Knife

24

It was just before midnight when VG published the news that the police had released Svein Finne, “the Fiancé.”

Johan Krohn declared to the same paper that his client’s confession still stood, but that the police had, of their own volition, concluded that in all likelihood it did not relate to Rakel Fauke, but to another offence in which his client may have harmed a mother in childbirth and her baby. There were witnesses, and even video evidence, but no report had been filed about the incident. But the confession had been provided, his client had kept his side of the deal, and Krohn warned the police of the consequences if they didn’t keep their side and drop the charges in relation to the vague and groundless accusations of rape.

Harry’s heart wouldn’t stop hammering.

He was standing with water halfway up his ankles, panting for breath. He had been running. Running through the streets of the city until there were no streets left, and then he had run out here.

That wasn’t why his heart was so out of control. That had started when he left the Justice. The paralysing cold crept up his legs, over his knees, towards his crotch.

Harry was standing in the plaza in front of the Opera House. Below him, the white marble slid into the fjord like a melting ice cap, a warning of impending disaster.

Bjørn Holm woke up. He lay still in bed, listening.

It wasn’t the baby. It wasn’t Katrine, who had come to bed and lain down behind him without wanting to talk. He opened his eyes. Saw faint light on the white bedroom ceiling. He reached out to the bedside table and saw who was calling on the screen of his mobile. Hesitated. Then he crept quietly out of bed and into the hallway. Pressed Answer.

“It’s the middle of the night,” he whispered.

“Thanks, I wasn’t sure,” Harry said drily.

“Don’t mention it. Goodnight.”

“Don’t hang up. I can’t access the files in Rakel’s case. Looks like my access code’s been blocked.”

“You’d have to talk to Katrine about that.”

“Katrine’s the boss, she has to go by the book, we both know that. But I’ve got your code, and I suppose I might be able to guess your password. Obviously you couldn’t give it to me, because that would be against regulations.”

Pause.

“But?” Bjørn sighed.

“But you could always give me a clue.”

“Harry...”

“I need this, Bjørn. I need it so fucking bad. The fact that it isn’t Finne just means that it’s someone else. Come on, Katrine needs this too, because I know that neither you nor Kripos have got a damn thing.”

“So why you, then?”

“You know why.”

“Do I?”

“Because in a world full of blind people, I’ve got the only eye.”

Another pause.

“Two letters, four numbers,” Bjørn said. “If I had to choose, I’d like to die like him. In a car, right at the start of the new year.”

He hung up.

25

“According to Professor Paul Mattiuzzi, most murderers fit into one of eight categories,” Harry said. “One: chronically aggressive individuals. People with poor impulse control who get easily frustrated, who resent authority, who convince themselves that violence is a legitimate response, and who deep down enjoy finding a way to express their anger. This is the type where you can see it coming.”

Harry put a cigarette between his lips.

“Two: controlled hostility. People who rarely give in to anger, who are emotionally rigid and appear polite and serious. They abide by rules and see themselves as upholders of justice. They can be kind in a way that people take advantage of. They’re simmering pressure cookers where you can’t see anything coming until they explode. The sort where the neighbours say he always seemed such a nice guy.”

Harry sparked his lighter, held it to his cigarette and inhaled.

“Three: the resentful. People who feel that others walk all over them, that they never get what they deserve, that it’s other people’s fault that they haven’t succeeded in life. They bear grudges, especially against people who have criticised or reprimanded them. They assume the role of victim, they’re psychologically impotent, and when they resort to violence because they can’t find other ways to control their violence, it’s usually directed towards people they hold grudges against. Four: the traumatised.”

Harry blew smoke from his mouth and nose.

“The murder is a response to a single assault on the killer’s identity that is so offensive and unbearable that it strips them of all sense of personal power. The murder is necessary if they are to protect the essence of the trauma victim’s existence or masculinity. If you’re aware of the circumstances, this type of murder can usually be both foreseen and prevented.”

Harry held the cigarette between the second knuckles of his index and middle fingers as he stood reflected in the small, half-dried-up puddle framed by brown earth and grey gravel.

“Then there are the rest. Five: obsessive and immature narcissists. Six: paranoid and jealous individuals on the verge of insanity. Seven: people well past the verge of insanity.”

Harry put the cigarette back between his lips and looked up. Let his eyes slide across the timber building. The crime scene. The morning sun was glinting off the windows. Nothing about the house looked different, just the degree of abandonment. It had been the same inside. A sort of paleness, as if the stillness had sucked the colour from the walls and curtains, the faces out of the photographs, the memories out of the books. He hadn’t seen anything he hadn’t seen last time, hadn’t thought anything he hadn’t thought then, they were back where they had ended up last night: back at the start, with the smoking ruins of buildings and hotels behind them.

“And the eighth category?” Kaja asked, wrapping her coat more tightly around her and stamping on the gravel.

“Professor Mattiuzzi calls them the ‘just plain bad and angry.’ Which is a combination of the seven others.”

“And you think the killer you’re looking for is in one of eight categories invented by some American psychologist?”

“Mm.”

“And that Svein Finne is innocent?”

“No. But of Rakel’s murder, yes.”

Harry took a deep drag on his Camel. So deep that he felt the heat of the smoke in his throat. Oddly, it hadn’t come as a shock that Finne’s confession was fake. He had had a feeling that something wasn’t right, ever since they were sitting in the bunker. That Finne had been a bit too happy with the situation. He had deliberately provoked physical violence so that, regardless of what he confessed about the murder or rapes, it could never be used in court. Had he known all along that Rakel’s murder had taken place the same night he was in the maternity unit? Had he been aware that the video clip could be misinterpreted? Or was it only later, before his interview in Police Headquarters, that he realised this irony of fate, that the circumstances were set for a tragicomedy? Harry looked over towards the kitchen window, where in April last year he and Rakel had gathered leaves and branches when they were clearing the garden. That was just after Finne had been released from prison, with a half-spoken threat to pay Harry’s family a visit. If Finne had stood on that trailer one night, he could have seen right in between the bars over the kitchen window, where he would have seen the breadboard on the wall, and could have read the writing on it if his eyesight was good enough. Finne had found out that the house was a fortress. And had hatched his plan.

Harry doubted Krohn was behind the decision to use the false confession to get rid of the rape charges. Krohn was more aware than anyone that anything he won in the short term by a maneuver of that sort was small change in comparison to the damage to the credibility that — even for a defense lawyer with a license to be manipulative — was his real stock-in-trade.

“You’re aware that those categories of yours don’t exactly narrow it down much?” Kaja said. She had turned and was looking down at the city. “At some point in our lives we all fit into one or other of those descriptions.”

“Mm. But actually going through with a premeditated, cold-blooded murder?”

“Why are you asking, if you already know the answer?”

“Maybe I just want to hear someone else say it.”

Kaja shrugged. “Killing is just a question of context. There’s no problem taking a life if you see yourself as the city’s respected butcher, the fatherland’s heroic soldier or the long arm of the law. Or, potentially, the righteous avenger of justice.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it, that came from your own lecture at Police College. So who killed Rakel? Someone with personality traits from one of those categories killing without any context, or a normal person killing for a reason they’ve come up with themselves?”

“Well, I think that even a crazy person needs some sort of context. Even in outbursts of rage there’s a moment when we manage to convince ourselves that we’re acting in a justifiable way. Madness is a lonely dialogue where we give ourselves the answers we want. And we’ve all had that conversation.”

“Have we?”

“I know I have,” Harry said, looking down the drive where the dark, heavy fir trees stood on watch on either side. “But to answer your question: I think the process of narrowing down potential suspects starts here. That’s why I wanted you to see the scene. It’s been cleaned up. But murder is messy, emotional. It’s as if we’re facing a murderer who is both trained and untrained at the same time. Or perhaps trained, but emotionally unbalanced, typical for a murder motivated by sexual frustration or personal hatred.”

“And because there are no signs of sexual assault, you’ve concluded that we’re dealing with hatred?”

“Yes. That’s why Svein Finne looked like the perfect suspect. A man accustomed to using violence who wants to avenge the death of his son.”

“In which case surely he should have killed you?”

“I reasoned that Svein Finne knows that living after losing the person you love is worse than dying. But it looks like I was wrong.”

“The fact that you got the wrong person doesn’t necessarily mean that you got the wrong motive.”

“Mm. You mean it’s hard to find anyone who hated Rakel, but easy to find people who hate me?”

“Just a thought,” Kaja said.

“Good. That could be a starting point.”

“Perhaps the investigative team have got something that we don’t know about.”

Harry shook his head. “I went through their files last night, and all they’ve got are separate details. No definite line of inquiry or actual evidence.”

“I didn’t think you had access to the investigation?”

“I know the access code of someone who has. Because he was pissed off that IT had given him his bust measurement: BH100. I guessed the password.”

“His date of birth?”

“Almost. HW1953.”

“Which is?”

“The year Hank Williams was found dead in a car on New Year’s Day.”

“So, nothing but random thoughts, then. Shall we go and think them somewhere warmer than this?”

“Yes,” Harry said, about to take a last drag on the cigarette.

“Hold on,” Kaja said, holding out her hand. “Can I...?”

Harry looked at her before passing her the cigarette. It wasn’t true that he was able to see. He was more blind than any of them, blinded by tears, but now it was as if he had managed to blink them away for a moment and, for the first time since they’d met again, actually saw Kaja Solness. It was the cigarette. And the memories flooded back, suddenly and unexpectedly. The young police officer who had travelled to Hong Kong to fetch Harry home so he could hunt a serial killer the Oslo Police hadn’t managed to catch. She had found him on a mattress in Chungking Mansions, in a kind of limbo between intoxication and indifference. And it wasn’t exactly clear who had needed rescuing most: the Oslo Police or Harry. But here she was again. Kaja Solness, who denied her own beauty by showing her sharp, irregular teeth as often as she could, thereby spoiling her otherwise perfect face. He remembered the morning hours they had spent in a large, empty house, the cigarettes they had shared. Rakel used to want the first drag of a cigarette, Kaja always wanted the last.

He had abandoned them both and fled to Hong Kong again. But he had come back for one of them. Rakel.

Harry saw Kaja’s raspberry lips close around the yellow-brown filter and tense ever so slightly as she inhaled. Then she dropped the butt onto the damp brown earth between the puddle and the gravel, trod on it and set off towards the car. Harry was about to follow her, but stopped.

His eyes had been caught by the squashed cigarette butt.

He thought about pattern recognition. They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible. And he recognised the pattern in the shoeprint. From the pictures in the file titled “Crime-scene photographs” in the investigative team’s material. A short comment attached to the photograph said they hadn’t found a match in Interpol’s database of shoe-sole patterns.

Harry cleared his throat.

“Kaja?”

He saw her thin back stiffen as she made her way to the car. God knows why, perhaps she detected something in his voice that he himself hadn’t heard. She turned towards him. Her lips were drawn back, and he could see those sharp teeth.

26

“All infantry soldiers have dark hair,” the stocky, fit-looking man sitting in the low armchair at the end of the coffee table said. Erland Madsen’s chair was positioned at a ninety-degree angle to Roar Bohr’s, instead of directly opposite him. That was so Madsen’s patients could decide for themselves if they wanted to look at him or not. Not having to see the person you were talking to had the same effect as talking in a confessional: it gave the patient a feeling of talking to themselves. When you don’t see a listener’s reactions in the form of body language and facial expressions, the threshold for what you tell them is lowered. He had toyed with the idea of getting hold of a couch, even if that would have a been a cliché, something of a showpiece.

Madsen glanced down at his notepad. At least they had been allowed to keep those. “Can you elaborate?”

“Elaborate on dark hair?” Roar Bohr smiled. And when the smile reached those slate-grey eyes, it was as if the tears in them — the silent, dry tears that just lay there — emphasised the smile, the way the sun shines extra strongly when it’s at the edge of a cloud. “They have dark hair, and they’re good at putting a bullet in your skull from a couple of hundred metres. But the way to recognise them when you approach a checkpoint is that they have dark hair and are friendly. Terrified and friendly. That’s their job. Not to shoot the enemy as they’ve been trained, but the last thing they ever thought they’d have to do when they applied to join the corps and went through hell to be accepted into Special Forces. Smiling and being friendly to civilians passing through a checkpoint that has been blown to pieces by suicide bombers twice in the previous year. It’s called winning hearts and minds.”

“Did it ever win any?”

“No,” Bohr said.

As a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, Madsen had become a sort of Doctor Afghanistan, the psychologist whom people who were struggling after their experiences in war-torn areas heard about and sought out. But even if Madsen had learned a lot about the life and feelings they talked about, he also knew from experience that it was better to be a blank page. To let the patients talk as long as they liked about concrete, simple things. Nothing could be taken for granted, he needed to get them to realise that they had to paint the whole picture for him. His patients weren’t always aware of where their pressure points were; occasionally they lay in things the patients themselves regarded as trivial and unimportant, in things they may otherwise have skipped over, in things their unconscious was working through in secret, out of sight. But right now, it was a sort of limbering up.

“So no hearts?” Madsen said.

“No one in Afghanistan really understood why ISAF were there. Not even everyone in ISAF. But no one believes that ISAF were there solely to bring democracy and happiness to a country that has no concept of democracy, nor any interest in the values it represents. The Afghans say what they think we want to hear as long as we help them with drinking water, supplies and mine clearance. But apart from that, we can go to hell. And I’m not just talking about people sympathetic to the Taliban.”

“So why did you go?”

“If you want to get on in the Army, you need to have been part of ISAF.”

“And you wanted to get on?”

“There’s no other way. If you stop, you die. The Army has a slow, painful and humiliating death in store for anyone who thinks they can stop striving to get ahead.”

“Tell me about Kabul.”

“Kabul.” Bohr shifted position in his chair. “Strays.”

“Strays?”

“They’re everywhere. Stray dogs.”

“You mean literally, not...”

Bohr shook his head with a smile. No sunlight in his eyes this time. “The Afghans have far too many masters. The dogs live off rubbish. There’s a lot of rubbish. The city smells of exhaust fumes. And burning. They burn everything to keep warm. Rubbish, oil, wood. It snows in Kabul. It always seemed to make the city look greyer. There are a few decent buildings, of course. The Presidential Palace. The Serene Hotel is five-star, apparently. The Babur Gardens are nice. But what you see most of when you drive around the city are simple, shabby buildings, one or two storeys, and shops where they sell all manner of things. Or Russian architecture at its most depressing.” Bohr shook his head. “I’ve seen pictures of Kabul before the Soviet invasion. And what they say is true, Kabul really was beautiful once.”

“But not when you were living there?”

“We didn’t really live in Kabul, but in tents just outside. Very nice tents, almost like houses. But our offices were in ordinary buildings. We didn’t have air con in the tents, just fans. They weren’t often on, anyway, because it gets cold at night. But the days could get so hot that it was impossible to move outside. Not as bad as fifty humid degrees in Basra in Iraq, but all the same, Kabul in summer could be hell.”

“But you still went back...” Madsen looked down at his notes. “Three times? On twelve-month tours?”

“One twelve, two six.”

“You and your family were obviously aware of the risks of going into a war zone. With regard to both mental health and close relationships.”

“I was told about that, yes. That the only things you get from Afghanistan are shredded nerves, divorce, and a promotion to colonel just before you retire if you manage to avoid alcoholism.”

“But...”

“My course was staked out. I had been invested in. Officer training at the Military Academy. There are no limits to what people are willing to do if you give them a feeling that they’ve been chosen. Getting sent to the moon in a tin can in the sixties was pretty much a suicide mission, and everyone knew it. NASA asked only the best pilots to volunteer for their astronaut programme, the ones who had brilliant prospects in an age when pilots — civilian as well as military — had the same sort of status as film stars and footballers. They didn’t ask the fearless, thrill-seeking younger pilots, but the more experienced, steady ones. The ones who knew what risk was, and had no desire to seek it out. Married pilots, who had maybe just had a child or two. In short: the ones with everything to lose. How many of them do you think turned down their country’s offer to commit suicide in public?”

“Was that why you went?”

Bohr shrugged. “It was probably a mixture of personal ambition and idealism. But I don’t really remember the proportions anymore.”

“What do you remember most about coming home again?”

Bohr gave a wry smile. “That my wife always had to retrain me. Remind me that I didn’t have to say ‘understood’ when she asked me to buy milk. That I should dress properly. When you haven’t worn anything but a field uniform for years because of the heat, a suit feels... constricting. And that in social situations you’re expected to shake hands with women, even if they’re wearing hijabs.”

“Shall we talk about killing?”

Bohr tugged at his tie and looked at the time. He took a slow, deep breath. “Shall we?”

“We’ve still got time.”

Bohr closed his eyes for a moment. Opened them again. “Killing is complicated. And extremely simple. When we select soldiers for an elite unit like Special Forces, they don’t just have to fulfil a set of physical and mental criteria. They also have to be able to kill. So we’re looking for people who are capable of maintaining enough distance to kill. You’ve probably seen films and television programmes about recruitment to specialist units, like the Rangers, where it’s mostly about stress management, solving tasks without food or sleep, behaving like a soldier under emotional and physical stress. When I was a rank-and-file soldier, there wasn’t much focus on killing, on the individual’s ability to take a life and deal with that. We know more about that now. We know that people who are going to kill have to know themselves. They mustn’t be surprised by their own feelings. It isn’t true that it’s unnatural to kill a member of the same species, it’s actually perfectly natural. It happens in nature all the time. Most people obviously feel a certain reluctance, which is also logical from an evolutionary perspective. But that reluctance can be overcome when the circumstances demand it. In fact, being able to kill is actually a sign of good health, because it demonstrates a capacity for self-control. If there’s one thing my soldiers in Special Forces had in common, it was the fact that they were extremely relaxed about killing. But I’d happily slap anyone who accused a single one of them of being a psychopath.”

“Just slap them?” Madsen asked with a wry smile.

Bohr didn’t answer.

“I’d like you to talk a little more directly about your own problem,” Madsen said. “Your own killing. I see from my notes that you called yourself a freak last time. But you didn’t want to go into that in any more depth.”

Bohr nodded.

“I can see that you’re concerned, and I can only repeat what I’ve said before about being under an oath of complete confidentiality.”

Bohr rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I know, but I’m starting to run short of time if I’m going to make it to a meeting at work.”

Madsen nodded. Apart from purely professional curiosity, the business of working out where the problem was, it was rare that he ever felt curious about his patients’ stories per se. But this was different, and he hoped his face wasn’t showing the disappointment he felt. “Well, let’s call it a day, then. And if you’d rather not talk about it at all...”

“I want to talk about it, I...” Bohr stopped. Buttoned his jacket. “I need to talk about it to someone. If I don’t...”

Madsen waited, but he didn’t go on.

“See you on Monday, same time?” Madsen asked.

Yes, he was definitely going to get hold of a couch. Maybe even a confessional.

“I hope you like your coffee strong,” Harry called towards the living room as he poured water from the kettle into their cups.

“How many records have you actually got?” Kaja called back.

“About fifteen hundred.” The heat scorched Harry’s knuckles as he stuck his fingers through the handles of the cups. With three quick, long strides he was in the living room. Kaja was kneeling on the sofa looking through the records. “About?”

Harry pulled one corner of his mouth up into a sort of smile. “One thousand, five hundred and thirty-six.”

“And like most neurotic guys, obviously you’ve got them arranged alphabetically by artist, but I see that at least you haven’t got each artists’ albums arranged by release date.”

“No,” Harry said, putting the cups down beside the computer on the table and blowing on his fingers. “Just in order of when I bought them. The most recent acquisition by that artist on the far left.”

Kaja laughed. “You’re all mad.”

“Probably. Bjørn says I’m the only mad one, because everyone else arranges theirs by release date.” He sat down on the sofa and she slid down beside him and took a sip of the coffee.

“Mmm.”

“Freeze-dried coffee from a freshly opened jar,” Harry said.

“I’d forgotten how good it is.” She laughed.

“What? Hasn’t anyone else served you coffee like this since I last did?”

“Clearly you’re the only one who knows how to treat a woman, Harry.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Harry said, then pointed at the screen. “Here’s the picture of the shoeprint in the snow outside Rakel’s house. Do you see it’s the same?”

“Yes,” Kaja said, holding up her own boot. “But the print in the picture is from a bigger size, isn’t it?”

“Probably size 43 or 44,” Harry said.

“Mine are 38. I bought them in a second-hand market in Kabul. They were the smallest they had.”

“And they’re Soviet military boots from the occupation?”

“Yes.”

“That must mean they’re over thirty years old.”

“Impressive, isn’t it? We had one Norwegian lieutenant colonel in Kabul who used to say that if these bootmakers had been in charge of the Soviet Union, it would never have collapsed.”

“Do you mean Lieutenant Colonel Bohr?”

“Yes.”

“Does that mean he had a pair of these boots as well?”

“I don’t remember, but they were popular. And cheap. Why do you ask?”

“Roar Bohr’s number appeared so frequently in Rakel’s phone log that they checked his alibi for the night of the murder.”

“And?”

“His wife says he was at home all evening and all night. What strikes me about those phone calls from Bohr is that he seems to have called her about three times for each call she made to him. That may not count as stalking, but wouldn’t a subordinate return their boss’s calls more often?”

“I don’t know. You’re suggesting that Bohr’s interest in Rakel could have been more than professional?”

“What do you think?”

Kaja rubbed her chin. Harry didn’t know why, but it struck him as a masculine gesture, possibly something to do with stubble.

“Bohr’s a conscientious boss,” Kaja said. “Which means that he can sometimes come across as a bit too engaged and impatient. I can well imagine him calling three times before you get around to returning the first call.”

“At one o’clock in the morning?”

Kaja grimaced. “Do you want me to argue, or...”

“Ideally.”

“Rakel was assistant director of the NHRI, if I’ve understood correctly?”

“Technical director. But yes.”

“And what did she do?”

“Reports for UN treaty organisations. Lectures. Advice to politicians.”

“So, in the NHRI you have to fit in with other people’s working hours and deadlines. UN Headquarters is six hours behind us. So it isn’t that remarkable for your boss to call you a bit late every now and then.”

“Where does... What’s Bohr’s address?”

“Somewhere in Smestad. I think it’s the house he grew up in.”

“Mm.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Random thoughts.”

“Come on.”

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “Seeing as I’m suspended, I can’t call anyone to interview, request a search warrant or operate in any way that might attract attention from Kripos or Crime Squad. But we can do a bit of digging in the blind spot where they can’t see us.”

“Such as?”

“Here’s the hypothesis. Bohr killed Rakel. Then he went straight home, and got rid of the murder weapon on the way. In which case he probably drove the same way we did to get back here from Holmenkollen. If you wanted to get rid of a knife between Holmenkollveien and Smestad, where would you choose?”

“Holmendammen is literally a stone’s throw from the road.”

“Good,” Harry said. “But the files say they’ve already looked there, and the average depth is only three metres, so they would have found it.”

“So where else?”

He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the wall of albums behind him and reconstructed the road he had driven so many times. Holmenkollen to Smestad. It couldn’t be more than three or four kilometres. But still offered endless opportunities to get rid of a small object. It was mostly gardens. A thicket just before Stasjonsveien was a possibility. He heard the metallic whine of a tram in the distance, and a plaintive shriek from one right outside. Caught a sudden glimpse of it. Green, this time. With a stench of death.

“Rubbish,” he said. “The container.”

“The container?”

“At the petrol station just below Stasjonsveien.”

Kaja laughed. “That’s one of a thousand possibilities, and you sound so certain.”

“Sure. It’s the first thing that came to mind when I thought what I’d have done.”

“Are you OK?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look very pale.”

“Not enough iron,” Harry said, getting to his feet.

“The company that hires out the container comes and collects it when it’s full,” the bespectacled, dark-skinned woman said.

“And when was the last time that happened?” Harry said, looking at the big grey container standing next to the petrol station building. The woman — who had introduced herself as the manager — had explained that the skip was for the petrol station’s use, and was mostly used to get rid of packaging, and that she couldn’t recall seeing anyone dumping their own rubbish in it. The container had an open metal mouth at one end, and the woman had pressed a red button to demonstrate how the jaws compacted the rubbish and pressed it into the bowels of the container. Kaja was standing a few metres away making a note of the name and phone number of the container company, which was printed on the grey steel.

“The last time they replaced it was probably a month or so ago,” the manager said.

“Have the police opened it up and looked inside?” Harry asked.

“I thought you were the police?”

“The right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing in such a large investigation. Could you open the container for us so we can take a look at what’s inside?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to call my boss.”

“I thought you were the boss,” Harry said.

“I said I was the manager of this petrol station, that doesn’t mean—”

“We understand.” Kaja smiled. “If you could call him or her, we’d be very grateful.”

The woman left them and disappeared inside the red and yellow building. Harry and Kaja stood there looking down at the artificial grass pitch where a couple of boys were practising the latest Neymar tricks they’d no doubt seen on YouTube.

After a while, Kaja looked at her watch. “Shall we go in and ask how it’s going?”

“No,” Harry said.

“Why not?”

“The knife isn’t in the container.”

“But you said...”

“I was wrong.”

“And what makes you so sure about that?”

“Look,” Harry said, pointing. “Security cameras. That’s why no one dumps anything in here. And a murderer who’s had the presence of mind to remove a well-camouflaged wildlife camera from the crime scene isn’t going to drive straight into a petrol station with cameras to get rid of the murder weapon.”

Harry started to walk towards the football pitch.

“Where are you going?” Kaja called after him.

Harry didn’t answer. Largely because he didn’t have an answer. Not until he reached the back of the petrol station and saw a building with the logo of the Ready sports club above the entrance. There were six green plastic bins beside the building. Outside the reach of the cameras. Harry opened the lid of the largest one and was hit by the rancid smell of rotting food.

He tilted the bin onto the two wheels at the back and moved it out into the open. There he tipped it over, spilling its contents.

“What a terrible smell,” Kaja said as she caught up with him.

“That’s good.”

“Good?”

“It means it hasn’t been emptied in a while,” Harry said, crouching down and starting to hunt through the waste. “Can you start with one of the others?”

“There was nothing about poking through rubbish in the job description.”

“Given the terrible salary you’re on, you should probably have realised that rubbish was going to crop up at some point.”

“You’re not paying me a salary at all,” Kaja said as she tipped over the smallest bin.

“That’s what I meant. And yours doesn’t smell as bad as mine.”

“No one can say you don’t know how to motivate your staff.” Kaja crouched down, and Harry noted that she started with the top left, the way they were taught to search at Police College.

A man had come out onto the steps and was standing under the Ready sign. In jeans with the Ready logo on. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Harry stood up, walked over to the man and showed him his police ID. “Do you know if anyone might have seen anyone here on the evening of the tenth of March?”

The man stared at the ID, then back at Harry with his mouth half open. “You’re Harry Hole.”

“That’s right.”

“The super-detective himself?”

“Don’t believe everything—”

“And you’re looking through our rubbish.”

“Sorry if you’re disappointed.”

“Harry...” Kaja called.

Harry turned round. She was holding something between her thumb and forefinger. It looked like a tiny piece of black plastic. “What is it?” he asked, screwing his eyes up as he felt his heart start to beat faster.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s one of those...”

Memory cards, Harry thought. The sort you use in wildlife cameras.

The sun was shining into the kitchen on Lyder Sagens gate, to where Kaja was standing, removing her memory card from the slot of what looked to Harry like a cheap camera, but which Kaja had said was a Canon G9, bought in 2009 for a small fortune, and which had actually stood the test of time. She inserted the memory card from the rubbish bin into the empty slot, connected the camera to her MacBook with a cable and clicked on the Pictures folder. A series of thumbnails appeared. Some of them showed Rakel’s house in various stages of daylight. Some were taken in darkness, and all Harry could see was the light from the kitchen window.

“There you go,” Kaja said, and went over to the hissing espresso machine that was working on cup number two, but Harry realised that was mostly to leave him alone.

The thumbnails were marked with dates.

The second to last was marked 10 March, the last 11 March. The night of the murder.

He took a deep breath. What did he want to see? What was he worried about seeing? And what was he hoping to see?

His brain felt like a wasps’ nest under attack, so it was just as well to get it done.

He clicked the Play symbol on the thumbnail for 10 March.

Four smaller thumbnails appeared, with the times marked.

The camera had been activated four times before midnight on the night of the murder.

Harry clicked on the first recording, which was labelled 20:02:10.

Darkness. Light behind the curtain in the kitchen window. But someone, or something, was moving in the darkness and had triggered the recording. Damn, he should have followed the advice of the guy in the shop and bought a more expensive camera with Zero Blur technology. Or was it No Glow? Either way, something that meant you could see what was in front of the camera even in the middle of the night. Suddenly, there was light on the steps as the front door opened, and in the doorway stood a shape that could only be Rakel. She stood there for a couple of seconds before she let a different shape in, then the door closed behind them.

Harry was breathing hard through his nose.

Several long seconds passed, then the image froze.

The next recording started at 20:29:25. Harry clicked on it. The front door was open, but the lights in the living room and kitchen were switched off, or dimmed, so he could hardly see the shape that came out, closed the door behind it and went down the steps before disappearing into the darkness. But this was half past eight in the evening, an hour and a half before the window suggested by Forensics. The next clips were the important ones.

Harry could feel his palms sweating as he clicked on the third thumbnail, labelled 23:21:09.

A car swept across the drive. The headlights lit up the wall of the house before it came to a stop right in front of the steps and the lights went out. Harry stared at the screen, trying in vain to make his eyes bore into the darkness.

The seconds ticked past on the clock, but nothing happened. Was the driver sitting inside the dark car waiting for someone? No, because the recording hadn’t stopped, so the camera’s sensor was still detecting movement. Then, at last, Harry saw something. Faint light fell across the steps as the front door opened and what looked like a hunched figure went inside. The door closed, and the image went dark again. And froze a few seconds later.

He clicked on the last recording before midnight. 23:38:21.

Darkness.

Nothing.

What had the camera’s PIR sensor detected? Something that was moving and had a pulse, at least; a different temperature to everything else.

After thirty seconds the recording stopped.

It could have been someone moving across the drive in front of the house. But also a bird, a cat, a dog. Harry rubbed his face hard. What the hell was the point of a wildlife camera with sensors that were far more sensitive than the lens? He vaguely remembered the sales assistant in the shop saying something along those lines when he was trying to persuade Harry to spend a bit more money on the camera. But that was back when Harry was first starting to have trouble financing his drinking and still keeping a roof over his head.

“Have we got anything?” Kaja asked, putting one of the cups down in front of him.

“Something, but not enough.” Harry clicked the thumbnail for 11 March. One recording. 02:23:12.

“Cross your fingers,” he said, and pressed Play.

The front door opened, and a shape could just be made out in the weak grey light from the hall. It stood there for a few seconds, looked like it was swaying. Then the door closed and everything was completely dark again.

“He’s leaving,” Harry said.

Light.

The car’s headlights came on; the rear lights glowed red as well. The reversing light came on. Then they all went out again and everything was dark.

“He’s switched the engine off again,” Kaja said. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know.” Harry leaned closer to the screen. “There’s someone approaching, can you see?”

“No.”

The picture jolted, and the outline of the house became crooked. Another jolt, and it was even more crooked. Then the recording stopped.

“What was that?”

“He pulled the camera down,” Harry said.

“Surely we should have seen him if he walked from the car to the camera?”

“He approached it from the side,” Harry said. “You could just see him approach, from off to the left.”

“Why walk around? If he was going to get rid of the recordings, I mean?”

“He was avoiding the area with most snow. Less work to get rid of his footprints afterwards.”

Kaja nodded slowly. “He must have reconnoitred carefully in advance if he knew about the camera.”

“Yes. And he carried out the murder with almost military precision.”

“Almost?”

“He got in the car first, and came close to forgetting the camera.”

“He hadn’t planned it?”

“Yes,” Harry said, lifting the cup to his lips. “Everything was planned, down to the last detail. Such as the fact that the light inside the car didn’t come on when he got in and out of the car. He’d switched it off beforehand in case any of the neighbours heard the car and looked over to see who it was.”

