

“The murderer is the first person we see in the recording, the one who arrives on foot. They get to Rakel’s at 20:02, kill her with a knife from the block in the kitchen, turn up the thermostat that all the radiators on the ground floor are connected to, then leave without locking the door. Come to mine later, where I’m still so out of it I don’t notice myself being dosed up with Rohypnol. The killer plants the murder weapon between the records on my shelves, finds the keys to the Ford Escort, drives me to the scene and carries me inside. That’s why it takes so long on the video, and looks like a fat person, or someone with their coat hanging down as they go inside, hunched over. The killer is carrying me like a rucksack. ‘The way we carry anyone who’s fallen,’ as Bohr said they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I was put down in the pool of blood beside Rakel and left to my own devices.”

“Bloody hell.” Bjørn scratched his red beard. “But we don’t see anyone leaving the scene.”

“Because the perpetrator knew I’d be convinced I’d killed Rakel when I woke up. Which meant I’d have to find both sets of keys inside the house, with the door locked from the inside. Which would lead me to conclude that no one but me could have committed the murder.”

“A variation on the locked-room mystery?”

“Exactly.”

“So...?”

“After the murderer put me down beside Rakel, they locked the door from the inside and left the scene through one of the basement windows. That’s the only one without bars. They don’t know about the wildlife camera, but they’re lucky. The camera is activated by movement, but nothing shows up because the murderer is moving through total darkness on the far side of the drive when they leave the scene. We assumed it must have been a cat or a bird and didn’t really pay it much thought.”

“You mean it was all just... to fuck with you?”

“Manipulated into thinking I’d killed the woman I loved.”

“Christ, that’s worse than the most brutal death sentence, that’s just torture. Why...?”

“Because that’s exactly what it was. A punishment.”

“Punishment? For what?”

“For my betrayal. I realised that when I was about to kill myself and turned the radio on. ‘Farther along we’ll know more about it...’ ”

“ ‘Farther along we’ll understand why,’ ” Bjørn said, nodding slowly.

“ ‘Cheer up, my brother,’ ” Harry said. “ ‘Live in the sunshine. We’ll understand it all by and by.’ ”

“Beautiful,” Bjørn said. “A lot of people think that’s a Hank Williams song, but it was actually one of the few cover versions he ever recorded.”

Harry took out the pistol. He saw Bjørn shuffle uncomfortably in his seat.

“It’s unregistered,” Harry said as he screwed the silencer onto the barrel. “It was acquired for E14, a disbanded intelligence unit. Can’t be traced to anyone.”

“Are you thinking of...” — Bjørn nodded nervously towards Kaja’s house — “using that?”

“No,” Harry said, handing the pistol to his colleague. “I’m going in without it.”

“Why are you giving it to me?”

Harry looked at Bjørn for a long time.

“Because you killed Rakel.”

49

“When you called Øystein at the Jealousy Bar early on the night of the murder and found out that I was there, you realised I was going to be there for a while,” Harry said.

Bjørn was clutching the pistol as he stared at Harry.

