He’d always run. Felt calmer when he was running than when he was standing or sitting down. Still not too late to start putting his name down for races. Comeback man. He’d come back before. They didn’t believe in him any more. He’d had so many chances, they said. First of all that stuff they called care. The world of athletics was big hearted about anyone who came off the rails. Don’t push kids out into the cold when what they need is warmth. But then he got caught a couple more times. Coke and pepper. They were even prepared to overlook that. He was done with it, he said, but didn’t mean it. He signed a new contract. Got another chance on condition he went for treatment. No wonder they cared about him. No one had his acceleration, not even Vebjørn Rodal when he was at his peak. I could’ve taken him, he grinned as he ran. I would’ve beaten Rodal in Atlanta, he shouted. If it had been twelve years later. Or sixteen. Rodal was too slow. Too much dead Trøndelag meat there. As for him, he was born with that acceleration. Had it in his blood, in his fibres, in the atoms of his blood.
As he was approaching the exit to the tunnel, a car approached, a taxi. He gave it what he had left, the taxi sounded its horn, he gave it the finger and went up a gear, left it for dead and skipped up on to the narrow pavement. He ran straight across the roundabout and carried on up Schweigaards Street. A long, flat open stretch there. The road was slippery, but he had perfect balance and could adjust in a fraction of a second. His breath was warm and tasted of iron. He owed too much. Thirty grand, according to Karam. It couldn’t be that much. But no point in arguing with Karam. The guy said he hadn’t been selling enough. Taking too much off the top himself. This is business. Thirty grand before Wednesday or you won’t be able to run any more, not even crawl. Karam knows him well enough to know what the worst thing is. It’s not to be floating out somewhere in the fjord with the mackerel stripping the flesh off you until there’s only bone left. Worst of all is to be chained to a wheelchair for the rest of your life. Never run again. Not even crawl. Karam had sketched it out for him. It’s not the fucking mackerel that eat at you as you’re sitting there, but what’s crawling around inside you.
Mailin Bjerke was the first who had never demanded anything. That was why he couldn’t face going to see her. Just a couple of times and then he dropped out. Because of that look in her eye and the way she sat there listening to him and demanding nothing. It made him desperate. Had nothing to say. Could have stood up and taken that computer of hers and chucked it at the wall. Or lifted her up out of her chair and put her down on the desk and watched her eyes turn black. Scared of me at last, finally seeing a part of what you don’t know the first thing about. How could you control anything of what goes chasing around inside of me. But she didn’t give up. Wanted him to come back. Comeback man.
At times he believed in her. That she really might be able to help him. That it would help to talk. He should keep coming, she insisted, and she did all she could to make new appointments for him. If he didn’t turn up anyway, all he had to do was send a text. They could make another appointment, at a time that suited him better. For her, any time was all right, even at short notice. He made appointments and missed them, never sent a message, but she didn’t give up. She was naïve. Believed that all her talk could stop what it was that ravaged him inside. The same thing that made him run, that made him do drugs. She claimed to understand the connections between things. To understand why all he ever thought about was the next snort or the next pill. That those were the thoughts that enabled him to keep going. And the running. She suggested medication. No monkey dope and stuff that turns people into fat, slobbering idiots, but something new that would reduce the craving. But even if she had understood, it wouldn’t help him much now. Mailin is dead, he shouted as he accelerated past the last block before Galgeberg.
Mailin was dead, and someone else he’d never seen before had turned up at her office, tall and thin with a strange look in her eyes. Another patient, definitely, he could always tell; someone strung out like him. But then she started following him, showed up at the station in Oslo, and then again up at Sinsen, wanting to ask him questions. Went for him and tried to choke him.
He would have to find out who she was. Knew the right person to ask. The only person he could trust now.
7
JENNIFER HAD BEEN working with Professor Olav Korn for over ten years now. And yet still she hadn’t managed to locate him in her system of Hippocratic categorisations. Korn radiated a calm that was infectious. She might have been inclined to call him a phlegmatic, but he was a highly efficient worker who dispensed with tasks quickly, from pathologists’ reports to budget proposals. He had done research on sudden and unexplained infant deaths, on the effects of alcohol and drug abuse during pregnancy, as well as in a number of other fields. He published articles in the most important Norwegian and international scientific journals, and was an active voice in public debates on matters like biotechnology and ethics. And even though he spoke at seminars and conferences all over the world, to the staff at the Pathological Institute he remained their very present and involved leader. Had it not been for Korn, Jennifer would not have remained at the institute as long as she had; indeed, she might never even have become an expert on forensic medicine. She was glad that his retirement was still some years in the future, in spite of the fact that on several occasions he had hinted that she would be a very suitable candidate to succeed him as head of the department.
Korn was on the phone when she entered his office, but he gestured for her to sit down. She observed him surreptitiously as he brought the conversation to a close. He was sixty-two, and in terms of his individual features probably looked it, but there was something about his eyes, his repertoire of facial gestures and the way he moved that suggested a younger man. He had a rich head of iron-grey hair, was clean shaven, his eyebrows weren’t bushy and there were no balls of hair emerging from his nostrils and ears, as had begun to be the case with Ivar. All in all Korn took good care of his appearance without seeming the least bit vain about it. Jennifer had always been attracted to men older than herself.
He replaced the receiver and turned towards her.
– It’s about the woman who was found down in Hurum, she said.
– I hear Viken has been given the case, he nodded, perhaps hinting at a couple of earlier occasions on which she had come to him for advice on how best to handle cooperation with the detective chief inspector.
– That’s fine by me, said Jennifer. – I don’t have any trouble with him now. But of course he doesn’t like me getting involved in the investigation.
Korn raised his eyebrows. – And do you?
She sighed. – He appeared in the middle of the autopsy, and I tried to pass along a piece of information that might be very important.
She told him her thoughts on the similarity with the case in Bergen.