“But they’d still have seen his car.”

“I doubt it was his car. If it had been, he’d have parked farther away. It looked almost as if he wanted to have the car at the scene.”

“So that any eventual witnesses could mislead the police?”

“Mm.” Harry swallowed the coffee and pulled a face.

“Sorry I haven’t got any freeze-dried,” Kaja said. “So what’s the conclusion? Was it perfectly executed or not?”

“I don’t know.” Harry leaned back to pull his cigarettes from his trouser pocket. “Almost forgetting about the camera doesn’t fit with the rest of it. And it looked like he was swaying in the doorway, did you see? Almost as if the person coming out isn’t the same person who went in. And what was he doing in there for two and a half hours?”

“What do you think?”

“I think he was high. Drugs or drink. Does Roar Bohr take any pills?”

Kaja shook her head and fixed her gaze on the wall behind Harry.

“Is that a no?” he asked.

“It’s an I-don’t-know.”

“But you’re not ruling it out?”

“Ruling out the possibility that a Special Forces officer who’s been on three tours to Afghanistan is on pills? Absolutely not.”

“Mm. Can you remove the memory card? I’ll take it to Bjørn, maybe Forensics can get something out of the images.”

“Sure.” Kaja took hold of the camera. “What are your thoughts about the knife? Why doesn’t he get rid of it in the same place as the memory card?”

Harry inspected the remains of his coffee. “The crime scene indicates that he had some idea of how the police work. So he probably also knows the way we search the area around the scene for a possible murder weapon, and that the chances that we’d find a knife in a rubbish bin less than a kilometre from the scene is relatively large.”

“But the memory card...”

“...was OK to get rid of. He wasn’t counting on us even looking for that. Who would know that Rakel had a camouflaged wildlife camera in her garden?”

“So where’s the knife?”

“I don’t know. But I’d guess it’s in the perpetrator’s home.”

“Why?” Kaja asked as she looked at the camera screen. “If it gets found there, he’s as good as convicted.”

“Because he doesn’t think he’s a suspect. A knife doesn’t rot, it doesn’t melt, it needs to be hidden somewhere it will never be found. And the first place we can think of good hiding places is where we live. Having it nearby also gives us a sense of being in control of our own fate.”

“But if he used a knife he took from the scene and wiped his prints off it, the only way it could be traced back to him is if it’s found in his home. Home is the last place I’d have chosen.”

Harry nodded. “You’re right. Like I said, I don’t know, I’m just guessing. It’s just...” He tried to find the right word.

“Gut feeling?”

“Yes. No.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know. Do you remember the warnings we were given when we were young before we took LSD, that we could have flashbacks and start tripping again without any warning later in life?”

Kaja looked up from the camera. “I never took or was offered LSD.”

“Smart girl. I was a rather less clever boy. Some people say those flashbacks can be triggered. Stress. Heavy drinking. Trauma. And that sometimes those flashbacks are actually a new trip, that the remnants of old drugs get activated because LSD is synthetic and doesn’t get broken down in the same way as cocaine, for instance.”

“So now you’re wondering if you’re having an LSD trip?”

Harry shrugged his shoulders. “LSD is consciousness-raising. It makes the brain work in top gear, interpret information on such a detailed level that it gives you a feeling of cosmic insight. That’s the only way I can describe why I felt we had to check those green rubbish bins. I mean, you don’t just find such a tiny piece of plastic in the first rather odd place you look in, one kilometre from the crime scene by chance, do you?”

“Maybe not,” Kaja said, still staring at the camera screen.

“OK. Well, the same cosmic insight is telling me that Roar Bohr isn’t the man we’re looking for, Kaja.”

“And what if I tell you that my cosmic insight is saying you’re wrong?”

Harry shrugged. “I’m the one who took LSD, not you.”

“But I’m the one who’s looked at the recordings from before the tenth of March, not you.”

Kaja turned the camera around and held the screen up in front of Harry.

“This is a week before the murder,” she said. “The person obviously approaches from behind the camera, so when the recording starts we only see his back. He stops right in front of the camera, but unfortunately he doesn’t turn around and show his face. Nor when he leaves two hours later.”

Harry saw a large moon hanging directly above the roof of the house. And silhouetted against the moon Harry saw all the details of the barrel of a rifle and parts of the butt sticking up over the shoulder of someone standing between the camera and the house.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” Kaja said, and Harry already knew that she wasn’t mistaken, “that’s a Colt Canada C8. Not exactly your standard rifle, to put it mildly.”

“Bohr?”

“It’s the sort of rifle Special Forces used in Afghanistan, anyway.”

“Are you aware of the situation you’ve put me in?” Dagny Jensen asked. She had kept her coat on and was sitting bolt upright on the chair in front of Katrine Bratt’s desk as she hugged her handbag in her arms. “Svein Finne has walked free of all charges, he doesn’t even have to hide. And now he knows that I reported him for rape.”

Outside the door, Katrine saw the muscular frame of Kari Beal. She was one of three officers who were working shifts to protect Dagny Jensen.

“Dagny—” Katrine began.

“Jensen,” the woman interrupted. “Miss Jensen.” Then she covered her face with her hands and started to cry. “He’s free forever, and you can’t protect me for that long. But he... he’ll watch me like... like a farmer watching a pregnant cow!”

Her crying turned to hiccoughing sobs, and Katrine wondered what she ought to do. Should she go around her desk and try to comfort the woman, or leave her be? Do nothing. See if it blew over. If it went away.

Katrine cleared her throat. “We’re looking at the possibility of charging Finne for the rapes anyway. To get him behind bars.”

“You’ll never manage that, he’s got that lawyer. And he’s smarter than all of you, anyone can see that!”

“He may be smarter, but he’s on the wrong side.”

“And you’re on the right side? Harry Hole’s side?”

Katrine didn’t answer.

“You persuaded me not to press charges,” Dagny said.

Katrine opened her desk drawer and handed Dagny a tissue. “Obviously it’s up to you if you want to change your mind, Miss Jensen. If you want to file a formal complaint against Hole for claiming to be a police officer on active duty and for the way he put you in danger, I’m sure he would be dismissed and charged to your full satisfaction.”

Katrine saw from Dagny Jensen’s expression that that had come out rather sharper than she intended.

“You don’t know, Bratt.” Dagny wiped the makeup running from her eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like, bearing a child that you don’t want...”

“We can help arrange an appointment to see a doctor who—”

“Let me finish!”

Katrine closed her mouth.

“Sorry,” Dagny whispered. “I’m just so exhausted. I was going to say that you don’t know how it feels...” She took a deep, trembling breath. “...to still want the baby anyway.”

In the silence that followed, Katrine could hear footsteps hurrying up and down the corridor outside her office. But they had been moving faster yesterday. Tired feet.

“Don’t I?” Katrine said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Of course I can’t know how you feel. Look, I want to get Finne as much as you. And we will. The fact that he tricked us with that deal won’t stop us. That’s a promise.”

“The last time I got a promise like that from a police officer, it came from Harry Hole.”

“This is a promise from me. From this office. This building. This city.”

Dagny Jensen put the tissue down on the desk and stood up.

“Thanks.”

When she had gone, it struck Katrine that she had never heard a single syllable express so much and yet so little. So much resignation. So little hope.

Harry stared at the memory card he had put down on the bar counter in front of him.

“What can you see?” Øystein Eikeland asked. He was playing Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. According to Øystein, that was where the bar was at its lowest for old men who wanted to overcome their prejudices against hip-hop.

“Night recordings,” Harry said.

“Now you sound like St. Thomas when he puts a cassette to his ear and says he can hear it. You’ve seen the documentary?”

“No. Good?”

“Good music. And a few interesting clips and interviews. Way too long, though. Looks like they had too much footage and couldn’t manage to focus.”

“Same here,” Harry said, turning the memory card over.

“Direction is everything.”

Harry nodded slowly.

“I’ve got a dishwasher to empty,” Øystein said, and disappeared into the back room.

Harry closed his eyes. The music. The references. The memories. Prince. Marvin Gaye. Chick Corea. Vinyl records, the scratch of a needle, Rakel lying on the sofa at Holmenkollveien, sleepy, smiling as he whispers: “Listen now, this bit...”

Perhaps she had been lying on the sofa when he arrived.

Who was he?

Maybe it wasn’t a he; not even that much was possible to determine from the recordings.

But the first person, who had arrived on foot at eight o’clock and left again half an hour later, that had been a man, Harry was fairly certain of that. And he hadn’t been expected. She had opened the door and stood there for two or three seconds instead of letting him in at once. Perhaps he had asked if he could come in, and she had let him in without hesitation. So she had known him well. How well? So well that he had let himself out just under half an hour later. Perhaps that visit had nothing to do with the murder, but Harry couldn’t help the questions from popping up: What can a man and a woman do in just under half an hour? Why had the lights in the kitchen and living room been dimmed when he left? Bloody hell, he didn’t have time to let his thoughts wander off in that direction now. So he hurried on instead.

The car that had arrived three hours later.

It had parked right in front of the steps. Why? A shorter walk to the house, less chance of being seen. Yes, that fitted with the fact that the automatic light inside the car was switched off.

But there was slightly too much of a gap between the car arriving and the front door of the house opening.

Perhaps the driver had been looking for something inside the car.

Gloves. A cloth to wipe fingerprints off with. Perhaps he checked that the safety was on on the pistol he was going to threaten her with. Because obviously he wasn’t going to kill her with that; ballistics analysis can identify the pistol, which identifies the owner. He would use a knife he found at the scene. The perfect knife, the one the murderer already knew he would find in the knife block on the kitchen counter.

Or had he improvised in there, had the knife at the scene been a matter of chance?

The thought had struck Harry because it seemed careless to spend so long in the car in front of the steps. Rakel could have woken up and become alarmed, the neighbours could have chanced to look out of their windows. And when the man finally opened the front door and enough light filtered out for them to see the silhouette of an oddly hunched figure disappear inside, what was that? Someone who was intoxicated? That might fit with the clumsy parking, and the fact that he had taken so long getting to the door, but not the light inside the car and the clean crime scene.

A mixture of planning, intoxication and chance?

The person in question had been in there for almost three hours, from just before midnight until around half past two in the morning. Given the Forensic Department’s estimate of the time of death, he had been in there for a long time after committing the murder, and had taken plenty of time to clean up.

Could it be the same person who was there earlier that evening, and he had come back later in his car?

No.

The images had been too poor to see anything clearly, but there was something about the shape — the person who had been hunched over when he went in had looked broader. But, on the other hand, that could be thanks to a change of clothes, or even a shadow.

The person who had come out at 02:23 had stood for a couple of seconds in the doorway, and had looked as if he were swaying. Injured? Intoxicated? Momentary dizziness?

He had got in the car, the lights had come on, then gone off again. He had walked around behind the wildlife camera. End of recording.

Harry rubbed the memory card, hoping that a genie might appear.

He was thinking about this wrong. All wrong! Damn, damn.

And he needed a break. He needed a... coffee. Strong, Turkish coffee. Harry reached behind the bar for the cezve, the Turkish coffeepot Mehmet had left, and realised that Øystein had changed the music. Still hip-hop, but the jazz and intricate bassline were gone.

“What’s this, Øystein?”

“Kanye West, ‘So Appalled,’ ” Øystein called from the back room.

“And just when you almost had me. Please, turn it off.”

“This is good stuff, Harry! Give it time. We mustn’t let our ears get stale.”

“Why not? There are thousands of albums from the last millennium I haven’t heard, and that’s enough to last the rest of my life.” Harry swallowed. What a relief it was to take a break from the heavy stuff, with these feather-light, meaningless exchanges with someone you knew inside out, like table tennis with a three-gram ball.

“You need to make more of an effort.” Øystein came back into the bar with a broad, toothless grin. He had lost his last front tooth in a bar in Prague, it had just fallen out. And even if he had discovered the gap in the airport toilet, called the bar and had the brownish-yellow tooth returned to him by post, there was nothing that could be done. Not that Øystein seemed particularly bothered.

“These are the classics hip-hop fans will be listening to when they’re old, Harry. This isn’t just form, it’s content.”

Harry held the memory card up to the light. He nodded slowly. “You’re right, Øystein.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“I’m thinking wrong because I’m focusing on form, on how the murder was carried out. I’m ignoring what I always used to go on about to my students. Why. The motive. The content.”

The door opened behind them.

“Oh, shit,” Øystein said in a low voice.

Harry glanced up at the mirror in front of him. A man was approaching. Short, with a light step, shaking his head, with a grin under his black, greasy fringe. It was the sort of grin you see on golfers or footballers when they’ve just shot the ball high into the stands, a grin that’s probably supposed to suggest that it was such a fuck-up that all they can do is smile.

“Hole.” A high, disconcertingly friendly voice.

“Ringdal.” Not high. Not disconcertingly friendly.

Harry saw Øystein shiver, as if the temperature in the bar had just plunged below zero.

“So, what are you doing in my bar, Hole?” There was a jangle of keys and coins in Ringdal’s pockets as he took off his blue Catalina jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door to the back room.

“Well,” Harry said. “Would ‘seeing how the inheritance is being managed’ be a satisfactory answer?”

“The only satisfactory answer is ‘getting out of here.’ ”

Harry put the memory card in his pocket and pushed himself off the bar stool. “You don’t look as badly hurt as I’d hoped, Ringdal.”

Ringdal was rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Hurt?”

“To deserve a lifetime ban I should have broken your nose at the very least. But perhaps you haven’t got any bones in your nose?”

Ringdal laughed as if he genuinely thought Harry was funny. “You landed your first punch because I wasn’t expecting it, Hole. A bit of a nosebleed, but not enough to break anything, I’m afraid. And after that you hit nothing but air. And that wall over there.” Ringdal filled a glass with water from the tap behind the bar. Perhaps it was a paradox that a teetotaller was running a bar. Perhaps not. “But all credit to you for trying, Hole. Maybe you should try to be a bit less drunk next time you attempt to take on a Norwegian judo champion.”

“And there we have it,” Harry said.

“What?”

“Have you ever heard of anyone involved in judo who has good taste in music?”

Ringdal sighed, Øystein raised his eyebrows and Harry realised that the ball had ended up in the stand.

“Getting out of here,” Harry said, and stood up.

“Hole.”

Harry stopped and turned around.

“I’m sorry about Rakel.” Ringdal raised his glass of water in his left hand as if in a toast. “She was a wonderful person. A shame she didn’t have time to carry on.”

“Carry on?”

“Oh, didn’t she tell you? I asked her to stay on as chair after you were gone. Well, let’s draw a line under all that, Harry. You’re welcome here, and I promise to listen to Øystein here when it comes to the choice of music. I can see that takings have dropped a bit, although of course that could be due to something other than a slightly less...” — he searched for the right words — “strict music policy.”

Harry nodded and opened the door.

He stopped in the doorway and looked around.

Grünerløkka. The scraping sound of a skateboard, ridden by a guy closer to forty than thirty, wearing Converse and flannels. Harry guessed design studio, clothing boutique or one of the hipster burger joints that Helga, Oleg’s girlfriend, had said “sold the same shit, same wrapping as everywhere else, but they put truffles on the fries so they can charge three times the price and still be on-trend.”

Oslo. A young man with an impressive, unkempt beard — like an Old Testament prophet — hanging like a bib over his tie and impeccable suit, his Burberry coat open. Finance? Irony? Or just confusion?

Norway. A couple in Lycra suits, jogging with skis and sticks in their hands, ski wax worth a thousand kroner, energy drinks and protein bars in their bumbags, on their way to the last patches of snow in the highest shadows of Nordmarka.

Harry pulled out his phone and called Bjørn’s number.

“Harry?”

“I’ve found the memory card from the wildlife camera.”

Silence.

“Bjørn?”

“I just needed to get away from everyone. That’s crazy! What can you see?”

“Not much, sadly. I was wondering if you could help me get it analysed. It’s dark, but you’ve got methods of getting more out of the images than I can manage. There are a few silhouettes and reference points, the height of the door frame, that sort of thing. A 3-D specialist might be able to come up with a decent description.” Harry rubbed his chin. He was itching somewhere, he just didn’t know where.

“I can try,” Bjørn said. “I can use an external expert. Because I’m assuming you’d like this done discreetly?”

“If I’m to have any chance of following this line of inquiry undisturbed, yes.”

“Have you made copies of the recordings?”

“No, it’s all on the memory card.”

“OK. Leave it in an envelope at Schrøder’s and I’ll call in and pick it up later today.”

“Thanks, Bjørn.” Harry ended the call. Tapped in R for Rakel. The other entries in his contacts were O for Oleg, Ø for Øystein, K for Katrine, B for Bjørn, S for Sis and A for Ståle Aune. That was all. That was enough for Harry, even if Rakel had told Ståle that Harry was open to meeting new people. But only if those letters weren’t already taken.

He keyed in Rakel’s work number without her extension.

“Roar Bohr?” he said when the receptionist answered.

“It looks like Bohr isn’t here today.”

“Where is he, and when will he be back?”

“It doesn’t say anything about that here. But I’ve got a mobile number.”

Harry made a note of the number and tapped it into the app for directory inquiries. It came up with an address between Smestad and Huseby, and a landline number. He looked at his watch. Half past one. He called the number.

“Yes?” a woman’s voice said after the third ring.

“Sorry, wrong number.” Harry hung up and started to walk towards the tram stop at the top of Birkelunden. He rubbed his upper arm. That wasn’t where the itch was either. It wasn’t until he was on the metro heading towards Smestad that he realised that the itch was probably in his head. And that it had almost certainly been triggered by Ringdal’s possibly well-meant, possibly calculated gesture. And that he would actually have preferred to have gone on being barred, rather than be the recipient of irritating, broad-minded benevolence. And that he might possibly have underestimated judo.

The woman who opened the door of the yellow house exuded the sort of sharp vitality that was typical of women between thirty and fifty in the upper social segment here on the west side of the city. It was difficult to know if it was an ideal they were trying to live up to, or their true energy level, but Harry had a suspicion that there was something status-related about the effortless, loud way they marshalled their two children, gun dog and husband, preferably in a public place.

“Pia Bohr?”

“How can I help you?” No confirmation, and gently dismissive politeness, but said with a confident smile. She was short, wasn’t wearing makeup, and her wrinkles suggested she was closer to fifty than forty. But she was as slim as a teenager. A lot of time at the gym and plenty of outdoor living, Harry guessed.

“Police.” He held up his ID.

“Of course, you’re Harry Hole,” she said without looking at it. “I’ve seen your face in the paper. You were Rakel Fauke’s husband. My condolences.”

“Thank you.”

“I presume you’re here to talk to Roar? He isn’t here.”

“When...”

“This evening, possibly. Give me your number and I’ll ask him to contact you.”

“Mm. Perhaps I could talk to you, Mrs. Bohr?”

“To me? What for?”

“It won’t take long. There are just a couple of things I need to know.” Harry’s eyes roamed across the shoe rack behind her. “Can I come in?”

Harry noticed the hesitation. And found what he was looking for on the bottom shelf of the rack. A pair of black, Soviet military boots.

“Now isn’t a good time, I’m in the middle of... something.”

“I can wait.”

Pia Bohr smiled quickly. Not obviously beautiful, but cute, Harry decided. Possibly what Øystein would call a Toyota: not the boys’ first choice when they were teenagers, but the one that stayed in the best shape as the years passed.

She looked at her watch. “I need to go and get something from the chemist. We can talk while we walk, OK?”

She grabbed a coat from a hook, came out onto the steps and closed the door behind her. Harry had noted that the lock was the same sort as Rakel’s, no self-locking mechanism, but Pia Bohr didn’t bother to look for a key. Safe neighbourhood. No strange men who’d just walk into your house.

They walked past the garage, through the gate and down the road, where the first Tesla cars were humming home from their short days at work.

Harry put a cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Are you going to pick up sleeping pills?”

“Sorry?”

Harry shrugged his shoulders. “Insomnia. You told our detective that your husband was at home all night of the tenth and eleventh of March. To know that for certain, you can’t have slept much.”

“I... Yes, it’s sleeping pills.”

“Mm. I needed sleeping pills after Rakel and I split up. Insomnia eats away at your soul. What have they put you on?”

“Er... Imovane and Somadril.” Pia was walking faster.

Harry lengthened his stride as he clicked the lighter beneath the cigarette but failed to get it to light. “Same as me. I’ve been on them for two months. You?”

“Something like that.”

Harry put the lighter back in his pocket. “Why are you lying, Pia?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Imovane and Somadril are heavy stuff. If you take them for two months, you’re hooked. And if you’re hooked, you take them every night. Because they work. So well that if you did take them that night, you were in a coma and would have no idea what your husband was doing. But you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’s hooked on sedatives. You’re a little too energetic, a little too quick-witted.”

Pia Bohr slowed down.

“But of course you could easily prove me wrong,” Harry said. “By showing me the prescription.”

Pia stopped walking. She put her hand in the back pocket of her tight jeans. Pulled out and unfolded a piece of blue paper.

“See?” she said with a light vibrato in her voice, holding it up and pointing. “So-ma-dril.”

“I see,” Harry said, taking the paper from her before she had time to react. “And when I look more closely, I see that it’s been prescribed for Bohr. Roar Bohr. He evidently hasn’t told you how strong the medication he needs is.”

Harry handed the prescription back to her.

“Perhaps there are other things he hasn’t told you, Pia?”

“I...”

“Was he at home that night?”

She swallowed. The colour in her cheeks was gone, her energetic vitality punctured. Harry adjusted his estimate of her age by five years.

“No,” she whispered. “He wasn’t.”

They skipped the chemist and walked down to Smestaddammen, then sat down on one of the benches on the slope on the eastern side, looking out at the little island that had room for a single willow tree.

“Spring,” Pia said. “Anything but spring. In the summer it’s so green here. Everything grows like mad. Loads of insects. Fish, frogs. It’s so full of life. And when the trees get their leaves and the wind plays through the willow, they dance and rustle loud enough to drown out the motorway.” She smiled sadly. “And autumn in Oslo...”

“Finest autumn in the world,” Harry said, lighting his cigarette.

“Even winter’s better than spring,” Pia said. “At least it used to be, when you could count on it being properly cold, with solid ice. We used to bring the children here to go skating. They loved it.”

“How many...?”

“Two. One girl and one boy. Twenty-eight and twenty-five. June’s a marine biologist in Bergen, and Gustav’s studying in the U.S.”

“You started early.”

She smiled wryly. “Roar was twenty-three and I was twenty-one when we had June. Couples who get moved around the country on Army postings often become parents early. So the wives have something to do, I suppose. As an officer’s wife you have two options. To let yourself be tamed and accept life as a breeding cow. Stand in your stall, give birth to calves, give milk, chew the cud.”

“And the second option?”

“Not to become an officer’s wife.”

“But you chose option number one?”

“Looks like it.”

“Mm. Why did you lie about that night?”

“To spare us from questions. From becoming the focus. You can imagine how it would have damaged Roar’s reputation if he’d been called in for questioning in a murder investigation, surely? He doesn’t need that, if I can put it like that.”

“Why doesn’t he need that?”

She shrugged. “No one needs that, do they? Especially not in our neighbourhood.”

“So where was he?”

“I don’t know. Out.”

“Out?”

“He can’t sleep.”

“Somadril.”

“It was worse when he got home from Iraq; they gave him Rohypnol for his insomnia that time. He got hooked in two weeks and it gave him blackouts. So now he refuses to take anything. He puts his field uniform on, says he has to go out on reconnaissance. Keep watch. Keep an eye out. He says he just walks from place to place, like a night patrol, staying out of sight. I suppose it’s typical of people with post-traumatic stress disorder that they’re frightened the whole time. He usually comes home and gets a couple of hours’ sleep before he goes to work.”

“And he manages to keep this hidden at work?”

“We see what we want to see. And Roar has always been good at making whatever impression he wants to make. He’s the sort of man people trust.”

“You too?”

She sighed. “My husband isn’t a bad person. But sometimes even good people fall to pieces.”

“Does he take a gun with him when he’s out on night patrol?”

“I don’t know. He goes out after I’ve gone to bed.”

“Do you know where he was on the night of the murder?”

“I asked him after you’d asked me. He said he slept in June’s old room.”

“But you didn’t believe him?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because then you would have told the police that he’d slept in another room. You lied because you were worried we had something else. Something that meant he needed a stronger alibi than the truth.”

“You’re not seriously suggesting that you suspect Roar, Hole?”

Harry looked at a pair of swans that were paddling towards them. He glimpsed a flash of light from the hillside beyond the motorway. A window opening, perhaps.

“Post-traumatic,” Harry said. “What’s the trauma?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. A combination of things. Rough stuff from his childhood. And Iraq. Afghanistan. But when he came home from his last tour and told me he’d left the Army, obviously I realised that something had happened. He’d changed. Was more shut off. After a lot of nagging, I finally got it out of him that he’d killed someone in Afghanistan. Of course that’s what they were there for, but this one had got to him, and he didn’t want to talk about it. But he was able to function, at least.”

“And he isn’t now?”

She looked at Harry with the eyes of someone who’d been shipwrecked. And he realised why she had opened up to him, a stranger, so easily. Not in our neighbourhood. She had wanted this, had been longing desperately for it, she just hadn’t had anyone to talk to about it until now.

“After Rakel Fauke... after your wife’s death, he went completely to pieces. He... he’s not functioning, no.”

That flash of light again. And it struck him that it must be coming from roughly the same part of the hillside where the Bohrs’ house was. Harry stiffened. He had seen something from the corner of his eye, something between them on the white backrest of the bench, something trembling that had moved and disappeared, like a quick, red, silent insect. There were no insects here in March.

Harry leaned forward instantly, dug his heels in the slope, pushed off and threw himself against the back of the bench. Pia Bohr screamed as the bench tipped over and they fell backwards. Harry wrapped his arms round her as they slid off the backrest, pressing her down into the shallow ditch behind the bench. Then he began to snake his way across the mud, pulling Pia behind him. He stopped and peered up towards the hillside. He saw that the willow tree was between them and where he had seen the flash of light. Farther away on the path, a man in a hooded sweater walking a Rottweiler had stopped, and looked like he was considering getting involved.

“Police!” Harry cried. “Get back! There’s a sniper!”

Harry saw an elderly lady turn and hurry away, but the man with the Rottweiler didn’t move.

Pia tried to pull free, but Harry lay with the whole of his body weight on top of the slight woman so that they were lying face to face.

“Looks like your husband’s at home after all,” he said, pulling out his phone. “That’s why I couldn’t come in. That’s why you didn’t lock the door when we left.” He called a number.

“No!” Pia cried.

“Emergency Control,” a voice said on the phone.

“Inspector Harry Hole here. Reporting an armed man—”

The phone was snatched from his hand. “He’s just using the rifle sight as a telescope.” Pia Bohr put the phone to her ear. “Sorry, wrong number.” She ended the call and gave the phone back to Harry. “Isn’t that what you said when you called me?”

Harry didn’t move.

“You’re quite heavy, Hole. Could you...”

“How do I know I’m not going to get a bullet in my forehead when I stand up?”

“Because you’ve had a red dot on your forehead since we sat down on the bench.”

Harry looked at her. Then he put his hands down on the cold mud and pushed himself up. Got to his feet. Squinted towards the hillside. He turned to help Pia, but she was already up. Her jeans and jacket were black and dripping with mud. Harry pulled a bent cigarette from his packet of Camels. “Is your husband going to disappear now?”

“I imagine so,” she sighed. “You need to understand that he’s in a bad way mentally, and very jittery right now.”

“Where does he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know you can be prosecuted for obstructing the police, Mrs. Bohr?”

“Are you talking about me or my husband?” she asked, brushing her thighs. “Or yourself?”

“Sorry?”

“You’d hardly be allowed to investigate the murder of your own wife, Hole. You’re here as a private detective. Or should we say pirate detective?”

Harry tore off the bent tip of the cigarette and lit what was left. He looked down at his own filthy clothes. His coat was torn where one of the buttons had been pulled off. “Will you tell me if your husband comes back?”

Pia nodded towards the water. “Watch out for that one, it doesn’t like men.”

Harry turned and saw that one of the swans had set off towards them.

When he turned back, Pia Bohr was already heading up the slope.

“A pirate detective?”

“Yep,” Harry said, holding the door to Bjølsenhallen open for Kaja.

The hall lay nestled among the more ordinary buildings around it. Kaja had said that Kjelsås Table Tennis Club was based above the large supermarket on the ground floor.

“Still not keen on the whole lift concept?” Kaja asked as she struggled to keep up with Harry on the stairs.

“It’s not the concept, it’s the size,” Harry said. “How did you find out about this military police officer?”

“There weren’t that many Norwegians in Kabul, and I’ve talked to most of the people I know there now. Glenne is the only person who sounds like he might have something to tell us.”

The girl in reception told them where to go. The sound of shoes on hard floors and the clatter of ping-pong balls reached them before they turned the corner and found themselves in a large, open room where a few people, most of them men, were dancing and crouching and swinging at either end of green table-tennis tables.

Kaja set off towards one of them.

Two men were hitting a ball diagonally across the net at each other, the same trajectory every time, forehand with topspin. They were barely moving, just repeating the same movement, striking the ball with their arms bent and a flick of the wrist, accompanied by a hard step with one foot. The ball was moving so fast that it looked like a white line between the men, who seemed locked into this duel, like a computer game that had got stuck.

Then one of them hit the ball too far and it bounced away across the floor between the tables.

“Damn,” the player said. He was a fit-looking man in his forties or fifties, with a black headband over cropped, silver-grey hair.

“You’re not reading the spin,” the other man said as he went to fetch the ball.

“Jørn,” Kaja said.

“Kaja!” The man with the headband grinned. “Here’s a sweaty soldier for you.” They hugged each other.

Kaja introduced him to Harry.

“Thanks for agreeing to see us,” Harry said.

“No one turns down a meeting with this young lady,” Jørn Glenne said with his smile still in his eyes, squeezing Harry’s hand just hard enough for it to be taken as a challenge. “But if I’d known she was going to be bringing backup...”

Kaja and Glenne laughed.

“Let’s grab a coffee,” Glenne said, putting his paddle on the table.

“What about your partner?” Kaja asked.

“My trainer, bought and paid for,” he said, showing them the way. “Connolly and I are going to be meeting up in Juba this autumn. I need to get in practice.”

“An American colleague,” Kaja explained to Harry. “They had a never-ending table-tennis tournament while we were in Kabul.”

“Fancy coming along?” Glenne asked. “I’m sure your lot could find a job for you there.”

“South Sudan?” Kaja asked. “What’s it like there now?”

“Same as before. Civil war, famine, Dinkas, Nuers, cannibalism, gang rape and more weapons than the whole of Afghanistan put together.”

“Let me think about it,” Kaja said, and Harry could see from the expression on her face that she wasn’t joking.

They got coffee in the canteen-like cafeteria and sat down at a table next to a grimy window looking out onto Bjølsen Valsemølle and the Akerselva. Jørn Glenne started speaking before Harry and Kaja had a chance to ask any questions.

“I agreed to talk to you because I fell out with Roar Bohr in Kabul. A woman was raped and murdered; she was Bohr’s personal interpreter. A Hazara woman. The Hazaras are mostly poor, simple peasants with no education. But this young woman, Hela—”

“Hala,” Kaja corrected. “It means the circle around the full moon.”

“...had taught herself English and French pretty much unaided. And she was in the process of learning Norwegian as well. Brilliant at languages. She was found right outside the house where she lived with other women who worked for the coalition and various aid agencies. Of course, you lived there too, Kaja.”

Kaja nodded.

“We suspected it was the Taliban or someone from her home district. Honour is obviously a huge thing for Sunni Muslims, and even more so for the Hazaras. The fact that she was working for us infidels, socialised with men and dressed like a Westerner may have been enough for someone to want to make an example of her.”

“I’ve heard about honour killings,” Harry said. “But honour rape?”

Glenne shrugged his shoulders. “One could have led to the other. But who knows? Bohr stopped us investigating it.”