“So you drove to Holmenkollen. Parked the Amazon a little way away so the neighbours or other witnesses wouldn’t see and remember the unusual car. You walked to Rakel’s house. Rang the bell. She opened the door, saw it was you, and obviously let you in. At the time you didn’t know you were being recorded by a wildlife camera, of course. Back then, all you knew was that everything was in place. There were no witnesses, nothing unforeseen had happened, the block of knives was standing where it had been the last time you visited us, when I was still living there. And I was sitting in the Jealousy Bar drinking. You grabbed the knife from the block and killed her. Efficiently and without any pleasure, you’re not a sadist. But brutally enough for me to know that she had suffered. When she was dead, you turned up the thermostat, took the knife, drove to the Jealousy, put Rohypnol in my drink while I was busy fighting with Ringdal. You bundled me into your car and drove home with me. Rohypnol works fast, I was well away by the time you parked next to the Escort in the car park behind my building. You found the keys to my flat in my pocket, pressed my hand round the knife so it had my fingerprints on it, then planted it in my flat between The Rainmakers and the Ramones, in the right place for Rakel. You searched until you found the car keys. On your way down the stairs you bumped into Gule, on his way home from work. That wasn’t part of the plan, but you improvised well. Told him you’d put me to bed and were on your way home. Back in the car park you moved me from the Amazon to the Escort, then drove it up to Rakel’s. You managed to get me out, but it took a bit of time. You carried me on your back up the steps, in through the unlocked door, and put me down in the pool of blood beside Rakel. You cleaned the scene of any evidence that you’d been there, then left the house through the basement window. Obviously the window catch couldn’t be fastened from the outside. But you’d thought about that too. I’m guessing you walked home from there. Down Holmenkollveien. Sørkedalsveien to Majorstua, maybe. Avoiding anywhere with security cameras, taxis that would need paying by card, anything that could be traced. Then you just had to wait, keeping your TETRA terminal nearby, following developments. That was why you — even though you were on paternity leave — were one of the first on the scene when there was a report that a woman’s body had been found at Rakel’s address. And you took charge. You went around the house looking for possible escape routes, something the others hadn’t thought to do seeing as the main entrance had been open when they found Rakel. You went down into the basement, put the catch back on the window, then went up into the attic for appearance’s sake, then came back and said everything was locked up. Any objections so far?”

Bjørn Holm didn’t answer. He was sitting slouched in his seat, his glassy eyes looking in Harry’s direction, but apparently unable to focus.

“You thought you were home and dry. That you’d committed the perfect crime. No one could accuse you of not being ambitious. Obviously things got a bit tricky when you realised my brain had suppressed the fact that I’d woken up in Rakel’s house. Suppressed the fact that I was convinced I must have killed her seeing as the door was locked from the inside. Suppressed the fact that I had removed any evidence that I had been there, taken down the wildlife camera and thrown the memory card away. I couldn’t remember anything. But that wasn’t going to save me. You’d hidden the murder weapon in my flat as insurance. Insurance that if I didn’t recognise my own guilt and punish myself enough, if it looked like I was going to escape, you could discreetly arrange for the police to get a search warrant and find the knife. But when you realised I couldn’t remember anything, you made sure I found the knife you’d planted. You wanted me to become my own torturer. So you gave me a new record and you knew exactly where in my record collection I’d put it, seeing as you know my system. The Ramones’ Road to Ruin was precisely that. I dare-say you didn’t take any perverse pleasure from giving it to me at the funeral, but...” Harry shrugged. “That’s what you did. And I found the knife. And I began to remember.”

Bjørn’s mouth opened and closed.

“But then a couple of real flies appeared in the ointment,” Harry said. “I found the memory card containing the recordings from the wildlife camera. You realised there was a serious danger that you could be identified and uncovered. You asked if the contents had been copied before you told me to hand the card over to you. I thought you were asking because it would be easier to send the contents by Dropbox. But you just wanted to make sure that you were getting the only copy in existence, and could destroy or modify the recordings so that you couldn’t be recognised. When, to your relief, you saw that the recordings didn’t reveal much, you sent the card on to a 3-D expert, but without your name being involved. In hindsight it’s easy to see that I should have asked myself why you didn’t just ask me to send it straight to him in the first place.”

Harry looked at the pistol. Bjørn wasn’t holding it by the handle with his finger on the trigger, but by the trigger guard, like it was a piece of evidence that he didn’t want to leave any fingerprints on.

“Have you...” Bjørn’s voice sounded like a sleepwalker’s, as if his mouth were full of cotton wool. “Have you got some sort of recording device?”

Harry shook his head.

“Not that it matters,” Bjørn said with a resigned smile. “How... how did you figure it out?”

“The thing that always bound us together, Bjørn. Music.”

“Music?”

“Just before I drove into the truck, I turned the radio on and heard Hank Williams and those violins. It should have been playing hard rock. Someone had changed the channel. Someone other than me had used the car. And when I was in the river I realised something else, that there was something about the seat. It wasn’t until I got to Bohr’s cabin that I had time to figure it out. It was the first time I got in the car after Rakel’s death, when I was about to drive to the old bunkers in Nordstrand. I felt it then as well, that something wasn’t right. I even bit my false finger, the way I do when I can’t quite remember something. Now I know it was the back of the seat. When I got in the car, I had to adjust it, raise it. Sometimes I had to adjust it when Rakel and I were sharing the car, but why would I have to adjust the seat of a car that no one but me drives? And who do I know who has the seat pushed so far back that he’s almost lying down?”

