It was from the night of the murder.
Roar Bohr let the air out of his lungs and leaned his rifle against the trunk of the tree.
Was the image good enough for the person to be identified?
He ran his left hand over his hip. Over thekarambitknife.
Think. Think, then act.
His fingertip slid over the cold, serrated edge of the steel. Up and down. Up and down.
—
“Watch out,” Harry said by way of warning.
“What now?” Bjørn asked. Harry didn’t know if Bjørn was referring to his exclamation up at the cabin, which had turned out to be groundless.
“Freezing rain.”
“I can see,” Bjørn said, and braked gently before turning onto the bridge in front of them.
It had stopped raining, but a film of ice was glinting on the road ahead of them. The road straightened out again after they crossed the river, and Bjørn accelerated. A sign.Oslo 85 kilometres. There weren’t many vehicles on the road, and if they got a bit of dry road under their tires they could be back in the city in just over an hour.
“Are youquitesure you don’t want to issue an alert?” Bjørn asked.
“Mm.” Harry closed his eyes. Roar Bohr had been at the cabin recently, the newspaper in the wood basket was six days old. But he wasn’t there now. No tracks in the snow outside the door. No food. Mould on the dregs of coffee in the cup on the table. The boots by the door were dry, he must have several pairs. “I called that 3-D expert, Freund. His first name’s Sigurd, by the way.”
Bjørn chuckled. “Katrine suggested we should name the kid after the singer in Suede. Brett. Brett Bratt. What did Freund have to say?”
“That he was going to look at the memory card, and that I could expect a response at the weekend. I explained what was on it, and he said there wasn’t much he could do about the lack of light. But by measuring the height of the doorway and the tread of the steps at Holmenkollveien he reckoned he could give me the height of the person down to the nearest centimetre. If I say that we need to bring Bohr in as a result of what we found after breaking into his cabin without a search warrant, you’d get into trouble as well, Bjørn. It makes more sense to use the fact that the height of the guy in the doorway matches Bohr’s, because there’s no way you can be linked to those images. I’ll call Kripos, explain that I’ve got pictures proving that Bohr was at the crime scene, and suggest that they search his cabin. They’ll find a broken window, but anyone could have done that.”
Harry saw flashing blue lights at the end of the straight stretch of road in front of them. They passed a warning triangle. Bjørn slowed down.
An articulated truck was parked by the verge on their side of the road. On the other side lay the wreckage of a car next to the crash barrier in front of the river. What had once been a car reminded Harry of a crushed tin can.
A policeman waved them past.
“Hang on,” Harry said, winding his window down. “That car’s got Oslo plates.”
Bjørn stopped the Amazon next to a policeman with a face like a bulldog, a neck and arms that looked too short sticking out from his over-pumped upper body.
“What’s happened?” Harry asked, holding up his ID.
The policeman looked at it and nodded. “The truck driver’s being questioned, so we should know soon enough. It’s icy, so itcouldjust be an accident.”
“It’s a bit straight for that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the police officer said, composing his face into a professional sombre expression. “At worst, we have one a month. We call this stretch of road the green mile. You know, that last walk people sentenced to death in America take on their way to the chair.”
“Mm. We’re looking for a guy who lives in Oslo, so it would be interesting to know who was driving the car.”
The policeman took a deep breath. “To be honest, when a car weighing one thousand three hundred kilos drives at eighty or ninety kilometres an hour into the front of an almost-fifty-ton truck, seat belts and airbags aren’t a lot of use. I couldn’t tell you if my own brother had been driving that car. Or my sister, come to that. But the car’s registered to a Stein Hansen, so for the time being we’re working on the assumption that it’s him.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, and closed the window.
They drove on in silence.
“You seem relieved,” Bjørn said after a while.