“Really?”

“Her body was found a stone’s throw from the house where we’re responsible for security. It was basically an area that was under our control. Despite that, Bohr handed the investigation to the local Afghan police. When I objected, he pointed out that the military police, which in this case meant me and one other guy, were under his command and charged with the security of Norwegian troops in the country, and that was all. Even if he knew perfectly well that the Afghan police lacked the resources and forensic tools that we take for granted. Fingerprinting was a new-fangled concept, and DNA-testing the stuff of dreams.”

“Bohr had to consider the political implications,” Kaja said. “There was already a lot of ill will about Western forces taking too much control, and Hala was Afghan.”

“She was a Hazara,” Glenne snorted. “Bohr knew the case wouldn’t be given the same priority it would have got if she’d been a Pashtun. OK, there was a post-mortem, and they found traces of fluni-something-or-other. The stuff men put in women’s drinks if they want to rape—”

“Flunitrazepam,” Kaja said. “Also known as Rohypnol.”

“Right. And do you think any Afghan would spend money drugging a woman before he raped her?”

“Mm.”

“No, damn it, it was a foreigner!” Glenne hit the table with his hand. “And was the case ever solved? Of course not.”

“Do you think...” Harry took a sip of coffee. Tried to find an alternative, more indirect way to phrase the question, but changed his mind when he looked up and met Jørn Glenne’s gaze. “...that Roar Bohr could have been behind the murder, and made sure that the people with the least chance of catching him were given responsibility for the investigation? Is that why you wanted to talk to us?”

Glenne blinked and opened his mouth. But nothing came out.

“Listen, Jørn,” Kaja said. “We know Bohr told his wife he killed someone in Afghanistan. And I’ve talked to Jan...”

“Jan?”

“The camp instructor for Special Forces. Tall, blond...”

“Oh, him. He was crazy about you too!”

“Anyway,” Kaja said, lowering her eyes, and Harry suspected she was acting embarrassed to give the laughing Glenne what he wanted. “Jan says they have no record of any confirmed or claimed kill for Roar. As the officer in command, obviously he wasn’t on the front line much, but the fact is that he has no kills from earlier in his career when he was actually on the front line.”

“I know,” Glenne said. “Officially, Special Forces weren’t in Basra, but Bohr was there for training with an American unit. According to rumour he saw a lot of action, but still remained a virgin. And the closest he got to the action in Afghanistan was that time Sergeant Waage was taken by the Taliban.”

“Yes, that,” Kaja said.

“What was that?” Harry asked.

Glenne shrugged. “Bohr and Waage were on a long drive and stopped in the desert so the sergeant could have a shit. The sergeant went behind some rocks, and when he didn’t come back after twenty minutes and didn’t answer when he was called, Bohr said in his report that he got out of the car to look for him. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t budge.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because there’s not that fucking much that can happen in a desert. Because one or two Taliban farmers with basic rifles and a knife were sitting behind the rocks waiting for Bohr to come looking. And Bohr obviously knew that. And he was safe in the bulletproof car with open ground between him and the rocks. He knew there wouldn’t be any witnesses to prove he was lying. So he locked all the doors and called the camp. They told him it was a five-hour drive from there. Two days later an Afghan unit found a trail of blood on the pavement, several kilometres long, a few hours farther north. Sometimes the Taliban torture prisoners by dragging them behind a cart. And outside a village even farther north, a head was found on a stake stuck in the ground by the side of the road. His face had been scraped off on the pavement, but DNA analysis in Paris confirmed that it was Sergeant Waage, of course.”

“Mm.” Harry toyed with his coffee cup. “Do you think that about Bohr because you’d have done the same thing if it had been you, Glenne?”

The military police officer shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not under any illusions. We’re human, we all take the path of least resistance. But it wasn’t me.”

“So?”

“So I judge other people just as hard as I would have judged myself. And maybe Bohr did that as well. It’s tough for a commanding officer to lose any of his troops. Bohr was never the same after that, anyway.”

“So you think he raped and murdered his interpreter, but what broke him was the fact that the Taliban took his sergeant?”

Glenne shrugged again. “Like I said, I wasn’t allowed to investigate, so all I’ve got are theories.”

“And what’s your best one?”

“That the business of the rape was just a cover-up to make it look like sexually motivated murder. To get the police to look among the usual suspects and perverts. Which is a fairly thin file in Kabul.”

“A cover-up for what?”

“For Bohr’s real project. To kill someone.”

“Someone?”

“Bohr had a problem with killing, as you already know by now. And when you’re in Special Forces, that’s a big problem.”

“Really? I didn’t think they were that bloodthirsty.”

“They’re not, but... how can I explain it?” Glenne shook his head. “The old school in Special Forces, the ones who came through paratrooper training, were picked because of their long-term intelligence-gathering behind enemy lines, where patience and stamina are the most important qualities. They were the Army’s long-distance runners, OK? That’s where Bohr fitted in. Now, the focus is on antiterrorism in urban settings. And you know what? The new Special Forces look like ice hockey players, if you see what I mean? And in this new environment, a rumour had gone around saying Bohr was...” Glenne pulled a face, as if he didn’t like the taste of the word on his tongue.

“A coward?” Harry asked.

“Impotent. Imagine the shame. You’re in command, but you’re still a virgin. And not a virgin because you’ve never had the opportunity, because there are still soldiers in Special Forces who have never found themselves in a situation where it’s been necessary to kill. But because you couldn’t get it up when it mattered. See what I mean?”

Harry nodded.

“As an old hand, Bohr knew that the first kill is the hardest,” Glenne went on. “After that first blood it gets easier. Much easier. So he chose an easy first victim. A woman who wouldn’t put up a fight, who trusted him and wouldn’t suspect anything. One of the hated Hazaras, a Shia in a Sunni Muslim country, someone plenty of people might have a motive to kill. And then maybe he got a taste for it. Killing is a very special feeling. Better than sex.”

“Is it?”

“So they say. Ask people in Special Forces. And tell them to answer honestly.”

Harry and Glenne looked at each other for a few moments before Glenne looked at Kaja. “All of this is just things I’ve thought to myself. But if Bohr has admitted to his wife that he killed Hela—”

“Hala.”

“...then you can count on my help.” Glenne drank the last of his coffee. “Connolly never rests. I need to get back to training.”

“Well?” Kaja asked when she and Harry were standing outside in the street. “What do you think about Glenne?”

“I think he hits too long because he doesn’t read the spin.”

“Funny.”

“Metaphorically. He’s drawing overblown conclusions from the trajectory of the ball, but without analysing what his opponent has just done with the paddle.”

“Is the lingo supposed to tell me you know all about table tennis?”

Harry shrugged. “Øystein’s basement from when we were ten. Him, me and Tresko. And King Crimson. To be honest, by the time we were sixteen we knew more about screwballs and prog rock than girls. We...” Harry stopped abruptly and grimaced.

“What?” Kaja asked.

“I’m babbling, I...” He closed his eyes. “I’m babbling so I don’t wake up.”

“Wake up?”

Harry took a deep breath. “I’m asleep. As long as I’m asleep, as long as I can manage to stay in the dream, I can carry on looking for him. But every so often it starts to slip away from me. I need to concentrate on sleeping, because if I wake up...”

“What?”

“Then I’ll know that it’s true. And then I’ll die.”

Harry listened. The clatter of studded tires on pavement. The sound of a small waterfall in the Akerselva.

“Sounds like what my psychologist called lucid dreaming,” he heard Kaja say. “A dream where you can control everything. And that’s why we do all we can not to let it go.”

Harry shook his head. “I can’t control anything. I just want to find the man who killed Rakel. Then I’ll wake up. And die.”

“Why not try to sleep properly?” Her voice was soft. “I think it would do you good to get some rest, Harry.”

Harry opened his eyes again. Kaja had raised her hand, probably to put it on his shoulder, but instead she brushed a strand of hair from her face when she saw the look in his eyes.

He cleared his throat. “You said you’d found something in the property register?”

Kaja blinked a couple of times.

“Yes,” she said. “A cabin listed under Roar Bohr’s name. In Eggedal. An hour and forty-five minutes away, according to Google Maps.”

“Good. I’ll see if Bjørn can drive.”

“Sure you don’t want to talk to Katrine and put an alert out for him?”

“What for? The fact that his wife didn’t see with her own eyes that he was asleep in their daughter’s old room that night?”

“If she wouldn’t think what we’ve got is enough, why do you?”

Harry buttoned his coat and got his mobile out. “Because I’ve got a gut feeling that’s caught more murderers than any other gut in this country.”

He felt Kaja looking at him in astonishment as he called Bjørn.

“I can drive,” Bjørn said after a short pause for thought.

“Thanks.”

“One other thing. That memory card of yours...”

“Yes?”

“I forwarded the envelope in your name to Freund, our external 3-D expert. I haven’t spoken to him, but I’ve sent you an email with his contact details, so you can talk to him yourself.”

“I get it. You’d rather not have your name mixed up in this.”

“This is the only job I know how to do, Harry.”

“Like I said, I get it.”

“If I get fired now, with a kid and everything...”

“Stop it, Bjørn, you’re not the one who should be apologising. I should, for dragging you into this mess.”

A pause. In spite of what he’d just said, Harry could almost feel Bjørn’s guilty conscience down the phone.

“I’ll pick you up,” Bjørn said.

Detective Inspector Felah was sitting with the fan on his back, but his shirt was still sticking to his skin. He hated the heat, hated Kabul, hated his bombproof office. But most of all he hated the lies he had to listen to, day in, day out. Like the ones from the pathetic, illiterate, opium-addicted Hazara sitting in front of him now.

“You’ve been brought to see me because you claimed under questioning that you can give us the name of a murderer,” Felah said. “A foreigner.”

“Only if you protect me,” the man said.

Felah looked at the man cowering in front of him. The battered cap the Hazara was rubbing between his hands wasn’t a pakol, but it had at least covered his filthy hair. The dribbling, ignorant Shia bandit evidently thought that escaping the death penalty and getting a long prison sentence instead would be a mercy. A slow, painful death, that was what that was, and he himself would have chosen a quick death by hanging without hesitation.

Felah wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “That depends on what you’ve got to say to me. Spit it out.”

“He killed...” the Hazara said in a shaky voice. “He didn’t think anyone saw him, but I did. With my own eyes, I swear, as Allah is my witness.”

“A foreign soldier, you said.”

“Yes, sir. But this wasn’t in battle, this was murder. Murder, plain and simple.”

“I see. And who was this military foreigner?”

“The leader of the Norwegians. I know that because I recognised him. He’d been in our village, talking about how they’re here to help us, that we’d get democracy and jobs... all the usual.”

Felah felt a moment of longed-for excitement. “You mean Major Jonassen?”

“No, that wasn’t his name. Lieutenant Colonel Bo.”

“Do you mean Bohr?”

“Yes — yes I do, sir.”

“And you saw him murder an Afghan man?”

“No, not that.”

“What, then?”

Felah listened as he felt his excitement and interest fade away. Firstly, Lieutenant Colonel Bohr had gone home, and the chances of getting him extradited were as good as nonexistent. Secondly, a commander who was out of the game was no longer a particularly valuable chess piece in Kabul’s political game, a game that Felah actually hated more than everything else put together. Thirdly, the victim wasn’t someone who qualified for the amount of resources it would require to investigate this opium addict’s claims. And then there was the fourth thing. It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Everyone was out to save their own skin. And the more detail the man in front of him gave about the murder — and Felah was confident it matched what little they already knew — the more certain Felah was that the man was describing a murder he himself had committed. A crazy idea, and Felah wasn’t about to use the few resources he had at his disposal to investigate the hypothesis. Opium addiction or murder — either way, you still couldn’t hang a man more than once.

27

“Can it really not go any faster?” Harry asked, staring out into the darkness beyond the slush and the hard-working windshield wipers.

“Yes, but I’d rather not go off the road with so much irreplaceable brain capacity in the car.” As usual, Bjørn had his seat so far back that he was more lying than sitting. “Especially in a car with old-fashioned seat belts and no airbags.”

A truck coming around a bend in the opposite direction on Highway 287 passed them so close that Bjørn’s 1970 Volvo Amazon shook.

“Even I’ve got airbags,” Harry said, looking past Bjørn at the low crash barriers and still-frozen river that had been running alongside the road for the past ten kilometres. The Haglebu River, according to the GPS on the phone in his lap. When he looked the other way he saw the steep, snow-covered side of the valley and dark fir forest. Ahead of them: the paved road that swallowed up the light of the headlamps and wound, narrow and predictable, towards mountains, more forest and wilderness. He had read that there were supposed to be brown bears in the area.

And as the sides of the valley towered above them, the voice on the radio — which in between tracks announced that they were listening to nationwide P1 °Country — lost all credibility when it was intermittently replaced by static or disappeared altogether.

Harry turned the radio off.

Bjørn turned it back on again. Adjusted the dial. Crackling and a sense of post-apocalyptic empty space.

“DAB killed the radio star,” Harry said.

“Not at all,” Bjørn said. “They’ve got a local station here.” A razor-sharp steel guitar suddenly cut through the static. “There!” He grinned. “Radio Hallingdal. Best country channel in Norway.”

“You still can’t drive without country music, then?”

“Come on, driving and country music are like gin and tonic,” Bjørn said. “And they have radio bingo every Saturday. Just listen!”

The steel guitar faded away and, sure enough, a voice announced that it was time to have your bingo cards ready, especially in Flå, where, for the first time ever, all five winners two Saturdays before had lived. Then the steel guitar was back at full volume again.

“Can we turn it down?” Harry said, looking at the glowing screen of his phone.

“You can handle a bit of country, Harry. I gave you that Ramones album because it’s country in disguise. You really need to listen to ‘I Wanted Everything’ and ‘Don’t Come Close.’ ”

“Kaja’s calling.”

Bjørn turned the radio off and Harry put the phone to his ear. “Hi, Kaja.”

“Hi! Where are you?”

“Eggedal.”

“Where in Eggedal?”

Harry looked outside. “Somewhere near the bottom.”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“OK. I haven’t found out anything specific on Roar Bohr. He hasn’t got a criminal record, and none of the people I’ve spoken to have said anything to suggest that he’s a potential murderer. Quite the reverse, in fact, they all describe him as a very considerate man. Almost overprotective when it comes to his own children and troops. I spoke to an employee at the NHRI who said the same.”

“Hang on. How did you get them to talk?”

“I told them I’m working on a flattering profile piece about Roar Bohr’s time in Afghanistan for the Red Cross magazine.”

“So you’re lying to them?”

“Not really. I might be working on that article. Maybe I just haven’t asked the Red Cross if they’re interested yet.”

“Sneaky. Go on.”

“When I asked the member of staff at the NHRI how Bohr had taken Rakel Fauke’s murder, she said he had seemed upset and exhausted, that he’d taken a lot of time off in the past few days and had reported sick today. I asked what sort of relationship Bohr and Rakel had, and she said Bohr had kept an extra eye on Rakel.”

“An extra eye? Did she mean that he looked out for her?”

“I don’t know, but that’s how she put it.”

“You said you didn’t have anything specific on Bohr. Does that mean you’ve something non-specific?”

“Yes. Like I said, Bohr hasn’t got a criminal record, but I did find one old case when I searched for his name in the archive. It turns out that a Margaret Bohr went to the police in 1988 because her seventeen-year-old daughter, Bianca, had been raped. The mother claimed her daughter was showing behaviour typical of a rape victim, and had cuts on her stomach and hands. The police interviewed Bianca, but she denied she’d been raped and said she had inflicted those cuts herself. According to the report there were suspicions of incest, and Bianca’s father and her older brother, Roar Bohr, who was then in his twenties, were among the suspects mentioned. Later on, both the father and Bianca were briefly admitted to hospital for psychiatric treatment. But it was never discovered what — if anything — had happened. When I searched for Bianca Bohr, a report from Sigdal Police Station popped up from five years later. Bianca Bohr had been found dead on the rocks at the bottom of the twenty-metre-high falls at Norafossen. The Bohr family’s cabin is four kilometres farther up the river.”

“Sigdal. Is that the same cabin we’re on our way to?”

“I assume so. The post-mortem showed that Bianca died from drowning. The police concluded that she could have fallen into the river by accident, but that it was more likely that she had taken her own life.”

“Why?”

“A witness had seen Bianca running barefoot through the snow along the path between the cabin and the river, wearing only a blue dress. It’s several hundred metres from the cabin to the river. And she was naked when she was found. Her psychiatrist also confirmed that she had previously shown suicidal tendencies. I managed to find his phone number, and left a message on his answer machine.”

“OK.”

“Still in Eggedal?”

“Presumably.”

Bjørn turned the radio back on, and a voice monotonously reading out numbers, repeating them digit by digit, merged with the sound of the studded tires on the pavement. The forest and darkness seemed to be getting denser, the sides of the valley steeper.

Bohr rested the rifle on the thickest, lowest branch and looked through the telescopic sight. Saw the red dot dance across the wooden wall before it found the window. It was dark in there, but the man was on his way. The man who needed to be stopped before he ruined everything was going to come, Bohr just knew it. It was simply a matter of time. And time was the only thing Roar Bohr had left.

“It’s right up this hill,” Harry said, looking at the phone screen, where a red teardrop-shaped symbol marked the coordinates Kaja had given him. They were parked by the side of the road and Bjørn had switched the engine and lights off. Harry leaned forward and peered out through the windshield, where light rain had started to fall. There were no lights anywhere on the black hillside. “Looks pretty sparsely populated.”

“We’d better take some beads for the natives,” Bjørn said, taking a flashlight and his service pistol from the glove compartment.

“I was thinking I’d go up there alone,” Harry said.

“And leave me here on my own when I’m scared of the dark?”

“You remember what I said about laser sights?” Harry put his index finger to his forehead. “I’m still marked after Smestaddammen. This is my project, and you’re on paternity leave.”

“You’ve seen those discussions in films where the woman nags the hero to let her join in something dangerous?”

“Yes...”

“I usually fast-forward those bits, because I know who’s going to win. Shall we go?”

28

“Sure it’s this cabin?” Bjørn asked.

“According to the GPS, yes,” said Harry, who was holding his coat over his phone. Partly to shield it from the rain that had replaced the snow showers, and partly to stop the glow from giving away their position if Bohr was looking out for them. Because if he was in the cabin, the darkness inside suggested that that was precisely what he was doing. Harry screwed his eyes up. They had found a trail that ran partially across bare ground, and the brown marks where there was snow indicated that it had been used recently. It hadn’t taken more than fifteen minutes to find. The snow on the ground reflected the light, but it was still too dark for them to be able to make out what colour the cabin was. Harry was putting his money on red. The rain had camouflaged the sound as they approached, but now it was also muffling any noises from inside the cabin.

“I’ll go in, you wait here,” Harry said.

“I need a bit more instruction, I’ve been in Forensics too long.”

“Shoot if you see someone who isn’t me shooting,” Harry said, then got out from under the low, dripping branches and strode towards the cabin.

There were regulations for how to enter a house if you thought you might encounter armed resistance. Harry knew some of them. Roar Bohr probably knew them all. So there was no point overthinking it. Harry walked up to the door and tried the handle. Locked. He moved to the side of the door and banged on it twice.

“Police!”

He leaned against the wall and listened. All he could hear was the persistent rain. And a twig snapping somewhere. He stared out into the darkness, but it was like a solid black wall. He counted to five, then hit the pane of glass beside the door with the butt of his pistol. The glass shattered. He reached inside and loosened the window catch. The frame had swollen, and he had to grab it hard and pull. He climbed inside. Inhaled the spice-like smell of fresh birch wood and ash. He turned on his flashlight, holding it away from his body in case anyone felt like using it as a target. He swept the beam around the room until it found a light switch by the door. Harry clicked it and the ceiling lamp came on, and he hurried to stand with his back against the wall between the windows. He looked around the room, from left to right, like he would at a crime scene. He was in the living room, from which two doors led to bedrooms containing bunk beds. No bathroom. A kitchen worktop with a sink and a radio at one end of the room. An open fireplace. Typical Norwegian cabin furniture — pine — a painted wooden chest, and a submachine gun and automatic rifle leaning against the wall. A table with a crocheted tablecloth and candlesticks, a sports magazine, two glinting hunting knives and a game of Yahtzee. Printed sheets of A4 were pinned to the walls all around the room. Harry stopped breathing when he saw Rakel beside the fireplace. The picture showed her standing behind a barred window. The kitchen window at Holmenkollveien. It must have been taken from right in front of the wildlife camera.

Harry forced himself to carry on looking round.

Above the dining table were photographs of more women, some with newspaper cuttings beneath them. And when Harry turned to look at the wall behind him he saw more pictures. Of men. Around a dozen, pinned in three columns, numbered according to some sort of ranking system. He recognised three of them at once. Number 1 was Anton Blix, who had been convicted of several rapes and a double murder ten years ago. Number 2 was Svein Finne. And further down, at number 6, Valentin Gjertsen. Now Harry thought he recognised some of the others as well. Well-known violent criminals, at least one of them dead and a couple more still in prison, as far as he was aware. He peered over at the newspaper cuttings on the other side of the room, and managed to make out one bold headline: Raped in Park. The print of the others was too small.

If he stepped closer, he would make himself a target from outside. But, of course, he could switch the lamp off and just use his flashlight. Harry’s eyes turned towards the switch, but found Rakel again.

He couldn’t see her face, but there was something about the way she was standing inside the window. Like a deer that had raised its head, pricked up its ears. That scented danger. Perhaps that was why she looked so alone. While she’s waiting for me, Harry thought. The way I waited for her. Two of us, waiting.

Harry realised he’d stepped out into the room, into the light, visible to anyone and everyone. What the hell was he doing? He closed his eyes.

And waited.

Roar Bohr had the crosshairs on the back of the person in the illuminated room. He had switched off the laser sight that had given him away when Pia and Hole were sitting on the bench beside Smestaddammen. The raindrops rustled in the trees above him, dripping from the brim of his cap. He waited.

Nothing happened.

Harry opened his eyes. Started breathing again.

And read the newspaper clippings.

Some of them had turned yellow, some were just a couple of years old. Reports of rapes. No names, just ages, locations, an outline of what happened. Oslo, Østlandet. One in Stavanger. God knows how Bohr had got hold of the photographs, but Harry had no doubt that they were the rape victims. So what about the pictures of the men? A sort of top-ten list of the worst — or possibly best — rapists in Norway? Something for Roar Bohr to aspire to, to measure himself against?

Harry unlocked the front door and opened it. “Bjørn! The coast’s clear!”

He looked at the picture that was pinned up beside the door. Sharp sunlight in squinting green eyes, a hand brushing aside a strand of honey-brown hair, a white vest with the Red Cross on it, desert landscape, Kaja smiling with those pointed teeth.

Harry looked down. Saw the same military boots he had seen in Bohr’s hallway.

The rocks in the desert. The Taliban waiting for number two to get out of the bulletproof car.

“No, Bjørn! No!”

“Kaja Solness,” the almost exaggeratedly deep voice from the black stone slab beside the stove.

“Officer in the Oslo Police,” Kaja said loudly as she scanned the shelves of the fridge in vain for something to eat.

“And how can I help you, Officer Solness?”

“We’re looking for a serial attacker.” She poured herself a glass of apple juice in the hope of getting her blood sugar up a bit. She checked the time. A relaxed local restaurant had opened on Vibes gate since she was last home. “Obviously I’m aware that as a psychiatrist you’re under an oath of confidentiality when it comes to patients who are still alive, but this concerns a deceased patient...”

“Same rules.”

“...whom we suspect may have been raped by someone we want to prevent from raping others.”

There was silence at the other end.

“Let me know when you’ve finished thinking, London.” She didn’t know why the man’s surname, one of the biggest cities in the world, seemed to suggest loneliness. She switched off the speaker function on her phone, and took it and the glass of juice back into the living room.

“Go ahead and ask, and we’ll see,” he said.

“Thanks. Do you remember a patient called Bianca Bohr?”

“Yes.” He said this in a tone that told Kaja that he also remembered what had happened to her.

“When you were seeing her as a patient, did you think she had been raped?”

“I don’t know.”

“OK. Did she show any behaviour that might indicate—”

“The behaviour of psychiatric patients can indicate a lot of things. I wouldn’t rule out rape. Or assault. Or other traumas. But that’s just speculation.”

“Her father was also admitted for mental health problems. Did she ever talk about him?”

“During conversations between psychiatrists and patients we almost always talk about their relationship to their parents, but I can’t recall anything that struck me in particular.”

“OK.” Kaja tapped a key on her computer and the screen came back to life. The frozen image showed the silhouette of a person leaving Rakel’s house. “What about her older brother, Roar?”

Another long pause. Kaja took a sip from the glass and looked out at the garden.

“You’re talking about a serial attacker who’s still on the loose?”

“Yes,” Kaja said.

“During the period that Bianca was an inpatient with us, one of the nurses noted that she had repeatedly screamed a name in her sleep. The name you just mentioned.”

“Do you think that Bianca could have been raped, not by her father, but by her older brother?”

“Like I said, Solness, I can’t rule out—”

“But the thought has occurred to you, hasn’t it?”

Kaja listened to the sound of his breathing in an attempt to interpret it, but all she heard was the rain outside.

“Bianca did tell me something, but I have to stress that she was psychotic, and when suffering from psychosis patients say all sorts of things.”

“What did she say?”

“That her brother had performed an abortion on her at the family’s cabin.”

Kaja shuddered.

“Naturally, that needn’t necessarily have happened,” London said. “But I remember a drawing she had pinned up above the bed in her room. It was a large eagle swooping down over a little boy. And out of the bird’s beak came the letters R-O-A-R.”

“As in the English verb?”

“That was how I chose to interpret it at the time, yes.”

“But in hindsight?”

Kaja heard him sigh loudly, out there in telephone-land. “It’s quite typical that when a patient takes their own life, you imagine that you misinterpreted everything, that everything you did and thought was wrong. When Bianca died, we thought she was actually getting better. So I looked through my old notes to see what I had misunderstood, where I’d gone wrong. And I discovered that on two occasions — which I had dismissed as psychotic babbling — she told me that they had killed her big brother.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“She herself, and her older brother.”

“What does that mean? That Roar took part in killing himself?”

Roar Bohr lowered the butt of the rifle, but left the barrel resting on the branch.

The person he’d had in his sights had moved away from the illuminated window.

He took in the sounds of the darkness around him.

Rain. The sound of tires on wet pavement not far away. He guessed a Volvo. They liked Volvos here on Lyder Sagens gate. And Volkswagens. Estates. The expensive models. In Smestad it was more Audis and BMWs. The gardens here weren’t as obsessively neat as in his neighbourhood, but the more relaxed look didn’t necessarily take any less work and planning. Kaja’s wilderness of a garden was the exception; anarchy ruled here. In her defence, she hadn’t lived at home much in the past few years. And he wasn’t complaining. The overgrown shrubs and trees gave him better camouflage than in Kabul. Once he’d had to hide behind a burned-out car on top of a garage roof, where he had been far too exposed, but it was the only place where he had a complete view of the hostel where the girls lived. He had spent enough hours there watching Kaja Solness through the sights of his rifle to know that she wouldn’t let a garden get overgrown unless she had more important things to do. And she did. People do so many peculiar things when they think they’re not being seen, and Roar Bohr knew things about Kaja Solness that other people had no idea about. With his Swarovski rifle sight he could easily read the text on the screen of the computer on her desk when Kaja wasn’t sitting in the way. And now she had just tapped a key to make the screen light up. There was an image on the screen. Taken at night, it showed a house with one window lit up.

It took Bohr a few moments to realise that he was looking at Rakel’s house.

He adjusted the sight and brought the screen into focus. He saw that it wasn’t a still picture but a recording. It must have been filmed from where he used to stand. What the hell? Then the door of Rakel’s house opened and a figure was silhouetted in the opening. Bohr held his breath so that the rifle was completely still and he could read the date and time at the bottom of the clip.

It was from the night of the murder.

Roar Bohr let the air out of his lungs and leaned his rifle against the trunk of the tree.

Was the image good enough for the person to be identified?

He ran his left hand over his hip. Over the karambit knife.

Think. Think, then act.

His fingertip slid over the cold, serrated edge of the steel. Up and down. Up and down.

“Watch out,” Harry said by way of warning.

“What now?” Bjørn asked. Harry didn’t know if Bjørn was referring to his exclamation up at the cabin, which had turned out to be groundless.

“Freezing rain.”

“I can see,” Bjørn said, and braked gently before turning onto the bridge in front of them.

It had stopped raining, but a film of ice was glinting on the road ahead of them. The road straightened out again after they crossed the river, and Bjørn accelerated. A sign. Oslo 85 kilometres. There weren’t many vehicles on the road, and if they got a bit of dry road under their tires they could be back in the city in just over an hour.

“Are you quite sure you don’t want to issue an alert?” Bjørn asked.

“Mm.” Harry closed his eyes. Roar Bohr had been at the cabin recently, the newspaper in the wood basket was six days old. But he wasn’t there now. No tracks in the snow outside the door. No food. Mould on the dregs of coffee in the cup on the table. The boots by the door were dry, he must have several pairs. “I called that 3-D expert, Freund. His first name’s Sigurd, by the way.”

Bjørn chuckled. “Katrine suggested we should name the kid after the singer in Suede. Brett. Brett Bratt. What did Freund have to say?”

“That he was going to look at the memory card, and that I could expect a response at the weekend. I explained what was on it, and he said there wasn’t much he could do about the lack of light. But by measuring the height of the doorway and the tread of the steps at Holmenkollveien he reckoned he could give me the height of the person down to the nearest centimetre. If I say that we need to bring Bohr in as a result of what we found after breaking into his cabin without a search warrant, you’d get into trouble as well, Bjørn. It makes more sense to use the fact that the height of the guy in the doorway matches Bohr’s, because there’s no way you can be linked to those images. I’ll call Kripos, explain that I’ve got pictures proving that Bohr was at the crime scene, and suggest that they search his cabin. They’ll find a broken window, but anyone could have done that.”

Harry saw flashing blue lights at the end of the straight stretch of road in front of them. They passed a warning triangle. Bjørn slowed down.

An articulated truck was parked by the verge on their side of the road. On the other side lay the wreckage of a car next to the crash barrier in front of the river. What had once been a car reminded Harry of a crushed tin can.

A policeman waved them past.

“Hang on,” Harry said, winding his window down. “That car’s got Oslo plates.”

Bjørn stopped the Amazon next to a policeman with a face like a bulldog, a neck and arms that looked too short sticking out from his over-pumped upper body.

“What’s happened?” Harry asked, holding up his ID.

The policeman looked at it and nodded. “The truck driver’s being questioned, so we should know soon enough. It’s icy, so it could just be an accident.”

“It’s a bit straight for that, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” the police officer said, composing his face into a professional sombre expression. “At worst, we have one a month. We call this stretch of road the green mile. You know, that last walk people sentenced to death in America take on their way to the chair.”

“Mm. We’re looking for a guy who lives in Oslo, so it would be interesting to know who was driving the car.”

The policeman took a deep breath. “To be honest, when a car weighing one thousand three hundred kilos drives at eighty or ninety kilometres an hour into the front of an almost-fifty-ton truck, seat belts and airbags aren’t a lot of use. I couldn’t tell you if my own brother had been driving that car. Or my sister, come to that. But the car’s registered to a Stein Hansen, so for the time being we’re working on the assumption that it’s him.”

“Thanks,” Harry said, and closed the window.

They drove on in silence.

“You seem relieved,” Bjørn said after a while.

“Do I?” Harry said in surprise.

“You think it would be too easy if Bohr had got away like that, don’t you?”

“Dying in a car crash?”

“I mean, leaving you in this world to suffer alone every day. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You want him to suffer the same way.”

Harry looked out of the window. Moonlight was shining through a gap in the clouds, colouring the ice on the river silver.

Bjørn turned the radio on.

The Highwaymen.

Harry listened for a while, then he got his phone out and called Kaja.

No answer.

Weird.

