Killing Moon

19 Tuesday

Chimes

Katrine was listening to Sung-min.

Closing her eyes, she pictured the crime scene while he spoke. Answered that, no, she didn’t need to see it herself, she would dispatch a couple of detectives, then study photos of the scene. And, yes, she apologised for not being available by phone. She had switched it off while putting the child to bed and must have performed a very good rendition of ‘Blueman’, because she had fallen asleep too.

‘Maybe you’re working too hard,’ Sung-min said.

‘You can scratch maybe,’ Katrine said. ‘But that goes for all of us. Let’s call a press conference for tomorrow at ten. I’ll get Forensics to prioritise this.’

‘All right. Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight, Sung-min.’

Katrine rang off and sat staring at the phone.

Bertine Bertilsen was dead. That was as expected. Now she had been found. That was as hoped. The place and way she had been found confirmed the suspicion that it was the same killer. That was as feared. Because that meant there might be more murders.

Katrine heard a whimper from behind the open door to his bedroom. She told herself she would stay sitting where she was listening for more, but wasn’t able, stood up from the kitchen chair and tiptoed over to the doorway. It was quiet in there, just the sound of Gert’s steady slumberous breathing. She had lied to Sung-min. She had read that on average we hear two hundred lies every day, most of them white fortunately, the sort that keep the social wheels turning. This had been one of them. It was true she had switched off the phone to put the child to bed, but not about falling asleep herself. She hadn’t switched it back on because Arne usually called right after Gert’s bedtime, knowing that was when he would catch her. That was nice, of course it was. After all, he just wanted to hear how her day had been. Listen to her small joys and petty frustrations. Lately — with the missing girls — she had been mostly sharing her frustrations, naturally enough. But he had listened patiently, asked follow-up questions that showed he was interested, did everything a good, supportive friend and potential boyfriend should do. It was just that tonight she really wasn’t in the mood, she needed to be alone with her thoughts. Had decided to serve up the same white lie about having fallen asleep when Arne asked tomorrow. She had been thinking about Harry and Gert. How she was going to solve it. Because she had seen it in Harry’s eyes, the same helpless love she had seen in Bjørn’s when they looked at their son. Bjørn’s son and Harry’s son. How much should and could she include Harry in things? For herself, she wanted to have as little as possible to do with Harry and Harry’s life. But what about Gert? What right did she have to take yet another father from him? Hadn’t she herself had an unstable drunkard for a father, one she had loved in her own way and would not have been without?

She had switched the mobile back on before going to bed, hoping there wouldn’t be any messages. But there were two. The first, from Arne, was a declaration of love of the kind the younger generation obviously had a lower threshold for:

Katrine Bratt, you are the Woman, and I am the Man who loves you. Goodnight.

She saw it had been sent recently and that he hadn’t actually tried to call her while the phone was off, so he had probably been busy with something.

The other was from Sung-min and conformed to a style she was more familiar with:

Bertine found. Call me.

Katrine went into the bathroom and picked up her toothbrush. Looked in the mirror. You are the Woman, yeah, right. But OK, on a good day it might be warranted. She squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube. Her thoughts returned to Bertine Bertilsen and Susanne Andersen. And the woman — without a name yet — who might be the next in line.

Sung-min was giving his tweed jacket the once-over with a clothes brush. It was a waterproof Alan Paine hunting jacket, which Chris had given him for Christmas. After his conversation with Katrine, he had tapped in a text to him to say goodnight. It had bothered him in the beginning that he was always the one sending goodnight messages while Chris just responded. But it was fine now, that was just how Chris was, he needed to believe he had the upper hand in the relationship. But Sung-min knew that if he skipped texting one night, Chris would be a drama queen on the phone the very next day, nagging about something being wrong, about Sung-min having met someone else or losing interest.

Sung-min watched the pine needles fall to the floor. Yawned. Knew he would sleep. That he wouldn’t have any nightmares about what he had experienced tonight. He never did. He wasn’t quite sure what that said about his personality. A colleague at Kripos said this ability he had to shut off indicated a lack of empathy and had compared him to Harry Hole, who apparently suffered from something they called parosmia, a defect hindering the brain from registering the smell of human remains that meant Hole remained unaffected at crime scenes where other people’s stomachs were turning. But Sung-min didn’t regard himself as having any defect, he merely believed he had a healthy ability to compartmentalise, to keep his private and professional worlds away from each other. He brushed at the pockets sewn to the outside of the jacket, noticed there was something inside one of them and took it out. It was the empty Hillman Pets bag. He was about to throw it in the bin when he remembered that when Kasparov had got another bout of worms, the vet had recommended a different anti-parasitic cure because Hillman Pets contained a substance now prohibited to import and sell in Norway. That had to have been at least four years ago. Sung-min turned the bag around, examining it until he found what he was looking for. The best-before date and the date of manufacture.