Bjørn didn’t answer. There was that same, distant look in his eyes, as if he were listening to something going on inside his own head.

Bjørn Holm looked at Harry, saw his mouth move, registered the words, but they didn’t sound the way they ought to. He felt almost like he was drunk, watching a film, was underwater. But this was happening, it was real, only there was a filter over it, as if it didn’t really concern him. Not anymore.

He had known it ever since he heard dead Harry’s voice on the phone. That he had been found out. And that it was a relief. Yes, it was. Because if it had been torture for Harry to think he had killed Rakel, it had been hell for Bjørn. Because he not only thought, but knew he had killed Rakel. And he remembered almost every detail of the murder, reliving it practically every moment, without pause, like a monotonous, throbbing bass drum against his temple. And with each beat came the same shock: no, it isn’t a dream, I did it! I did what I dreamed about, what I planned, what I was convinced would somehow bring balance back to a world that’s spun out of control. Killing what Harry Hole loved more than anything, the way Harry had killed — ruined — the only thing Bjørn cherished.

Of course Bjørn had been aware that Katrine was attracted to Harry; no one who had worked closely with the pair of them could have failed to notice. She hadn’t denied it, but claimed she and Harry had never got it together, had never so much as kissed each other. And Bjørn had believed her. Because he was naive? Maybe. But primarily because he wanted to believe her. Besides, that was all a long time ago, and now she was with Bjørn. Or so he had thought.

When was the first time he had suspected anything?

Was it when he had suggested to Katrine that Harry should be one of the baby’s godparents and she had rejected the idea out of hand? She had no better explanation than the fact that Harry was an unstable person who she didn’t want having any responsibility for little Gert’s upbringing. As if the role of godparent was anything but a gesture from the parents to a friend or relative. And she had hardly any relatives, and Harry was one of the few friends they had in common.

But Harry and Rakel had come to the christening as ordinary guests. And Harry had been the same as usual, had stood in a corner, talking without any enthusiasm to anyone who went over to him, glancing at the time and looking at regular intervals at Rakel, who was deep in conversation with different people, and every half an hour he signalled to Bjørn that he was going outside for a cigarette. It was Rakel who had reinforced Bjørn’s suspicions. He had seen her face twitch when she saw the baby, heard the slight tremble in her voice when she dutifully told the parents what a miraculous child they had produced. And, not least, the pained look on her face when Katrine had passed the baby to her to hold while she sorted something out. He had seen Rakel turn her back on Harry so that he couldn’t see her or the child’s faces.

Three weeks later he had the answer.

He had used a cotton bud to take a sample of the child’s saliva. He’d sent it to the Forensic Medical Institute, without specifying which case it related to, just that it was a DNA test subject to the usual oath of confidentiality covering paternity tests. He had been sitting in his office in the Criminal Forensics Unit in Bryn when he read the results that showed there was no way he could be Gert’s father. But the woman he had spoken to, the new Romanian one, said they’d found a match with someone else in the database. The father was Harry Hole.

Rakel had known. Katrine knew, of course. Harry too. Maybe not Harry, actually. He wasn’t a good actor. Just a betrayer. A false friend.

The three of them against him. Of those three, there was only one he couldn’t live without. Katrine.

Could Katrine live without him?

Of course she could.

Because what was Bjørn? A plump, pale, harmless forensics expert who knew a bit too much about music and film, and who in a few years would be an overweight, pale, harmless forensics expert who knew even more about music and film. Who at some point had swapped his Rasta hat for a flat cap and had bought plenty of flannel shirts. Who had been convinced that these were personal choices, things that said something about personal development, about an awareness that only he had reached, because of course we’re all special. Right up until he looked around at a Bon Iver concert and saw a thousand copies of himself, and realised that he belonged to a group, a group of people who more than any other — at least in theory — hate everything about belonging to a group. He was a hipster.