He tried again.

He waited until her voicemail kicked in. Her voice. The memory of Rakel’s. The bleep. Harry cleared his throat. “It’s me. Call me.”

She probably had her headphones on, listening to loud music again.

The wipers cleared the windshield. Over and over again. A fresh start, a blank page every three seconds. The never-ending absolution of sin.

Two-tone yodelling and banjo music played on the radio.

29

Two and a half years earlier

Roar Bohr wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked up at the sky above the desert.

The sun had melted, that was why he couldn’t see it. It had dissolved, spreading out like a layer of golden copper across the hazy blue. And beneath it: a monk vulture, its three-metre wingspan etching a black cross on the yellow copper.

Bohr looked around again. There were only the two of them out here. The two of them, and open, empty, stony desert, sloping hillsides and rocky outcrops. Obviously it was a breach of operational safety manuals to drive out into the field without more protection, just two men in one vehicle. But in his report he would say he judged it to be a gesture to Hala’s home village, an appeal to Afghan hearts, that Hala’s boss had driven her body home in person, with no more protection than she herself had had.

One more month, then he’d be going home, home from his third and final tour in Afghanistan. He was longing to go home, he always longed to go home, but he wasn’t happy. Because he knew that when he got home, after just two or three weeks he would start longing to be back here again.

But there weren’t going to be any more tours, he had applied and been accepted to fill the post of head of the NHRI in Oslo, a newly established national institute for human rights. The NHRI was subject to Parliament, but operated as an independent body. They would be investigating human rights issues, providing information and advice to the national assembly, though beyond that their remit was rather vague. But that just meant that he and the eighteen other members of staff could influence what their purpose should be. In many ways it was a sort of continuation of what he had been doing in Afghanistan, just without guns. So he was going to take the job. He wasn’t going to end up being a general, in any case. That was the sort of thing they let you know in a very respectful, discreet manner. That you weren’t one of the chosen few. But that wasn’t why he had to get away from Afghanistan.

In his mind’s eye he could see Hala lying on the ground. She was usually dressed in Western clothes and a modest hijab, but that night she had been wearing a blue shalwar kameez tunic that was pulled up around her waist. Bohr remembered her bare hips and stomach, the skin with that glow that would slowly fade. The way the life in those beautiful, beautiful eyes had faded. Even when she was dead, Hala had looked like Bianca. He had noticed when she introduced herself as his interpreter, that Bianca was looking out through those eyes, that she had come back from the dead, from the river, to be with him again. But obviously Hala couldn’t know that, it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ever have explained to her. And now she was gone too.

But he had found someone else who resembled Bianca. The head of security at the Red Cross. Kaja Solness. Maybe that was where Bianca lived now, inside her? Or in someone else. He’d have to keep his eyes open.

“Don’t do it,” the man begged as he knelt on the ground behind the Land Rover, parked by the side of the road. His light-coloured camouflage uniform had three stripes on the chest to indicate that he was a sergeant, and on his left arm was the insignia of the Special Forces Division: a winged dagger. His hands were clasped. But perhaps that was only because his wrists were bound together with the narrow white cable ties they used on prisoners of war. A five-metre-long chain ran from the cable ties to a hook on the back of the Land Rover.

“Let me go, Bohr. I’ve got money. An inheritance. I can keep quiet if you can. No one needs to know what’s happened, ever.”

“And what has happened?” Bohr asked, without taking the barrel of his Colt Canada C8 from the sergeant’s forehead.

The officer swallowed. “An Afghan woman. A Hazara. Everyone knows you and she were close, but as long as no one makes a fuss it will soon be forgotten.”

“You shouldn’t have told anyone what you saw, Waage. That’s why I have to kill you. You wouldn’t forget. I wouldn’t forget.”

“Two million. Two million kroner, Bohr. No, two and a half. In cash, when we get to Norway.”

Roar Bohr started to walk towards the Land Rover.

“No! No!” his soldier screamed. “You’re not a murderer, Bohr!”

Bohr got in, started the engine and began to drive. He didn’t notice any resistance when the chain jerked the sergeant to his feet and he started to run after the vehicle.

Bohr slowed down. He speeded up again whenever the chain started to slacken. He watched the sergeant as he ran along in a sort of stumbling jog with his hands held out as if in prayer.

Forty degrees. Even at walking pace the sergeant would soon dehydrate. He wouldn’t be able to stay on his feet, he’d collapse. A farmer with a horse and cart was driving towards them on the road. As he passed them the sergeant cried out to him, begging for help, but the farmer merely bowed his turbaned head and looked down at the reins. Foreigners. Taliban. Their war wasn’t his — his war was against drought, against starvation, against the never-ending demands and torments of daily life.

Bohr leaned forward and looked at the sky.

The monk vulture was following them.

No one’s prayers were granted. No one’s.

“Sure you don’t want me to wait?” Bjørn asked.

“Get home, they’ll be waiting,” Harry said, peering out of the car window at Kaja’s house. The lights in the living room were on.

Harry got out and lit the cigarette he hadn’t been allowed to smoke in the car.

“New rules with kids,” Bjørn had explained. “Katrine doesn’t want any trace of smoke anywhere.”

“Mm. They sort of seize power the moment they become mothers, don’t they?”

Bjørn had shrugged. “I don’t know about seizing it. Katrine pretty much had it already.”

Harry took four deep drags. Then he pinched the cigarette out and put it back in the packet. The gate creaked when he opened it. Water dripped from the iron, it had been raining here too.

He walked up to the door and rang the bell. Waited.

After ten seconds of silence he tried the handle. Unlocked, like last time. With a feeling of déjà vu he went inside, past the open door to the kitchen. He saw a phone charging on the kitchen worktop. That explained why she hadn’t answered his calls. Maybe. He opened the door to the living room.

Empty.

He was about to call Kaja’s name when his brain registered a sound behind him, the creak of a floorboard. In the space of a nanosecond, his brain had reasoned out that it was obviously Kaja coming downstairs or out of the toilet, so it didn’t sound the alarm.

Not until an arm was squeezing his throat and a cloth was pressed against his mouth and nose. As his brain registered the danger it sent an automatic command to take a deep breath before the cloth completely blocked the supply of air. And by the time his slower cognitive process told him that was precisely the point of the cloth, it was too late.

30

Harry looked around. He was in a ballroom. An orchestra was playing, a slow waltz. He caught sight of her. She was sitting at a white-clothed table under one of the crystal chandeliers. The two men in dinner jackets standing on either side of her were trying to get her attention. But her eyes were focused on him, on Harry. They were telling him to hurry up. She was wearing the black dress, the one of several black dresses that she called the black dress. And when Harry looked down at himself he saw that he was wearing the black suit, his only one, the one he wore for christenings, weddings and funerals. He put one foot in front of the other and made his way through the tables, but it went slowly, as if the room were filled with water. There must be a lot of swell on the surface, because he pulled forward, then back, and the S-shaped chandeliers were swinging in time to the waltz. Just as he got there, just as he was about to say something and let go of the table, his feet lifted from the floor and he began to rise up. She stretched out her hand towards his, but he was already out of reach, and even if she stood up from her chair and stretched towards him, she remained where she was as he rose higher and higher. And then he discovered that the water was starting to turn red, so red that she receded from view, red and warm, and the pressure in his head began to rise. He didn’t realise at first that he couldn’t breathe, of course he couldn’t, and he began to flail about, he had to get to the surface.

“Good evening, Harry.”

Harry opened his eyes. The light cut like a knife and he closed them again.

“Trichloromethane. Better known as chloroform. A bit old-school, of course, but effective. We used it in E14 whenever someone needed kidnapping.”

Harry opened his eyes a crack. A lamp was shining directly into his face.

“You probably have a lot of questions.” The voice was coming from the darkness behind the lamp. “Like ‘What happened?’ and ‘Where am I?’ and ‘Who is he?’ ”

They had only exchanged a few words at the funeral, but Harry still recognised the voice and the hint of rolled “r”s. “But let me answer the question you’re wondering about most, Harry: ‘What does he want with me?’ ”

“Bohr,” Harry said hoarsely. “Where’s Kaja?”

“Don’t worry about that, Harry.”

Harry could tell from the acoustics that he was seated in a large room. Probably wooden walls. Not a basement, then. But it was cold and raw, as if it wasn’t in use. The smell was neutral, like in a meeting hall or open-plan office. That could make sense. His arms were taped to the armrests of the chair and his feet to the wheeled base of an office chair. No smell of paint or building work, but he saw the light reflect off transparent plastic that had been laid on the parquet floor beneath and in front of the chair.

“Have you killed Kaja as well, Bohr?”

“As well?”

“Like Rakel. And the other girls you’ve got pictures of in your cabin.”

Harry heard the other man’s footsteps behind the lamp.

“I have a confession to make, Harry. I have killed. I didn’t think I could do it, but it turned out I was wrong.” The steps stopped. “And they say that once you’ve started...”

Harry leaned his head back and looked up at the ceiling. One of the panels had been removed, and a load of severed cables were sticking out. IT stuff, presumably.

“I heard a rumour that one of my guys in Special Forces, Waage, knew something about the murder of my interpreter, Hala. And when I checked and found out what he knew, I realised I was going to have to kill him.”

Harry coughed. “He was on your trail. So you killed him. And now you’re planning to kill me. I have no interest in being your confessor, Bohr, so just get on with the execution.”

“You misunderstand me, Harry.”

“When everyone misunderstands you, Bohr, it’s time to ask yourself if you’re mad. Get on with it, you poor bastard, I’m done.”

“You’re in a hell of a hurry.”

“Maybe it’s better there than here. Might be more pleasant company too.”

“You misunderstand me, Harry. Let me explain.”

“No!” Harry tugged at the chair, but the tape held him down.

“Listen. Please. I didn’t kill Rakel.”

“I know you killed Rakel, Bohr. I don’t want to hear about it, and I don’t want to hear any pathetic excuses—”

Harry stopped when Roar Bohr’s face suddenly came into view, lit up from below, like in a horror film. It took Harry a moment to realise that the light was coming from a phone on the table between them, and that it had just started to ring.

Bohr looked at it. “Your phone, Harry. It’s Kaja Solness.”

Bohr touched the screen, picked the phone up and held it to Harry’s ear.

“Harry?” It was Kaja’s voice.

Harry cleared his throat. “Where... where are you?”

“I just got in. I saw you’d called, but I needed to eat so I went to the new restaurant around the corner and left my phone charging at home. Tell me, have you been here?”

“Here?”

“My computer has been moved from the desk to the living-room table. Tell me it was you, or I’ll start to worry.”

Harry stared into the lamplight.

“Harry? Where are you? You sound so—”

“It was me,” Harry said. “Nothing to worry about. Listen, I’m in the middle of something right now. I’ll call you later, OK?”

“OK,” she said, sounding doubtful.

Bohr tapped to end the call and put the phone on the table. “Why didn’t you sound the alarm?”

“If there was any point in doing that, you wouldn’t have let me speak to her.”

“I think it’s because you believe me, Harry.”

“You’ve got me taped to a chair. What I think is completely irrelevant.”

Bohr stepped into the light again. He was holding a large, broad-bladed knife. Harry tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. Bohr moved the knife closer to Harry. To the underside of the right armrest of the chair. Cut. Did the same with the left armrest. Harry lifted his arms and took the knife.

“I taped you to the chair so you wouldn’t attack me before you’d heard everything,” Bohr said as Harry cut through the tape around his ankles. “Rakel told me about the problems you and she had had in relation to a couple of your murder investigations. From people who were on the loose. So I kept an eye on you both.”

“Us?”

“Mostly her. I kept watch. Like I kept watch on Kaja in Kabul after Hala was raped and murdered. And now in Oslo.”

“You know that’s called paranoia?”

“Yes.”

“Mm.” Harry straightened up and rubbed his lower arms. He kept hold of the knife. “Tell me.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Start with the sergeant.”

“Understood. No one in Special Forces is an idiot, exactly. The entrance criteria are too strict for that. But Sergeant Waage was one of those soldiers with more testosterone than brains, if I can put it like that. In the days following Hala’s death, when everyone was talking about her, I heard that someone had said Hala must like Norway because she had a Norwegian word tattooed on her body. I looked into the matter and found out that it was Sergeant Waage who had said this after a few drinks in the bar. But Hala was always covered up, and that tattoo was right above her heart. There was no way she would have got mixed up with Waage. And I know Hala kept the tattoo secret. Even if the use of henna is widespread, many Muslims regard permanent tattoos as a ‘sin of the skin.’ ”

“Mm. But the tattoo wasn’t a secret from you?”

“No. I was the only person apart from the tattooist who knew about it. Before she got the tattoo, Hala asked me about the correct spelling, and any possible double meanings she might not have been aware of.”

“What was the word?”

Bohr smiled sadly. “ ‘Friend.’ She had such a fascination with languages, she wanted to know if the different spellings of the word meant different things, had different connotations.”

“Waage could have heard about the tattoo from the people who found her or conducted the post-mortem.”

“That’s the point,” Bohr said. “Two of the knife wounds...” He stopped, took a deep, shuddering breath. “Two of the sixteen knife wounds had pierced the tattoo, making the word illegible unless you already knew what it said.”

“Unless you were the person who raped her and saw the tattoo before you began to stab her.”

“Yes.”

“I understand, but that doesn’t exactly count as proof, Bohr.”

“No. Under the immunity regulations covering international forces, Waage would have been sent back to Norway, where any half-decent lawyer would have got him off the hook.”

“So you appointed yourself judge and jury?”

Roar Bohr nodded. “Hala was my interpreter. My responsibility. The same with Sergeant Waage. My responsibility. I contacted Hala’s parents and told them that I would personally be taking her earthly remains to their village. It was a five-hour drive from Kabul. Mostly empty desert. I ordered Waage to drive. After a couple of hours’ driving I told him to stop, held a pistol to his head and got a confession. Then I tied him to the Land Rover and drove. So-called D and Q.”

“D and Q?”

“Drawing and quartering. The penalty for high treason in England between 1283 and 1870. The condemned man was hanged until he was almost dead, then they cut his stomach open, pulled out his innards and burned them while he watched. Before they cut his head off. But before all that he was dragged to the gallows behind a horse, the drawing. And if it was a long way from the prison to the gallows, he might be fortunate enough to die at that point. Because when he could no longer walk or run after the horse, he got dragged along on his chest. The flesh got scraped off, layer by layer. It was a slow and extremely painful death.”

Harry thought about the long trail of blood they had found on the ground.

“Hala’s family were extremely grateful to have her body back home,” Bohr said. “And for the corpse of her murderer. Or what was left of it. It was a beautiful burial ceremony.”

“And the sergeant’s body?”

“I don’t know what they did with it. Quartering is probably an English thing. But decapitation is evidently pretty international, because his head was found on a pole outside the village.”

“And you reported that the sergeant went missing on the way back?”

“Yes.”

“Mm. Why do you watch over these women?”

Silence. Bohr had sat down on the edge of the table, and Harry tried to read the expression on his face.

“I had a sister.” His voice was toneless. “Bianca. My younger sister. She was raped when she was seventeen. I should have been looking after her that evening, but I wanted to go and see Die Hard at the cinema. It was rated 18. It wasn’t until several years later that she told me she was raped that evening. While I was watching Bruce Willis.”

“Why didn’t she tell you straightaway?”

Bohr took a deep breath. “The rapist threatened to kill me, her older brother, if she said anything. She didn’t know how the rapist could have known she had an older brother.”

“What did the rapist look like?”

“She never got a good look at him, she said it was too dark. Unless her mind had blocked it. I saw that happen in Sudan. Soldiers who experienced such terrible things that they simply forgot about them. They could wake up the next day and, perfectly sincerely, deny having been there and seen anything. For some people suppression works absolutely fine. For others it pops up later, in the form of flashbacks. Nightmares. I think everything came back to Bianca. And she couldn’t handle it. The terror of it broke her.”

“And you think it was your fault?”

“Of course it was my fault.”

“You know you’re damaged, don’t you, Bohr?”

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“What were you doing in Kaja’s house?”

“I saw that she had a video on her computer, a man leaving Rakel’s house on the night of the murder. So when she went out, I went in to take a closer look at it.”

“What did you find out?”

“Nothing. Poor-quality images. Then I heard the door. I left the living room and went into the kitchen.”

“So you could approach me from behind in the hallway. And you just happened to have some chloroform on you?”

“I always have chloroform on me.”

“Because?”

“Anyone who tried to break into any of my ladies’ houses ends up in the chair where you’re sitting.”

“And?”

“And pays the price.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Bohr?”

Bohr clasped his hands. “I have to admit that I thought you’d killed Rakel at first, Harry.”

“Oh?”

“The spurned husband. It’s the classic, isn’t it? The first thing you think. And I thought I could tell from the look in your eyes at the funeral. A mixture of innocence and remorse. The look that belongs to someone who’s killed for no other motive than their own hatred and lust, and who regrets it. Who regrets it so much that he’s managed to suppress it. Because that’s the only way he can survive, the truth is too unbearable. I saw that look in Sergeant Waage. It was as if he’d managed to forget what he’d done to Hala, and only remembered it again when I confronted him with it. But then, when I found out that you had an alibi, I realised that the guilt I’d seen in your eyes was the same I felt. Guilt because you hadn’t been able to prevent it happening. And the reason why I’m telling you this...” — Bohr got up from the table and disappeared into the darkness as he went on — “is because I know you want the same thing as me. You want to see them punished. They took someone we loved away from us. Prison isn’t enough. An easy death isn’t enough.”

The fluorescent lights flickered a few times, then the room was bathed in light.

Sure enough, it was an office. Or had been. The six or seven desks, the pale patches where computers had stood, the wastepaper bins, random office equipment, a printer — everything suggested that the office had been abandoned in some haste. There was a picture of the king hanging on the white wooden wall. Military people, Harry thought automatically.

“Shall we go?” Bohr asked.

Harry stood up. He felt dizzy and walked rather unsteadily towards the wooden door where Bohr was waiting, holding Harry’s phone, pistol and lighter out towards him.

“Where were you?” Harry asked as he put the phone and lighter away and weighed the pistol in his hand. “The night Rakel was killed? Because you weren’t at home...”

“It was a weekend, I was at the cabin,” Bohr said. “In Eggedal. Alone, I’m afraid.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Yes, what was I doing? Polishing weapons. Keeping the stove alight. Thinking. Listening to the radio.”

“Mm. Radio Hallingdal?”

“Yes, actually, it’s the only station you can get there.”

“They had radio bingo that night.”

“They did. Do you spend a lot of time in Hallingdal?”

“No. Do you remember anything special?”

Bohr raised an eyebrow. “About the bingo?”

“Yes.”

Bohr shook his head.

“Nothing?” Harry said, feeling the weight of the pistol. He concluded that the bullets hadn’t been removed from the magazine.

“No. Is this an interview?”

“Think.”

Bohr frowned. “Maybe something about all the winners being from the same place? Ål. Or Flå.”

“Bingo,” Harry said quietly, and put the pistol in his coat pocket. “You’re hereby removed from my list of suspects.”

Roar Bohr looked at Harry. “I could have killed you in there without anyone finding out. But radio bingo is what got me off your list?”

Harry shrugged. “I need a cigarette.”

They walked down some worn, creaking wooden steps and out into the night as a clock started to chime.

“Bloody hell,” Harry said, breathing in the cold air. In the square in front of them people were hurrying towards bars and restaurants, and above the rooftops he could see the City Hall. “We’re in the middle of the city.”

Harry had heard the City Hall bells play both Kraftwerk and Dolly Parton, and once Oleg had been delighted to recognise a tune from the game Minecraft. But this time they were playing one of the regular tunes, “Watchman’s Song” by Edvard Grieg. Which meant it was midnight.

Harry turned around. The building they had come out of was a barrack-like wooden building just inside the gates of Akershus Fortress.

“Not exactly MI6 or Langley,” Bohr said. “But this did actually used to be the headquarters of E14.”

“E14?” Harry dug out his packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.

“A short-lived Norwegian espionage organisation.”

“I vaguely remember it.”

“Started in 1995, spent a few years doing James Bond — style action stuff, then there were power struggles and political rows about its methods, until it was shut down in 2006. The building’s been empty since then.”

“But you’ve got the keys?”

“I was here for its last few years. No one ever asked for them back.”

“Mm. A former spy. That explains the chloroform.”

Bohr smiled wryly. “Oh, we did more interesting things than that.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Harry nodded towards the clock on the City Hall tower.

“Sorry I ruined your evening,” Bohr said. “Can I bum a cigarette off you before we call it a night?”

“I was a young officer when I was recruited,” Bohr said, blowing smoke up towards the sky. He and Harry had found a bench on the ramparts behind the cannons pointing out across the Oslo Fjord. “It wasn’t just people from the military in E14. There were diplomats, waiters, carpenters, police officers, mathematicians. Beautiful women who could be used as bait.”

“Sounds like a spy film,” Harry said, sucking on his own cigarette.

“It was a spy film.”

“What was the mandate?”

“Gathering information from places Norway could imagine having a military presence. The Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan, Afghanistan. We were given a lot of freedom; we were supposed to operate independently of the American intelligence network and NATO. For a while it actually looked like we might manage it. A strong sense of camaraderie, a lot of loyalty. And maybe a bit too much freedom. In closed environments like that you end up developing your own standards for what is acceptable. We paid women to have sex with our contacts. We equipped ourselves with unregistered High Standard HD 22 pistols.”

Harry nodded. That was the pistol he had seen in Bohr’s cabin, the pistol CIA agents preferred because it had a lightweight and efficient silencer. The pistol the Soviets found on Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane that was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960.

“With no serial numbers, they couldn’t be traced back to us if we ever had to use them for liquidation.”

“And you did all that?”

“Not the bit about paying for sex or liquidating anyone. The worst thing I did...” Bohr rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Or the one that felt worst... was the first time I deliberately got someone to trust me, then betrayed them. Part of the admission test was to get from Oslo to Trondheim as quickly as possible with only ten kroner in your pocket. The point was to show you had the social skills and imagination that an active situation might require. I offered the money to a kind-looking woman at the Central Station in return for borrowing her phone to call my mortally ill younger sister in the district hospital in Trondheim, to tell her that my luggage had just been stolen, along with my wallet, train ticket and phone. I called one of the other agents and managed to cry on the phone. When I hung up the woman was crying as well, and I was just about to ask to borrow money for the train fare when she offered to drive me in her car, which was in the car park next to the station. We drove as fast as we could. The hours passed, and we talked about everything, our deepest secrets, the way you only do with strangers. My secrets were lies I had learned, good training for someone hoping to be a spy. We stopped at Dovre after four hours. Watched the sun go down over the plateau. Kissed. Smiled through the tears and said we loved each other. Two hours later, just before midnight, she dropped me off in front of the main entrance to the hospital. I told her to find somewhere to park while I found out where my sister was. I said I’d wait in reception. I walked straight through the reception area, out through the other side, and ran as fast as I could to the statue of Olav Tryggvason where the head of recruitment for E14 was waiting with a stopwatch. I was the first person to get there, and was celebrated as a hero that night.”

“No bitter aftertaste?”

“Not at the time. That came later. Same thing with Special Forces. You’re under the sort of pressure normal people never experience. And after a while you start to think that the rules for normal people don’t apply to you. In E14 it started with a bit of gentle manipulation. Exploitation. A few little breaches of the law. And ended with moral questions about life and death.”

“So you’re saying that those rules do actually apply to people with jobs like that?”

“On paper...” Bohr tapped his thigh with his finger. “Of course. But up here...” He tapped his forehead. “Up here you know you’re going to have to break a few rules in order to protect them. Because it’s your watch, the whole time. And it’s a lonely watch — us watchers only have each other. No one else is ever going to thank us, because most people never know that they’ve been watched over.”

“The rule of law—”

“Has its limitations. If the rule of law had its way, a Norwegian soldier who raped and murdered an Afghan woman would have been sent home to serve a short sentence in a prison that would have seemed like a five-star hotel to a Hazara. I gave him what he deserved, Harry. What Hala and her family deserved. An Afghan punishment for a crime committed in Afghanistan.”

“And now you’re hunting the man who killed Rakel. But if you follow the same principle, a crime committed in Norway should be punished according to Norwegian law, and we don’t have the death penalty.”

“Norway might not, but I have the death penalty, Harry. And so do you.”

“Do I?”

“I don’t doubt that you, along with the majority of people in this country, have a genuine belief in humane punishment and fresh starts. But you’re also human, Harry. Someone who’s lost someone you loved. Someone I loved.”

Harry sucked hard on his cigarette.

“No,” Bohr said. “Not like that. Rakel was my younger sister. Just like Hala. They were Bianca. And I’ve lost them all.”

“What is it you want, Bohr?”

“I want to help you, Harry. When you find him, I want to help you.”

“Help me how?”

Bohr held up his cigarette. “Killing someone is like smoking. You cough, you don’t want to, you don’t think you’ll ever be able to do it. And deep down I never believed the guys in Special Forces who said that killing an enemy is the ultimate kick. If Rakel’s murderer is killed after he’s been arrested, you need to be beyond all suspicion.”

“I pass the death sentence, and you’re offering to be the executioner?”

“Oh, we’ve already passed judgement, Harry. Hatred is burning us to our foundations. We’re aware of it, but we’re already alight, and it’s too late to stop it.” Bohr tossed the cigarette butt on the ground. “Shall I drive you home?”

“I’ll walk,” Harry said. “I need to air out the chloroform. Just two questions. When your wife and I were sitting by Smestaddammen, you aimed at us with a laser sight. Why, and how did you know that’s where we would go?”

Bohr smiled. “I didn’t know. I often sit in the basement keeping watch. I make sure the mink don’t take any more cygnets from the two swans who live there. Then the pair of you showed up.”

“Mm.”

“The second question?”

“How did you get me out of the car and up all those stairs this evening?”

“The way we carry anyone who’s fallen. Like a rucksack. That’s the easiest way.”

Harry nodded. “I suppose it is.”

Bohr stood up. “You know how to get hold of me, Harry.”

Harry walked past City Hall, crossed Stortingsgata and stopped in front of the National Theatre. He noted that he had walked past three open, lively bars without much difficulty. He got his phone out. A message from Oleg.

Anything new? Head above water?

Harry decided to call after he’d spoken to Kaja. She answered on the first ring.

“Harry?” He could hear the concern in her voice.

“I’ve been speaking to Bohr,” he said.

“I knew something was going on!”

“He’s innocent.”

“Really?” He heard the sound of a duvet scraping the phone as she rolled over. “What does that mean?”

“That means we’re back at square one. I can give you a full report first thing tomorrow, OK?”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“I was worried.”

“I noticed.”

“And now I feel a bit lonely.”

A pause.

“Harry?”

“Mm.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

He ended the call. Tapped O for Oleg. Just as he was about to press the Call button he hesitated. He clicked the message symbol instead and typed: Call you tomorrow.

31

Harry was lying on his back on top of the duvet, almost fully dressed. His Dr. Martens boots were standing on the floor beside the bed, his coat draped over the chair. Kaja was lying under the duvet, but right beside him with her head on his arm.

“You feel exactly the same,” she said, running her hand over his sweater. “All these years, and nothing’s changed. It’s not fair.”

“I’ve started to smell of BO,” he said.

She stuck her face into his armpit and sniffed. “Rubbish, you smell good, you smell of Harry.”

“That’s the left one. It’s the right one that’s changed. Maybe it’s age.”

Kaja laughed quietly. “You know research has shown that it’s a myth that old people smell worse? According to a Japanese study, the aroma component 2-nonenal is only found in people over forty, but in blind tests the sweat of older people was found to smell better than people in their thirties.”

“Bloody hell,” Harry said. “You’ve just theorised away the fact that I smell like shit on the other side.”

Kaja laughed. The soft laugh he had been longing for. Her laughter.

“So tell me,” she said. “You and Bohr.”

Harry was granted a cigarette and started at the beginning. He told her about Roar Bohr’s cabin, and how Bohr had overpowered him in the room below them. About coming to in the empty premises that used to belong to E14, and his conversation with Bohr. He repeated it more or less in detail, minus the last part. The offer to carry out the execution.

Oddly, Kaja didn’t seem particularly shocked that Bohr had executed one of his own soldiers. Or that he had kept watch over her both in Kabul and here in Oslo.

“I thought you might freak out a bit when I told you you’d been under observation without knowing it.”

She shook her head and borrowed his cigarette. “I never saw him, but sometimes I just had a feeling. You see, when Bohr found out I’d lost my older brother the same way he lost his younger sister, he started to treat me a bit like a surrogate younger sister. It was only little things, like the fact that I got a bit more backup than the others when I went out on jobs beyond the secure zones. I pretended never to notice. And being watched is something you get used to.”

“Do you?”

“Oh, yes.” She put the cigarette back between his lips. “When I was working in Basra, there were mostly British people in the coalition forces around the hotel where the Red Cross team were living. And the British are different, you know. The Americans work broadly, they sweep streets and talk about ‘snake procedure’ when they’re out to get someone; they go straight forward and literally smash through walls that are in their way. They claim it’s quicker as well as more terrifying, which shouldn’t be undervalued. Whereas the British...” — she traced her fingers across his chest — “they sneak along by the walls, they’re invisible. There was a curfew after eight o’clock, but sometimes we used to go out onto the hotel roof outside the bar. We never saw them, but occasionally I would see a couple of red dots on the person I was standing next to. And he saw the same on me. Like a discreet message from the Brits that they were there. And that we should go back inside. It made me feel safer.”

“Mm.” Harry took a drag on his cigarette. “Who was he?”

“Who?”

“The guy you saw the dots on.”

Kaja smiled. But her eyes looked sad. “Anton. He was with the ICRC. Most people don’t realise it, but there are two Red Crosses. There’s the IFRC, who are regular health workers under the command of the UN. And then there’s the ICRC, which mostly consists of Swiss nationals and has its headquarters outside the UN building in Geneva. They’re the Red Cross equivalent of the Marines and Special Forces. You don’t often hear about them, but they’re the first in and the last out. They do everything the UN can’t do because of safety considerations. It’s the ICRC who go around at night counting bodies, that sort of thing. ICRC staff keep a low profile, but you can recognise them by the fact their shirts are more expensive and they exude a feeling that they’re a bit superior to the rest of us.”

“Because they are?”

Kaja took a deep breath. “Yes. But they’re just as liable to die of shrapnel from a mine.”

“Mm. Did you love him?”

“Are you jealous?”

“No.”

“I was jealous.”

“Of Rakel?”

“I hated her.”

“She hadn’t done anything wrong.”

“That was probably why.” Kaja laughed. “You left me because of her, that’s all the reason a woman needs to hate someone, Harry.”

“I didn’t leave you, Kaja. You and I were two people with broken hearts who were able to comfort each other for a while. And when I left Oslo, I was running away from both of you.”

“But you said you loved her. And when you came back to Oslo the second time, it was because of her, not me.”

“It was because of Oleg, he was in trouble. But yes, I always loved Rakel.”

“Even when she didn’t want you?”

“Especially when she didn’t want me. That seems to be how we’re made, doesn’t it?”

Kaja’s four fingers began to retreat.

“Love’s complicated,” she said, curling up closer and laying her head on his chest.

“Love’s the root of everything,” Harry said. “Good and bad. Good and evil.”

She looked up at him. “What are you thinking about?”

“Was I thinking about something?”

“Yes.”

Harry shook his head. “Just a story about roots.”

“Come on. Your turn to talk.”

