Roar recalled that one of his best friends, a journalist on Romerikes Blad, had interviewed the infamous TV talk-show host. He left a message on his voicemail before heading down into the garage and taking out a service car.
He was passing Slotts Park when his friend called back.
– Dan-Levi here, you called me.
Roar fiddled with the hands-free and almost didn’t see the tram that turned down Henrik Ibsen’s Street.
– I’m guessing you didn’t call me to say that you’re still into swearing and various other forms of sinful behaviour, he heard from the other end.
Dan-Levi Jakobsen had been Roar’s best friend from primary school onwards. As the oldest son of a pastor in the Pentecostal church, he was condemned to an outsider’s existence, especially during the secondary school years. Roar probably exaggerated his own sense of being different that came from the fact that he was half Hungarian. Later he came to realise that every single pupil at Kjellervolla school felt like an outsider in those days. Most of them managed to hide it, but the pastor’s son Dan-Levi never had a chance, and nor did Roar, with his surname. To make up for it, they cultivated a fellowship based on their own version of ‘I’m black and I’m proud’. Deep down, the fear of being like everyone else was probably greater than the fear of being rejected.
– Dan-Levi, I called you for two reasons. In the first place, it’s getting on for three years since we last went out for a drink.
In actual fact it had been something like three months. Roar was using irony to try to put his old friend on the defensive. Dan-Levi was a father of four and still unassailably married to his teenage sweetheart, Sara. That she had originally been Roar’s girlfriend, and the first with whom he went further than a bit of necking in the back row of the cinema, was one of the few things they never joked about.
– I’m ready when you are, señor, his friend parried. – You’re the one who’s let himself get stuck in that swamp of a so-called capital city.
– You’re right. I get homesick just thinking about the smell of the river Nitelva.
After moving from Lillestrøm eighteen months ago, leaving behind the wreck of a marriage and a heap of friends all wondering which of the two exes they should stay in touch with, Roar took every opportunity to trash the place. It had conned its way into being called a town. The town centre was a cross between a dump and a permanent building site. The football team was nothing but a gang of grouchy old peasants, und so weiter. None of it was particularly seriously meant, but it felt liberating to say it.
– That was the first thing, said Dan-Levi after they’d agreed to meet at Klimt on New Year’s Day. – What was the other thing?
– I’m wondering about an interview you did a few years back. But you must promise that this is strictly between us.
Dan-Levi swore. Roar couldn’t actually see him cross his heart and hope to die, but his old journalist buddy was someone he trusted, and he’d been very helpful to Roar during his years at Romerike police station. In return, Roar had given Dan-Levi tip-offs that brought the local paper a number of scoops.
– I’m on my way to interview Berger, said Roar. – Give me a bit of gen on the guy.
– Are you suggesting there might be some connection between Berger and this woman they found down in Hurum? Dan-Levi exclaimed.
– No comment, said Roar in English. – I’m the one asking the questions here. I want everything you know about him. Weak points, what to look out for, und so weiter. I’m asking because you interviewed the guy. And because Berger has deep roots in the Pentecostal movement. Once a Pentacostalist, always a Pentacostalist. I’m sure you know people who can talk about his childhood among the speakers in tongues.
– You want to get hold of someone who can tell you whether the guy had psychopathic tendencies even as a child? What’s in it for me?
– A beer. Maybe two.
A few moments’ silence.
– I’ll try and dig up something by Thursday, said Dan-Levi finally. – But here’s a tip to be going on with: don’t reveal anything about yourself when you talk to him. When I turned up for the interview, I’d hardly finished introducing myself before he started asking me about the Pentecostal movement. He claimed that my name was the giveaway. After that, he was the one grilling me, not the other way around, not for a moment.
11
BERGER LIVED AN apartment in Løvenskiolds Street. The registered owner was someone called Odd Løkkemo, Roar had discovered, and when the door was opened by a man with a reddish-grey rim of hair around his head, he showed his ID and said: – Might you be Odd Løkkemo.
– Might be, the man responded testily. His eyes were red rimmed, as though he had just been crying.
Roar informed him that he had an appointment to see Berger. The man who might have been Løkkemo turned his head. – Elijah, he shouted. – Visitor for you.
The feminine voice and the way he sashayed down the hallway and into a room were enough to persuade Roar that he shared more than just a kitchen with the TV celebrity.
No one emerged to greet him, and rather than just stand there pathetically waiting in the entrance, Roar stepped inside and opened the first door he came to. It led to a bathroom. It looked to have been newly decorated, with tiled walls in the style of the old Roman baths and a large jacuzzi in one corner. Still no sign of life out in the hallway. Roar opened one of the cupboards. Towels and face cloths on shelves. In the next one he found tubes and bottles of pills, most of them prescribed for E. Berger. Co-codamol, he noted. Temgesic. A few morphine tablets. He made a note of the name of the prescribing doctor. Not that he thought he might get something out of him, but it might be interesting to find out if this was someone who was casual about prescribing opiates.
He opened several doors in the corridor, found the kitchen and what looked like a library. The fourth door opened on to an enormous room. A man sat at a desk with his back to the door, bending motionless over a computer keyboard. He didn’t react, not even when Roar tried to attract his attention by a noisy clearing of the throat. Not until he closed the door heavily behind him did the man turn round, as though suddenly waking up. His eyes slid up towards his visitor. The long hair was obviously dyed and looked anything but natural against the wrinkled pale yellow skin of the face. Roar noticed that the man’s pupils were the size of pinpoints, though the light in the room was not particularly bright.