As a hipster he hated hipsters, and especially male hipsters. There was something insubstantial, unmanly, about that dreamy, idealistic striving for the natural, the original, the authentic; about a hipster trying to look like a lumberjack who lived in a log cabin and grew and shot his own food, but who was still an overprotected little boy who thought modern life, quite rightly, had stripped away all his masculinity, leaving him with a feeling of being helpless. Bjørn had this suspicion about himself confirmed during a Christmas party with his old schoolmates back home in Toten, when Endre, the cocky headmaster’s son, who was studying sociology in Boston, had called Bjørn a typical “hipster loser.” Endre had brushed his thick black fringe back with a smile and quoted Mark Greif, who had written an article in the New York Times saying that hipsters compensated for their lack of social and career achievements by trying to claim cultural superiority.

“And that’s where we have you, Bjørn, an employee of the state in your mid-thirties, in the same job you were in ten years ago, thinking that as long as you have long hair and farmer’s clothes that look like they were bought second-hand from the Salvation Army, you can still rise above the younger, short-haired, straighter colleagues who passed you by on the career ladder years ago.”

Endre had said this in a single long sentence without pausing for breath, and Bjørn had listened and thought: Is this true, is this what defines me? Was this what he, a farmer’s son, had fled the rolling fields of Toten to become? A feminised, militant conformist and loser? A failed, backward-looking police officer looking for an image to contradict that? Who used his roots — a quirky old car, Elvis and old country-music heroes, fifties hairstyles, snakeskin boots and his dialect — to trace a line back to something authentic, down to earth, but that was about as honest as the politician from west Oslo who takes off his tie, rolls up his shirtsleeves and says “gonna” and “gotta” as many times as he can when making election speeches in factories.

Maybe. Or, if that wasn’t the whole truth, perhaps it was part of it. But did it define him? No. Just as little as the fact that he had red hair defined him. What defined him was that he was a damn good forensics officer. And one other thing.

“Maybe you’re right,” Bjørn had replied when Endre paused for breath. “Maybe I am a pathetic loser. But I’m nice to people. And you’re not.”

“What the hell, Bjørn, are you upset?” Endre had laughed, putting a comradely, sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and smiling conspiratorially at the onlookers, as if this were a game they were all playing, one where Bjørn hadn’t understood the rules. OK, Bjørn may have drunk one glass too many of the moonshine they were serving for reasons of nostalgia rather than cost, but he had felt it then, just for a moment, had felt what he might be capable of. That he could have planted a fist in the middle of Endre’s sociological smirk, broken his nose and seen the fear in his eyes. Bjørn had never got into fights when he was growing up. Not once. So he’d known nothing about fighting before he started at Police College, where he had learned a thing or two about close combat. Such as the fact that the surest way to win a fight is to strike first and with maximum aggression, which effectively brings nine out of ten fights to an immediate conclusion. He knew that, he wanted to do it, but could he? What was his threshold for resorting to violence? He didn’t know, he had never been in a situation in which violence had looked like an adequate solution to the problem. Which it wasn’t now either, of course. Endre posed no physical threat, and all a fight would accomplish was a scandal and possibly being reported to the police. So why had he wanted to do it so badly: to feel the other man’s face under his knuckles, hear the dead sound of bone against flesh, see the blood spray from his nose, see the fear on Endre’s face?

When Bjørn went to bed in his boyhood bedroom that night he hadn’t been able to sleep. Why hadn’t he done anything? Why had he merely muttered “No, ’course not, I’m not upset,” waited for Endre to take his hand off his shoulder, mumbled something about needing another drink, then found some other people to talk to before leaving the party shortly afterwards? Those insults would have been the real cause. The moonshine could have been used as an excuse for getting into a fight at a party; that would have been acceptable in Toten. And it would have ended with one punch. Endre wasn’t a fighter. And if he had hit back, everyone would have cheered for him, for Bjørn. Because Endre was a wanker, he always had been. And everyone loved Bjørn, they always had. Not that it had been much help to him growing up.