“OK. Have you heard about Old Tjikko?”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a pine tree. One time Rakel, Oleg and I drove to Fulufjället in Sweden because Oleg had learned in school that’s where Old Tjikko, the oldest tree in the world, was growing — it was almost ten thousand years old. In the car Rakel explained that the tree was born back when human beings first invented agriculture and Britain was still part of the continent. When we reached the mountain, we discovered to our disappointment that Old Tjikko was a scruffy, windblown, rather small spruce tree. We were told by a ranger that the tree itself is only a few hundred years old, and that it was one of several trees, and that the root system that these trees had grown from was the part that was ten thousand years old. Oleg was sad, he’d been looking forward to telling the rest of the class that he’d seen the world’s oldest tree. And of course we couldn’t even see the roots of the scrappy little tree. So I told him that he’d be able to tell his teacher that roots aren’t a proper tree, and that the world’s oldest known tree is in the White Mountains in California and is five thousand years old. That cheered Oleg up, and he ran the whole way down because he couldn’t wait to get home and lord it over his classmates. When we went to bed that night, Rakel curled up next to me and told me she loved me, and that our love was like that root system. The trees might rot, get struck by lightning, we might argue, I might get drunk. But no one, not us or anyone else, could touch the part that was underground. That would always be there, and a new tree would always emerge and grow.”

They lay in silence in the darkness.

“I can barely hear your heartbeat,” Kaja said.

“Her half,” Harry said. “It’s supposed to stop once the other half is gone.”

Kaja suddenly lay on top of him.

“I want to smell your right armpit,” she said.

He let her. She lay there with her cheek close to his, and he felt the warmth of her body through her washed-out pyjamas and his own clothes.

“Maybe you need to take your jeans off for me to be able to smell it,” she whispered with her lips close to his ear.

“Kaja...”

“Don’t, Harry. You need it. I need it. Like you said. Comfort.” She moved just enough to make room for her hand.

Harry grabbed it. “It’s too soon, Kaja.”

“Think about her while you do it. I mean it. Just do it. Think about Rakel.”

Harry swallowed.

He let go of her hand. Closed his eyes.

It was like slipping into a warm bath with his suit on and his phone in his pocket: completely wrong, and completely wonderful.

She kissed him. He opened his eyes again, looked directly into hers. For a moment it was as if they were watching each other, like two animals that had run into each other in the forest and had to figure out if the other was friend or foe. Then he returned her kiss. She undressed him, then herself, and sat on top of him. Gripped his cock. She didn’t move her hand, just held him hard. Possibly fascinated to feel the blood throb in his erection, the way he could feel it. Then — without any further ado — she guided him inside her.

They found each other’s rhythm, remembered it. Slow, heavy. Harry saw her rocking above him in the thin red glow from the clock radio. He ran his hand over what he thought was a necklace shaped like a symbol or sign, but which turned out to be a tattoo, a sort of S with two dots under it, and something that made him think of Fred Flintstone in his car. Kaja’s moaning grew louder, she wanted to speed up, but Harry didn’t let her, he held her down. She let out an angry cry, but let him lead the dance. He closed his eyes and looked for Rakel. He found Alexandra. He found Katrine. But he couldn’t find Rakel. Not until Kaja stiffened, her moaning stopped, he opened his eyes and saw the red light running down her face and upper body. Her eyes were fixed on the wall, her mouth was open as if in a mute scream, and her sharp, wet teeth were glinting.

And his half a heartbeat.

32

“Sleep well?” Kaja asked, handing Harry one of the two steaming cups of coffee and creeping back into bed beside him. Light from the pale sun was filtering through the curtains that were swaying gently in front of the open window. The morning air still had a chill to it, and Kaja shivered happily as she stuck a pair of ice-cold feet between his legs.

Harry pondered. Yes, damn it, he had slept well. No nightmares that he could remember. No withdrawal symptoms he couldn’t suppress. No sudden visions or signs of a panic attack.

“Looks that way,” Harry said, sitting up in bed and taking a sip. “You?”

“Like a log. The idea of you being here works well for me. But it did last time too, of course.”

Harry stared into space and nodded. “What do you say, shall we give it another go? Start again on a new page.” He turned around and saw from the look of astonishment on her face that she had misunderstood. “OK, we haven’t got any suspects lined up,” he said quickly. “So where do we start?”

Her face tightened, in an unspoken “you couldn’t even leave Rakel alone for five minutes after we woke up together?”

He saw Kaja compose herself, then clear her throat. “Well, Rakel had told Bohr about the threats that had been made against her because of your work. But we also know that in nine out of ten murders committed in the home, the murderer is someone known to the victim. So it was someone she knew. Or someone who knows you.”

“The first list is a long one. The second one very short.”

“Which men did she know, apart from Bohr and other people from work?”

“She knew my colleagues. And... no.”

“What?”

“She helped out when I owned the Jealousy Bar. Ringdal, the guy who took it over, wanted her to carry on. She said no, but that’s hardly a motive for murder.”

“Is it worth considering that it could be a woman?”

“Fifteen percent probability.”

“Statistically, yes, but think about it. Jealousy?”

Harry shook his head.

They heard a phone vibrate in the room. Kaja leaned over her side of the bed, fished the mobile from Harry’s pocket, looked at the screen and pressed Answer.

“He’s a bit busy right now, in bed with Kaja, so please keep it short.”

She handed the phone to a resigned-looking Harry. He looked at the screen.

“Yes?”

“Not that it’s any of my business, but who’s Kaja?” Alexandra’s voice sounded ice-cold.

“Sometimes I find myself wondering the same thing,” Harry said, watching Kaja as she slipped out of bed, took off her pyjamas and went into the bathroom. “What is it?”

“What is it?” Alexandra mimicked. “I thought I might let you know about the last DNA report we sent the investigating team.”

“Oh?”

“But now I’m not so sure.”

“Because I’m in Kaja’s bed?”

“You admit it!” Alexandra exclaimed.

“ ‘Admit’ is the wrong word, but yes. I’m sorry if you think that sucks, but I’m just a booty call to you, so you’ll get over it pretty quickly.”

“No more booty calls from me, pretty boy.”

“OK, I’ll have to try to live with that.”

“You could at least try to sound a bit sad.”

“Listen, Alexandra, I haven’t been anything but sad for several months, and I don’t feel up to playing this sort of game right now. Are you going to tell me about the report or not?”

A pause. Harry heard the sound of the shower in the bathroom.

Alexandra sighed. “We’ve analysed anything that might be thought to contain DNA from the scene, and obviously there are loads of matches with the police officers we’ve got in the database. You, Oleg, the investigating officers.”

“Did they really manage to contaminate the crime scene?”

“Not too much, but this was a very thorough search for evidence, Harry. From the whole house, including the basement. We brought in so much that the team at the scene gave us a list of what to prioritise. That’s why this has only just cropped up. The unwashed glasses and cutlery in the dishwasher were some way down the list.”

“What’s cropped up?”

“DNA from an unknown individual in dried saliva on the edge of the glass.”

“Male?”

“Yes. And they said there were fingerprints on the glass as well.”

“Fingerprints? Then they’ll have pictures.” Harry swung his legs out of bed. “Alexandra, you’re a good friend, thanks!”

“Friend,” she snorted. “Who wants to be friends?”

“Will you call me when you’ve got anything else?”

“I’ll call when I’ve got a well-hung man in my bed, that’s what I’m going to do.” She ended the call.

Harry got dressed, took his cup of coffee, coat and boots down to the living room, opened Kaja’s laptop and logged into the investigation section of the Oslo Police District website. He found images of the glass in the final report, among the pictures of the contents of the dishwasher. Two plates and four glasses. That meant that the glass had probably been used not long before the murder. Rakel never let things sit in the dishwasher for more than a couple of days, and if it was still less than half full she would sometimes take things out again and wash them by hand.

The glass containing the fingerprints was one of the ones Rakel had bought from a small glassworks in Nittedal, run by a Syrian family who had come to Norway as refugees. Rakel had liked the blue-tinted glasses and wanted to help the family, so she had suggested the Jealousy Bar should buy a load, saying they’d give the bar a distinctive quality. But before Harry had time to make a decision he had been thrown out of both the house in Holmenkollen and ownership of the bar. Rakel had kept the glasses in a cupboard in the living-room section of the large, open space. Not the first place a killer would look for a glass if he wanted a drink after the murder. The report also said that Rakel’s own fingerprints had been found on the glass. So she had given this person something to drink, had handed him the glass. Water, probably, because according to the report there were no traces of anything else. And Rakel hadn’t drunk anything herself; there was only one of the blue-tinted glasses in the dishwasher.

Harry rubbed his face.

So she had known whoever had arrived well enough to let him in, but not so well as to use one of the IKEA glasses from the kitchen cupboard above the tap when he asked for a glass of water. She had made more of an effort. A lover? A new date, if so, because the cupboard containing those glasses was a bit of a detour. And he hadn’t been there before. When Harry had checked the rest of the recordings from the wildlife camera, Rakel was the only person seen coming and going, she hadn’t had any visitors at all. It must be him. Harry thought about the person Rakel had seemed surprised to see but had still let in a few seconds later. The report said that no matching fingerprints had been found in the database. So, not an active police officer — at least, not one who had worked at the scene — and not a known felon. Someone who hadn’t been in the house much, seeing as this was the only print he had left.

Whoever had lifted the fingerprint from the glass had used the old method: coloured powder spread evenly over the surface with a brush or magnet. Harry could see prints from five fingers. In the middle of the glass, four prints in a pattern that indicated that the four fingers, with the little finger at the bottom, had been pointing to the left. At the bottom of the glass was the print from the thumb. Rakel’s, from when she handed him the glass with her right hand. Harry looked further down the report and found confirmation of what he already knew: the prints were from Rakel’s right hand and the unknown man’s left hand. Harry’s brain sounded the alarm when it detected the same creaking on the floor as the previous evening.

“Made you jump!” Kaja laughed as she padded barefoot into the living room wearing a worn blue dressing gown that was far too big for her. Her father’s. Or her older brother’s. “I’ve only got enough breakfast for one, but we can go out and—”

“Don’t worry,” Harry said, closing the laptop. “I need to get home and change clothes.” He stood up and kissed her forehead. “Nice tattoo, by the way.”

“Do you think? I seem to remember that you don’t like tattoos?”

“Really?”

She smiled. “You said that human beings are by definition idiots, and therefore shouldn’t inscribe anything in either stone or skin, and should only use water-soluble paint. That we needed to be able to erase the past and forget who we used to be.”

“Christ. Did I say that?”

“A blank page, you said. The freedom to become someone new, something better. That tattoos define you, force you to stick to old values and opinions. You used the example of having a tattoo of Jesus on your chest, which would then be an incentive to cling to old superstitions, because the tattoo would look ridiculous on an atheist.”

“Not bad. I’m impressed you remember that.”

“You’re a thoughtful man with many peculiar ideas, Harry.”

“I used to be better, maybe I should have had them tattooed.” Harry rubbed the back of his neck. The alarm didn’t want to stop, like an old-style car alarm that kept blaring outside the bedroom window, waiting for someone to come and turn it off. Had something other than a creaking floorboard set it off?

Kaja followed him into the hallway as he put his boots on.

“You know what?” she said when he was about to open the door. “You look like you’ve decided to survive.”

“What?”

“When I saw you at the church, you looked like you were waiting for the first decent excuse to die.”

Katrine looked at the screen of her phone to see who was calling. She hesitated, looked at the heap of reports on her desk and sighed.

“Good morning, Mona. So you’re working on a Sunday?”

“ISB,” Mona Daa said.

“Sorry?”

“In the same boat. Text speak.”

“Yes, I’m at work. Without trucks, Norway stops.”

“Sorry?”

“Old saying. Without women... Never mind, how can I help VG?”

“An update on the Rakel case.”

“That’s what we have press conferences for.”

“And it’s getting to be quite a while since you last had one of those. And Anders seems—”

“The fact that you’re living with a forensics officer doesn’t mean you can jump the queue, Mona.”

“No, it puts me at the back of the queue. Because you’re all so terrified it’ll look like I’m getting special treatment. What I was about to say is that Anders obviously isn’t saying anything, but he seems moody. Which I interpret as meaning that you’re treading water.”

“Investigations are never treading water,” Katrine said, massaging her forehead with her free hand. Dear God, she was tired. “We and Kripos are working systematically and tirelessly. Every line of inquiry that doesn’t take us closer to our goal takes us closer to our goal.”

“Great, but I think I’ve had that quote from you before, Bratt. Have you got anything a bit more sexy?”

“Sexy?” Katrine felt something come loose, something that had been threatening to come out for a long time. “OK, here’s sexy. Rakel Fauke was a wonderful person. And that’s more than I can say about you and your colleagues. If you can’t keep the day of rest sacred, then at least try to keep her memory and whatever remnants of integrity you’ve got left sacred, you fucking bitch. There, is that sexy enough for you?”

In the seconds that followed, Katrine was as speechless at what she had just said as Mona Daa.

“Do you want me to quote you on that?” Mona asked.

Katrine leaned back in her chair and cursed silently. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

“Bearing in mind future cooperation,” Mona said, “I think this conversation never happened.”

“Thanks.”

They hung up, and Katrine leaned her head on the cool desktop. It was too much. The responsibility. The headlines. The impatience of the people on the top floor. The baby. Bjørn. The uncertainty. The certainty. Certainty about so much, about knowing she was at work because she didn’t want to be at home, with them. And it was too little. She could read as many reports as she liked, her own and those from Winter and Kripos, but it didn’t help. Because Mona Daa was right: they were treading water.

Harry stopped abruptly in the middle of Stensparken. He had taken a slight detour to give himself time to think, but had forgotten it was Sunday. Angry barking competed with the excited cries of children, which in turn competed with the shouted commands of the owners of the dogs and children. Yet all this hadn’t managed to drown out the alarm that wouldn’t stop ringing. Until he suddenly remembered. Because he did remember. Remembered where he had seen a left hand holding a glass of water.

“What do you think about the fact that you can get sent to prison for ordering a sex doll in the shape of a child?” Øystein Eikeland asked as he leafed through the newspaper on the counter in the Jealousy Bar. “I mean, it’s disgusting, but thoughts ought to be free, surely?”

“There have to be boundaries for disgusting things,” Ringdal said, then licked a finger and went on counting the notes from the till. “We had a good night last night, Eikeland.”

“It says here that experts disagree about whether messing about with child sex dolls increases the likelihood of assaults on children.”

“But we’re not getting enough babes. Maybe we should advertise cheaper drinks for ladies under thirty-five.”

“If that’s the case, why don’t parents get sent to prison for buying toy guns for their kids and teaching them to carry out school massacres?”

Ringdal put a glass under the tap. “Are you a pedophile, Eikeland?”

Øystein Eikeland stared out into space. “I’ve considered it, naturally. Just out of curiosity, you know? But no, no tingling anywhere. What about you?”

Ringdal filled the glass. “I can assure you that I’m an extremely normal man, Eikeland.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does what mean?”

“Extremely normal. It sounds kind of creepy.”

“Extremely normal means I like babes above legal age. Just like our male clientele.” Ringdal raised his glass. “And that’s why I’ve employed a new bartender.”

Øystein’s mouth fell open.

“She’ll be in addition to the two of us,” Ringdal said. “So we can have a bit more time off. Rotate the team, so to speak. Mourinho-style.” He drank.

“Firstly, it was Sir Alex who introduced the rotation system. Secondly, José Moronho is a pompous jerk who may have won a few titles with the most expensive players in the world, but like most people he’s been deceived by the comments of so-called experts into believing that his own unique gifts were the cause. Even if all research shows that it’s a myth that the coach has anything to do with a football team’s results. The team with the highest-paid players wins, it’s as easy as that. So if you want the Jealousy to come top of the bar league in Grünerløkka, all you have to do is increase my wages, Ringdal. Simple as that.”

“You’re entertaining, I’ll give you that, Eikeland. That must be why the customers seem to like you. But I don’t think it would do any harm to mix things up a bit.”

Øystein flashed his brown stumps of teeth in a grin. “Mix bad teeth with big tits? She’s got big tits, hasn’t she?”

“Well...”

“You’re an idiot, Ringdal.”

“Careful now, Eikeland. Your position here isn’t that secure.”

“You need to decide what sort of bar this is going to be. A place with integrity and self-respect, or Hooters?”

“If that’s the choice, I’d—”

“Don’t answer until you’ve added this to your tactical considerations, Moronho. According to statistics from the porn website Pornhub, the customers of the future — aged between eighteen and twenty-four — are almost 20 percent less likely to search for tits than any other group. While those who are closest to dying, the ones between fifty-five and sixty-four, are most likely to search for your big-titted ladies. Tits are on the way out, Ringdal.”

“What about bad teeth?” Harry asked.

They turned towards the new arrival.

“Perhaps you could get me something to drink, Ringdal?”

Ringdal shook his head. “It’s not time yet.”

“I don’t want anything strong, just—”

“No beer or wine served before twelve on Sundays, Hole. We’d like to keep our license.”

“...a glass of water,” Harry said, finishing his sentence.

“Oh,” Ringdal said, putting a clean glass under the tap and turning it on.

“You said you asked Rakel if she wanted to carry on working for the Jealousy,” Harry said. “But you’re not in her email folder or in the list of calls made to her phone in the past few months.”

“No?” Ringdal said, handing the glass to Harry.

“So I was just wondering where, when and how you were in contact with her?”

“You were wondering? Or the police?”

“Does that make any difference to your answer?”

Ringdal stuck his bottom lip out and tilted his head. “No. Because I can’t actually remember.”

“You can’t remember if you met her in person or if you sent an email?”

“No, actually.”

“Or if it was recent or a long time ago?”

“I’m sure you can appreciate that sometimes there are gaps in our memories.”

“You don’t drink,” Harry said, raising the glass of water to his lips.

“And I have busy days when I meet a lot of people and there’s a lot going on, Harry. Speaking of which...”

“You’re short of time now?” Harry looked around the empty bar.

“Before it happens, Harry, that’s when you should be busy. Preparation is everything. That stops you having to improvise. A good plan has nothing but advantages. Have you?”

“Have I what? Got a plan?”

“Think about it, Harry. It pays off. Now, if you’ll excuse us...”

When they saw the front door close behind Harry, Øystein looked around automatically — and in vain — for Harry’s empty glass.

“He must be desperate,” Ringdal said, nodding towards the newspaper in front of Øystein. “They’re saying the police haven’t got anything new. And everyone knows what they do then.”

“What do they do then?” Øystein asked as he stopped looking.

“They go back to their old lines of inquiry. The ones they’ve already dismissed.”

It took a while for Øystein to realise what Ringdal meant. Harry wasn’t desperate because the police didn’t have anything. Harry was desperate because the police would be looking more closely at their previous lines of inquiry. Such as Harry’s alibi.

The Criminal Forensics Unit laboratory out in Bryn was almost deserted. But two men were bent over a computer screen in the fingerprint lab.

“It’s a match,” Bjørn Holm concluded, and straightened up. “The same prints as the blue-tinted glass in Rakel’s house.”

“Ringdal was there,” Harry said, studying the marks on the glass from the Jealousy.

“Looks that way.”

“Apart from the people coming and going on the night of the murder, no one apart from Rakel had entered or left the house in several weeks. No one.”

“Right. So this Ringdal guy could have been the first one. The one who arrived earlier that evening and then left again.”

Harry nodded. “Of course. He could have paid her an unannounced visit, and drank a glass of water while he asked Rakel if she wanted to carry on working for the Jealousy. She said no, and he left. That would all fit with the recordings. What doesn’t fit is Ringdal saying he can’t remember. Of course you remember if you visited a woman somewhere you find out two days later in the paper was the scene of a murder just hours after you were there.”

“Maybe he’s lying because he doesn’t want to become a suspect. If he was alone with Rakel on the night of the murder, he’d obviously have a lot to explain. And even if he knows he’s innocent, he may be aware that he can’t prove it, and stands to risk both being held in custody and being the subject of unwelcome media attention. You’ll have to confront him with the evidence and see if that jogs his memory.”

“Mm. Unless perhaps we should hold our cards closer to our chest until we’ve got more.”

“Not we, Harry. This is your thing. Like Ringdal, I’m aiming for a strategy of not getting involved.”

“Sounds like you think he’s innocent.”

“I’ll leave the thinking to you. But I’m on paternity leave, and I’d like to have a job to come back to afterwards.”

Harry nodded. “You’re right, it’s very selfish of me to expect that people who don’t owe me anything should risk everything to help me.”

A subdued whimper came from the pram. Bjørn looked at the time, pulled his sweater up and pulled out a baby’s bottle. He had told Harry about the trick of squeezing the bottle between two rolls of fat under a tight sweater as a way of keeping it at around body temperature.

“Ah, I’ve just realised which musician Ringdal reminds me of,” Harry said as he watched the little boy with his three comically large fair curls suck and chew on the teat. “Paul Simon.”

“Paul Frederic Simon?” Bjørn exclaimed. “You just realised?”

“It’s your son’s fault. He looks like Art Garfunkel.”

Harry was expecting Bjørn to look up and say something about that being an insult, but he just sat there with his head bowed, concentrating on the feed. Perhaps he was contemplating where Art Garfunkel was on his barometer of musical taste.

“Thanks again, Bjørn,” Harry said, doing his coat up. “I’d better get going.”

“That thing you said about me not owing you anything,” Bjørn said, without looking up. “That isn’t true.”

“I don’t know what it could be.”

“If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never have met Katrine.”

“Of course you would.”

“You were the one who guided her into my arms. She could see what happened in the relationships you were in, so you represented everything she didn’t want in a man. And I was as far from you as she could get. So in a way, you were my matchmaker, Harry.” Bjørn looked up with a broad smile and moist eyes.

“Oh, shit,” Harry said. “Is this that famous paternal sensitivity talking?”

“Probably,” Bjørn laughed, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “So what are you going to do now? About Ringdal, I mean.”

“You said you didn’t want to get involved.”

“Right. I don’t want to know.”

“So I’d better get out before there are two people crying here.” Harry looked at his watch. “The two of you, obviously.”

On his way to the car, Harry called Kaja.

“Peter Ringdal. See what you can find out.”

At seven o’clock that evening it was already dark, and the invisible, silent twilight rain draped itself like a cold spider’s web on Harry’s face as he walked up the gravel path to Kaja’s house.

“We’ve got a lead,” he said into his phone. “I’m not entirely sure it deserves to be called that, though.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Oleg asked.

“Haven’t I said?”

Oleg didn’t answer.

“Kaja Solness,” Harry said. “A former colleague.”

“Are you two—”

“No. Nothing like that. Nothing...”

“Nothing I need to know?” Oleg filled in.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“OK.”

A pause.

“Do you think you’re going to find him?”

“I don’t know, Oleg.”

“But you know what I need to hear.”

“Mm. We’re probably going to find him.”

“OK.” Oleg sighed deeply. “Speak soon.”

Harry found Kaja on the sofa in the living room, where she was sitting with her laptop on her knees and her phone on the coffee table. She had found out the following: Peter Ringdal was forty-six years old, had been divorced twice, had no children, his relationship status was unclear, but he lived alone in a house in Kjelsås. His career had been mixed. He had studied economics at the Norwegian Business School, and had once launched a new transportation concept.

“I found two interviews with him, both in Finansavisen,” Kaja said. “In the first, from 2004, he was looking for investors for what he claimed was going to revolutionise the way we think about individual transport. The headline was Killer of the Private Car.” She tapped her laptop. “Here it is. A quote from Ringdal: ‘Today we convey one or two people in vehicles weighing a ton on roads that demand huge amounts of space and a lot of maintenance to handle the traffic they have to carry. The amount of energy required to get these machines rolling with their wide tires on rough pavement is laughable when you consider the alternatives available to us. In addition there’s also the resources that go into making these outsized driving machines. But that isn’t the biggest cost to humanity of today’s private transport. It’s time. The loss of time when a potential contributor to society has to spend four hours each day focusing solely on steering his own private machine through the Los Angeles traffic. That isn’t just a pointless use of a quarter of a person’s waking life, it also means a loss in GDP that in this city alone would be enough to finance another trip to the moon — every year!’ ”

“Mm.” Harry ran his forefinger over the worn varnish on the armrest of the wingback chair he had sat down on. “What’s the alternative?”

“According to Ringdal, masts with small carriages hanging off them, containing one or two people, not unlike cable cars. The carriages are parked at platforms on every street corner, like bicycles. You get inside, tap in your personal code and where you want to go. Your debit card is charged a small amount per kilometre, and a computerised system sends the carriages off, gradually accelerating to up to two hundred kilometres an hour, even in the centre of Los Angeles. While you carry on working, reading, watching television, barely noticing the corners. Or the corner, because on most journeys there would only be one. No traffic lights, no concertina effect, the carriages are like electrons drifting through a computer system without ever colliding. And beneath the carriages, all the roads are freed up for the use of pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders.”

“What about heavy transport?”

“Anything that’s too heavy for the masts is carried in trucks that would have to drive at a snail’s pace in cities, in allocated time slots at night or early in the morning.”

“Sounds expensive, having to build both masts and roads.”

“According to Ringdal, the new masts and rails would cost between 5 and 10 percent of what a new road costs. The same with maintenance. In fact a transition to masts and rails would be paid for within ten years simply from the reduction in road maintenance. In addition to that, there would be the human and financial saving of fewer accidents. The target is no accidents at all, not a single one.”

“Mm. Sounds sensible in the city, but out in the sticks...”

“The cost of building masts to your cabin would be a fifth of an ordinary gritted road.”

Harry gave her a wry smile. “Sounds as if you like the idea.”

Kaja laughed. “If I’d had the money in 2004, I’d have invested in it.”

“And?”

“And would have lost it. The second interview with Ringdal is from 2009, and has the headline Black belt bankrupt. The investors lost everything and are furious with Ringdal. He for his part claims that he’s the victim, and that people with no vision for the future have ruined things for him by cutting off the money. Did you know he used to be Norwegian judo champion?”

“Mm.”

“He says something funny, actually...” Kaja scrolled down and read out loud with laughter in her voice: “ ‘The so-called financial elite are a gang of parasites who think it takes intelligence to get rich in a country with fifty successive years of growth. Whereas in fact the only thing you need is an inferiority complex, a willingness to risk other people’s money, and being born after 1960. Our so-called financial elite are a gaggle of blind hens in a corn silo, and Norway is the paradise of mediocrity.’ ”

“Strong words.”

“It doesn’t stop there, he’s got a conspiracy theory as well.”

Harry watched steam rise from the cup on the table in front of her. That meant fresh coffee in the kitchen. “Let’s hear it.”

“ ‘This development is inescapable, and who has most to lose from it?’ ”

“Are you asking me?”

“I’m reading from the interview!”

“You’d better use your funny voice, then.”

Kaja shot him a warning glance.

“Car manufacturers?” Harry sighed. “Road builders? Oil companies?”

Kaja cleared her throat and looked back at the screen: “ ‘Just like the big arms manufacturers, the car companies are extremely powerful players, and they live or die with private motoring. So they’re fighting desperately against development by pretending to be trailblazers. But when they try to convince people that driverless cars are the solution, of course it isn’t because they want better transport solutions, but because they want to slow things down as long as possible and carry on producing one-ton monsters even if they know that this is of no benefit to the world, and actually uses up its limited resources. And they’re trying to smother any other initiatives with everything they’ve got. They’ve been out to get me from day one. They haven’t managed to put me off, but they’ve obviously managed to frighten my investors.’ ” She looked up.

“And after that?” Harry asked.

“Not much. A short piece in 2016, also in Finansavisen, about the Norwegian Musk-wannabe Peter Ringdal, who is currently running a small tobacconist’s in Hellerud, but who once ruled a castle in the air that didn’t last long despite the fact that experts at the Institute of Transport Economics praised it as the most sensible proposal for the future of personal transportation, especially in cities.”

“Criminal record?”

“One report for beating up a guy when he was working as a bouncer while he was a student, and one for careless driving, also when he was a student. He wasn’t convicted in either instance. But I’ve found something else. An abandoned missing person case.”

“Oh?”

“His second ex-wife, Andrea Klitchkova, was reported missing last year. Because the case was dropped, the files have been deleted, but I found a copy of an email from the Norwegian friend who reported Andrea missing. She wrote that Andrea had told her that before she left Ringdal, he had threatened her several times with a knife when she criticised him about the bankruptcy. I found the friend’s number and had a chat with her. She says the police spoke to Ringdal, but then she got an email from Russia, from Andrea, in which she apologised for not telling her she was going leave so suddenly. Because Andrea was a Russian citizen, the matter was passed on to the Russian police.”

“And?”

“Presumably Andrea was found, because there’s nothing more about the case in the police’s files.”

Harry stood up and walked towards the kitchen. “How come you’ve got access to police files?” Harry asked. “Did IT forget to cancel your access?”

“No, but I’ve still got my access chip, and you told me your friend’s user ID and password.”

“Did I?”

“BH100 and HW1953. Have you forgotten?”

It’s gone, Harry thought as he got a cup out of the kitchen cupboard and poured himself some coffee from the cafetière. Ståle Aune had warned him about Wernicke — Korsakoff syndrome, which was when alcoholics slowly but surely drank away their ability to remember things. Well, at least he could remember the names Wernicke and Korsakoff. And he hardly ever forgot things he’d done when he was sober. And there were rarely such long, totally blank gaps as there were for the night of the murder. Passwords.

He looked at the pictures hanging on the wall between the cupboards and worktop.

A faded photograph of a boy and a girl in the back seat of a car. Kaja’s sharp teeth were smiling for the photographer, the boy had his arm round her, he must be her older brother, Even. Another picture showed Kaja with a dark-haired woman who was a head shorter than her. Kaja was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers, the other woman in Western dress with a hijab over her head, with a desert landscape behind them. The shadow of a camera tripod was etched on the ground in front of them, but no photographer. Taken using a timer. It was just a photograph, but something about the way they were standing, so close together, put Harry in mind of the same sense he got from the picture taken in the car. An intimacy.

Harry moved on to a photograph of a tall fair man in a linen jacket, sitting at a restaurant table with a whisky glass in front of him and a cigarette dangling from one hand. A playful, self-assured look in his eyes, not focused on the camera but slightly above it. Harry thought about the Swiss guy, the one in the hardcore version of the Red Cross.

The fourth picture was of him, Rakel and Oleg. The same one Harry had in his own flat. He didn’t know how Kaja had got hold of it. This version wasn’t as sharp as his, the dark bits were darker and there was a reflection on one side, as if it was a photograph of a photograph. Obviously she could have taken the picture during the short time they had been together, if that could actually be called being “together.” They were two people who had huddled up next to each other for a bit of warmth during the winter night, seeking shelter from the storm. And when the storm had eased, he had got up and gone off to warmer climes.

Why did anyone stick photographs from their life on the kitchen wall? Because they didn’t want to forget, or because drink or the passage of time had drained colour and definition from the memories? Photographs were a better record, more accurate. Was that why he — apart from this single one — didn’t have any pictures? Because he preferred to forget?

Harry took a sip from the cup.

No, photographs weren’t more accurate. The pictures you chose to hang on the wall were fragments torn from life the way you wished it had been. Photographs revealed more about the person who had hung them up than the images in them. And if you read them right, they could tell you more than any interview. The newspaper cuttings on the wall of Bohr’s cabin. The guns. The picture of the boy with the Rickenbacker guitar on the wall of the girl’s bedroom on Borggata. The trainers. The father’s single wardrobe.

He needed to get into Peter Ringdal’s home. Read his walls. Read about the man who was furious with his investors for not holding out for longer. The man who had threatened his wife with a knife because she criticised him.

“Category three,” he called as he studied Rakel, Oleg and himself. They had been happy. That was true, wasn’t it?

“Category three?” Kaja called back.

“Categories of killer.”

“Which one was number three again?”

Harry carried his cup of coffee to the doorway and leaned against the frame. “The resentful. The ones who can’t handle criticism and direct their rage at people they bear grudges against.”

She was sitting there with her legs tucked beneath her, her cup in one hand as she brushed the hair from her face with the other. And it struck him once again how beautiful she was.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

Rakel, he thought.

“A break-in,” he said.

