Five paces to the doorsteps. An excuse. Two paces. The doorsteps. Come on. No. They were at the door.
Aurora swallowed. ‘I think it’s locked,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait outside.’
‘Oh?’ the man said, gazing round from the top step, as though searching for Dad somewhere behind the hedges. Or neighbours. She felt the heat from his arm as it stretched across her shoulder, grabbed the door handle and pushed it down. It opened.
‘Well, hello,’ he said, and he was breathing faster now. And there was a light quiver to his voice. ‘We were lucky there.’
Aurora faced the doorway. Stared into the darkened hall. Just a glass of water. And this music with the talking that didn’t have any interest for her. In the distance there was the sound of a lawnmower. Angry, aggressive, insistent. She stepped inside.
‘I have to. .’ she began, came to an abrupt halt, and at that moment felt his hand on her shoulder, as though he had crossed a line. Felt the heat of his hand where her shirt stopped and her skin started. Felt her little heart pounding. Heard another lawnmower. Which wasn’t a lawnmower but an excitedly purring little engine.
‘Mummy!’ Aurora shouted and squirmed out of the man’s grip, dived past him, jumped down all four steps, landed in the gravel and raced off. Shouting over her shoulder:
‘I have to help with the shopping.’
She ran to the gate, listened for footsteps coming after her, but the crunch of her trainers on the gravel was almost deafening. Then she was at the gate, tearing it open and watching her mother get out of the little blue car in front of the garage.
‘Hi, sweetheart,’ Mum said, looking at her with a quizzical smile. ‘That was quite a turn of speed.’
‘There’s someone here asking for Dad,’ Aurora said, realising the gravel path was longer than she thought, she was out of breath anyway. ‘He’s on the steps.’
‘Oh?’ Mum said, passing her one of the bags from the rear seat, slamming the door and walking with her daughter through the gate.
No one was on the steps, but the front door was still open.
‘Has he gone inside?’ Mum asked.
‘Don’t know,’ Aurora said.
They went into the house, but Aurora stayed in the hallway, close to the open door while her mother continued past the living room towards the kitchen.
‘Hello?’ she heard her mother call. ‘Hello?’
Then she was back in the hall, without the shopping bags.
‘There’s no one here, Aurora.’
‘But he was here. I promise you!’
Mum looked at her in surprise and laughed. ‘Of course he was, sweetheart. Why wouldn’t I believe you?’
Aurora didn’t answer. Didn’t know what to say. How could she explain that it might have been Jesus? Or the Holy Spirit. At any rate, someone not everyone could see.
‘He’ll turn up again if it was important,’ Mum said, going back to the kitchen.
Aurora stood in the hallway. That sweet, stale smell, it was still there.
35
‘Tell me, have you got a life?’
Arnold Folkestad looked up from his papers. Catching sight of the tall guy leaning against the door frame, he smiled.
‘No, I haven’t either, Harry.’
‘It’s after nine and you’re still here.’
Arnold chuckled and stacked his papers together. ‘I’m on my way home anyway. You’ve just come and how long are you going to stay?’
‘Not long.’ Harry took one long stride to the spindle-back chair and sat down. ‘And I’ve got a woman I can be with at weekends.’
‘Oh yes? I’ve got an ex-wife I can avoid at weekends.’
‘Have you? I didn’t know that.’
‘Ex-cohabitant anyway.’
‘Coffee? What happened?’
‘Run out of coffee. One of us had the terrible idea of thinking a marriage proposal was the next step. Things went downhill from there. I called it off after all the invitations had been sent out, and so she left. Couldn’t live with it, she said. Best thing that’s ever happened to me, Harry.’
‘Mm.’ Harry used his thumb and middle finger to clear his eyes.
Arnold stood up and took his jacket from the hook on the wall. ‘Slow going in the Boiler Room?’
‘Well, we had a setback today. Valentin Gjertsen. .’
‘Yes?’
‘We think he’s the Saw Man. But he’s not the one who’s been murdering all the officers.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘At least, not on his own.’
‘Could there be several?’
‘Katrine’s suggestion. But the fact is that in ninety-eight point six per cent of sexually motivated murders there’s only one perpetrator.’
‘So. .’
‘She wouldn’t give in. Pointed out that in all likelihood there were two men involved in the murder of the girl at Tryvann.’
‘Is that where the body was found scattered over several kilometres?’
‘Yep. She thought Valentin might have been working with someone. To confuse the police.’
‘Taking turns to kill and thereby securing an alibi?’
‘Yes. And in fact that’s been done before. Two ex-cons, violent crim-inals, in Michigan, got together sometime in the sixties. They made it look like classic serial killings by setting a pattern they followed every time. The murders were copies. Like crimes both of them had committed before. They each had their own sick predilections and ended up attracting the attention of the FBI. But when first one and then the other had watertight alibis for several of the murders they were, naturally enough, eliminated from inquiries.’
‘Smart. So why don’t you think something similar happened here?’
‘Ninety-eight-’
‘-point six per cent. Isn’t that thinking a bit rigid?’
‘It was thanks to your percentage of key witnesses dying of unnatural causes that I found out Asayev didn’t die of natural ones.’
‘But you still haven’t done anything about that case?’
‘No. But drop that one now, Arnold. This one’s more urgent.’ Harry rested his head against the wall behind him. Closed his eyes. ‘We think along the same lines, you and I, and I’m bloody knackered. So I came straight here to ask you to help me to think.’
‘Me?’
‘We’re back to square one, Arnold. And your brain’s got a couple of neurons mine obviously hasn’t.’
Folkestad took off his jacket again, hung it neatly across the back of the chair and sat down.
‘Harry?’
‘Yes?’
‘You have no idea how good this feels.’
Harry pulled a wry smile. ‘Good. Motive.’
‘Motive. Yes, that’s square one.’
‘That’s where we are. What could this murderer’s motive be?’
‘I’ll go and see if I can rustle up some coffee after all, Harry.’
Harry talked his way through the first cup and was well down the second before Arnold spoke up.
‘I think the murder of René Kalsnes is important because it’s an exception, because it doesn’t fit in. That is to say, it does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t fit in with the original murders, the sex, sadism and use of knives. It fits in with the police murders because of the violence to the head and face with a blunt object.’
‘Go on,’ Harry said, putting down the cup.
‘I remember the Kalsnes murder well,’ Arnold said. ‘I was in San Francisco on a course when it happened, staying at a hotel where everyone had the Gayzette delivered to the door.’
‘The gay newspaper?’
‘They ran the story of this murder in little Norway on the front page, calling it yet another hate crime against a homosexual man. The interesting bit was that none of the Norwegian papers I read later carried any suggestion of a hate crime. I wondered how this American paper could draw such a categorical and premature conclusion, so I read the whole article. The journalist wrote that the murder had all the classic features: the homosexual who exhibits his leanings so provocatively is picked up, driven to some out-of-the-way place where he is subjected to ritual, frenzied violence. The murderer has a gun, but it’s not enough to shoot Kalsnes straight away, his face has to be obliterated first. He has to give vent to his homophobia by smashing the far too attractive, effeminate face, doesn’t he? It’s premeditated, it’s planned and it’s a homo murder — that was the journalist’s conclusion. And do you know what, Harry? I don’t think it’s an unreasonable conclusion.’