‘You mean it’s a waste of time?’
Bjørn thought she sounded disappointed. ‘You’re the detective,’ he answered and immediately regretted not saying anything more encouraging.
In the ensuing silence he wondered where she was. At home? Was she also in bed?
‘Oh well,’ she sighed. ‘By the way, something odd happened while I was in the Evidence Room.’
‘Oh yes?’ Bjørn said and could hear he was overdoing the enthusiasm.
‘I thought I heard someone else in there. I may have been mistaken, but on the way out it looked as if someone had moved one of the evidence boxes on the shelf. I checked the label. .’
Bjørn Holm thought she was lying down; her voice had that lazy softness.
‘It was the René Kalsnes case.’
Harry closed the heavy door and locked out the gentle morning light behind him.
He walked through the cool darkness of the timber house to the kitchen. Slumped down onto a chair. Unbuttoned his shirt. It had taken time.
The guy in the army jacket had seemed fairly alarmed when Harry went over to him and asked him to wait until a police colleague arrived.
‘This is normal tobacco, you know!’ he had said, passing Harry the cigarette.
When Arnold came they took the student’s signed testimony and then got into a dust-covered Fiat of indeterminate vintage and went straight to Krimteknisk where people were still working because of the latest police murder. There, Harry undressed, and while someone took his clothing for examination, two of the male officers went over his genitals and hands with a light and contact paper. Then he was given an empty plastic beaker.
‘Give it your best shot, Hole. If there’s enough room. Toilet’s down the corridor. Think about something nice, OK?’
‘Mm.’
Harry had sensed rather than heard the suppressed laughter as he left them.
Think about something nice.
Harry fingered the copy of the report lying on the kitchen worktop. He had asked Hagen to send it. Privately. Discreetly. It consisted largely of medical terms in Latin. He understood some of them though. Enough to know that Rudolf Asayev had died in the same mysterious, inexplicable way that he had lived. And, lacking anything to suggest criminal activity, they had been obliged to conclude that it had been a cerebral infarction. A stroke. The kind of thing that happens.
As a detective, Harry could have told them that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. A Crown witness doesn’t ‘happen to’ die. What was it that Arnold had said? In ninety-four per cent of cases it was murder if someone had enough to lose as a result of the witness’s testimony.
The paradox was of course that Harry himself would have had something to lose if Asayev had testified. A lot to lose. So why bother? Why not just show gratitude, bow and move on with his life? There was a simple answer to that. His system had a malfunction.
Harry slung the report down to the end of the long oak table. And decided he would shred it in the morning. Now he needed to get some sleep.
Think about something nice.
Harry got up and undressed on his way to the bathroom. Stood under the shower, turned the dial to burning hot. Felt his skin tingle and smart, punishing him.
Think about something nice.
He dried himself, lay down under the clean white bedlinen in their double bed, closed his eyes and tried to hurry the process. But the thoughts reached him before sleep did.
He had thought about her.
When he had been standing in the toilet cubicle with his eyes closed, concentrating, trying to think of something nice, he had thought about Silje Gravseng. Thought of her soft, suntanned skin, her lips, her burning breath on his face, the wild fury in her eyes, the muscular body, the curves, the firm flesh, all the unjust beauty of the young.
Shit!
Her hand over his belt, on his stomach. Her body on its way down to meet his. The half-nelson. Her head almost on the ground, the protesting groans, the arched back with her bottom raised towards him, as slender as a doe.
Shit, shit!
He sat up in bed. Rakel was smiling warmly at him from the photo on the bedside table. Warm, clever and knowing. But did she actually know? If she had been allowed to spend five seconds in his head, to see who he actually was, would she have run off screaming? Or are we all equally sick? Is the difference only who lets the monster loose and who doesn’t?
He had thought about her. Thought that he had done exactly what she’d wanted, there, on the desk, knocked the pile of students’ work flying, sending the sheets fluttering around the room like faded butterflies, which stuck to their skin, rough paper with small, black letters that became categories of murder: sex, alcohol, crimes of passion, family feuds, honour killings and greed. He had thought about her as he stood there in the toilet. And he had filled the beaker to the brim.
21
Beate Lønn yawned, blinked and stared out of the tram window. The morning sun had started its work burning away the mist over Frogner Park. The dewy tennis courts were empty. There was just one emaciated, elderly man standing lost in thought on a shale court where they still hadn’t put up the nets for the new season. Staring at the tram. Thin thighs protruding from antiquated shorts, blue office shirt buttoned up wrongly, racket dragging on the ground. Waiting for a partner who wasn’t coming, Beate thought. Perhaps because the arrangement was for this time last year, and he was no longer alive. She knew how he felt.
She glimpsed the Monolith as they glided past the main park gate to where the tram stopped.
In fact, she had a partner, she had visited him last night, after Katrine had collected the key for the Evidence Room. That was why she was on this tram on this side of town. He was an ordinary man. That was how she classified him. Not the kind of man you dreamt about. Just the kind of man you needed once in a while. His children were at the ex’s, and now that her little one was staying with her mother-in-law in Steinkjer they had the time and opportunity to meet a little more. Nevertheless, Beate noticed that she limited it. Basically it was more important for her to know he was there as an option rather than for them to spend time together. He hadn’t been able to replace Jack, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t want a replacement, she wanted this. Something else, something non-committal, something that wouldn’t cost her much if it was taken from her.
Beate stared through the window, at the tram going the opposite way sliding in beside them. In the silence she could hear low music coming from the headphones of the girl sitting next to her and recognised an irritating pop hit from the nineties. From the time when she had been the quietest girl at Police College. Pale with an embarrassing tendency to blush as soon as anyone looked in her direction. Though fortunately not many did. And those who did forgot her at once. Beate Lønn had the type of face and charisma that made her a non-event, an aquarium fish, visual Teflon.
But she remembered them.
Every single one of them.
And that was why she could look at the faces on the tram alongside her and remember where she had seen them and when. Perhaps on the same tram the day before, perhaps in a school playground twenty years ago, perhaps on CCTV footage of a bank robbery, perhaps on an escalator at Steen amp; Strøm where she went to buy a pair of tights. And it didn’t make any difference if they had grown older, put on make-up, grown a beard, had a haircut, Botox or silicone implants, it was as though the face, their real face, shone through, as though it was a constant, something unique, an eleven-figure number in a DNA code. And this was her blessing and curse, which some psychiatrists wanted to label Asperger’s syndrome, others minor brain damage, for which her fusiform gyrus — the brain’s centre for facial recognition — tried to compensate. And which others, wiser counsels, didn’t call anything at all. They just stated that her brain stored the uniqueness of every face like a computer stores the numbers of a DNA code for later identification.