Øystein Eikeland lived a simple life. He got up. Or not. If he got up, he walked from his flat in Tøyen down to Ali Stian’s kiosk. If it was shut, that meant it was Sunday, and he would automatically check the first thing that stuck in his long-term memory: Vålerenga football club’s fixture list, because he had arranged to have every Sunday when they played a home match off work from the Jealousy. If Vålerenga weren’t playing in their new stadium at Valle-Hovin that day, he went home and lay down again for another half hour before the Jealousy opened. But if it was a weekday, he would get a cup of coffee from Ali Stian, who had a Pakistani father, a Norwegian mother, and — as his name suggested — one foot firmly planted in each culture. One year, Norwegian National Day, 17 May, had fallen on a Friday, and he was seen kneeling on his prayer mat in the local mosque dressed in full national costume.

After leafing through Ali Stian’s newspapers and discussing the most important stories with him, then sticking the papers back in the stand, Øystein would walk to a café where he would meet Eli — an older, overweight woman who was only too pleased to buy him breakfast in return for him talking with her. Or at her, because she didn’t have much to say, she just smiled and nodded no matter what he was running on about. And Øystein didn’t feel remotely guilty. She valued his company, and that value was equivalent to a roll and a glass of milk.

After that, Øystein would walk from Tøyen to the Jealousy Bar in Grünerløkka, and that was his exercise for the day. Even if it took no more than twenty minutes, sometimes he decided it merited a glass of beer. Not a large glass, but he was happy to make do. And that was fine, because that hadn’t always been the case. But having a secure job did him good. Even if he didn’t like Ringdal, his new boss, he liked the job and wanted to keep it. The way he wanted to keep his life simple. As a result, he was deeply unhappy with the phone conversation he was having with Harry.

“No, Harry,” he said. He was standing in the back room of the Jealousy with his phone pressed to one ear and a finger stuck in the other to block out Peter Gabriel, who was singing “The Carpet Crawlers” out in the bar, where Ringdal and the new girl were serving the early evening rush. “I’m not going to steal Ringdal’s keys.”

“Not steal,” Harry said. “Borrow.”

“OK, borrow. That’s what you said when we were seventeen and stole that car in Oppsal.”

“You were the one who said that, Øystein. And it was Tresko’s father’s car. And that was all fine, if you remember?”

“Fine? We got away with it, but Tresko was grounded for two months.”

“Like I said, fine.”

“Idiot.”

“He keeps them in his jacket pocket, you hear them rattle when he hangs it up.”

Øystein stared at the old Catalina jacket hanging on the hook right in front of him. In the eighties those short, overpriced cotton jackets had been the uniform of young Social Democrats in Oslo. In other parts of the world they had been adopted by graffiti artists. But Øystein mostly found himself thinking of Paul Newman. How some people could make even the blandest item of clothing look so cool that you simply had to have one. Even if you already had an idea of the disappointment that would come when you looked at yourself in the mirror. “What do you want his keys for?”

“I just want to take a look in his house,” Harry said.

“Do you think he killed Rakel?”

“Don’t think about that.”

“No, because that’s really easy to do,” Øystein groaned. “OK, if I was stupid enough to say yes, what’s in it for me?”

“The satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done your best and only friend a favour.”

“And unemployment benefit when the Jealousy’s owner ends up in prison.”

“OK, good. Say you’re taking the rubbish out, then meet me in the backyard at nine o’clock. That’s in... six minutes.”

“You know this is a really bad idea, don’t you, Harry?”

“Let me think about it. OK, I’ve thought about it. And you’re right. A really bad idea.”

Øystein hung up and told Ringdal he was taking a cigarette break, went out through the back door, stopped between the parked cars and rubbish bins, lit a cigarette and pondered the same two eternal mysteries: how could it be that the more expensive players Vålerenga bought, the greater their chances of fighting to avoid relegation rather than competing for medals seemed to be? And how come the more hair-raising things Harry asked Øystein to do, the greater the chances were of him saying yes? Øystein rattled the key ring he had taken from the Catalina jacket and tucked in his pocket as he thought about Harry’s concluding argument: A really bad idea. But it’s the only one I’ve got.

33

It took Harry barely ten minutes to drive from Grünerløkka, across Storo, to Kjelsås. He parked the Escort on one of the side streets off Grefsenveien, on a street named after a planet, and walked around to one named after another one. The drizzle had turned into a steady downpour and the dark streets were deserted. A dog started barking on a balcony as Harry approached the house where Peter Ringdal lived. Kaja had found his address in the population register. Harry pulled up the collar of his coat, turned in through the gate and walked up the paved drive to the blue-painted house that consisted of one traditional rectangular section and another part shaped like an igloo. Harry wasn’t sure if the neighbourhood had taken a collective decision to have space as their theme, but in the garden there was a sculpture that looked like a satellite. Harry assumed it was supposed to look as if it was floating around the blue, dome-shaped part of the house: the earth. Home. The impression was only strengthened by the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. There was no sticker warning that the house was alarmed. Harry rang the bell. If anyone answered, he would say he’d got lost and ask the way to the street where his car was parked. No answer. He put the key in the lock and turned it. He opened the door and stepped into the dark hallway.

The first thing that struck him was the smell. That there was no one there. Every home Harry had been in had a smell: clothes, sweat, paint, food, soap or something else. But walking in from the torrent of smells outside felt like it did when you left most houses: the smells stopped.

There was no Yale lock, so you had to turn the knob from the inside to lock the door. He turned on the light on his mobile phone, then swept it across the walls of the hallway that ran like an axis through the centre of the house. The walls were lined with artistic photographs and paintings, bought with what looked to Harry like a keen eye for taste. It was the same with food: Harry couldn’t cook, he couldn’t even put together a sensible three-course meal when he was sitting in a restaurant with an extensive menu. But he had the sense to recognise a good order when he watched Rakel smile and tell the waiter quietly what she wanted, and would copy her without embarrassment.

There was a chest of drawers just inside the door. Harry opened the top drawer. Gloves and scarves. He tried the next one down. Keys. Batteries. A flashlight. A judo magazine. A box of bullets. Harry picked it up: 9mm. Ringdal had a pistol somewhere. He put the box back and was about to close the drawer when he noticed something. There was no longer a total absence of smell; an almost imperceptible smell was rising from the drawer.

A smell of sun-warmed forest.

He moved the judo magazine.

There was a red silk scarf under it. He stood frozen to the spot for a moment. Then he picked it up and held it to his face, inhaling its smell. There was no doubt. It was hers, it was Rakel’s.

Harry stood there for a few seconds before he pulled himself together. He thought for a moment, then put the scarf back under the magazine, closed the drawer and carried on along the hallway.

Instead of going into what he assumed was the living room, he went upstairs. Another passageway. He opened a door. Bathroom. Seeing as there were no windows that could be seen from outside, he turned the light on. Then it struck him that if Ringdal had had one of those new electricity monitors fitted, and if what the workman from Hafslund had said was right, they would be able to tell if someone had been inside the house by checking the meter and seeing that the electricity usage had gone up a tiny bit just before half past nine in the evening. Harry checked the shelf under the mirror and the bathroom cabinet. Just the usual toiletries a man would need. No interesting pills and potions.

Same thing with the bedroom. A clean, neatly made bed. No skeletons in the closets. The light on his mobile evidently used a lot of power, he could see that the charge in the battery had already sunk alarmingly quickly. He sped up. A study. Barely used, it looked almost abandoned.

He went down to the living room. The kitchen. The house was silent, it wasn’t telling him anything.

He found a door leading to the cellar. His phone died as he was about to go down the narrow staircase. He hadn’t seen any basement windows from the outside of the house facing the road. He switched the light on and went down.

There was nothing that spoke to him there either. A freezer, two pairs of skis, tins of paint, some white and blue rope, worn hiking boots, a board of tools beneath an oblong basement window, the same sort Rakel’s house had, facing the back of the building. Four separate, fenced-off compartments. The house had probably been semi-detached once upon a time, with the igloo and the more conventional part of the house as separate homes. So why were there padlocks on the compartment doors if there was only one person living there? Harry looked through the wire mesh towards the top of one of them. Empty. The same with two of the others. But the last one had chipboard over the opening.

That was where it was.

The first three compartments were locked and visibly empty, to fool an intruder into thinking that the fourth was as well.

Harry thought. He wasn’t hesitating, he was just taking a bit of time to think through the consequences, weighing up the advantages of finding something against the disadvantages of the break-in being discovered, meaning that whatever he found couldn’t be used as evidence. There had been a crowbar hanging on the board. He reached a conclusion, went back to the tools, grabbed a screwdriver and returned to the door. It took him three minutes to remove the screws from the door hinges. He lifted the door aside. The light inside must have been connected to the switch at the top of the stairs, because the compartment was lit up. An office. Harry’s eyes scanned the desk and computer, the shelves of files and books. He stopped at the picture that was fixed to the bare grey wall above the desk with a piece of red tape. Black and white. Maybe it had been taken using a flash, which was why the contrast between the white glare of the skin and the darkness of the blood and shadows was so noticeable, like an ink drawing. But the drawing showed her oval face, her dark hair, her lifeless eyes, her mutilated, dead body. Harry closed his eyes. And there, on the red skin on the inside of his eyelids, there it was again. Burned on. Rakel’s face, the blood on the floor. It felt like a knife being driven into his chest, with such force that it made him stagger back.

“What did you say?” Øystein Eikeland called over David Bowie, staring at his boss.

“I said the two of you can manage!” Ringdal cried, putting his hand on the back of the door of the back room and pulling on his jacket.

“B-but...” Øystein stammered. “She’s only just started!”

“And she’s proved to us that she’s worked behind a bar before,” Ringdal said, nodding at the girl who was pouring two glasses of beer at the same time as she chatted to a customer.

“Where are you going?” Øystein asked.

“Home,” Ringdal said. “Why?”

“So early?” Øystein muttered desperately.

Ringdal laughed. “That’s kind of the point of employing someone else, Eikeland.” He zipped his jacket up and took his car keys out of his trouser pocket. “See you tomorrow.”

“Hold on!”

Ringdal raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

Øystein just stood there, scratching the back of his hand hard, trying to think fast, which wasn’t one of his strong points. “I... I was wondering if I could leave early this evening instead. Just this once.”

“What for?”

“Because... the clan are practising some new songs tonight.”

“Vålerenga’s supporters club?”

“Er, yes.”

“They can manage without you.”

“Manage? We could get relegated!”

“Two matches into the season? I doubt that. Ask me again in October.” Ringdal smiled as he walked through the back room towards the door. Then he was gone.

Øystein pulled out his phone, leaned back against the inside of the bar and called Harry.

A woman’s voice answered after two rings.

“The person you have called has turned their phone off...”

“No!” Øystein exclaimed, ending the call and trying again. Three rings this time. But the same woman’s voice and the same message. Øystein tried for a third time, and thought he could detect a note of irritation in the woman’s voice this time.

He tapped out a text message.

“Øyvind!” A woman’s voice. Definitely irritated. The new bargirl was mixing a cocktail as she nodded towards the queue of impatient, thirsty drinkers behind him.

“Øystein,” he said quietly, before turning and glaring at a young woman who ordered a beer with a resigned, patronising sigh. Øystein’s hand was shaking so much that he spilled the drink, so he wiped the glass and put it down on the bar as he looked at the time. Kjelsås? All hell would break loose in ten minutes. Harry locked up and him with no job. Fuck Harry, the crazy idiot! The young woman had evidently tried to communicate with him, because now she was leaning forward and shouting into his ear: “I said a small glass, you jerk, not half a litre!”

“Suffragette City” was blaring from the speakers.

Harry was standing in front of the photograph. Taking in the details. The woman was lying in the boot of a car. Now that he was standing closer, he could see two things. That it wasn’t Rakel, but a younger woman with the same colouring and facial features as Rakel. And that what had initially made him think it was a drawing and not a photograph was that there were several things wrong with the body. It had indentations and protrusions where it shouldn’t, as if the artist didn’t quite know his anatomy. This body wasn’t just dead, it had been shattered, with rage and force, as if it had been thrown off a mountain. There was nothing about the picture to indicate where it had been taken, or who had taken it. Harry turned the picture over without removing the tape. Glossy photographic paper. Nothing on the back.

He sat down at the desk, which was strewn with drawings of small, two-person carriages hanging from rails running between masts. In one someone was using a laptop, in another someone was sleeping on a chair that had been folded back, and in a third an elderly couple were kissing. There were ramps for people to get on every hundred metres or so along the street, with empty carriages waiting beside them. Another drawing showed a bird’s-eye view of a cross, the rails forming a four-pointed star. One large sheet of paper showed a map of Oslo with a grid that Harry assumed was the network of rails.

He opened the desk drawers. Pulled out futuristic sketches of aerodynamically shaped carriages hanging from cables or rails, bright colours, extravagant lines, smiling people, an optimistic view of the future that made Harry think of adverts from the sixties. Some of them had captions in English and Japanese under them. The pictures evidently weren’t Ringdal’s own idea, just related proposals. But no more pictures of bodies, just the one stuck to the wall right in front of him. What did it mean, what were the walls telling him this time?

He tapped the keyboard in front of him and the screen lit up. No password. He clicked the email icon. Tapped Rakel’s address into the search box, but got no results. Not surprising, seeing as all the folders turned out to be empty. Either they weren’t used, or he emptied them as he went along, which might explain why he wasn’t worried about protecting access to his computer. The police’s IT experts might be able to reconstruct Ringdal’s email correspondence, but Harry was aware that had become harder rather than easier in the past few years.

He looked through the list of documents, opened a couple of them. Notes about transport. An application for increased opening hours for the Jealousy Bar. Six-monthly accounts that showed the bar had made a healthy profit. Nothing of interest.

Nothing on the shelves of files — about transport theory, research into urban development, traffic accidents, game theory — either. But one worn hardback book. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. When he was younger, Harry had leafed through this mythologised book out of curiosity without finding anything about Übermensch or the purported Nazi ideology, just a story about an old man in the mountains who — except for the bit about God being dead — said completely incomprehensible things.

He looked at the time. He had been there half an hour. With no charge in his phone he couldn’t take a picture of the dead girl so he could find out who she was. But there was no reason to believe that the photograph and Rakel’s scarf would be gone when they came back with a search warrant.

Harry stood up and left the office, screwed the door hinges back in place, hung the screwdriver on the board, jogged up the stairs, switched off the light and went out into the hallway. He heard the neighbour’s dog barking outside. On his way to the front door, he opened the door to the only room he hadn’t been in. A combination of toilet and utility room. He was about to close it again when he caught sight of a white sweater lying on the tiled floor in the heap of dirty underwear and T-shirts in front of the washing machine. The sweater had a blue cross on the chest. And flecks of what looked like blood. To be more precise: sprays of blood. Harry closed his eyes. The cross had triggered something in his memory. He saw himself walk into the Jealousy Bar, Ringdal behind the counter. That was the sweater Ringdal had been wearing that night, the night Rakel died.

Harry had punched Ringdal. They had both bled. But that much?

If the sweater got washed before the house was searched, they would never know.

Harry hesitated for a moment. The dog had stopped barking. Then he bent down, carefully rolled the sweater up and squeezed it into his coat pocket. He stepped back out into the passageway.

And stopped abruptly.

The sound of footsteps on gravel.

Harry moved back, into the darkness farther along the passageway.

Through the half-moon glass he saw a shape step into the light out on the steps.

Shit.

The glass was too low for him to see the other man’s face, but he saw a hand searching in the pockets of a blue Catalina jacket, followed by subdued swearing. The door handle was pushed down. Harry tried to remember: had he turned the lock?

The man outside tugged at the door. Cursed more loudly now.

Harry silently let the air out of his lungs. He had locked it. And, once again, it was as if something had been triggered. Rakel’s lock. He had checked it, as if to make sure it was locked.

Something lit up outside. A mobile. A pale face was pressed against the half-moon in the door, nose and cheek pressed flat against the glass, lit up by the phone being held to his ear. Ringdal was almost unrecognisable, his face like a bank robber’s under a nylon stocking, demonic, but his eye was staring into the darkness of the hallway.

Harry stood motionless, holding his breath. They were five metres apart, at most. Could Ringdal really not see him? As if in response, Ringdal’s voice echoed through the half-moon window with an odd, muffled resonance, low and calm.

“There you are.”

Shit, shit.

“I can’t find the keys to the house,” Ringdal said. The heat of his mouth settled as grey condensation on the glass.

“Eikeland,” Øystein had said rather stiffly when, after a moment of panic, he had gone into the back room to take Ringdal’s call.

“There you are,” Ringdal had said. Then: “I can’t find the keys to the house.”

Øystein closed the door so he could hear better.

“Oh?” Øystein did his best to sound calm. Where the hell was Harry, and why the hell had he turned his phone off?

“Can you see if they’re lying on the floor under the hook where I hang my jacket?”

“OK, hang on a moment,” Øystein said, and took the phone from his mouth. He was breathing hard, as if he’d been holding his breath, which he might well have been. Think, think!

“Eikeland? Are you there, Eikeland?” Ringdal’s voice sounded thin and less threatening when Øystein was holding the phone farther away from him. Reluctantly he moved it closer to his ear again.

“Yes. No, I can’t see any keys. Where are you?”

“I’m standing outside my house.”

Harry’s inside, Øystein thought. If he’s heard Ringdal approach, he needs time to get away, a window at the back, a back door.

“Maybe the keys are out in the bar,” Øystein said. “Or in the toilet. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll go and check.”

“I never put my keys down anywhere, Eikeland.” This was said with such certainty that Øystein realised there was no point trying to sow any doubt. “I’ll just have to break the glass.”

“But...”

“I can get the window mended tomorrow, it’s no big deal.”

Harry was looking right into Ringdal’s eyes behind the glass, and it was a complete mystery to him that the other man couldn’t see him. He thought about retreating towards the door to the cellar and crawling out through one of the basement windows. But he knew that the slightest movement would give him away. Ringdal’s face moved away from the window. Harry saw Ringdal put his hand inside his jacket, under a dark pullover. He pulled out something black. A pistol with what Bjørn called a “stuck-up nose,” an extremely short barrel, possibly a Sig Sauer P320. Easy to fire, easy to use, quick trigger, effective at short range.

Harry gulped.

He imagined he could hear Ringdal’s defense lawyer. The accused thought a burglar was coming towards him through the darkness in the hallway, so he fired in self-defense. The defense lawyer asking Katrine Bratt in the witness stand: “On whose orders was Hole inside the house?”

He saw the pistol being raised, then the hand swing back.

“I can see them!” Øystein shouted into his phone.

Silence at the other end.

“That was in the nick of time,” Ringdal’s voice finally said. “Where—”

“On the floor. Below the hook, where you said. They’re behind the broom.”

“Broom? There’s no broom...”

“I put it in there, I kept kicking it behind the bar,” Øystein said, leaning through the doorway to look at the bar, where a throng of unserved, thirsty customers was waiting. He grabbed the brush and put it behind the door, beneath the hook.

“OK, hang on to them, I’m on my way.”

The line went dead.

Øystein called Harry’s number. Still the same woman’s voice reciting her mantra about the phone being switched off. Øystein wiped the sweat from his brow. Relegation. The season had hardly begun, but it was already decided, it was the law of gravity, which could at best be counterbalanced rather than avoided.

“Øyvind! Where are you, Øyvind?”

“Øy-STEIN!” Øystein bellowed towards the crowd on the other side of the doorway. “I’m definitely an Øy, but I’d much prefer to be a — stein, OK?”

Harry watched the shape move away from the window. He heard quick footsteps down the steps. The dog started barking again.

Keep them there, I’m on my way.

Øystein must have persuaded Ringdal that he had his keys.

He heard a car start, then disappear.

His own car was parked on a different planet. There was no way he could get to the Jealousy Bar ahead of Ringdal. And his phone was dead, so he couldn’t contact Øystein. Harry tried to think. It was as if his brain had lost its steering, and kept thinking about the photograph of the dead girl. And something Bjørn had said about developing pictures from crime scenes back when they still had a darkroom in Forensics. That new staff always tended to use too much contrast, meaning that there was less detail in both black and white. The contrast in the photograph in the basement wasn’t exaggerated because of the flash, but because it had been developed by an amateur. Harry was suddenly sure. Ringdal had taken the picture himself. Of a girl he had killed himself.

34

Øystein saw the door swing open from the corner of his eye. It was him, Ringdal. He walked in, but was so short that he immediately vanished in the crowd of customers. But Øystein could see them moving, could tell he was on his way over, like the jungle moving above the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park. Øystein went on pouring beer. He saw the brown liquid fill the glass, then the head form on top of it. The tap spluttered. An air bubble, or was it time to change the barrel again already? He didn’t know. He didn’t know if this was the end, or just a bump in the road. All he could do was wait and see. Wait and see if everything was going to go to hell. No question about that “if,” really. Everything always went to hell, it was all just a question of time. At least if your best friend was called Harry Hole.

“It’s the barrel,” he said to the girl. “I’ll go and change it, tell Ringdal I’ll be back in a moment.”

Øystein went into the back room, locked himself inside the staff toilet, which also functioned as a storage space for everything from glasses and napkins to coffee and filters. He took out his phone and made one last attempt to call Harry. With the same deflating result.

“Eikeland?”

Ringdal had come into the back room. “Eikeland!”

“In here,” Øystein mumbled.

“I thought you were changing the barrel?”

“It wasn’t empty after all. I’m on the bog.”

“I’ll wait.”

“On the bog, as in having a shit.” Øystein underlined the claim by straining his stomach muscles and pressing the air from his lungs in a long, loud groan. “Help out in the bar and I’ll be out soon.”

“Push the keys under the door. Come on, Eikeland, I want to get home!”

“I’ve got a magnificent cable halfway out, boss, we could be talking a world record here, so I’m reluctant to pinch it off halfway.”

“Keep your toilet humour for people who appreciate it, Eikeland. Now.”

“OK, OK, just give me a minute.”

Silence.

Øystein wondered how long he could delay things. Delaying was everything. Wasn’t that what life came down to in the end, anyway?

After counting slowly to twenty and still not managing to come up with a better excuse than the ten hopeless ones he had already thought of, he flushed the toilet, unlocked the door and went out into the bar.

Ringdal was handing a customer a glass of wine, took his bank card and turned towards Øystein, who had put his hands in his pockets and adopted an expression that he hoped conveyed surprise and dismay. That wasn’t far from what he was actually feeling.

“I had them right here!” Øystein called over the music and buzz of conversation. “I must have lost them somewhere.”

“What’s going on, Eikeland?” More abstract than interested.

“Going on?”

Ringdal’s eyes narrowed. “Go-ing on,” he said. Slowly, almost in a whisper, yet it still cut through the noise like a knife.

Øystein swallowed hard. And decided to give up. He had never understood people who let themselves be tortured and then told the truth. He couldn’t help thinking that was just lose-lose.

“OK, boss. It’s—”

“Øystein!”

It wasn’t the girl this time, finally getting his name right. The cry came from over by the door, and this person didn’t pass below the canopy of customers, but stood a head taller than them, as if he were swimming through them. “Øystein, my Øystein!” Harry repeated, with a wild grin. And seeing as Øystein had never seen Harry with that sort of grin before, it was quite a disconcerting sight. “Happy birthday, old friend!”

The other customers turned towards Harry, and a few glanced at Øystein. Harry reached the bar and threw his arms round Øystein, pressing him to him with one hand between his shoulder blades and the other at the base of his spine. In fact it slid even lower down, and came dangerously close to his buttocks.

Harry let him go and straightened up. Someone began to sing. And someone — it must have been the girl — turned the music off. Then more of them joined in.

“Happy birthday to you...”

No, Øystein thought, not that, I’d prefer the rack and having my fingernails pulled out.

But it was too late, even Ringdal joined in, somewhat reluctantly, presumably keen to show everyone what a great guy he was. Øystein bared his brown teeth in a stiff smile as embarrassment burned his cheeks and ears, but that just made them laugh and sing even louder.

The song ended with everyone raising their glasses to Øystein, and with Harry giving him a hard slap on the backside. And only when he noticed something sharp pressing into his buttock did he realise what the opening hug had been about.

The music came back on, and Ringdal turned to Øystein and offered him his hand. “Happy birthday, Eikeland. Why didn’t you say it was your birthday when you asked to have the evening off?”

“Well, I didn’t want...” Øystein shrugged. “I suppose I just like to keep things to myself.”

“Really?” Ringdal said, looking genuinely surprised.

“Oh, by the way,” Øystein said. “I remembered where I put your keys.” With what he hoped didn’t look like too exaggerated a gesture, he put his hand in the back pocket of his trousers.

“Here.”

He held up the key ring. Ringdal stared at it for a moment, then glanced at Harry. Then he snatched it from Øystein.

“Have a good night, boys.”

Ringdal strode towards the door.

“Fucking hell, Harry,” Øystein hissed as he watched him leave. “Fucking hell!”

“Sorry,” Harry said. “A quick question. After Bjørn got me out of here on the night of the murder, what did Ringdal do?”

“Do?” Øystein thought. He stuck one finger in his ear as if the answer might be in there. “That’s right, he went straight home. He said his nose wouldn’t stop bleeding.”

Øystein felt something wet against his cheek. He turned towards the girl, who was standing there, her lips still in a pout. “Happy birthday. I’d never have guessed you were an Aries, Øyvind.”

“You know what they say.” Harry smiled, putting one hand on Øystein’s shoulder. “Up like a lion, down like a ram.”

“What did he mean by that?” the girl asked as she watched Harry march off towards the door in Ringdal’s wake.

“You tell me. He’s a man of mystery,” Øystein mumbled, hoping Ringdal wouldn’t pay any attention to his date of birth on his next wage slip. “Let’s put some Stones on and get this place going, OK?”

His phone woke up after a few minutes’ charging in the car. Harry brought up a name, pressed Call and got an answer as he braked at a red light on Sannergata.

“No, Harry, I don’t want to have sex with you!”

The acoustics suggested Alexandra was in her office at the Forensic Medical Institute.

“Great,” Harry said. “But I’ve got a bloodstained sweater that—”

“No!”

Harry took a deep breath. “If Rakel’s DNA is in the blood, that puts the owner of the sweater at the scene on the night Rakel died. Please, Alexandra.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. A noisy drunk stopped on the crossing in front of the car, swayed, stared at Harry with a dark, foggy look in his eyes, hit the hood with his fist, then wandered off into the darkness.

“You know what?” she said. “I hate bed-hoppers like you.”

“OK, but you love solving murders.”

Another pause.

“Sometimes I wonder if you even like me at all, Harry.”

“Of course I do. I may be a desperate man, but not when it comes to who I go to bed with.”

“Someone you go to bed with? Is that all I am?”

“No, don’t be daft. We’re professional colleagues who catch criminals who would otherwise plunge our society into chaos and anarchy.”

“Ha ha,” she groaned drily.

“Obviously I’m willing to lie to you to get you to do this,” Harry said. “But I like you, OK?”

“Do you want to have sex with me?”

“Well. No. Yes, but no. If you get what I mean.”

It sounded like there was a radio playing quietly in her office. She was on her own.

She let out a deep sigh. “If I do this, Harry, you need to be clear that it isn’t for your sake. But I still can’t do a full DNA analysis for a while — there’s a long queue, and Kripos and Bratt’s team are breathing down my neck the whole time.”

“I know. But a partial profile that excludes matches against certain other profiles takes less time, doesn’t it?”

Harry heard Alexandra hesitate. “And who do you want to have excluded?”

“The owner of the sweater’s DNA. Mine. And Rakel’s.”

“Yours?”

“The owner of the sweater and I had a little boxing match. He had a nosebleed, my knuckles were bleeding, so it isn’t impossible that that’s where the blood on the sweater comes from.”

“OK. You and Rakel are in the DNA database, so you’re fine. But if I need to exclude a match with the sweater’s owner, I’ll need something I can get his DNA profile from.”

“I’ve thought about that. I’ve got a pair of bloodstained jeans in my laundry basket, and there’s too much blood for it all to have come from my knuckles, so some of that must be from his nose. Sounds like you’re still at work?”

“I am.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Alexandra was waiting when Harry pulled up outside the entrance to the Rikshospital, freezing with her arms wrapped round her. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, tight trousers and a lot of make-up. Alone at work, but looking like she was going to a party. He’d never seen her any other way. Alexandra Sturdza said life was too short not to make yourself look as good as you could all the time.

Harry wound the window down. She bent over.

“Evening, mister.” She smiled. “Five hundred for a hand job, seven for—”

Harry shook his head and handed her two plastic bags: one containing Ringdal’s sweater, the other with his own jeans. “You know no one in Norway works at this time of the night?”

“Oh, is that why I’m alone here? You Norwegians truly have a lot to teach the rest of the world.”

“Working less?”

“Lowering the bar. Why go to the moon when you’ve got a cabin in the mountains?”

“Mm. I really appreciate this, Alexandra.”

“In that case, you ought to choose something from the price list,” she said without smiling. “Is it that Kaja who’s lured you away? I’ll kill her.”

“Her?” Harry leaned over and looked at her more closely. “I thought it was people like me you hated?”

“I hate you, but she’s the one I want to kill. If you get that?”

Harry nodded slowly. Killing. He was about to ask if that was a Romanian saying, something that sounded worse when it was translated into Norwegian, but decided against it.

Alexandra took a step back from the car and looked at him as the window slid silently closed.

Harry looked in the mirror as he drove off. She was still standing there, arms by her sides, under the light of the street lamp, getting smaller and smaller.

He called Kaja as he was passing under Ring 3 and told her about the sweater. And the scarf in the drawer. About Ringdal showing up, and his pistol. He asked her to check if he had a gun license, as soon as she could.

“One more thing—” Harry said.

“Does this mean you’re not on your way here?” she interrupted.

“What?”

“You’re five minutes away from me and you say ‘one more thing’ like we’re not going to be seeing each other soon.”

“I need to think,” Harry said. “And I think best on my own.”

“Of course. I didn’t mean to nag.”

“You’re not nagging.”

“No, I...” She sighed. “What’s the last thing?”

“Ringdal has a photograph of the shattered body of a woman on the wall above his computer. You know, so he can see her the whole time. Like a certificate or something.”

“Bloody hell. What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But do you think you could find a photograph of his ex-wife, the Russian one who disappeared?”

“Shouldn’t be too hard. If there’s nothing on Google, I’ll call her friend again. I’ll text it to you.”

“Thanks.” Harry drove slowly down Sognsveien, between the brick houses in the quiet, English-style garden district. He saw a pair of headlights coming towards him. “Kaja?”

“Yes?”

It was a bus. Pale, ghostly faces looked out at him from inside the illuminated vehicle as it passed. And among them Rakel’s face. They were coming more frequently now, the flashes of memory, like loose stones before a landslide.

“Nothing,” Harry said. “Goodnight.”

Harry was sitting on the sofa listening to the Ramones.

Not because the Ramones meant anything special to him, but because the album had been sitting on the record player ever since Bjørn had given it to him. And he realised he’d been steering clear of music since the funeral, that he hadn’t turned the radio on once, not here at home or in the Escort, and seemed to have preferred silence. Silence to think. Silence while he tried to hear what it was saying, the voice out there, on the other side of the darkness, behind a half-moon-shaped window, behind the windows of the ghostly bus, saying something he could almost hear. Almost. But now it needed to be drowned out instead. Because now it was talking too loudly, and he couldn’t bear to hear it.

He turned the volume up, closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the shelves of records behind the sofa. The Ramones. Road to Ruin. Joey’s punchy lyrics. Even so, it still sounded more pop than punk. That was what tended to happen. Success, the good life, age, they all made even the angriest of people more conciliatory. The way they had with Harry, making him milder, kinder. Almost sociable. Happily tamed by a woman he loved in a marriage that worked. Not perfect. Well, fuck it, as perfect as anyone could bear. Until one day, like a bolt from the blue, she picked at a sore point. Confronted him with her suspicions. And he had confessed. No, not confessed. He always told Rakel what she wanted to know, it was just up to her to ask. And she had always known better than to ask about more than she needed to know. So she must have thought she needed to know. One night with Katrine. Katrine had taken care of him on a night when he was so drunk that he couldn’t look after himself. Had they had sex? Harry didn’t remember, he had been rat-arsed, probably so drunk that even if he had tried he wouldn’t have managed it. But he told Rakel the truth, that it couldn’t be ruled out entirely. And then she had said that it didn’t make any difference, that he had betrayed her anyway, that she didn’t want to see him again, and told Harry to pack his things.