In Year 9, Bjørn had finally manned up and asked Brita if she wanted to go to the local cinema in Skreia. The manager of the cinema had taken the astonishing decision to show Led Zeppelin’s filmed concert, The Song Remains the Same. Fifteen years after it was released, admittedly, but that didn’t bother Bjørn. He had gone looking for Brita and eventually found her behind the girls’ toilet. She was standing there crying, and sobbed to Bjørn that she had let Endre sleep with her at the weekend. Then, during break, her best friend had told her that she and Endre were now together. Bjørn had comforted Brita as best he could, then, without much preamble, asked if she’d like to go to the cinema with him. She had just stared at him and asked if he’d heard what she’d just said. Bjørn said he had, but that he liked both Brita and Led Zeppelin. At first she snorted “no,” but then she seemed to have a moment of clarity and said she’d like to go. When they were sitting in the cinema it turned out that Brita had asked her best friend and Endre to go as well. Brita had kissed Bjørn during the film, first during “Dazed and Confused,” then in the middle of Jimmy Page’s guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven,” thereby sending Bjørn a fair way up those stairs. Nonetheless, when they were alone again and he had walked her home from the cinema, there hadn’t been any more kissing, just a short “goodnight.” One week later, Endre broke up with the best friend and got back together with Brita.

Bjørn had carried these things inside him, of course he had. The betrayal he should have seen coming, the punch that hadn’t come. And that nonexistent punch had somehow confirmed what Endre had said about him, that the only thing that was worse than the shame of not being a man was the fear of being a man.

Was there a clear thread between then and now? Was there a causal connection, was this explosion of rage something that had built up and just needed a fresh humiliation to detonate it? Was the murder somehow the punch he hadn’t managed to land on Endre?

The humiliation. It had been like a pendulum. The prouder he felt at being a father, the greater the humiliation when he had realised the child wasn’t his. The pride when his parents and two sisters had visited mother, baby and father in hospital and Bjørn had seen the delight on their faces. His sisters who were now aunts, his parents now grandparents. Not that they weren’t already, Bjørn was the youngest and the last to get started, but even so. He realised that they hadn’t been sure it would ever happen for him. His mother hadn’t thought that bachelor style of his had boded well. And they loved Katrine. There had been a slightly strained atmosphere during their first visits to Toten, when Katrine’s direct, chatty Bergen attitude had come up against Toten’s restrained, taciturn understatement. But Katrine and his parents had met each other halfway, and during the first Christmas lunch at the farm, when Katrine came downstairs after making a real effort to look nice, Bjørn’s mother had nudged him in the side and looked at him with a mixture of admiration and astonishment, a look that seemed to ask: How did you manage to catch that?

Yes, he had been proud. Far too proud. Perhaps she had noticed too. And this pride, which was so hard to hide, may in the end have prompted her to ask herself the same question: How did he manage to catch me? And she had left him. Though that wasn’t how he described it to himself — he thought of it as a pause, a temporary break in their relationship, caused by a bout of claustrophobia. Anything else was unthinkable. And eventually she had come back. It happened a few weeks later, maybe a couple of months, he didn’t really remember, he had suppressed that whole period, but it was just after they thought they’d solved the vampirist case. Katrine had fallen pregnant at once. It was as if she had emerged from sexual hibernation, and Bjørn found himself thinking that perhaps the break hadn’t been such a bad thing, that perhaps people needed a break from each other from time to time to realise what they had together. A child conceived in the joy of reconciliation. That was how he had seen it. And he had travelled around Toten with their child, showing him off to family, friends, ever more distant relatives, showing him off like a trophy, proof of his manhood to anyone who had doubted him. It had been stupid, but everyone’s allowed to be stupid once or twice in their life.

And then the humiliation.

It had been unbearable. It was like sitting on a plane during takeoff or landing on the occasions when the narrow passageways inside his ear and nose didn’t manage to even out the pressure and he was sure his head was going to explode, had wanted it to explode, anything to escape the pain that just kept getting worse, even when you thought it must have reached its apex. And sent you mad. Willing to jump out of the plane, shoot yourself in the head. An equation with only one variable: pain. And with death as the only liberating common denominator. Your death, other people’s deaths. In his confusion he had thought that his pain — like the difference in pressure — could be evened out by the pain of others. Of Harry Hole.

