She saw it had been sent recently and that he hadn’t actually tried to call her while the phone was off, so he had probably been busy with something.
The other was from Sung-min and conformed to a style she was more familiar with:
Bertine found. Call me.
Katrine went into the bathroom and picked up her toothbrush. Looked in the mirror. You are the Woman, yeah, right. But OK, on a good day it might be warranted. She squeezed the toothpaste out of the tube. Her thoughts returned to Bertine Bertilsen and Susanne Andersen. And the woman — without a name yet — who might be the next in line.
Sung-min was giving his tweed jacket the once-over with a clothes brush. It was a waterproof Alan Paine hunting jacket, which Chris had given him for Christmas. After his conversation with Katrine, he had tapped in a text to him to say goodnight. It had bothered him in the beginning that he was always the one sending goodnight messages while Chris just responded. But it was fine now, that was just how Chris was, he needed to believe he had the upper hand in the relationship. But Sung-min knew that if he skipped texting one night, Chris would be a drama queen on the phone the very next day, nagging about something being wrong, about Sung-min having met someone else or losing interest.
Sung-min watched the pine needles fall to the floor. Yawned. Knew he would sleep. That he wouldn’t have any nightmares about what he had experienced tonight. He never did. He wasn’t quite sure what that said about his personality. A colleague at Kripos said this ability he had to shut off indicated a lack of empathy and had compared him to Harry Hole, who apparently suffered from something they called parosmia, a defect hindering the brain from registering the smell of human remains that meant Hole remained unaffected at crime scenes where other people’s stomachs were turning. But Sung-min didn’t regard himself as having any defect, he merely believed he had a healthy ability to compartmentalise, to keep his private and professional worlds away from each other. He brushed at the pockets sewn to the outside of the jacket, noticed there was something inside one of them and took it out. It was the empty Hillman Pets bag. He was about to throw it in the bin when he remembered that when Kasparov had got another bout of worms, the vet had recommended a different anti-parasitic cure because Hillman Pets contained a substance now prohibited to import and sell in Norway. That had to have been at least four years ago. Sung-min turned the bag around, examining it until he found what he was looking for. The best-before date and the date of manufacture.
The bag was marked as produced last year.
Sung-min turned the bag over again. So what? Someone had bought a packet abroad and brought it home, probably without even knowing it was banned. He considered whether to throw it away. It had been lying several hundred metres from the crime scene, and it was extremely unlikely that the killer had had a dog with him. But there was something about breaches of the law, they were usually linked. A rule-breaker is a rule-breaker. The sadistic serial killer begins by killing small animals, like mice and rats. Starting small fires. Then torturing and killing slightly bigger animals. Setting fire to vacant houses...
Sung-min folded the bag.
‘Satan’s cunt!’ Mona Daa yelled, staring at her phone.
‘What is it?’ Anders asked, from the open bathroom door, as he brushed his teeth.
‘Dagbladet!’
‘You don’t need to shout. And Satan doesn’t have a—’
‘Cunt. Våge is saying that Bertine Bertilsen has been found dead. Wenggården in Østmarka, only a few kilometres from where they found Susanne.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, oh. Oh as in why the fucking hell does Dagbladet have that news and not VG.’
‘They probably don’t fuck—’
‘That much in hell? Yes, I think they do. I think whoever is down there gets fucked in the mouth, in the nose and the ear, and they can only think of one thing worse, and that’s working at VG and getting fucked in the arse by Terry Våge. Satan’s cunt!’
She tossed the phone on the bed as Anders slid under the duvet and snuggled up to her.
‘Have I told you that it gets me a little horny when you—’
She gave him a shove. ‘I’m not in the mood, Anders.’
‘—aren’t in the mood...?’
She pushed away his probing hand, but couldn’t help smiling a little as she picked up her phone. Began reading again. At least Våge didn’t have any details from the crime scene, so it was unlikely he had talked to anyone who had been there. But how had he found out about the discovery of the body so fast? Did he have an illegal police radio, could it be that simple? That he deduced what was going on from listening to those brief, half-coded messages the police used because they knew interlopers were always eavesdropping? And then Våge merely made up the rest based on what he heard, so it became a suitable blend of fact and fiction which could just about pass for real journalism? It had up to now at any rate.
‘Someone suggested I should ask you for a little inside information,’ she said.
‘Really? Did you tell them that I’m not on that case unfortunately, but that I can be bought for uninhibited sex?’
‘Stop it, Anders! This is my job.’
‘So you think I should give you free info and risk my own?’
‘No! I just mean... it’s so bloody unfair!’ Mona folded her arms. ‘Våge has someone feeding him while I’m sitting here... starving to death.’
‘What’s unfair,’ Anders said, sitting up in bed and his playful cheeriness dissipating, ‘is that girls in this city can’t go out without running the risk of being raped and killed. It’s unfair that Bertine Bertilsen is lying dead in Østmarka while two people sit here thinking the world is unfair because another journalist was first on the case or because the clearance rate of the department will go down.’
Mona swallowed.
And nodded.
He was right. Of course he was right. She swallowed again. Tried to suppress the question that was forcing its way up:
Can you make a call to someone and ask how it looked at the crime scene?
Helene Røed lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
Markus had wanted them to have a drop-shaped bed, three metres long and two and a half metres at its widest. He had read that it was the drop we originated from, from water, that we unconsciously sought to return to, and so the shape offered us harmony and deeper sleep.
She had managed not to laugh but also to get him to agree to a rectangular luxury bed one eighty metres wide by two metres ten long. Enough for two. Too much for one.
Markus was sleeping at the penthouse in Frogner, as he did almost every night now. So she presumed anyway. Not that she missed having Markus in bed, it had been a long time since that had been exciting or even particularly desirable. The sneezing and sniffing had only got worse, and he got up at least four times a night to piss. Prostate enlargement, not necessarily cancer, but something affecting more than half of men over sixty by all accounts. And apparently it would only get worse. No, she didn’t miss Markus, but she missed having someone. She didn’t know who, only that the feeling was particularly strong tonight. There had to be someone for her as well, someone who would love her and she could love in return. It was that simple, wasn’t it? Or was that just something she hoped?
She turned over onto her side. She had been nauseous and feeling poorly since last night. Had thrown up and had a slight temperature. She had done a test for the virus, but it had been negative.