‘I can do it tomorrow as a matter of fact.’
‘Good. My office at two o’clock. Can you remember the address from the last time?’
Harry nodded.
‘Excellent. Have a marvellous day, Hole!’
Krohn jumped from his chair. Knee-lifts, pull-ups and bench press, Harry guessed.
After he had gone, Harry looked at his watch. It was Thursday and Rakel was coming a day earlier this weekend. Due to land at 17.30 and he had offered to collect her from the airport, which — after two of the standard ‘oh no, you don’t need to’s — she had accepted gratefully. He knew she loved the three-quarters of an hour in the car home. The chat. The calm. The prelude to a wonderful evening. Her excited voice explaining what it actually meant that only states could be parties to the Statute of the Court at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. About the UN’s legal powers or lack of them, as the countryside rolled past them. Or they talked about Oleg, about how he was doing, how he looked better by the day, how the old Oleg was returning. About the plans he had made. Studying law. PHS. And how lucky they had been. And how fragile happiness was.
They talked about everything that came into their heads, no beating around the bush. Almost everything. Harry never said how frightened he was. Frightened of making promises he couldn’t keep. Frightened of not being the person he wanted to be, had to be, for them. Frightened that he didn’t know if they could be the same for him. That he didn’t know how someone could make him happy.
The fact that he was now together with her and Oleg was almost an exceptional circumstance, something he only half believed in, a suspiciously wonderful dream he was constantly expecting to wake up from.
Harry rubbed his face. Perhaps it was close now. The awakening. The pitiless, stinging daylight. Reality. Where everything would be as before. Cold, hard and lonely. Harry shivered.
Katrine Bratt looked at her watch. Ten past nine. Outside, it might have been a sudden mild spring evening. Down in the basement it was a chilly, damp winter evening. She watched Bjørn Holm scratching his red sideburns. Ståle Aune scribbling on a pad. Beate Lønn stifling a yawn. They were sitting around a computer looking at the photo Beate had taken of the tram window. They had talked a bit about the drawing, and concluded that whatever it was meant to signify, it was unlikely to help them catch Valentin.
Then Katrine had told them again about her feeling that someone else had been in the Evidence Room.
‘It must have been someone working there,’ Bjørn said. ‘But, well, OK, it is strange they didn’t switch on the light.’
‘The key would be easy to copy,’ Katrine said.
‘Perhaps they aren’t letters,’ Beate said. ‘Perhaps they’re numbers.’
They turned to her. She was still staring at the computer.
‘Ones and zeros. Not i’s and o’s. Like a binary code. Don’t ones mean yes and zeros no, Katrine?’
‘I’m not a programmer,’ Katrine said. ‘But yes, that’s right. And one means on and zero means off.’
‘One means action, zero means do nothing,’ Beate said. ‘Do. Don’t. Do. Don’t. One. Zero. Row after row.’
‘Like petals on an ox-eye daisy,’ Bjørn said.
They sat in silence; the computer fan was all that could be heard.
‘The matrix ends in a zero,’ Aune said. ‘Don’t.’
‘If he was finished,’ Beate said. ‘He had to get off at his stop.’
‘Sometimes serial killers just stop killing,’ Katrine said. ‘Disappear. Never to be seen again.’
‘That’s the exception,’ Beate said. ‘Zero or no zero. Who thinks the cop killer intends to stop? Ståle?’
‘Katrine’s right, that does happen, but I’m afraid this one will keep going.’
Afraid, Katrine thought, close to blurting out what she was thinking, which was that she was afraid of the opposite, now that they were so close, that he would stop, disappear from view. That it was worth the risk. Yes, that in a worst-case scenario she would be willing to sacrifice one colleague to catch Valentin. It was a sick thought, but it was there anyway. Another police death was tolerable. Letting Valentin get away wasn’t. And she mouthed a silent incantation: one more time, you bastard. Strike one more time.
Katrine’s mobile rang. She saw from the number it was the Pathology Unit.
‘Hi. We checked this chunk of chewing gum from the rape case.’
‘Yes?’ Katrine could feel her blood pumping round faster. To hell with all the little theories, this was hard evidence.
‘I’m afraid we can’t find any DNA.’
‘What?’ It was like someone dousing you with a bucket of ice-cold water. ‘But. . but it has to be crammed with spit.’
‘That’s the way it goes sometimes, I’m afraid. Of course we could check it again, but with these police murders. .’
Katrine rang off. ‘They didn’t find anything in the chewing gum,’ she said in a low voice.
Bjørn and Beate nodded. Katrine thought she detected a certain air of relief in Beate.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Yes!’ Beate shouted.
Katrine stared at the iron door, suddenly sure it was him.
The tall blond man. He had changed his mind. He had come to save them all from this misery.
The iron door opened. Katrine cursed. It was Gunnar Hagen. ‘How’s it going?’
Beate stretched her arms above her head. ‘No Valentin on trams 11 or 12 this afternoon, and the questioning didn’t produce anything of interest. We’ve got officers on the tram this evening, but our hopes are higher for early tomorrow morning.’
‘I’ve been fielding queries from the Investigation Unit about the use of officers on the tram. They’re wondering what’s going on and if it has any connection with the police murders.’
‘Rumours spread quickly,’ Beate said.
‘Bit too quickly,’ Hagen said. ‘This is going to get to Bellman’s ears.’
Katrine stared at the screen. Patterns. This was her strength, this was; it was how they had managed to trace the Snowman that time. So. One and zero. Two numbers in pairs. Ten maybe? A pair of numbers that go together several times. Several times. Several. .
‘For this reason I’ll have to inform him about Valentin this evening.’
‘What does that mean for our group?’ Beate asked.
‘Valentin turning up on a tram isn’t our fault. It’s obvious we had to act. However, with that our group has completed its mission. It has established that Valentin is alive and given us a main suspect. And if we don’t catch him, there’s a chance he’ll turn up at the house in Berg. Now other officers will take over, folks.’
‘What about poly-ti?’ Katrine said.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Hagen answered in a soft voice.
‘Ståle says that you write what’s going on in your subconscious. Valentin has written lots of tens, one after the other. Another way of saying “many” is “poly”. So, poly-ti. As in politi. Police. That might mean he’s planning to murder more police officers.’
‘What’s she blathering about?’ Hagen asked, turning to Ståle.
Ståle Aune shrugged. ‘We’re trying to interpret his doodles on the tram window. My own doodle suggested that he was writing die. But what if he’s content to use ones and zeros? The human brain is a four-dimensional labyrinth. Everyone’s been there; no one knows the way.’
As Katrine walked through Oslo’s streets on her way to the police flat in Grünerløkka, she wasn’t aware of life around her, the laughing, excited people hurrying to celebrate the short spring, the short weekend, life before it was over.
She knew now. Why they had been so obsessed with this idiotic ‘code’. Because they were desperately hoping that things would cohere, have some meaning. But more importantly, because they had nothing else to go on. So they flogged a dead horse.
Her gaze was fixed on the pavement in front of her, and she was banging her heels on the tarmac in time to the incantation she kept repeating: ‘One more time, you bastard. Strike one more time.’