“Peter Ringdal. See what you can find out.”
—
At seven o’clock that evening it was already dark, and the invisible, silent twilight rain draped itself like a cold spider’s web on Harry’s face as he walked up the gravel path to Kaja’s house.
“We’ve got a lead,” he said into his phone. “I’m not entirely sure it deserves to be called that, though.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Oleg asked.
“Haven’t I said?”
Oleg didn’t answer.
“Kaja Solness,” Harry said. “A former colleague.”
“Are you two—”
“No. Nothing like that. Nothing…”
“Nothing I need to know?” Oleg filled in.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“OK.”
A pause.
“Do you think you’re going to find him?”
“I don’t know, Oleg.”
“But you know what I need to hear.”
“Mm. We’re probably going to find him.”
“OK.” Oleg sighed deeply. “Speak soon.”
Harry found Kaja on the sofa in the living room, where she was sitting with her laptop on her knees and her phone on the coffee table. She had found out the following: Peter Ringdal was forty-six years old, had been divorced twice, had no children, his relationship status was unclear, but he lived alone in a house in Kjelsås. His career had been mixed. He had studied economics at the Norwegian Business School, and had once launched a new transportation concept.
“I found two interviews with him, both inFinansavisen,” Kaja said. “In the first, from 2004, he was looking for investors for what he claimed was going to revolutionise the way we think about individual transport. The headline wasKiller of the Private Car.” She tapped her laptop. “Here it is. A quote from Ringdal: ‘Today we convey one or two people in vehicles weighing a ton on roads that demand huge amounts of space and a lot of maintenance to handle the traffic they have to carry. The amount of energy required to get these machines rolling with their wide tires on rough pavement is laughable when you consider the alternatives available to us. In addition there’s also the resources that go into making these outsized driving machines. But that isn’t the biggest cost to humanity of today’s private transport. It’stime. The loss of time when a potential contributor to society has to spend four hours each day focusing solely on steering his own private machine through the Los Angeles traffic. That isn’t just a pointless use of a quarter of a person’s waking life, it also means a loss in GDP that in this city alone would be enough to finance another trip to the moon—every year!’ ”
“Mm.” Harry ran his forefinger over the worn varnish on the armrest of the wingback chair he had sat down on. “What’s the alternative?”
“According to Ringdal, masts with small carriages hanging off them, containing one or two people, not unlike cable cars. The carriages are parked at platforms on every street corner, like bicycles. You get inside, tap in your personal code and where you want to go. Your debit card is charged a small amount per kilometre, and a computerised system sends the carriages off, gradually accelerating to up to two hundred kilometres an hour, even in the centre of Los Angeles. While you carry on working, reading, watching television, barely noticing the corners. Orthecorner, because on most journeys there would only be one. No traffic lights, no concertina effect, the carriages are like electrons drifting through a computer system without ever colliding. And beneath the carriages, all the roads are freed up for the use of pedestrians, cyclists, skateboarders.”
“What about heavy transport?”
“Anything that’s too heavy for the masts is carried in trucks that would have to drive at a snail’s pace in cities, in allocated time slots at night or early in the morning.”
“Sounds expensive, having to build both masts and roads.”
“According to Ringdal, the new masts and rails would cost between 5 and 10 percent of what a new road costs. The same with maintenance. In fact a transition to masts and rails would be paid for within ten years simply from the reduction in road maintenance. In addition to that, there would be the human and financial saving of fewer accidents. The target is no accidents at all, not a single one.”
“Mm. Sounds sensible in the city, but out in the sticks…”
“The cost of building masts to your cabin would be a fifth of an ordinary gritted road.”
Harry gave her a wry smile. “Sounds as if you like the idea.”
