– She never has done. Not since she kept getting arrested going on all those innocent demonstrations. And I don’t know, I really don’t, it isn’t easy to sit through those interrogations. Being pressed about the slightest detail. As though they suspected you were the one who’d done something terrible to Mailin. Can you imagine what that’s like, to feel yourself suspected of murdering your own daughter?
Jennifer heard something happening in the woman’s voice and was waiting for it to surface again, but when Ragnhild Bjerke continued, it was still in that same toneless pitch.
– And Tage? He’s the most trustworthy person in the world. He came to us and he was the father the girls had been missing and needed so much. He’s never had any thanks for it. Even I haven’t been good enough at telling him how grateful we ought to be. And then came all these questions about where was he when Mailin went missing, and when did he get back home. And I start thinking how I called him at the office several times that evening. He was supposed to be picking up Viljam, and I wanted to remind him to buy something to eat. He’s always available on the telephone when he works late like that, but on that particular evening…
– You couldn’t get hold of him.
– He said later there was some problem with the phone lines at the institute. But then you get all these questions, and suddenly this doubt is there, it worms its way inwards, and you can’t face trying to think it all through.
– Did you tell the police about the telephone?
She didn’t answer. Again Jennifer thought about asking for her permission to pass the information on, but when she looked into Ragnhild Bjerke’s eyes, she dropped the idea. Certain stones should be left unturned, she decided. Later maybe, if it turned out to be important, but for the time being this woman should be left in peace.
Under the circumstances, even the pleasure of calling DCI Viken with several bits of information his own people hadn’t got hold of was muted.
23
Wednesday 7 January, night
JIM HARRIS CAME running down from Fagerborg, crossed Suhms Street and carried on down Sorgenfri Street. No cars around, he had the whole road to himself. He could run faster a few years earlier, but he still wasn’t far off. Had made up his mind now. No one believed in him any more, no one expected anything. He could hit back from below. Run his way out of it. Pay this debt, then back to the sports academy and set up some training sessions. Not a personal trainer, not yet, no one who mattered would have anything to do with him. But things would turn around. First pay off the thirty thousand. Karam had been asking about him. Repeated the threat to make a cripple of him. The only thing Jim was afraid of. End up in a wheelchair. He’d sent Karam a message. Before the week was over, he’d have his thirty thousand.
He turned into Bogstadveien. The asphalt was slippier there, but he accelerated as he headed on down the road. He’d show them, all those who’d turned their backs on him. Those who’d trodden him down into the shit. Mailin Bjerke was the only one who had never given up on him. But she made him so mad. She was actually pretty ruthless. Found the weak spot and then twisted. All the same, he’d gone there that Thursday. For the first time, she wasn’t there when he arrived. Hadn’t left a message or anything. The office windows dark. He was furious, kicking and kicking at the main gate. Walked a couple of times around the block. Her car was fucking well there, the Hyundai with the dent in the front bumper. Not hard to recognise. But it was only when he was about to turn the corner, and glanced round, that he saw what happened…
And now she was dead. He’d read about it in the papers a few days later. And yet he went back again. As though she would still be sitting there in her office promising to do all she could to help him. The door had been open, and he’d looked in. Opened a few drawers. Old habit. People left all sorts of stuff lying about. Her appointments diary was on the table; he looked up the day when he should have had his. There were his initials: 17.00 JH. No one else due to see her that day. Below was written BERGER – Channel Six, Nydalen, 8 o’clock. And a message he didn’t understand. Something about a jacket. He’d ripped out that page. Often wondered why he did things like that. Maybe to avoid getting dragged into anything.
So that girl who suddenly appeared was her sister. Not that you would have guessed. As unlike Mailin as you could get. A nervous, weird girl. Like something out a fairy tale. The Brothers Grimm, he recalled, that book he’d had lying under his bed all those years when he was a kid. This sister wanted something from him, kept showing up all the time. Obviously after him. That was why he stopped her in the park. She said something there that made him understand what he had seen in Welhavens Street that Thursday. At least understand enough to take a chance and lay out some bait. A stroke of luck. Because there was one person at least who had more reason to be nervous than him.
Jim had made up his mind not to ask for more than thirty thousand the first time. Then five or ten. Then raise it gradually. Could be a nice little earner on the side. He wasn’t scared of Karam any more. He ran. Going to run his way out of it. Round the roundabout behind the National, down Munkedams Way. Not slippy here. Good grip for the shoes. He was pleased with them. Grabbed them from a store in the Storo shopping mall. The alarm went off, but the security guard who could catch up with him hadn’t been born yet. The shoes were as lightweight as the best he’d had from Nike, but the soles were better.
He didn’t slow down until he reached the fjord. Could have kept on running the rest of the night. Getting close to his form from 2003, his best season, when he crushed the junior record for the four hundred flat, and the eight hundred. Eight hundred is the best. The others are done for by the time he starts his sprint, merciless, inhuman, impossible to respond to.
All the restaurants and shops on the fjord side had shut hours ago. Not a soul in sight along Aker Brygge. Should maybe have insisted on Egertorget. You got people there, even in the middle of the night. But the person he was going to meet insisted that no one should see them together. Jim knew that from now on he would be the one setting the conditions, so he’d gone along with the suggested meeting place on this occasion.
He stopped by the flaming torch that stood outermost on the quay. The Eternal Peace Flame. Peered down one of the alleyways. A couple of boats moored on the canal. Started walking along, keeping to the edge of the quay, towards the sculptures in the water. He checked his mobile phone: 1.35. The person he was supposed to meet should have been here by now.
Something rattled down on the boat deck on his left, metal on metal, a box or a weight or something falling. He turned and peered down into the half-darkness. In the same instant he realised that the sound had something to do with him, with the meeting he’d arranged, with what he’d seen that Thursday outside Mailin’s office, with the thirty thousand he was going to get, but he didn’t hear the footsteps behind him. Something hit him in the neck, boring its way inward from the side, and suddenly everything was clear around him and as bright as midday. He stood, frozen in this light, as his mouth was blasted open by what came gushing out of him.
24
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, Liss was woken by a magpie screeching outside her window. She got up and closed it, but was too wide awake to sleep any more. She sat on the edge of her bed for a while, bare feet on the cold floor. Couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed, but still something lingered, as if someone had been pecking and plucking away at her thoughts, helping themselves to the best bits and leaving small holes behind.