He had been wrong.

Killing Rakel had been easier than he’d thought. Possibly because he had been planning it for so long, had worked out his game plan, as sportsmen would say. He had gone through it in his mind so many times that when he was actually there and it was about to happen in real life, it had felt almost as if he was still only in his thoughts, looking on from the outside. As Harry said, he had walked down Holmenkollveien, but not towards Sørkedalsveien. Instead he had turned left, into Stasjonsveien, then Bjørnveien, before weaving through smaller streets towards Vinderen, where a pedestrian would be less conspicuous. He had slept well the first night, didn’t even wake up when Gert, according to Katrine, had cried hysterically from five o’clock in the morning. Exhaustion, presumably. The second night he didn’t sleep as well. But it wasn’t until Monday, when he saw Harry at the crime scene, that what he had done began to sink in. Seeing Harry had been like watching a church going up in flames. Bjørn thought back to the footage of Fantoft Stave Church burning in 1992, a fire started by a Satanist at six o’clock in the morning, on the sixth day of the sixth month. There was often an element of beauty to catastrophes, something that meant you couldn’t take your eyes off them. As the walls and roof burned, the skeleton of the church, its true form and personality emerged, naked, unadorned. He had watched the same thing happen to Harry in the days that followed Rakel’s death. And he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Harry was stripped back to his true, pitiful self. He, Bjørn, had become a pyromaniac, fascinated by the spectacle of his destruction. But as he looked on, he suffered. He too was burning. Had he known that would happen from the start? Had he consciously poured the last remnants of the petrol over himself, and stood so close to Harry that he too would be consumed when the church burned? Or had he believed that Harry and Rakel would disappear, and that he would live on, move on with his family, make it his, become whole again?

Whole.

They had rebuilt Fantoft Church. It was possible. Bjørn took a deep, trembling breath.

“You know all this is just your imagination, Harry? A radio station and the adjustment of a car seat, that’s all you’ve got. Anyone could have drugged you. With your history of substance abuse it isn’t even implausible that you did it yourself. You have absolutely no evidence.”

“Are you sure? What about the married couple who say they saw a large man walking down Holmenkollveien at quarter to midnight?”

Bjørn shook his head. “They weren’t able to give a description. And seeing pictures of me wouldn’t prompt their memory, because the man they saw was wearing a false black beard, glasses, and limped whenever anyone could see him.”

“Mm. OK.”

“OK?”

Harry nodded slowly. “If you’re confident you haven’t left any evidence, then OK.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“There aren’t that many people who need to know.”

Bjørn stared at Harry. There was nothing triumphant in his eyes. No trace of hatred towards the man who had killed his beloved. All Bjørn could see in those blank eyes was vulnerability. Nakedness. Something approaching sympathy.

Bjørn looked down at the pistol Harry had given him. He had realised now.

They would know. Harry. Katrine. That was enough. Enough to make it impossible to go on. But if it stopped here, if Bjørn put a stop to it here, no one else would have to know. His colleagues. His family and friends in Toten. And, most important of all, the boy.

Bjørn swallowed. “You promise?”

“I promise,” Harry said.

Bjørn nodded. He almost smiled at the thought that he would finally get what he had wanted. That his head would explode.

“I’m going now,” Harry said.

Bjørn nodded towards the back seat. “Will you... will you take the lad with you? He’s yours.”

“He’s yours and Katrine’s,” Harry said. “But yes, I know I’m his father. And that no one who isn’t under an oath of confidentiality knows. And that’s how it will stay.”

Bjørn fixed his eyes ahead of him.

There was a nice place in Toten, a ridge from which the fields looked like a rolling yellow sea on a moonlit spring night. Where a young guy with a driving license could sit in a car and kiss a girl. Or sit alone with a sob in his throat and dream about one.

“If no one knows, how did you find out?” Bjørn asked, without any real interest in the answer, just to delay his departure for a few more seconds.

