‘Oh no,’ Emilie said, reading the bus timetable. ‘The 149 won’t be here for at least another twenty minutes. Mum’s made pizza for us this evening. It’ll be freezing cold now.’
‘What a shame,’ Aurora said, reading down further. She didn’t particularly like pizza or sleepovers. But it was what everyone did now. Everyone had sleepovers with everyone; it was like a circle dance you had to join. That or you were off the map. And Aurora didn’t want to be off the map. Not entirely at any rate.
‘Emilie,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘it says here the 131 will be along in a minute, and I’ve remembered I’ve left my toothbrush at home. The 131 goes past our house, so if I catch that one I can cycle over afterwards.’
She could see Emilie didn’t like the idea. Didn’t like the idea of standing here in the darkness, in the almost-rain that would never be rain, to catch the bus home alone. And she probably already suspected that Aurora would find some excuse for not sleeping over after all.
‘Hm,’ Emilie grunted, fiddling with her sports bag. ‘We won’t wait for you with the pizza though.’
Aurora saw the bus coming round the bend at the bottom of the hill. The 131.
‘And we can share a toothbrush,’ Emilie said. ‘After all, we’re friends.’
We are not friends, Aurora thought. You are Emilie, friends with all the girls in the class, Emilie who always wears the right clothes, Emilie, Norway’s most popular name, who never falls out with anyone because you’re so great and never criticise anyone, at least not when they’re within earshot. Whereas I’m Aurora, who does what she has to do — but nothing more — to be with you all because she doesn’t have the courage to be alone. Who all of you consider strange, but smart enough and confident enough for you not to pick on her.
‘I’ll be at your place before you,’ Aurora said. ‘I promise.’
Harry was sitting in the modest stand, head supported on his hands, looking at the track.
There was rain in the air, it could pour down at any moment and there was no roof on Valle Hovin.
He had the whole ugly little stadium to himself. Knew he would have, concerts here were few and far between now, and it was even longer to the ice-skating season when anyone who wanted could come and train. This was where he had sat watching Oleg taking his first tentative steps and slowly but surely developing into a promising skater in his age category. He hoped he would soon see Oleg here again. So that he could time his circuits without him realising. Note his progress and plateaus. Encourage him when things were sluggish, lie about the conditions and the state of his skates, and maintain a neutral tone when things were going well, not letting his internal jubilation come across. Be a kind of compressor to even out the peaks and troughs. Oleg needed that, otherwise his emotions would have free rein. Harry didn’t know much about skates, but he did know a lot about this. Affective control, Ståle called it. How to console yourself. It was one of the most important features of a child’s development, but not everyone developed it to the same degree. Ståle thought, for example, that Harry needed more affective control. He lacked the average person’s ability to flee from what hurt, to forget, to focus his mind on nicer, lighter topics. He had used alcohol to cope with his job. Oleg’s father was also an alcoholic, who drank his family fortune and life away in Moscow, Rakel had told him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Harry felt such tenderness for the boy. They shared this lack of affective control.
Harry heard footsteps on the concrete. Someone was coming through the darkness from the other side of the track. Harry took a full drag of the cigarette so that the glow would show him where he was sitting.
The man swung a leg over the fence and walked with light, agile strides up the stand’s concrete steps.
‘Harry Hole,’ the man said, stopping two steps below.
‘Mikael Bellman,’ Harry said. In the night the white patches on Bellman’s face seemed to light up.
‘Two things, Harry. This had better be important. My wife and I had planned a cosy evening together.’
‘And the second?’
‘Stub that out. Cigarette smoke damages your health.’
‘Thank you for your concern.’
‘I was thinking about me, not you. Please put it out.’
Harry rubbed the end on the concrete and dropped it back into the packet while Bellman took a seat beside him.
‘Unusual place to meet, Hole.’
‘Only hangout I have, besides Schrøder’s. And less populated.’
‘Too unpopulated, in my opinion. I wondered for a moment if you were the cop killer trying to lure me here. We still believe it’s a policeman, do we?’
‘Absolutely,’ Harry said, already craving the cigarette. ‘We’ve matched the gun.’
‘Already? That was damn quick. I didn’t even know you’d started calling in all-’
‘We don’t need to. The first gun matched.’
‘What?’
‘Your gun, Bellman. It was fired and the result matched the bullet in the Kalsnes case.’
Bellman burst out laughing. The echo carried between the stands. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Harry?’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me, Mikael.’
‘To you I’m the Chief of Police or herr Bellman, Harry. And I don’t have to tell you anything. What’s going on?’
‘That’s what you’ll have to — sorry — is should better?. . you should tell me, Police Chief Bellman. Otherwise we’ll have to — and I do mean have to here — summon you to an official interview. And I’m sure everyone would prefer to avoid that. Are we agreed?’
‘Get to the point, Harry. How could this have happened?’
‘I can see two possible explanations,’ Harry said. ‘The first and more obvious one is that you shot René Kalsnes, Police Chief Bellman.’
‘I. . I. .’
Harry watched Mikael Bellman’s mouth moving as the light seemed to pulsate in the white patches, as though he were some kind of exotic deep-sea creature.
‘You’ve got an alibi,’ Harry completed for him.
‘Have I?’
‘When we got the result I put Katrine Bratt on the case. You were in Paris the night René Kalsnes was shot.’
‘Was I?’
‘Your name was on the Air France passenger list from Oslo to Paris and in the guest book at the Golden Oriole Hotel the same night. Anyone you met who can confirm you were there?’
Mikael Bellman blinked hard as if to see better. The northern lights in his skin went out. He nodded slowly. ‘The Kalsnes case, yes. That was the day I went for a job interview with Interpol. I could definitely find a few witnesses from that trip. We even went out to a restaurant in the evening.’
‘So there’s just the question of where your gun was on that date.’
‘At home,’ Mikael Bellman said with total certainty. ‘Locked up. The key was on the key ring I had with me.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘Doubt it. You said there were two possible explanations here. Let me guess. The second is that the ballistics boys-’
‘Most of them are girls now.’
‘-have made a mistake, have mixed up the fatal bullet with one of mine, or something like that.’
‘No. The lead bullet in the box in the Evidence Room comes from your gun, Bellman.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘By what?’
‘By saying “the bullet in the box in the Evidence Room” and not “the bullet found in Kalsnes’s skull”.’
Harry nodded. ‘Now we’re getting warm, Bellman.’
‘Getting warm how?’
‘The other possibility, the way I see it, is that someone swapped the bullet in the Evidence Room with one from your gun. There is one thing about the bullet that doesn’t add up. It’s crushed in a way that suggests it hit something much harder than flesh and bone.’