She concentrated on the hard piece of chewing gum again. Cut off a tiny piece with the Swiss army knife she had brought along. And froze.
It came from somewhere by the door, so far away the ear hadn’t been able to identify what it was. The rattle of a key? The banging of a counter? It was probably nothing; perhaps you just get strange sounds in a large building.
Katrine switched off the torch and held her breath. Blinked into the darkness as though that might help her to see. It was quiet. As quiet as the. .
She tried not to continue that train of thought.
Instead she tried another train of thought, one that would slow her heart down: what was actually the worst that could happen? She was caught exceeding the call of duty and they were all reprimanded? Perhaps she would be sent home to Bergen? Tedious, but not exactly a reason for her heart to pound like a pneumatic drill inside her chest.
She waited, listening.
Nothing.
Still nothing.
And that was when she realised. Pitch black. If someone had really been there they would of course have switched on the light. She grinned at her own stupidity, felt her heart slowing down. Switched the torch on, put the evidence back in the box and replaced it. Made sure it was exactly in line with the other boxes, and walked towards the exit. A thought flashed through her mind. A stray thought that caught her by surprise. She was looking forward to ringing him. Because that was what she was going to do. Ring him and tell him what she had done. She came to an abrupt halt.
The torch beam had caught something.
Her first instinct was to keep walking; a small, cowardly voice that told her to get out as fast as she could.
But she shone the light back.
An unevenness.
One of the boxes wasn’t in line.
She went closer. Shone the torch on the label.
Harry thought he heard a door slam. He pulled out his earphones on the sound of Bon Iver’s new recording, which so far had lived up to the hype. Listened. Nothing.
‘Arnold?’ he called.
No answer. He was used to having this wing of PHS to himself so late in the evening. Of course it could have been a member of the cleaning staff who had forgotten something. But a quick look at his watch confirmed it was not evening but night. Harry glanced to the left of the pile of uncorrected assignments on his desk. Most students had printed them on the rough recycled paper they used at the library, and it was so dusty that Harry went home with nicotine-yellow fingertips, which Rakel told him to wash before he was allowed to touch her.
He looked out of the window. The moon hung in the sky, big and round, reflecting on the windows and the roofs of the blocks towards Kirkeveien and Majorstuen. To the south he saw the green, shimmering silhouette of the KPMG financial services building beside the Colosseum cinema. It wasn’t magnificent, beautiful or even picturesque. But it was the town he had lived and worked in almost all his life. There were some mornings in Hong Kong when he had put a bit of opium in a cigarette and gone up onto the roof of Chungking to see the day break. Sitting there in the darkness wishing the town, which would soon come to life, were his. A modest town with low, self-effacing buildings instead of these intimidating steel steeples. Wishing he could see Oslo’s soft, green ridges instead of Hong Kong’s brutally steep, black mountainsides. Hear the sound of a tram clanking and braking or the Denmark ferry entering the fjord and whistling, elated that today too it had succeeded in crossing the sea between Frederikshavn and Oslo.
Harry looked down at the paper centred in the beam from the reading lamp, the only light in the room. He could, of course, have taken everything with him to Holmenkollveien. Coffee, a babbling radio, the fragrance of fresh trees through an open window. But he had decided not to mull over why he preferred to sit here alone instead of there alone. Presumably because he had an inkling what the response would be. That there he wasn’t alone. Not quite. The black timber fortress with three locks on the door and sprinklers in front of all the windows still couldn’t keep the monsters out. The ghosts were sitting in the dark corners watching him through their empty eye sockets. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and saw the text on the illuminated screen. It was from Oleg and there were no letters, only numbers. 665625. Harry smiled. Naturally it was a long way off Stephen Krogman’s legendary Tetris world record of 1,648,905 points in 1999, but Oleg had long smashed Harry’s best scores in the slightly antiquated computer game. Ståle Aune had maintained there was a line where Tetris records went from being impressive to just being sad. And that Oleg and Harry had crossed it a long time ago. But no one else knew of the other line they had crossed. The one to death and back. Oleg on a chair beside Harry’s bed. Harry feverish as his body fought against the damage Oleg’s bullets had caused, Oleg crying as his body shook with cold turkey. Not much was said, but Harry had a vague memory of them holding hands so hard at one point that it had hurt. And this image, two men clinging to each other, not wanting to let go, would always be with him.
Harry texted I’ll be back in return. A number answered with three words. It was enough. Enough to know that the other person was there, even if the next time they saw each other could be weeks away. Harry put the earphones back and searched for the music Oleg had sent over without any comment. The band was the Decemberists and was more Harry than Oleg, who preferred harder stuff. Harry heard a lone Fender guitar with the pure, warm twang, which was only a pipe amplifier and not a fixed box, or perhaps a deceptively good box, and leaned over the next sheet. The student had written that after a sudden hike in the murder rate in the 1970s, the figure had stabilised at the new, higher level. There were around fifty murders a year in Norway, so about one a week.
Harry noticed that the air had become close and he ought to open a window.
The student remembered that the clear-up rate was around ninety-five per cent. And concluded that there had to be approximately fifty unsolved murders over the last twenty years. Seventy-five over the last thirty years.
‘Fifty-eight.’
Harry jumped in his chair. The voice had reached his brain before the perfume. His doctor had explained that his sense of smell — or more specifically the olfactory cells — had been damaged by years of smoking and alcohol abuse. But that wasn’t why it took him a minute to place the scent. It was called Opium, made by Yves Saint Laurent, and stood by the bath at home in Holmenkollveien. He tore out his earphones.
‘Fifty-eight over the last thirty years,’ she said. She had put on make-up. Sported a red dress and was barefoot. ‘But Kripos’s statistics don’t include Norwegian citizens killed abroad. For that you would have to use Statistics Norway. And then the figure is seventy-two. Which means that the clear-up rate in Norway is higher. Which the Chief of Police regularly uses in his publicity.’
Harry pushed his chair away from her. ‘How did you get in?’
‘I’m the class rep. I have keys.’ Silje Gravseng perched on the edge of the desk. ‘But the point is that the majority of murders abroad are assaults, so we can assume the perp doesn’t know the victim.’ Harry registered suntanned knees and thighs where her skirt rode up. She must have been on holiday recently. ‘And for that type of murder the clear-up rate in Norway is lower than in countries we ought to be comparing ourselves with. It is frighteningly low, actually.’ She had angled her head down to one shoulder so that damp blonde hair fell across her face.
‘Oh yes?’ Harry said.
‘Yes. There are in fact only four detectives in Norway with a hundred per cent clear-up rate. And you’re one of them. .’
‘I’m not sure that’s correct,’ Harry said.
‘But I am.’ She smiled at him, squinting as though she had the low afternoon sun in her eyes. Dangling her bare feet as though she were sitting on the edge of a jetty. Holding his eyes as though she thought she could suck the eyeballs out of the sockets.