Mona Daa screwed up her eyes and pushed with her arms as she curled the dumbbells up towards her chest. She imagined she was unfurling her wings and flying away from here with her arms outstretched. Across Frognerparken, across Oslo. That she could see everything. Absolutely everything.
And she was showing them.
She had seen a documentary about her favourite photographer, Don McCullin, who became known as a humanitarian war reporter because he showed the worst aspects of humanity in order to encourage reflection and soul-searching, not for cheap thrills. She couldn’t say the same of herself. And it had struck her that there was one word that hadn’t been mentioned in the one-sided hagiography of the documentary. Ambition. McCullin became the best, and he must have met thousands of admirers in between his battles, quite literally. Young colleagues who wanted to be like him, who had heard the myth about the photographer who stayed with the soldiers in Hue during the Tet Offensive, and the anecdotes from Beirut, Biafra, Congo, Cyprus. Here was a photographer who achieved what human beings thirsted for most, recognition and acclaim, yet not a word about how it could make a man put himself through the very worst trials, take risks he would otherwise never have dreamt of. And – potentially – commit similar offences to the ones he was documenting, all to take the perfect picture, get the groundbreaking story.
Mona had agreed to sit in a cage and wait for the vampirist. Without telling the police and potentially saving people’s lives. It would have been easy to sound the alarm, even if she did think she was being watched. A note slipped discreetly across the table to Nora. But she had – like Nora’s sexual fantasy of allowing herself to be raped by Harry Hole – made it feel like she was obliged to go through with it. Of course she had wanted it. The recognition, the acclaim, seeing the admiration in younger colleagues’ eyes when she was giving her acceptance speech for the Journalism Award, humbly saying that she was just a lucky, hard-working girl from a small town in the north. Before going on, slightly less humbly, to talk about her childhood, the bullying, and revenge and ambition. Yes, she would talk out loud about ambition, she wouldn’t be afraid to tell it how it was. And she wanted to fly. Fly.
‘You need a bit more resistance.’
It had got harder to lift the weights. She opened her eyes and saw two hands pushing down gently on the weights. The person was standing immediately behind her, so that in the big mirror in front of her she looked like some sort of four-armed Ganesh.
‘Come on, two more,’ the voice whispered in her ear. She recognised it. The police officer’s. And now she looked up and saw his face above hers. He was smiling. Blue eyes below a white fringe. White teeth. Anders Wyller.
‘What are you doing here?’ she said, forgetting to push with her arms, but feeling herself fly anyway.
‘What are you doing here?’ Øystein Eikeland asked, putting a half-litre of beer on the counter in front of the customer.
‘Huh?’
‘Not you, him there,’ Øystein said, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb towards the tall man with the crew cut who had just walked behind the bar and was filling the cezve with coffee and water.
‘Can’t deal with any more instant coffee,’ Harry said.
‘Can’t deal with any more time off,’ Øystein said. ‘Can’t deal with being away from your beloved bar. Hear what this is?’
Harry stopped to listen to the rapid, rhythmic music. ‘Not until she starts singing, no.’
‘She doesn’t, that what’s so great,’ Øystein said. ‘It’s Taylor Swift, “1989”.’
Harry nodded. He remembered that Swift or her record company hadn’t wanted to put the album on Spotify, so instead they’d released a version with no singing.
‘Didn’t we agree that today’s singers were only going to be women over fifty?’ Harry said.
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ Øystein said. ‘She’s not singing.’
Harry gave up any idea of arguing against the logic of that. ‘People are here early today.’
‘Alligator sausage,’ Øystein said, pointing at the long, smoked sausages hanging above the bar. ‘The first week was because it was weird, but now the same people are back wanting more. Maybe we should change the name to Alligator Joe’s, Everglades, or—’
‘Jealousy is fine.’
‘OK, OK, just trying to be proactive here. Someone’s going to nick that idea, though.’
‘We’ll have had another one by then.’
Harry put the cezve on the hotplate and turned round just as a familiar figure came in through the door.
Harry folded his arms as the man stamped his boots and glared across the room.
‘Something wrong?’ Øystein wondered.
‘Don’t think so,’ Harry said. ‘Make sure the coffee doesn’t boil.’
‘You and that Turkish not-boiling thing.’
Harry walked round the bar and went over to the man, who had unbuttoned his coat. Heat was steaming off him.
‘Hole,’ he said.
‘Berntsen,’ Harry said.
‘I’ve got something for you.’
‘Why?’
Truls Berntsen grunt-laughed. ‘Don’t you want to know what it is?’
‘Only if I’m happy with the answer to the first question.’
Harry saw Truls Berntsen attempt an indifferent smirk, but fail and swallow instead. And the blush on his scarred face could of course be the result of the transition from the cold outside.
‘You’re a bastard, Hole, but you did save my life that time.’
‘Don’t make me regret it. Out with it.’
Berntsen pulled the document file from the inside pocket of his coat. ‘Lemmy – I mean Lenny Hell. You’ll see that he was in touch with both Elise Hermansen and Ewa Dolmen.’
‘Really?’ Harry looked at the yellow folder, held together by a rubber band, Truls Berntsen was holding towards him. ‘Why haven’t you gone to Bratt with this?’
‘Because she – unlike you – has to think about her career and would have had to take this to Mikael.’
‘And?’
‘Mikael’s taking over as Justice Minister next week. He doesn’t want any blots on his copybook.’
Harry looked at Truls Berntsen. He had long since figured out that Berntsen wasn’t as stupid as he might appear. ‘You mean he doesn’t want this case dragged out again?’
Berntsen shrugged. ‘The vampirist case came close to sticking a serious spoke in Mikael’s wheel. Then it turned into one of his greatest successes instead. So no, he doesn’t want to spoil that image.’
‘Hm. You’re giving these documents to me because you’re worried that otherwise they’ll end up in a drawer in the Police Chief’s office?’
‘I’m worried they’ll end up in the paper shredder, Hole.’
‘OK. But you still haven’t answered my question. Why?’
‘Didn’t you hear? The paper shredder.’
‘Why do you, Truls Berntsen, care about that? And no bullshit, I know who and what you are.’
Truls grunted something.
Harry waited.
Truls glanced at him, looked away, stamped his feet as if there was more snow on them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s true, I don’t know. I thought maybe it would be good if Magnus Skarre got a bloody nose for not noticing the link between the phones and Facebook, but it’s not that either. I don’t think. I think I just want … no, fuck it, I don’t know.’ He coughed. ‘But if you don’t want it, I’ll put it back in the filing cabinet and it can rot in there, same difference to me.’
Harry wiped the condensation from the window and watched Truls Berntsen as he walked out of the door and crossed the street, head bowed, in the sharp winter light. Was he mistaken, or had Truls Berntsen just shown symptoms of the partially benign illness known as police?
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Øystein asked when Harry walked back behind the bar.