“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.