Just the thought of it now hurt so much that it left Harry gasping for breath.

He had taken a bag of clothes, his bathroom stuff and his records, leaving the CDs behind. Harry hadn’t drunk a drop of alcohol since the night Katrine picked him up, but the day Rakel threw him out he went straight to the liquor store. And was stopped by one of the staff when he started to unscrew one of the bottles before he was out of the shop.

Alexandra would be working on the sweater by now.

Harry put the pieces together in his head.

If it was Rakel’s blood, then the case was sorted. On the night of the murder, Peter Ringdal left the Jealousy Bar around 22:30 and paid Rakel an unannounced visit, possibly under the pretext of trying to persuade her to remain as chairperson. She let him in, gave him a glass of water. She turned down his offer. Unless perhaps she said yes. Perhaps that was why he stayed longer, because they had things to discuss. And perhaps the conversation had slipped on to more personal subjects. Ringdal probably told Rakel about Harry’s outrageous behaviour in the bar earlier, and Rakel would have told him about Harry’s problems and — this was the first time Harry had considered this — that Harry had set up a wildlife camera that he didn’t think Rakel knew anything about. Rakel might even have told Ringdal where the camera was mounted. They had shared their troubles, and possibly their joys, and at some point Ringdal evidently thought the time was right to make a more physical move. But this time he was definitely rejected. And in the rage that followed this humiliation, Ringdal grabbed the knife from the block on the kitchen counter and stabbed her. Stabbed her several times, either in ongoing rage or because he realised it was too late, the damage was done, and he had to finish the job, kill her and get rid of the evidence. He managed to keep a clear head. Do what had to be done. And when he left the scene, he took a trophy with him, a certificate, like when he took a photograph of the other woman he had killed. The red scarf that was hanging next to Rakel’s coat under the hat rack. Then, when he was sitting in his car, he remembered just in time about the camera Rakel had mentioned, got out and removed it. He got rid of the memory card at the petrol station. Tossed the sweater with Rakel’s blood on it on the floor with his dirty washing. Maybe he hadn’t even seen the blood, because presumably then he would have washed it at once. That was what had happened.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Twenty-five years’ experience as a murder detective had taught Harry that the chain of events was almost always more complicated and incomprehensible than it seemed at first.

But that the motive was almost always as simple and obvious as it seemed at first glance.

Peter Ringdal had been in love with Rakel. Hadn’t Harry seen the desire in his eyes the first time he came to view the Jealousy? Maybe he had been viewing Rakel as well. Love and murder. The classic combination. When Rakel rejected Ringdal in her home, maybe she told him she was going to take Harry back. And we’re all stuck in our ways. Bed-hoppers, thieves, drunks, murderers. We repeat our sins and hope for forgiveness, from God, other people, ourselves. So Peter Ringdal had killed Rakel Fauke the way he killed his ex-wife, Andrea Klitchkova.

Harry had originally been thinking along different lines. That it was the same person who had been there earlier that evening, that the murder had happened then, and then the perpetrator — who knew Rakel would be alone — had come back later to clean up. From the images on the wildlife camera they had seen Rakel in the doorway when she opened the door, but not the second time. Could that be because she was already dead. Maybe the murderer had taken her keys, let himself in, cleaned up and then left the keys behind when he left the house? Or had the murderer sent someone else to clean up after him? Harry had a vague notion that the silhouettes of the two visitors couldn’t belong to the same person. Either way, Harry had rejected that theory because the Forensic Medical Institute’s written report had been so certain about the time of the murder, that because of the temperature of the body and the room, the murder must have taken place after the first visit. In other words, while the second visitor was there.

Harry heard the needle of the record player bump gently against the label, as if to point out discreetly that the record needed to be turned over. His brain was suggesting more loud, numbing hard rock, but he resisted, the way he routinely resisted the same bastard brain’s suggestion to have a drink, just a sip, a few drops. Time to go to bed. And if he managed to get some sleep, that would be a bonus. He lifted the record from the deck without touching the grooves, without leaving any fingerprints. Ringdal had forgotten to clean the glass in the dishwasher. Odd, really. Harry slid the album into the inner sleeve, then the cover. He ran his finger over the spines of his records. Alphabetical by artist’s name, then chronologically by date of acquisition. He inserted his hand between the eponymous albums The Rainmakers and Ramones to make space for the new acquisition. He caught sight of something tucked between the albums. He pushed them aside a bit harder to see better. Shut his eyes. His heart began to beat faster, as if it had understood something his brain hadn’t yet taken in.

His phone rang.

Harry answered.

“It’s Alexandra. I’ve done a first sweep and I can already see differences in the DNA profiles that mean the blood on this Ringdal guy’s sweater can’t possibly be Rakel’s.”

“Mm.”

“And it doesn’t match yours either. And the blood on your jeans isn’t yours either.”

Silence.

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it must be blood from his nose on his sweater and my jeans, then. We’ve still got fingerprints tying him to the scene. And Rakel’s scarf in the drawer in his home, it smells of her, it’s bound to have her DNA on it. Hair, sweat, skin.”

“OK. But there’s a difference between the DNA profiles of the blood on the sweater and on your trousers as well.”

“Are you saying that the blood on the sweater doesn’t belong to Rakel, me or Ringdal?”

“It’s a possibility.”

Harry realised she was giving him time to figure out the other possibilities for himself. The other possibility. It was a matter of logic.

“The blood on my trousers isn’t Ringdal’s. And you began by saying it wasn’t mine. So whose is it, then?”

“I don’t know,” Alexandra said. “But...”

“But?” Harry stared in between the records. He knew what she was going to say. There were no longer any loose stones warning of a landslide. That had already happened. The whole mountainside had given way.

“So far, the blood on your trousers doesn’t show any deviation from Rakel’s DNA,” Alexandra said. “Obviously there’s a lot of work left before we get to the 99.999 percent probability that we count as a complete match, but we’re already up to 82 percent.”

Eighty percent. Four out of five.

“Of course,” Harry said. “I was wearing the trousers when I was at the scene after Rakel was found. I knelt down beside her body. There was a pool of blood there.”

“That explains that, if it really is Rakel’s blood on your trousers. Do you want me to carry on with the analysis that could rule out the possibility that the blood on the sweater is Rakel’s?”

“No, there’s no need,” Harry said. “Thanks, Alexandra. I owe you one.”

“OK. You’re sure everything’s OK? You sound so—”

“Yes,” Harry interrupted. “Thanks, and goodnight.” He ended the call.

There had been a pool of blood. He had knelt down. But that wasn’t what had triggered the scream inside Harry’s head, the landslide that was already starting to bury him. Because he hadn’t been wearing those trousers when he was in Rakel’s house with the crime-scene investigators, he had left them in the laundry basket the morning after the night she was murdered. That much he did remember. Until now, his memory had been as blank as a crystal ball when it came to that night, from the time he walked into the Jealousy Bar at seven in the evening until the time the woman collecting for charity rang on the door and woke him the next day. But images were starting to appear, connect, become a sequence. A film with him in the lead role. And what was screaming inside his head, in a trembling, broken voice, was his own voice, the soundtrack from Rakel’s living room. He had been there on the night of the murder.

And squeezed between The Rainmakers and the Ramones lay the knife Rakel had loved. A Tojiro knife with an oak handle and a white guard of water-buffalo horn. The blade was smeared with something that could only be blood.

35

Ståle Aune was dreaming. At least, he assumed it was a dream. The siren that had been cutting through the air had stopped abruptly, and now he could hear the distant rumble of bombers as he ran through the empty street to the air-raid shelter. He was late, everyone else had got inside long before, and now he could see that a man in uniform was closing the metal door at the end of the street. He could hear himself panting for breath, he should have tried to lose some weight. But on the other hand, it was only a dream, everyone knew Norway wasn’t at war. But perhaps we’ve been attacked suddenly? Ståle reached the door and discovered that the opening was much smaller than he had thought. “Come on!” the man in uniform yelled. Ståle tried to get in, but it was impossible, all he could do was get his shoulder and one foot inside. “Get in or get lost, I have to close the door!” Ståle kept pushing. And now he was stuck, he couldn’t get in or out. The air-raid siren started to blare again. Damn. But he could comfort himself with the fact that all the evidence suggested that this was a dream, nothing more.

“Ståle...”

He opened his eyes and felt his wife Ingrid’s hand shaking his shoulder. There you go, the professor was right again.

The bedroom was dark, and he was lying on his side with the alarm clock on the bedside table right in front of him. The luminous numbers said it was 3:13.

“Someone’s at the door, Ståle.”

And there it was again. The siren.

Ståle heaved his overweight body out of bed and into his silk dressing gown, and pushed his feet into the matching slippers.

He was downstairs and on his way to the front door when the thought struck him that whoever was outside might be less than welcome. A paranoid schizophrenic patient with voices in his head telling him to kill his psychologist, for instance. But on the other hand, perhaps the air-raid shelter had been a dream within a dream, perhaps this was the real dream. So he opened the door.

And once again the professor was proved right. The person outside was less than welcome. It was Harry Hole. More precisely: the Harry Hole you don’t want to see. The one with eyes that were more bloodshot than usual, with the hunted, desperate expression that could only mean trouble.

“Hypnosis,” Harry said. He was out of breath, and his face was wet with sweat.

“Good morning to you too, Harry. Would you like to come in? Assuming the door isn’t too small, of course.”

“Too small?”

“I dreamed I couldn’t get through the door to an air-raid shelter,” Ståle said, then followed his stomach through the hallway and into the kitchen. When his daughter Aurora was little, she used to say it always looked like Daddy was walking uphill.

“And the Freudian interpretation of that is?” Harry asked.

“That I need to lose weight.” Aune opened the fridge. “Truffle salami and cave-aged Gruyère?”

“Hypnosis,” Harry said.

“Yes, so you said.”

“The husband in Tøyen, the one we thought had killed his wife. You said he had suppressed his memories of what happened. But that you could bring them back with hypnosis.”

“If the subject was susceptible to hypnosis, yes.”

“Shall we find out if I am?”

“You?” Ståle turned towards Harry.

“I’ve started to remember things from the night Rakel died.”

“Things?” Ståle closed the fridge door.

“Images. Random pictures.”

“Fragments of memory.”

“If I can get them to link up, or dig out more of them, I think I might know something. Know something I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”

“Put them together into a sequence? I can try, obviously, but there are no guarantees. To be honest, I fail more often than I succeed. It’s hypnosis as a method rather than me that’s at fault, of course.”

“Of course.”

“When you say you think you know something, what sort of knowledge are we talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it’s clearly urgent.”

“Yes.”

“OK. Do you remember anything definite from these fragments of memory?”

“The crystal chandelier in Rakel’s living room,” Harry said. “I’m lying right under it, looking up, and can see the pieces of glass form the letter S.”

“Good. That gives us a location and a situation, so we can try associative memory retrieval. Just let me get my pocket watch first.”

“You mean the sort you can swing in front of me?”

Ståle Aune raised an eyebrow. “Any objections?”

“No, not at all, it just seems... a bit old-school.”

“If you’d rather be hypnotised in a more modern way, I can recommend a number of respected but obviously less qualified psychologists who—”

“Get the watch,” Harry said.

“Fix your eyes on the face of the watch,” Ståle said. He had sat Harry on the tall-backed armchair in the living room, and was himself sitting on a footstool alongside. The old watch was swinging on its chain, back and forth, twenty centimetres in front of the detective’s pale, anguished face. Ståle couldn’t remember ever having seen his friend in such a state before. And he felt guilty about not going to see Harry since the funeral. Harry wasn’t the sort of person who found it easy to ask other people for help, and when he did it meant that things were pretty bad.

“You’re safe and relaxed,” Ståle chanted slowly. “Safe and relaxed.”

Had Harry ever been that? Yes, he had. When he was with Rakel, Harry had become someone who seemed to be at peace with both himself and his surroundings. He had — however much of a cliché it might sound — found the right woman for him. And on the occasions when Harry had invited Ståle to give guest lectures at Police College, Ståle got the distinct impression that Harry was genuinely happy with his job and his students.

So what had happened? Had Rakel thrown Harry out, had she left him just because he had fallen off the wagon? When you choose to marry a man who has been an alcoholic for so long, who has fallen apart so many times, you know that the chances of him doing so again are pretty high. Rakel Fauke had been an intelligent and realistic woman, would she really wreck a driveable car just because there was a dent in it, because it had gone into the ditch? The thought had obviously occurred to him that Rakel might have met someone else, and that she had used Harry’s alcohol abuse as an excuse to leave him. Maybe the plan was to wait until the dust had settled, until Harry had come to terms with the break-up, before showing herself in public with her new man.

“You’re sinking deeper and deeper into a trance each time I count down from ten.”

Ingrid had had lunch with Rakel after they broke up, but Rakel hadn’t mentioned another man. On the contrary, when she got home Ingrid had said Rakel seemed sad and lonely. They weren’t close enough friends for Ingrid to feel comfortable asking Rakel, but she said that if there had been another man, she thought Rakel had already dumped him and was trying to find a way back to Harry. Nothing Rakel had said gave any basis for that sort of speculation, but the professor of psychology was under no illusions that when it came to reading other people, Ingrid was far superior to him.

“Seven, six, five, four...”

Harry’s eyelids were half closed now, and his irises looked like pale blue half-moons. People’s susceptibility to hypnosis varied. Only 10 percent were what were regarded as extremely unreceptive, and some didn’t react at all to this sort of intervention. In Ståle’s experience, you could pretty much assume that people with imagination, who were open to new experiences, and who often worked in the creative industries, were the easiest to hypnotise. Anyone who had anything to do with engineering was harder. This made it tempting to believe that murder detective Harry Hole, who wasn’t exactly a tea-drinking daydreamer, would be a tough nut to crack. But without Ståle ever having performed any of the more popular personality tests on Harry, he had a suspicion that he would score unusually highly on one point: imagination.

Harry’s breathing was even, like someone asleep.

Ståle Aune counted down one more time.

There was no doubt, Harry was in a trance.

“You’re lying on a floor,” Ståle said slowly and calmly. “You’re on the floor of the living room in Rakel’s and your house. And above you, you see a crystal chandelier where the crystals form the letter S. What else can you see?”

Harry’s lips moved. His eyelids fluttered. The first two fingers on his right hand flexed in an involuntary twitch. His lips moved again, but no sound came out, not yet. He started to move his head back and forth at the same time as he pushed himself harder against the back of the chair, with a look of pain on his face. Then, like someone having a fit, two strong jolts ran through his long body, and Harry sat there with his eyes wide open, staring in front of him.

“Harry?”

“I’m here.” Harry’s voice was hoarse, thick. “It didn’t work.”

“How do you feel?”

“Tired.” Harry stood up. Swayed. He blinked hard and stared into space. “I need to go home.”

“Maybe you should sit down for a while,” Ståle said. “If you don’t finish the session properly, it can leave you feeling dizzy and disorientated.”

“Thanks, Ståle, but I have to go. Goodnight.”

“In the worst cases it can lead to anxiety, depression and other unpleasantness. Let’s just take a little while to make sure you’re back on your feet, Harry.”

But Harry was already on his way to the door. Ståle got to his feet, but by the time he reached the hall the front door was already closing.

Harry managed to get to his car and bend over behind it before he threw up. Then again. Only when his half-digested breakfast, the only thing he had eaten that day, was completely out of his stomach did he stand up, wipe his mouth with the back of his hand, blink away the tears and unlock the car. He got in and stared through the windshield.

He took out his phone. Called the number Bjørn had given him.

After a few seconds, a groggy male voice muttered his surname, like a tic, a habit from the stone age of telephony.

“Sorry to wake you, Freund. This is Inspector Harry Hole again. Something’s cropped up that’s made things urgent, so I was wondering if you can let me have your preliminary findings from the wildlife camera?”

The sound of a long yawn. “I’m not finished.”

“That’s why I said preliminary, Freund. Anything at all would be a help.”

Harry heard the expert at 3-D analysis of 2-D images talk in a whisper to someone else before he came back.

“It’s tricky to determine the height and width of the man entering the house because he’s crouching,” Freund said. “But it could — and I emphasise could — look like the person who comes back out again — assuming that this person is standing upright in the doorway and isn’t wearing heels or anything like that — is between one metre ninety and one ninety-five. And it looks like the car, based on the design and distance between the brake and rear lights, could be a Ford Escort.”

Harry took a deep breath. “Thanks, Freund, that’s pretty much all I needed to know. Take as long as you need with the rest, there’s no longer any rush. In fact, you can leave it at that. Send me the memory card and your invoice at the return address that was on the envelope.”

“Addressed to you personally?”

“It’s more practical that way. We’ll be in touch if we need a more detailed description.”

“Whatever you want, Hole.”

Harry ended the call.

The 3-D expert’s conclusion merely confirmed what Harry already knew. He had already seen everything when he was sitting in Ståle Aune’s armchair. He remembered everything now.

36

The white Escort was parked in Berg, where the clouds were chasing across the sky as if they were fleeing something, but the night wasn’t yet showing any signs of retreat.

Harry Hole rested his forehead against the inside of the damp, ice-cold windshield. He felt like turning the radio on, Stone Hard FM, hard rock, turning the volume as loud as it would go and blasting his head empty for a few seconds. But he couldn’t, he needed to think.

It was almost incomprehensible. Not the fact that he had suddenly remembered. But the fact that he had managed not to remember, to shut it out. It was as if Ståle’s command about the living room and the S-shape, the sound of Rakel’s name, had forced his eyes open. And in that instant it was there, all of it.

It was night, and he had woken up. He was staring directly up at the crystal chandelier. He realised he was back, back in the living room on Holmenkollveien. But he didn’t know how he had ended up there. The lighting was subdued, the way he and Rakel liked it when they were alone. He could feel that his hand was lying in something wet, sticky. He lifted it. Blood? Then he had rolled over. Rolled over and looked right into her face. She hadn’t looked like she was sleeping. Or like she was staring blankly at him. Or like she had lost consciousness. She looked like she was dead.

He was lying in a pool of blood.

Harry had done what you’re always supposed to do — he pinched himself in the arm. He dug his fingernails into his skin as hard as he could, hoping that the pain would make the vision go away, that he would wake up, yawn with relief and thank the God he didn’t believe in that it had only been a nightmare.

He hadn’t tried to revive her, he had seen too many dead bodies and knew it was too late. It looked like she’d been stabbed with a knife, her cardigan was soaked with blood, darker around the stab wounds in her stomach. But it was the blow to the back of her neck that had killed her. An efficient and deadly wound, inflicted by someone who knew that was what it would be. Someone like him.

Had he killed Rakel?

He had looked around the room in search of evidence to the contrary.

There was no one else there. Just him and her. And the blood. Could that be right?

He had got to his feet and stumbled over to the front door.

It was locked. If anyone had been there and left, they must have used a key to lock it from the outside. He had wiped his bloody hand on his trousers, opened the drawer in the chest. Both sets of keys were there. Hers and his. The ones he had given back to her one afternoon at Schrøder’s, when he had pestered her to take him back, even though he had promised himself that he wasn’t going to do that.

The only other keys were a little way south of the North Pole, in Lakselv with Oleg.

He had looked around. There was too much to take in, too much to grasp, too much for him to be able to find any sort of explanation. Had he killed the woman he loved? Destroyed what he valued more than anything? When he expressed it the first way, when he whispered Rakel’s name, it seemed impossible. But when he said it the other way, about destroying everything he had, it didn’t seem impossible at all. And all he knew, all he had learned from experience, had taught him that facts beat gut feeling. Gut feeling was just a collection of ideas that could be trumped by a single, crushing fact. And the fact here was this: he was a spurned husband who was in a room with his murdered spouse, a room that had been locked from the inside.

He knew what he was doing. That, by going into detective mode, he was trying to protect himself against the unbearable pain he couldn’t yet feel but knew was on its way, like an unstoppable train. That he was trying to reduce the fact that Rakel was lying there dead on the floor to a murder case, something he could handle, the way he had — before he had started to drink alone — made his way to the nearest bar the moment he felt that the pain of living needed to be combated with his talent for drinking, with performing in an arena where he had once imagined himself its master. And why not? Why not assume that the part of the brain governed by instinct is making the only logical, necessary choice when you see your life, your only reason for living, lying broken in front of you? When it chooses to take flight. Alcohol. Detective mode.

Because there was still someone who could be — who needed to be — saved.

Harry already knew he wasn’t afraid of any personal punishment. On the contrary, any punishment, especially death, would feel like liberation, like finding a window on the hundredth floor of a burning skyscraper when you’re surrounded by flames. And no matter how irrational, crazy or simply unfortunate he had been at the moment of the deed, he knew he deserved this punishment.

But Oleg didn’t deserve it.

Oleg didn’t deserve to lose his father, his real, non-biological father, at the same time as he had lost his mother. To lose the beautiful story of his life, the story of growing up with two people who loved each other so much, the story that in and of itself was proof that love did exist, could exist. Oleg, who was now standing on the threshold of settling down with someone, perhaps of having a family of his own. He may have had to watch Rakel and Harry split up a few times, but he had also been the closest witness to the fact that two people loved each other, two people who always wanted what was best for the other. And that they had therefore always found their way back to each other. Taking that idea — no, that truth, damn it! — away from Oleg would destroy him. Because it wasn’t true that he had murdered Rakel. There was no doubt that she was lying there on the floor, and that he had caused her death, but all the associations, the conclusions that followed automatically when it was discovered that a spurned husband had murdered his wife, were lies. That wasn’t why.

The chain of events was always more complicated than you assumed at first, but the motives were simple and clear. And he hadn’t had any motive, any desire to kill Rakel, never! That was why Oleg needed to be protected from this lie.

Harry had cleaned up after him as well as he could without looking at Rakel’s body, telling himself it would only shake his resolve, and that he had seen what he needed to see: that she wasn’t here, that all that was left was an uninhabited body. Harry couldn’t give a detailed account of what this cleaning had entailed, he had been feeling dizzy and was now trying in vain to remember the critical moment, to push through the total darkness that shrouded the hours from when he reached a certain level of intoxication in the Jealousy Bar until he woke up here. How much does anyone really know about themselves? Had he gone to see her, had she, as she stood there in the kitchen with this raving, drunk man, realised that she couldn’t actually do what she had intimated to Oleg that she might do: take Harry back? Had she said as much to Harry? Was that what had tipped him over the edge? The rejection, the sudden awareness that he would never, ever get her back, had that managed to turn love into uncontrollable hatred?

He didn’t know, he didn’t remember.

All he could remember was that after he woke up, as he was cleaning up, an idea had started to take shape. He knew he would be the police’s first prime suspect, that much was obvious. So to mislead them, to save Oleg from the lie about the classic murder, to save his young, unsullied faith in love, save him from the realisation that he’d had a murderer as his role model, he needed someone else. A lightning rod. An alternative suspect, someone who could and should be hung on the cross. Not a Jesus, but a sinner worse than him.

Harry stared out through the windshield, where the condensation from his breath made the lights of the city below him look like they were dissolving.

Was that what he had been thinking? Or had his brain, like the manipulative illusionist it was, merely invented this business about Oleg, clutching at any excuse instead of admitting the real, simpler motive: to escape. To evade punishment. To hide somewhere and suppress the whole thing because it was a memory, a certainty that it was impossible to live with, and survival was, when it came down to it, the only real function of the body and brain.

That, at any rate, was what he had done. Suppressed it. Suppressed the fact that he had left the house, making sure to leave the door unlocked so it couldn’t be concluded that the killer must have a key to the house. He had got in his car, then remembered that the wildlife camera could give him away if the police found it. He tore it down. Removed the memory card and ditched it in one of the bins outside the Ready sports club. Later, a fragment had swirled up from the suppressed sludge when, in a moment of deep concentration, he reconstructed the killer’s probable line of retreat and where he might have got rid of the memory card. How could he have imagined it was a coincidence that he had guided Kaja and himself back there, when there were a million other possibilities? Even Kaja had been astonished at his confidence.

But then Harry’s suppressed memories had turned against him, threatened to bring him down. Without a moment’s hesitation he had handed the memory card to Bjørn, and as a result Harry’s meticulous investigation, the intention of which had been to find another deserving culprit — a violent rapist like Finne, a killer like Bohr, an enemy like Ringdal — had begun to close in on himself.

Harry’s thoughts were interrupted when his phone rang.

It was Alexandra.

On his way to see Ståle he had stopped off to see Alexandra and given her a cotton bud with blood on it. He hadn’t told her it was blood from the presumed murder weapon, the knife he had found among his records. While he was driving he had realised why he had left the knife between The Rainmakers and the Ramones. Simple. Rakel.

“Did you find anything?” Harry asked.

“It’s the same blood group as Rakel’s,” she said. “A.”

The most common, Harry thought. Forty-eight percent of the Norwegian population belong to blood group A. A match was like tossing a coin, it didn’t mean anything. All the same, right now it did mean something. Because he had decided in advance — like Finne and his dice — to let this toss of a coin decide.

“There’s no need to do a full DNA analysis,” Harry said. “Thanks. Have a good day.”

There was just one loose thread, one other possibility, one thing that could save Harry: breaking an apparently solid alibi.

It was ten o’clock in the morning when Peter Ringdal woke up in his bed.

It wasn’t his alarm clock that had woken him, that was set for eleven. It wasn’t the neighbour’s dog, the neighbour’s car setting off to work, kids on their way to school or the garbage truck — his sleeping brain had learned to ignore all those noises. It was something else. It had been a loud noise, like a cry, and it sounded like it had come from the floor below him.

Ringdal got up, pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and grabbed the pistol that he kept on the bedside table every night. He felt a cold draft around his bare feet as he crept down the stairs, and when he reached the hall he discovered the cause. There was broken glass on the floor. Someone had smashed the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. The door to the basement was standing half open, but the light was off. They had arrived. It was time.

The scream, or whatever it had been, had sounded like it had come from the living room. He crept in, holding the pistol out in front of him.

He realised at once that the sound hadn’t been made by someone screaming, but that the noise that had woken him had been made by a chair leg scraping against the parquet floor. One of the heavy armchairs had been moved, turned around so its back was facing him, with a view of the picture window and the garden containing the satellite sculpture. A hat was sticking up above the back of the chair. Peter assumed that the man in the chair hadn’t heard him coming, but obviously it was possible he had positioned the chair like that so he could see anyone entering the room reflected in the window without them seeing him. Peter Ringdal took aim at the back of the chair. Two bullets to the base of the spine, two higher up. The neighbours would hear the shots. It would be difficult to get rid of the body without being discovered. And even more difficult to explain why he had done it. He could tell the police it was self-defence, that he had seen the broken glass, that his life had been threatened.

He squeezed the trigger more tightly.

Why was it so difficult? He couldn’t even see the face of the person in the chair. For all he knew there might be no one there, just a hat.

“It’s only a hat,” a hoarse voice whispered in his ear. “But what you can feel against the back of your head is a very real pistol. So drop yours and stand very still, or I’ll shoot you with a very real bullet right through the brain I’m suggesting you now use for your own good.”

Without turning round, Ringdal dropped the pistol, which hit the floor with a thud.

“What do you want, Hole?”

“I want to know why your fingerprints are on a glass in Rakel’s dishwasher. Why you’ve got her scarf in the drawer in your hallway. And who this woman is.”

Ringdal stared at the black-and-white photograph the man behind him held up in front of his face. The photograph from his office in the basement. The photograph of the woman he, Peter Ringdal, had killed. And then stuffed into a cold car boot and photographed as she lay there.

37

Peter Ringdal was staring bitterly through the front windshield of the car, into the snowdrift. He couldn’t see much, but put his foot down anyway. There wasn’t much traffic up here on the mountain on a Saturday night, not in this weather, anyway.

He had set off from Trondheim two hours earlier, and realised from the weather reports on the radio that he must have been one of the last vehicles allowed onto the E6 across Dovrefjell before it was closed to traffic because of the bad weather. He’d had a hotel room in Trondheim, but couldn’t bear the thought of the banquet. Why not? Because he was a bad loser and had just lost the final of the featherweight class at the Norwegian Judo Championship. If only he had lost against someone better than him instead of sabotaging himself in such an unnecessary way. There had been only seconds to go in the match, and he was leading by two yuko to one koka, and all he had to do was see it through. And he had been in control, he really had! But then he had started thinking about his victory interview, and something funny he could say, and had lost concentration for a fraction of a second, and suddenly he was flying through the air. He managed to avoid landing on his back, but his opponent was awarded a waza-ari, and therefore emerged victorious when the match was over a few seconds later.

Peter hit the steering wheel hard.

In his locker room afterwards he opened the bottle of champagne he had bought for himself. Someone had made a comment, and he had replied that the point of holding the senior finals on a Saturday afternoon for once instead of on Sunday morning was surely that they could have a bit of a party, so what the hell? He had managed to drink more than half the bottle before his coach came in, snatched the bottle away from him and said he was sick of seeing Peter drunk after every meeting, whether he won or lost. And then Peter had said he was sick of having a coach who couldn’t even help him beat people who were obviously worse than him. His coach had started with the philosophical bullshit about judo meaning “soft power,” that Peter needed to learn to give way, let his opponent find himself, show humility, not believe he was best, because after all it was only two years since he had been a junior, and that pride came before a fall. And Peter had replied that judo was all about fake humility. About tricking your opponent by pretending to be weak and submissive, luring him into a trap and then striking without mercy, like a beautiful, wide-open carnivorous plant, a lying whore. It was a stupid, fake sport. And Peter Ringdal had stormed out of the locker room, yelling that he’d had enough. How many times had he done that?

Peter steered the car around a bend as the headlights swept across banks of snow that were still one and a half metres high, even though it was the end of March, so close to the edge of the road that it felt like driving through a tunnel that was far too narrow.

He emerged onto a straight section and accelerated, more out of anger than haste. Because he had been planning to make a move on Tina at the banquet. He knew she had her eye on him as well. But the fair-haired girl had won gold in the lightweight class, and a female Norwegian champion doesn’t fuck a loser, especially not one who’s half a head shorter than her, and who she might now think she could floor on the judo mat. That’s how evolution works.

As if by magic it stopped snowing, and the road — which stretched off between the banks of snow like a long, black pencil line on a white page — lay bathed in moonlight. Was this the eye of the storm? No, for fuck’s sake, this wasn’t some tropical storm, it was just a Norwegian one, and they didn’t have eyes, just teeth.

Peter looked at the speedometer. He felt tiredness settling over him, the result of the long drive to Trondheim yesterday after his lectures at business school, the matches today, the champagne. Hell, he’d thought out some fucking funny remarks for his victory interview, he was going to say—

And there she was. Tina. Right in front of him in the light of the headlamps, with her long fair hair, a flashing red star above her head, waving her arms as if to welcome him. She wanted him after all! Peter smiled. Smiled because he realised he was only imagining this, and his brain told his foot to press the brake pedal. It wasn’t Tina, he thought, it couldn’t be her, Tina was at the banquet dancing with one of the winners, probably welterweight, and his foot pressed the pedal, because it wasn’t his imagination that there was a girl standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of Dovrefjell, in the middle of the night, with a red star above her head, a real-life girl with fair hair.

And then the car hit the girl.

There were two quick thuds, one of them from the roof, and she was gone.

Peter took his foot off the brake, pulled the seat belt away from his chest and drove on slowly. He didn’t look in the mirror. Didn’t want to look in the mirror. Because maybe he had imagined it after all? The windshield had a large white rose on it where it had hit Tina. Tina or another girl.

He reached a bend where he wouldn’t be able to see if there was anyone lying on the road behind him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead of him, then slammed the brakes on. A car that had evidently lost its grip or got caught by a gust of wind was standing with its front pressed into the bank of snow, sideways, blocking the road.