“Deduction,” Harry Hole said.

Bjørn Holm smiled tiredly. “Of course.”

Harry got out, unfastened the baby carrier from the back seat and lifted it out. He looked down at the sleeping child. Unsuspecting. All the things we don’t know. All the things we will be spared. The simple sentence Alexandra had uttered that night when Harry declined the condom she offered him.

You don’t want another kid, do you?

Another kid? Alexandra knew perfectly well that Oleg wasn’t his biological son.

Another kid? She knew something, something he didn’t know.

Another kid. A slip of the tongue, a simple mistake. In the eighties, psychologist Daniel Wegner claimed that the subconscious constantly makes sure we don’t blurt out things we want to keep secret. But that when the secret pops up from the subconscious, it informs the conscious part of the brain and forces it to think about it. And from then on it’s only a matter of time before the truth slips out by mistake.

Another kid. Alexandra had checked the cotton bud Bjørn had sent in against the database. Where the DNA profiles of all police officers who worked at crime scenes were stored, so that there would be no confusion if they messed up and left their own DNA at the scene. So not only did she have Bjørn’s DNA and could rule out the possibility that he was the father — she had both parents’ DNA, and could see that there were two matches: Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole. That was the secret that her oath of confidentiality prevented her from telling anyone except the person who had requested the analysis, Bjørn Holm.

The night Harry had sex, or at least some form of intercourse, with Katrine Bratt, he had been so drunk that he didn’t remember anything. Or, more accurately, he remembered something, but thought it was something he’d dreamed. But then he started to suspect when he noticed that Katrine was avoiding him. And when Gunnar Hagen — rather than Harry — was asked to be the child’s godfather, even though Harry was obviously a much closer friend of both Katrine and Bjørn. No, he hadn’t been able to rule out the possibility that something had happened that night, something that had ruined things between him and Katrine. The way it had ruined things between him and Rakel when, after the christening, just before Christmas, she had turned his life upside down by asking him if he had had sex with Katrine in the past year. And he hadn’t had the sense to deny it.

Harry remembered his own confusion after she had thrown him out and he was sitting on his hotel bed with a bag containing a few clothes and toiletries. He and Rakel were, after all, both adults with realistic expectations, they loved each other with all their faults and idiosyncrasies, they were good together. So why would she throw all that away because of a simple mistake, something that had happened and was over, which had no consequences for the future? He knew Rakel, and it didn’t make sense.

That was when he figured out what Rakel had already figured out but hadn’t told him. That that night had had consequences, that Katrine’s child was Harry’s, not Bjørn’s. When had she first suspected? At the christening, maybe, when she saw the baby. But why hadn’t Rakel told him, why had she kept it to herself? Simple. Because the truth would help no one, it would just ruin things for even more people than it had already: Rakel herself. But that wasn’t something Rakel could live with. The fact that the man she shared her bed, her life with — but with whom she didn’t have a child — had a child, one that was living among them, one they would have to see.

The sower. Svein Finne’s words on the recording from outside the Catholic church had been echoing through Harry’s head during the past day, like an echo that wouldn’t fade. Because I am the sower. No. It was him, Harry, who was the sower.

He watched as Bjørn turned the key in the ignition and turned the radio on in the same automatic movement. The engine started, then settled into its rhythm, rumbling good-naturedly in neutral. And through the gap at the top of the passenger window, Rickie Lee Jones’s voice floated above Lyle Lovett’s on “North Dakota.” The car slipped into gear and slowly drove away. Harry watched it go. Bjørn, who couldn’t drive without listening to country music. Like gin and tonic. Not even when Harry was lying drugged in the seat beside him and they were on their way to Rakel’s. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange. Bjørn had probably wanted company. Because he could never have felt so alone as he did then. Not even now, Harry thought. Because he had seen it in Bjørn’s eyes before the car drove off. Relief.

50

Johan Krohn opened his eyes. Looked at the time. Five past six. He thought his ears must be mistaken and rolled over to go back to sleep, but then he heard it again. The doorbell downstairs.

“Who’s that?” Frida murmured sleepily beside him.