The bag was marked as produced last year.

Sung-min turned the bag over again. So what? Someone had bought a packet abroad and brought it home, probably without even knowing it was banned. He considered whether to throw it away. It had been lying several hundred metres from the crime scene, and it was extremely unlikely that the killer had had a dog with him. But there was something about breaches of the law, they were usually linked. A rule-breaker is a rule-breaker. The sadistic serial killer begins by killing small animals, like mice and rats. Starting small fires. Then torturing and killing slightly bigger animals. Setting fire to vacant houses...

Sung-min folded the bag.

‘Satan’s cunt!’ Mona Daa yelled, staring at her phone.

‘What is it?’ Anders asked, from the open bathroom door, as he brushed his teeth.

‘Dagbladet!’

‘You don’t need to shout. And Satan doesn’t have a—’

‘Cunt. Våge is saying that Bertine Bertilsen has been found dead. Wenggården in Østmarka, only a few kilometres from where they found Susanne.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, oh. Oh as in why the fucking hell does Dagbladet have that news and not VG.’

‘They probably don’t fuck—’

‘That much in hell? Yes, I think they do. I think whoever is down there gets fucked in the mouth, in the nose and the ear, and they can only think of one thing worse, and that’s working at VG and getting fucked in the arse by Terry Våge. Satan’s cunt!’

She tossed the phone on the bed as Anders slid under the duvet and snuggled up to her.

‘Have I told you that it gets me a little horny when you—’

She gave him a shove. ‘I’m not in the mood, Anders.’

‘—aren’t in the mood...?’

She pushed away his probing hand, but couldn’t help smiling a little as she picked up her phone. Began reading again. At least Våge didn’t have any details from the crime scene, so it was unlikely he had talked to anyone who had been there. But how had he found out about the discovery of the body so fast? Did he have an illegal police radio, could it be that simple? That he deduced what was going on from listening to those brief, half-coded messages the police used because they knew interlopers were always eavesdropping? And then Våge merely made up the rest based on what he heard, so it became a suitable blend of fact and fiction which could just about pass for real journalism? It had up to now at any rate.

‘Someone suggested I should ask you for a little inside information,’ she said.

‘Really? Did you tell them that I’m not on that case unfortunately, but that I can be bought for uninhibited sex?’

‘Stop it, Anders! This is my job.’

‘So you think I should give you free info and risk my own?’

‘No! I just mean... it’s so bloody unfair!’ Mona folded her arms. ‘Våge has someone feeding him while I’m sitting here... starving to death.’

‘What’s unfair,’ Anders said, sitting up in bed and his playful cheeriness dissipating, ‘is that girls in this city can’t go out without running the risk of being raped and killed. It’s unfair that Bertine Bertilsen is lying dead in Østmarka while two people sit here thinking the world is unfair because another journalist was first on the case or because the clearance rate of the department will go down.’

Mona swallowed.

And nodded.

He was right. Of course he was right. She swallowed again. Tried to suppress the question that was forcing its way up:

Can you make a call to someone and ask how it looked at the crime scene?

Helene Røed lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

Markus had wanted them to have a drop-shaped bed, three metres long and two and a half metres at its widest. He had read that it was the drop we originated from, from water, that we unconsciously sought to return to, and so the shape offered us harmony and deeper sleep.

She had managed not to laugh but also to get him to agree to a rectangular luxury bed one eighty metres wide by two metres ten long. Enough for two. Too much for one.

Markus was sleeping at the penthouse in Frogner, as he did almost every night now. So she presumed anyway. Not that she missed having Markus in bed, it had been a long time since that had been exciting or even particularly desirable. The sneezing and sniffing had only got worse, and he got up at least four times a night to piss. Prostate enlargement, not necessarily cancer, but something affecting more than half of men over sixty by all accounts. And apparently it would only get worse. No, she didn’t miss Markus, but she missed having someone. She didn’t know who, only that the feeling was particularly strong tonight. There had to be someone for her as well, someone who would love her and she could love in return. It was that simple, wasn’t it? Or was that just something she hoped?