Peter sat there until he got his breath back before putting the car into reverse. He accelerated, heard the engine complain, but he wasn’t about to turn back, he was going to Oslo. He stopped when he saw something in the road, something glinting in the glare of the rear lights. He got out. It was the red star. Or rather, it was a warning triangle. The girl was lying on the windswept pavement just beyond it. An unmoving, shapeless bundle, like a sack of wood someone had stuck a fair-haired head on. Parts of her trousers and jacket had been torn off. He sank to his knees. The whistling of the wind rose and fell in an ominous melody over the moonlit banks of snow.

She was dead. Shattered. In pieces.

Peter Ringdal felt sober now. More sober than he had ever felt in his twenty-two-year life. Which was already over. He had been driving at 140 before he started to brake, sixty above the speed limit, and for all he knew they could probably work out what speed the car had been going from the extent of her injuries. Or the length of the trail of blood, the distance between where her body had first hit the ground and where it had ended up. His brain automatically began to identify the variables in that sort of calculation, as if he could somehow escape the more pressing realities that way. Because his speed wasn’t the worst of it. Or the fact that he hadn’t reacted quickly enough. He could blame the weather, he could say visibility had been poor. But what he couldn’t deny, and what was a measurable fact, was the amount of alcohol in his blood. The fact that he had been driving drunk. That he had made a choice, and that choice had killed someone. No, he had killed someone. Peter Ringdal repeated it to himself, he didn’t know why: I have killed someone. And his blood would be tested for alcohol; it always was in car accidents when someone got hurt.

His brain began its calculations again, couldn’t help it.

And when it had finished, he stood up and looked out across the desolate, windswept landscape. He was struck by how alien it looked, so different from when he had been driving in the opposite direction the day before. Now it might as well be a desert in a foreign country, apparently empty of people but where enemies might be hiding in every depression in the terrain.

He reversed his car alongside the girl, took his white judo outfit from his bag, spread it out across the back seat. Then he tried to lift her. He may have been a former Norwegian judo champion, but she still slid out of his grasp. In the end he carried her like a rucksack and bundled her onto the back seat. He turned the heater up full and drove up to her car. A Mazda. The keys were in the ignition. He got out a tow rope, pulled the Mazda out of the snow and parked it beside the bank of snow on the straight section where other vehicles would be able to see it in time to brake. Then he got back into his own car, turned around and drove back towards Trondheim. After two kilometres he reached a turning that probably led to one of the cabins you could see out on the plateau in better weather. He parked the car ten metres along the track, unwilling to drive any farther in case he got stuck. He took off his jacket and sweater because the hot air from the heater was making him sweat. He looked at the time. Three hours had passed since he had drunk almost a full bottle of champagne with a 12 percent alcohol content. He did the quick calculation he’d had plenty of opportunities to practise in the past few years. Alcohol measured in grams divided by his own weight, times 0.7. Minus 0.15 times the number of hours. He concluded it would be another three hours before he was safe.

It started to snow again. A heavy shower that hung like a wall on all sides of the car.

Another hour passed. Out on the main road a car passed at a snail’s pace. It was hard to guess where it might have come from, seeing as the radio had said the E6 was closed.

Peter looked up the emergency number, the one he was going to call when the time was right, once the alcohol had been burned up. He glanced in the mirror. Weren’t dead bodies supposed to leak? But there was no smell. Maybe she’d been to the toilet just before she set off to drive across Dovrefjell. Lucky for her, lucky for him. He yawned. Fell asleep.

When he woke up the weather was still the same, the darkness was still the same.

He looked at the time. He had been asleep for an hour and a half. He called the number.

“My name is Peter Ringdal, I want to report a car accident on Dovrefjell.”

They said they’d be there as soon as possible.

Peter waited a bit longer. Even if they were coming from the Dombås side, it would take them at least an hour.

Then he moved the body into the boot and drove out onto the main road. He parked and waited. An hour passed. He opened his bag and took out his Nikon camera, the one he’d won at a tournament in Japan, got out of the car into the storm and opened the boot. There was plenty of space for the little body in there. He took a few pictures every time the wind eased and there was a slight pause in the snow. He made sure he took a picture of her watch, which, miraculously enough, was undamaged. Then he closed the boot again.

Why had he taken pictures?

To prove she had been lying in the boot for a long time rather than inside the car? Or was there some other reason, a thought he hadn’t yet managed to decipher, a sense of something he hadn’t yet realised?

When he caught sight of the flashing light, like a lighthouse on top of the snowplough, he switched the heater off altogether. And hoped that his calculations were correct, when it came to both her and him.

A police car and ambulance were following the snowplow. The paramedics concluded at once that the girl in the boot was dead.

“Feel her,” Peter said, putting his hand on the girl’s forehead. “She’s still warm.”

He noticed the policewoman looking at him.

After the paramedics had taken a blood sample from him inside the ambulance, he was asked to get in the back of the police car.

He explained how the girl had come rushing out of the snowdrift and ran into his car.

“More like you ran into her,” the policewoman said, looking down at the pad she was making notes in.

Peter explained about the warning triangle, about the car that was stuck across the road on the bend, how he had moved it to prevent anyone else driving into it.

The older policeman nodded approvingly. “It’s good that you had the sense to think about others in a situation like this, lad.”

Peter felt something in his throat. He tried to clear it before realising that it was a sob. So he swallowed it instead.

“The E6 was closed six hours ago,” the policewoman said. “If you called us as soon as you hit the girl, you took a hell of a long time to get from the barrier to here.”

“I had to stop several times because of the visibility,” Peter said.

“Yes, this is a real spring storm,” the policeman rumbled.

Peter looked out of the window. The wind had eased, and the snow was settling on the road now. They wouldn’t find any sign of where the girl had hit the road. Nor any other tire tracks crossing the trail of blood on the pavement that might prompt them to look for any vehicles that had crossed Dovrefjell at the time in question. They wouldn’t get a witness statement from someone saying that yes, he had seen a car parked along the straight section, and yes, it was the same make as the girl’s, but no, that had been several hours before Peter Ringdal claimed he hit the girl.

“You got away with it,” Harry said.

He had sat Peter Ringdal on the sofa and was himself sitting astride the high-backed armchair. Harry’s right hand was resting on his lap, still holding the pistol.

Ringdal nodded. “There were traces of alcohol in my blood, but not enough. The girl’s parents filed charges against me, but I was acquitted.”

Harry nodded. He remembered what Kaja had said about Ringdal’s criminal record, and the charge of reckless driving when he was a student.

“That was lucky,” Harry said drily.

Ringdal shook his head. “I thought so too, but I was wrong.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t sleep for three years. And by that I mean that I didn’t sleep a single hour, a single minute. That hour and a half I slept up on the plateau, that was the last time I slept. And nothing helped, pills just made me crazy and unhinged, alcohol made me depressed and angry. I thought it was because I was frightened I was going to get caught, that the person who drove across Dovrefjell was going to come forward. And I didn’t get anywhere until I realised that wasn’t the problem. I’d started to have suicidal thoughts and was seeing a psychologist. I told her a different, made-up story but with the same content, with me causing another person’s death. And she told me that the problem was that I hadn’t made amends. You have to make amends. So I made amends. I stopped taking pills, stopped drinking. Started to sleep. Got better.”

“How did you make amends?”

“Same way as you, Harry. By trying to save enough innocent lives to make up for the ones you’re responsible for losing.”

Harry looked at the short, dark-haired man on the sofa.

“I devoted my life to a project,” Ringdal said, looking out at the satellite sculpture, which the rays of sunlight had now reached, casting sharp shadows into the living room. “A future where lives aren’t ruined by pointless, unnecessary traffic accidents. And by that I don’t just mean the girl’s life, but my own.”

“Self-driving cars.”

“Carriages,” Ringdal corrected. “And they’re not self-driving, they’re controlled centrally, like the electronic impulses in a computer. They can’t crash, they maximise speed and choice of route from the position of the other carriages right from the start. Everything follows the logic of the matrix and physics, and eliminates human drivers’ fatal fallibility.”

“And the photograph of the dead girl?”

“...I’ve had that in front of me right from the start so I never forget why I’m doing this. Why I’ve let myself be ridiculed in the media, yelled at by investors, why I’ve gone bankrupt and had trouble from car manufacturers. And why I still sit up at night working, when I’m not working in a bar that I hope will make enough profit to finance the project and employ engineers and architects and get the whole thing back on the agenda.”

“What sort of trouble?”

Ringdal shrugged. “Letters with a certain subtext. People showing up at the door a few times. Nothing you could ever use against them, but enough to make me get hold of that.” He nodded towards the pistol that was still lying on the floor.

“Mm. This is a lot to take in, Ringdal. Why should I believe you?”

“Because it’s true.”

“When did that become a reason?”

Ringdal let out a short laugh. “You might not believe this either, but when you were standing behind me with your arm out and the pistol against my head, you were standing in the perfect position for a seoi nage. If I’d wanted to, you would have been lying on the floor before you realised what was happening, disarmed and with all the air knocked out of you.”

“So why didn’t you do it?”

Ringdal shrugged again. “You showed me the photograph.”

“And?”

“It was time.”

“Time for what?”

“To talk. To tell the truth. The whole truth.”

“OK. So would you like to go on?”

“What?”

“You’ve already confessed to one murder. How about confessing to the other one?”

“What do you mean?”

“Rakel’s.”

Ringdal jerked his head back in a movement that made him look like an ostrich. “You think I killed Rakel?”

“Tell me quickly and without giving yourself time to think, why your fingerprints were found on a blue glass in Rakel’s dishwasher, a dishwasher where nothing dirty is allowed to sit for more than a day, and why you haven’t told the police you were there. And why you’ve got this in a drawer in your hall?” Harry pulled Rakel’s red scarf out of his jacket pocket and held it up.

“That’s easy,” Ringdal said. “They both have the same explanation.”

“Which is?”

“That she was here the morning of the day before she was killed.”

“Here? What for?”

“Because I’d invited her. I wanted to persuade her to carry on chairing the committee at the Jealousy. You remember?”

“I remember you mentioning it, yes. But I also know she’d never have been interested, she only helped out with the bar because of me.”

“Yes, that’s what she said when she came.”

“So why did she come at all?”

“Because she had her own agenda. She wanted to persuade me to buy these glasses, which I understand are made by a Syrian family who have a small glass workshop just outside Oslo. Rakel had brought one glass with her in an attempt to convince me that they were the perfect drinking glasses. I thought it was a bit too heavy.”

Harry could see Peter Ringdal holding the glass, weighing it in his hand. Giving it back to Rakel. Who took it home again and put it in the dishwasher. Unused, but not quite clean.

“And the scarf?” he asked, already guessing the answer.

“She left it on the coat rack when she left.”

“Why did you put it in the drawer?”

“The scarf smelled of Rakel’s perfume, and my lady friend has a strong sense of smell and is extremely prone to jealousy. She was coming by that evening, and we both have a better time when she doesn’t suspect me of playing the field.”

Harry drummed the fingers of his left hand on the armrest. “Can you prove that Rakel was here?”

“Well.” Ringdal scratched his temple. “If you haven’t already wiped everything off, her fingerprints should still be on the armrests of the chair you’re sitting in, I suppose. Or on the kitchen table. No, hang on! The coffee cup she used. It’s in the dishwasher, I never run it before it’s full.”

“Good,” Harry said.

“I also went to see that glassworks in Nittedal. Nice glasses. They offered to make them a bit lighter. With the Jealousy’s logo on them. I ordered two hundred.”

“Last question,” Harry said, even though he knew the answer to this as well. “Why didn’t you tell the police that Rakel was here a day and a half before she was murdered?”

“I weighed up the consequences of becoming involved in a murder inquiry against the benefit the police might get from the information. Because the police suspected me once before, when my ex-wife suddenly took off back to Russia without telling anyone and was reported missing here in Oslo. She showed up, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience being in the police spotlight, I can assure you. So I concluded that if what Rakel was doing a day and a half before the murder was important to the police, they’d track her phone’s movements, see that she’d been in this neighbourhood and put two and two together. In short, I reasoned it was up to the police, not me. So I chose the selfish option. But I realise I should have told them.”

Harry nodded. In the silence that settled he heard a clock ticking somewhere inside the house, and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it last time he was there. It sounded like a countdown. And it struck him that that could well be what it was, a clock inside his head counting down his last hours, minutes, seconds.

It felt like he needed all his strength to get to his feet. He took out his wallet. Opened it and looked inside. He pulled out the only note, five-hundred kroner, and put it on the table.

“What’s that for?”

“The broken glass in your door,” Harry said.

“Thanks.”

Harry turned to leave. He stopped and turned back, and looked thoughtfully down at the picture of Sigrid Undset on the note. “Mm. Have you got any change?”

Ringdal laughed. “It’s going to cost at least five hundred to—”

“You’re right,” Harry said, and picked the money up again. “I’ll have to owe you. Good luck with the Jealousy Bar. Goodbye.”

The sound of the whining dog faded away, but the ticking sound grew louder as Harry walked down the road.

38

Harry was sitting in the car, listening.

He had realised that the ticking was his own heart beating. Rakel’s half.

Racing away.

And it had been doing that ever since the moment he saw the bloody knife on his shelf.

That was ten hours ago now, and his brain had spent those hours frantically searching for an answer, for a way out, for alternatives to the only explanation he could think of, skittering hither and thither like a rat below deck on a sinking ship, finding nothing but closed doors and dead ends as the water rose higher and higher towards the ceiling. And that half of his heart was beating faster and faster, as if it knew what was coming. Knew it was going to have to speed up if it was going to have time to use up the two billion heartbeats the average human life was made up of. Because he had woken up now. Had woken up, and was going to die.

That morning — after the hypnosis, but before he went to see Ringdal — Harry had rung the doorbell of the flat immediately below his, on the first floor. Gule — who worked nights on the trams — had come to the door in just his boxers, but if he thought it was early he didn’t mention it. Gule hadn’t been living in the building back when Harry had his own flat on the third floor, so Harry didn’t really know him. Perched on his nose was a pair of round, steel-rimmed glasses that must somehow have survived the seventies, eighties and nineties and had therefore achieved retro status. A bit of wispy hair that wasn’t entirely sure what it was doing meant that he could just about avoid being described as bald. He spoke in a jerky, toneless way, like the voice of a satnav. Gule confirmed what he had told the police, which was in the report. He had got home from work at quarter to eleven in the evening, when he had met Bjørn Holm who was on his way down the stairs, having put Harry to bed. When Gule went to bed at three o’clock in the morning, he still hadn’t heard a sound from Harry’s flat.

“What were you doing that night?” Harry had asked.

“I was watching Broadchurch,” Gule said. When Harry showed no reaction, he added: “It’s a British television series. Crime.”

“Mm. Do you watch a lot of television at night?”

“Yes, I suppose so. My daily routine is a bit different to most people’s. I work late and it always takes me a while to wind down after I finish.”

“It takes a while to wind down after driving trams?”

“Yes. But three o’clock is bedtime. Then up at eleven. You don’t want to fall outside normal society altogether.”

“If the soundproofing here is as bad as you say, and you watch television at night, how come I live right above you, and sometimes go up and down the stairs late at night, and have never heard anything from your flat?”

“That’s because I’m considerate and wear headphones.” A couple of seconds passed before Gule asked: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Tell me,” Harry said. “How can you be so sure you would have heard me going out if you were wearing headphones?”

“It was Broadchurch,” Gule said. Then, when he remembered his neighbour hadn’t seen it: “It’s not exactly loud, if I can put it like that.”

Harry persuaded Gule to put on his headphones and start watching Broadchurch, which he said he could find on the NRK website, then see if he could hear anything from Harry’s flat or the stairwell. When Harry rang the doorbell again, Gule answered and asked him if they were going to start the test soon.

“Something’s come up, we’ll have to do this some other time,” Harry had said. He decided not to tell Gule that he’d just walked from his bed, downstairs to the front door, then back again.

Harry didn’t know much about panic attacks. But what he had heard fitted pretty well with what he was feeling right now. His heart, the sweating, the feeling of not being able to sit still, thoughts that wouldn’t settle and kept swirling around his head to the beat of his racing heart, as he careered towards the wall. The daily wish to carry on living, not forever, but another day, and therefore forever, like a hamster constantly running faster so the wheel doesn’t overtake it, and dying of a heart attack long before it realises that that’s all it is, a wheel, a meaningless race against time where time has already reached the finish line and is waiting for you, waiting for you, counting down, tick-tock, tick-tock.

Harry hit his head on the steering wheel.

He had woken up from his slumber, and now it was true.

He was guilty.

In the blackness of that night, on that windswept hillside in a storm of alcohol and God knows what else — because of course it was still a total, utter blank — it had happened. He had got home and was put to bed. He had got up as soon as Bjørn had left. He had driven to Rakel’s, arriving there at 23:21, according to the wildlife camera, which all fitted. Still so drunk that he was hunched over as he walked up to the house and straight in through the unlocked door. He had gone down on his knees and begged, and Rakel told him she had thought about it, but had made her mind up: she didn’t want him back. Or had he, in the full madness of drink, already decided before he went in that he was going to kill her, and himself, because he didn’t want to live without her? Then stuck the knife into her before she had time to tell him what he didn’t know at the time, that she had spoken to Oleg and had made up her mind to give Harry another chance? The thought of that was unbearable. He hit his head against the wheel again and felt the skin on his forehead tear.

Killing himself. Had he been thinking about that even then?

Even if the hours before he woke up on the floor of Rakel’s house were still blank, he had realised — and then suppressed the fact — that he was guilty. And had immediately started looking for a scapegoat. Not for his own sake, but for Oleg’s. But now, when it had proved impossible to find a scapegoat, or at least one who deserved to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, Harry had played out his role. He could leave the stage. Leave everything.

Kill himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it.

He had stood over bodies where as a murder detective he had to decide if this was someone who had taken their own life, or if someone else had done it. He was rarely in any doubt. Even where brutal means of death had been chosen, and the scenes were chaotic and bloody, most suicides had something simple and lonely about them: a decision, an act, no interaction, few complicated forensic issues. And the scenes tended to be still. Not that the scenes of suicides didn’t speak to him, because they did, but it wasn’t a cacophony of voices and conflict. Just an internal monologue that he — on a particularly good or a particularly bad day — could hear. And that always made him think about suicide as a possibility. A way of exiting the stage. An escape route for the rat on a sinking ship.

During the course of some of those investigations, Ståle Aune had guided Harry through the most common motives for suicide. From the infantile — revenge on the world, now-you’ll-be-sorry — through self-loathing, shame, pain, guilt, loss, all the way to the “small” motive — people who saw suicide as a comfort, a consolation. Who weren’t seeking an escape route, but just liked knowing it was there, the way a lot of people live in big cities because they offer everything from opera to strip clubs that they never think of making use of. Something to fend off the claustrophobia of being alive, of living. But then, in an unbalanced moment, prompted by drink, pills, romantic or financial problems, they take a decision, as heedless of the consequences as having another drink or punching a bartender, because the consolation thought has become the only thought.

Yes, Harry had considered it. But it had never — until now — been the only thought. He might be suffering from angst, but he was sober. And the thought had more to it than merely a conclusive end to pain. There was consideration of others, those who would go on living. He had thought it through. A murder investigation was supposed to serve several purposes. To bring certainty and peace to those left behind and society in general was only one of them. Others — such as removing a dangerous person from the streets, maintaining order by showing potential criminals that criminals got punished, or by fulfilling society’s tacit need for vengeance — fell by the wayside if the perpetrator was dead. In other words: society expended fewer resources on an investigation that they suspected would at best give them a dead perpetrator, than on one where they risked the perpetrator remaining at large. So if Harry were to disappear now, there was a good chance that the investigation would focus on everything except the dead man Gule had already given an alibi for at the time of the murder. The only thing that could come out — and that pointed vaguely in Harry’s direction — was a 3-D expert who claimed that the perpetrator could be taller than one metre ninety, and that the car could be a Ford Escort. But for all Harry knew, that information may get no further than Bjørn Holm, whose loyalty to Harry was unshakeable and who over the years had crossed the line of professional ethics on more than one occasion. If Harry died now, there would be no trial; Oleg would be the focus of a lot of publicity, but he wouldn’t be stigmatised for the rest of his life, nor would Harry’s younger sister Sis, or Kaja, or Katrine, Bjørn, Ståle, Øystein or anyone else whose name was marked by a single letter in his phone. It was for them he had composed the three-sentence letter it had taken him an hour to write. Not because he thought the words in themselves would mean much either way, but because his suicide could obviously rouse suspicions that he was guilty, and because he wanted to give the others — the police — the answer they needed to put the case to bed.

He had read the letter three times. Then he had taken out his cigarettes and lighter, lit a cigarette, then the letter, and flushed it down the toilet. There was a better solution. Dying in an accident. So he had got in his car and driven to Peter Ringdal’s, to tug at the last thread, extinguish his last hope.

And now it had been extinguished. In some ways it was a relief.

Harry had another think. Thought things through to see if he had remembered everything. Last night he had sat in his car, like he was now, and had seen the city below him, its lights shining in the darkness, bright enough to join the dots. But now he could see the whole picture, the city laid out beneath a high, blue sky, bathed in the sharp spring light of the new day.

His heart was no longer beating as fast. Unless that was just the way it felt, that the countdown slowed down as it approached zero.

Harry put his foot on the clutch, turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.

39

Highway 287.

Harry was driving north.

The glare from the snow-covered hillsides was so bright that he had taken his sunglasses out from the glove compartment. His heart had begun to beat more normally after he left Oslo, on roads where there was less and less traffic the farther he got from the city. The sense of calm was presumably because the decision was made, that he in some ways was already dead, that one relatively simple act was all that remained. Or it could be because of the Jim Beam. He had made one stop on his way out of the city, the liquor store on Thereses gate where he had given them the note with Sigrid Undset on it in return for a half-bottle and some change. Then another stop at the Shell garage in Marienlyst where he used up the change to put some petrol in his almost empty tank. Not that he needed that much petrol. But he wasn’t going to need the change either. Now the bottle was lying three-quarters empty on the passenger seat, next to his pistol and phone. He had tried calling Kaja again but there was still no answer. He couldn’t help thinking that was probably just as well.

He’d had to drink almost half the bourbon before he noticed any effect, but now he felt just detached enough from what was going to happen, but not so much that he risked killing anyone who shouldn’t be killed.

The green mile.

The police officer at the site of the accident two days earlier hadn’t told them exactly where on Highway 287 the crash had taken place, but that didn’t really matter. Any of the long straight sections would do the job.

There was a truck in front of him.

After the next bend Harry accelerated, pulled out, slipped past, saw that it was an articulated truck. He pulled in ahead of it. Glanced in the mirror. A tall cab.

Harry sped up a bit more, staying above 120 even though the speed limit was 80. A couple of kilometres farther on he reached another long straight. Towards the end of it was a lay-by on the left-hand side. He indicated, crossed the road and drove into the empty lay-by, past a toilet and some bins, then turned the car around so it was facing south again. He pulled over to the side of the road and let the engine idle in neutral as he looked back down the road. He saw the air shimmering above the pavement, as if it were crossing a desert rather than a Norwegian valley in March with an ice-covered river beyond the crash barriers on the right-hand side. Maybe the alcohol was playing tricks on him. Harry looked at the bottle of Jim Beam. The sunshine made its golden contents shimmer.

Something was telling him that it was cowardly to take his own life.

Possibly, but it still demanded courage.

And if you didn’t have that courage, it could be bought in a bottle for 209.90 kroner.

Harry unscrewed the lid, drank the rest of the bourbon and replaced the lid.

There. Detached enough. Courage.

But, more important: the post-mortem would show that the notorious drunk had such a high percentage of alcohol in his blood when he crashed that it couldn’t be ruled out that he had simply lost control of the car. And there would be no suicide note or anything else to suggest that Harry Hole had planned to kill himself. No suicide, no suspicions, no shadow of the wife-killer falling on anyone who didn’t deserve it.

He could see it way off to the south now. The articulated truck. A kilometre away.

Harry checked in the left wing mirror. They had the road to themselves. He put the engine into first gear and released the clutch, then pulled out onto the road. He looked at the speedometer. Not too fast, because that would encourage suspicions of suicide. And it wasn’t necessary anyway, as the police officer had said at the scene of the accident: when a car drives into the front of a truck at eighty or ninety, seat belts and airbags didn’t count for much. The steering wheel would end up behind the back seat.

The speedometer hit ninety.

One hundred metres in four seconds, a kilometre in forty. If the truck was going at the same speed, they’d meet in less than twenty seconds.

Five hundred metres. Ten... nine...

Harry wasn’t thinking about anything, apart from his intention: to hit the truck in the middle of its radiator. He was grateful he lived in an age where it was still possible to steer your car straight into your own and other people’s deaths, but this funeral was going to be his alone. He would damage the truck and leave its driver scarred for life, prone to recurrent nightmares, but as the years passed hopefully that would happen less and less frequently. Because ghosts really did fade.

Four hundred metres. He steered the Escort onto the other side of the road. Tried to make it look like he was swerving, so the truck driver could tell the police it looked like the driver of the car had simply lost control of his car or fallen asleep at the wheel. Harry heard the howl of the truck’s horn rise in volume and tone. The Doppler effect. It cut into his ear like a knife of disharmony, the sound of approaching death. And to drown out its shriek, to stop himself dying to that music, Harry reached out his right hand and turned the radio on, full blast. Two hundred metres. The speakers were crackling.

Farther along we’ll know more about it...

Harry had heard the slow version of the gospel song before. The violins...

Farther along we’ll understand why.

The front of the truck was growing larger. Three... two...

Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine.

So completely right. So completely... wrong. Harry wrenched the wheel hard to the right.

The Ford Escort veered back onto its own side of the road, only just missing the left-hand corner of the front of the truck. Harry was heading straight towards the crash barriers and braked, turning the wheel sharply to the left. He felt the tires lose their grip, the back of the car slide right, and felt the centrifugal force push him into his seat as the car spun round, aware that this couldn’t possibly end well. He had time to see the truck disappear ahead of him, it was already a long way away, before the back of the car hit the crash barrier and he became weightless. Blue sky, light. For a moment he thought he was dead, that it was like they said: that you left your body and rose up towards paradise. But the paradise he was heading towards was spinning, as were the forest-covered hillside, the road and the river, while the sun was going up and down like a time-lapse film about the seasons, to the accompaniment of a voice that, in the sudden, strange silence, sang “We’ll understand it all...” before it was interrupted by another crash.

Harry was pushed back into his seat, looked at the sky above him, which had stopped spinning, but now it seemed to be dissolving, taking on a greenish hue before a pale, transparent curtain was pulled across it. It was getting darker, they were sinking, down, underground. It’s hardly that surprising, he found himself thinking, that I’m heading to hell instead. Then he heard a muffled thud, like the door of an air-raid shelter closing. The car straightened out, then slowly turned around, and he realised what had happened. The car had landed in the river, rear end first, had gone through the ice, and now he was underneath it. It was like landing on an alien planet with a strange, green landscape lit up by rays of sunlight filtered through ice and water, where everything that wasn’t rock or the rotting remains of trees swayed dreamily as if dancing to the music.

The current had caught hold of the car, and it floated slowly down the river like a hovercraft as it rose gently to the surface. There was a scraping sound as the roof hit the ice. Water was pouring in from the bottom of the car doors, so cold that it numbed Harry’s feet. He undid the seat belt and tried to shove the door open. But the water pressure just one metre below the surface made it impossible. He’d have to get out through the window. The radio and the headlights were still working, so the water hadn’t yet short-circuited the electrics. He pressed the button to open the window, but nothing happened. A short circuit, or the water pressure. The water had risen to his knees. The roof of the car was no longer scraping against the ice, the car had stopped rising, he was floating between the bottom and the surface of the river. He would have to kick the front windshield out. He leaned back in his seat, but there wasn’t enough room, his legs were too long, and he could feel the alcohol making his movements sluggish, his thoughts slow, his coordination clumsy. His hand fumbled under the seat and found the lever to push it backwards. Above it another lever, and he lowered the back of the seat until he was almost lying down. A fragment of memory. From when he had last adjusted the seat. At least now he could pull his legs out from beneath him. The water had almost reached his chest now, the cold clutching at his lungs and heart like a claw. Just as he was about to kick both feet against the windshield, the car hit something and he lost his balance, fell towards the passenger seat and his kick struck the steering wheel instead. Fuck, fuck! Harry saw the rock he had collided with glide past as the car spun around in a slow waltz before it carried on, backwards, hit another rock and turned the right way around again. The song fell silent in the middle of another “We’ll understand it all...” Harry took a deep breath up by the roof, then ducked under to get in position to kick again. This time he hit the windshield, but he was surrounded by water now and he felt his feet hit the glass as gently and devoid of force as an astronaut’s boots on the moon.

He crawled up onto the seat, had to press his head against the roof to get to the air. He inhaled deeply a couple of times. The car stopped. Harry ducked under again and saw through the windshield that the Escort had caught on the branches of a rotten tree. A blue dress with white dots was waving at him. Panic seized him. Harry beat his hand against the side window, tried to shove it open. In vain. Suddenly two of the branches snapped off and the car slid sideways and came loose. The light from the headlamps, which, bizarrely, were still working, swept across the bottom of the river, towards the shore, where he saw a flicker of something that could have been a beer bottle, something made of glass, anyway, before the car drifted on, faster now. He needed more air. But the car was now so full of water that Harry had to close his mouth and press his nose against the car roof, and breathe in through his nostrils. The headlights went out. Something drifted into his field of vision, rocking on the surface of the water. The Jim Beam bottle, empty, with its lid on. As if it wanted to remind him of a trick that had saved him once before, a long time ago. But that wouldn’t make any difference now; the air in the bottle would only give him a few more seconds of painful hope after resignation had granted him a little peace.

Harry closed his eyes. And — just like the cliché — his life passed before his eyes.

The time when he got lost as a boy, and ran around the forest in terror just a couple of stones’ throws from his grandfather’s farm in Romsdalen. His first girlfriend, in her parents’ bed with the house to themselves, the balcony door open, the curtain swaying, letting in the sun as she whispered that he had to look after her. And him whispering “yes,” then reading her suicide note six months later. The murder case in Sydney, the sun off to the north, meaning that he got lost there as well. The one-armed girl who plunged into the pool in Bangkok, her body cutting through the water like a knife, the peculiar beauty of asymmetry and destruction. A long hike in Nordmarka, just Oleg, Rakel and him. Autumn sun falling on Rakel’s face, smiling at the camera as they waited for the timer, Rakel noticing him looking at her, turning towards him, her smile growing even wider, reaching her eyes, until the light evens out and she’s the one shining like the sun, and they can’t take their eyes off each other and have to take the picture again.

Evens out.

Harry opened his eyes again.

The water hadn’t risen any higher.

The pressure had finally evened out. The basic, complex laws of physics were permitting this strip of air to remain beneath the roof and the surface of the water, for the time being.

And there was — literally — light at the end of the tunnel.

Through the rear window, back where they had come from, what he saw had been coloured an increasingly dark green, but in front of him it was getting lighter. That had to mean that the river up ahead was no longer covered in ice, or was at least shallower, possibly both. And if the pressure had evened out, he should be able to open the car door. Harry was about to duck under and try when he realised he was still under the ice. That it would be a ridiculous way to drown, seeing as here in the car he had enough air to last until they reached what was hopefully a shallow section of the river, free from ice. And it wasn’t far away now, they seemed to be drifting faster, and the light was getting brighter.

You don’t drown if you’re going to be hanged.

He didn’t know why the old saying had popped into his head.

Or why he was thinking about the blue dress.

Or Roar Bohr.

A noise was getting closer.

Roar Bohr. Blue dress. Younger sister. Norafossen. Twenty metres. Smashed on the rocks.

And when he emerged into the light, the water became a white wall of bubbles ahead of him, and the noise rose to a rumbling roar. Harry felt beneath him, grabbed hold of the back of the seat, took a deep breath, pulled himself under the water as the front of the car tipped forward. He stared through the water, through the windshield, straight down into something black, where cascades of white water splintered into white nothingness.