She didn’t mention her suspicions to Mikael when they spoke later in the day. He clearly thought her presence in reception had been a coincidence, one of those lightning strikes that happen in everyone’s lives, that improbable concurrence of events that some call fate.
Mikael hadn’t tried to lie and say he hadn’t been there with Isabelle. She had to give him that. He wasn’t so stupid. He had explained she didn’t need to ask him to finish the affair; he had terminated it on his own initiative before Isabelle had left the hotel. That was the word he had used: affair. Probably advisedly, it made it sound so small, unimportant and sordid, something that could be swept under the carpet, as it were. A ‘relationship’, on the other hand, that would have been a different matter. She didn’t believe for a second that he had ‘terminated it’ at the hotel. Isabelle had seemed too elated for that. But what he said next was true. If this came out, the scandal would not only hurt him, but also their children and her. It would, furthermore, come at the worst possible moment. The council chairman had wanted to talk to him about politics. And he wanted him to join the party. Mikael was someone they had been considering as an interesting candidate for a political post in the not too distant future. He was exactly what they were after: young, ambitious, popular and successful. Until these police murders, of course. But after he had solved them, they should sit down and discuss his future, where it lay, in the police or in politics, where Mikael thought he could have the most impact. Not that Mikael had decided what he wanted, but it was obvious that any kind of scandal would close that door.
And then of course there was her, and the children. What happened to his career was a minor issue compared to what this loss would mean. She interrupted him before his self-pity had gone too far and said she had thought the matter through and that her calculations matched his. His career. Their children. The life they had together. She said quite simply that she forgave him, but he would have to promise never, ever to have any more contact with Isabelle Skøyen. Except as the Chief of Police at meetings where others were present. Mikael had almost seemed disappointed, as though he had been armed for a battle and not a tame skirmish, which had fizzled out in an ultimatum that wouldn’t cost him much. Ulla watched Truls start the car and drive off. She hadn’t told Mikael about her suspicions and had no intention of doing so either. What purpose would it serve? If she was right, Truls could continue to be the spy who sounded the alarm if the pact regarding Isabelle Skøyen was not kept.
The car disappeared and the residential silence mingled with the clouds of dust. And a thought went through her mind. A wild, totally unacceptable thought, of course, but the mind isn’t so strict on censorship. Her and Truls. In the bedroom, here. Just as revenge, of course. She rejected the idea as soon as it had appeared.
The sleet that had oozed across the windscreen like grey spit had been superseded by rain. Vertical, heavy rain. The windscreen wipers fought a desperate battle against a wall of water. Anton Mittet drove slowly. It was pitch black, and the water was making everything blur and distort as though he were drunk. He glanced at the clock in his VW Sharan. When they had decided to buy a new car three years ago, Laura had insisted on this seven-seater, and he had jokingly enquired if she was planning a big family, even though he knew it was because she didn’t want to be in a tiny car if they crashed. Well, Anton didn’t want a crash either. He knew these roads well and also knew the chances of meeting oncoming traffic at this time of night were slim, but he didn’t take any risks.
The pulse in his temple was pounding. Mostly because of the telephone call he had received twenty minutes ago. But also because he hadn’t had his coffee today. He had lost his taste for it after reading the result of the test. Stupid, that went without saying. And now the caffeine-accustomed blood vessels had narrowed so much that his headache lay there like unpleasant, throbbing background music. He had read that coffee addicts’ withdrawal symptoms took two weeks to disappear. But Anton didn’t want to renounce his addiction. He wanted coffee. He wanted it to taste good. Good like the mint taste of Mona’s tongue. But all he could taste now when he drank coffee was the bitter aftertaste of sleeping tablets.
He had plucked up the courage to ring Gunnar Hagen to tell him that he had been doped when the patient died. That he had been asleep while someone had been in the room. That even if the doctors said it had been a natural death, that could not have been the case. That they would have to do another, more thorough autopsy. Twice he had rung. Without getting an answer. He had tried. He had. And he would try again. Because it always catches up with you. Like now. It had happened again. Someone had been killed. He braked, turned off and took the gravel road up to Eikersaga, accelerated again and heard the small stones hitting the wheel arches.
It was even darker here, and there was already water lying in the hollows in the road. Midnight soon. It had been around midnight when it had happened the first time as well. As the location was close to the border of the neighbouring district, Nedre Eiker, an officer from that police force had been first on the crime scene after receiving a call from someone who had heard a crash and thought a car must have landed in the river. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the officer had entered the district without permission, he had also made a mess, gouging up the site with his car and obliterating potential clues.
Anton passed the bend where he had found it. The baton. It had been the fourth day after the murder of René Kalsnes and Anton had finally had a day off, but he had got restless and had gone for a walk in the forest on his own to continue the search. After all, murder wasn’t the kind of crime they had every day — or every year — in Søndre Buskerud Police District. He had left the area the search party had gone over with a fine-tooth comb. And that was where it had been, under the spruce trees behind the bend. That was where Anton had taken the decision, the stupid decision that had ruined everything. He decided not to report it. Why? First of all, it was such a long way up to the crime scene in Eikersaga that the baton could hardly have had anything to do with the murder. Later they had asked him why he had been searching there if he had really thought it was too far away to be of any relevance. But at the time he had just thought that a standard police baton would only lead to unnecessary and negative attention for the force. The injuries inflicted on René Kalsnes could have been caused by any heavy instrument or by being tossed around in the car when it had fallen off the precipice into the river forty metres below. And it wasn’t the murder weapon anyway. René Kalsnes had been shot in the face with a 9mm calibre handgun, and that had been the end of the story.
But Anton had told Laura about the baton a couple of weeks later. And it was her who ultimately persuaded him it should be reported and that it wasn’t up to him to assess how important the find was. So he had done it. He had gone to his boss and told him what he had found. ‘A serious miscalculation,’ the Chief of Police had called it. And the thanks he had received for spending his day off trying to help a murder investigation had been that they dropped him from active service and put him in an office answering a phone. In one fell swoop he had lost everything. For what? No one said it aloud, but René was generally known as a cold, unscrupulous bastard who had cheated friends and strangers alike, a person most considered the world was better off without. But the most mortifying part of the whole business had been that Krimteknisk hadn’t found any traces on the baton to link it with the murder. After three months of being incarcerated in the office Anton had the choice of going insane, resigning or getting himself moved. So he rang his old friend and colleague Gunnar Hagen, and he got him a job with Oslo Police. Professionally, what Gunnar offered him was a step backwards, but at least Anton was among people, and villains, in Oslo, and anything was better than the stale air of Drammen, where they tried to copy Oslo, calling their little station ‘Police HQ’, and even the address sounded plagiarised: Grønland 36 as compared with Oslo’s Grønlandsleiret.