She turned over onto her side. She had been nauseous and feeling poorly since last night. Had thrown up and had a slight temperature. She had done a test for the virus, but it had been negative.

She looked out the window, at the rear of the recently finished Munch Museum. No one who had bought their apartment prior to construction in Oslobukta had thought it would be so massive and ugly. People had been fooled by the drawings where the museum had a glass facade and was shown from an angle, rendering it difficult to see that it looked like that wall in the north in Game of Thrones. But that’s how it is, things don’t turn out as promised or expected, you’ve only yourself to thank for being taken in. Now the building cast a shadow on all of them, and it was too late.

She felt a fresh wave of nausea and hurried to get out of bed. The bathroom was on the other side of the room, but still it was so far! She had only been in Markus’s apartment in Frogner once. It was much smaller, but she’d rather have lived there. Together with... someone. She managed to make it to the toilet bowl before the contents of her stomach came up.

Harry was sitting at the bar in the Thief when the text message came.

Thanks for the tip-off. Yours sincerely, Sung-min.

Harry had already read Dagbladet. It was the only newspaper with the story, which could only mean one thing: that no press release had been put out yet, and that this journalist, Terry Våge, had a source in the police. Since it was impossible the leak could be a tactical manoeuvre on the part of the police, that meant someone was receiving money or other favours to inform Våge. It wasn’t as unusual as people believed — he had in his time been offered money by journalists on numerous occasions. The reason such transactions seldom came to light was that journalists never printed information which pointed towards the informant, that would after all be like sawing through the branch both parties were sitting on. But Harry had read most of the articles on the case, and something told him that this Våge was a little too eager and that it would backfire sooner or later. That is, Våge would walk away from it, yes, even with his journalistic credentials intact. It would be worse for the source of the leak. But the source was obviously unaware of how exposed he or she was as they were continuing to feed Våge information.

‘Another?’ The bartender looked at Harry, and was standing ready with the bottle over the empty whiskey glass. Harry cleared his throat. Once. Twice.

Yes, please, it said in the script. The one for the bad movie he had been in so many times, playing the only role he actually could.

Then — as though the bartender had seen the plea for mercy in Harry’s eyes — he turned to a customer signalling from the other end of the bar, took the bottle and left.

Out in the darkness the chiming of the bells of City Hall could be heard. It would soon be midnight and there would be six days left, plus the nine-hour time difference to Los Angeles. Not much time, but they had found Bertine, and finding a body meant new leads and the possibility of a crucial breakthrough. That was how he had to think. Positively. It didn’t come naturally to him, especially not to think so unrealistically positively as circumstances required, but hopelessness and apathy were not what he needed now. Not what Lucille needed.

As Harry left the bar and stepped out into the darkened corridor, he could see there was light at the end, like in a tunnel. As he drew closer, he realised that the light was coming from an open lift and could see a person standing half outside holding the doors. As though he were waiting for Harry. Or someone else — after all, he had already been standing there when Harry appeared in the corridor.

‘Just go ahead,’ Harry called out, signalling with a wave of his hand. ‘I’m taking the stairs.’ The man backed into the lift and out of the light. Harry had time to see the clerical collar but not the face before the doors slid shut.

Harry was soaked with sweat as he unlocked the door to his room. He hung up his suit and lay down on the bed. Tried to put thoughts of how Lucille was doing out of his head. He had made up his mind he was going to have a pleasant dream about Rakel tonight. One from the time they lived together and went to bed together every night. From the time he was walking over water, stepping on ice that lay thick and solid. Always listening out for cracks, always on the lookout for fissures, but also with the ability to live in the moment. They had done that. As though they had known the time they had together would run out. No, they didn’t live every day as if it were the last, but as if it were the first. As though they had discovered each other over and over again. Was he exaggerating, embellishing the memory of what they’d had? Maybe. So what? What had realism ever done for him?

He closed his eyes. Tried to picture her, her golden skin against the white sheets. But instead all he could see was her pale skin against the pool of blood on the living-room floor. And he saw Bjørn Holm in the car staring at him while the baby cried in the back seat. Harry opened his eyes. Yes, honestly, what was he supposed to do with realism?

His phone buzzed again. A message from Alexandra this time.

Will have DNA analysis ready by Monday. Spa and dinner on Saturday would be nice. Terse Acto is a good restaurant.