That, Johan Krohn thought, is the devil himself coming to claim his due. Finne had given him forty-eight hours to leave his response by the gravestone, and that didn’t expire until that evening. But there was no one else who rang doorbells anymore. If there was a murder and they needed a defense lawyer straightaway, they phoned. If there was a crisis at work, they phoned. Even the neighbours phoned if they wanted something.

“It’s probably to do with work,” he said. “Go back to sleep, darling, I’ll go and answer.”

Krohn closed his eyes for a moment and tried to take deep, calm breaths. He hadn’t slept well, had just stared into the darkness all night as his brain chewed over the same question: How on earth was he going to stop Svein Finne?

He, the master tactician of the courtroom, hadn’t managed to come up with an answer.

If he arranged for Finne to get Alise to himself, he would be making himself an accomplice to a crime. Which was bad enough in itself, both for Alise and for him. And if he made himself an accomplice, that would only give Finne an even stronger hand when — and there was no question that it would be when — he showed up with more demands. Unless he could somehow persuade Alise to have sex with Finne, of course, so that it was voluntary. Was that a possibility? And what would he have to promise Alise in return? No, no, it was an impossible idea, as impossible as the one Frida had spontaneously suggested as a way of solving the problem in the fictitious case: hiring a hitman to get rid of Finne.

Should he confess his misdemeanour to Frida instead? A confession. The truth. Atonement. The thought was liberating. But it was no more than a brief, soothing puff of wind under the blazing sun in a desert with an unbroken horizon of hopelessness. She would leave him, he knew that. The firm, the courtroom victories, the newspaper articles, his reputation, the admiring glances, the parties, the women, the offers, to hell with all that. Frida and the children, they were all he had, they always had been. And when Frida was alone, when she was no longer his, hadn’t Finne more or less said straight out that she would be open game, that he would take her? If you looked at it like that, didn’t he have a moral obligation to bear his heavy secret alone and make sure that Frida didn’t leave him, for her own safety’s sake? Which in turn meant that he would have to let Finne have Alise, and the next time Finne... Oh, it was a fiendish Gordian knot! He needed a sword. But he had no sword, just a pen and a babbling mouth.

He swung his legs out of bed and put them into his slippers.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said. As much to himself as Frida.

He went downstairs and through the hall towards the oak door.

And knew that when he opened it, he needed to have his answer ready for Finne.

I’ll say no, Johan Krohn thought. And then he’ll shoot me. Fine.

Then he remembered that Finne used a knife and changed his mind.

A knife.

He cut his victims open.

And he didn’t kill them, he just wounded them. Like a landmine. Mutilated them for the rest of their life, a life they had to live even when death would be preferable. On the terrace Finne had claimed to have raped a young girl from Huseby. The bishop’s daughter. Had that been a subtle threat against his own children? Finne hadn’t been risking anything by admitting the rape. Not only because Krohn was his lawyer, but because the case must have passed the statute of limitations. Krohn couldn’t remember any rape case, but he did remember Bishop Bohr, who people said died of grief because his daughter had drowned herself in a river. Was he going to let himself be terrorised by someone who had made it his life’s work to ruin other people’s? Johan Krohn had always managed to find a socially defensible, professional and occasionally also an emotional justification to fight tooth and nail for his clients. But now he gave up. He detested the man standing on the other side of the door. He wished with all his heart, as well as all his brain, that the pestilential, ruinous Svein Finne might die a soon and not necessarily painless death. Even if it meant that he got dragged down with him.

“No,” Krohn muttered to himself. “I’m saying no, you fucking bastard.”

He was still wondering about whether or not to swear as he opened the door.

He stared speechless at the man in front of him, who was looking him up and down. He felt the biting morning chill against his naked, scrawny body and realised that he hadn’t put his dressing gown on, and was standing there wearing nothing but the boxer shorts Frida gave him every Christmas, and the slippers the children had given him. Krohn had to clear his throat before he could make a sound: “Harry Hole? But aren’t you...”

The policeman, if it was him, shook his head and gave him a wry smile. “Dead? Not quite. But I need a bloody good lawyer. And I’ve heard that you could do with some help too.”