The bedroom was dark, and he was lying on his side with the alarm clock on the bedside table right in front of him. The luminous numbers said it was 3:13.
“Someone’s at the door, Ståle.”
And there it was again. The siren.
Ståle heaved his overweight body out of bed and into his silk dressing gown, and pushed his feet into the matching slippers.
He was downstairs and on his way to the front door when the thought struck him that whoever was outside might be less than welcome. A paranoid schizophrenic patient with voices in his head telling him to kill his psychologist, for instance. But on the other hand, perhaps the air-raid shelter had been a dream within a dream, perhaps this was the real dream. So he opened the door.
And once again the professor was proved right. The person outside was less than welcome. It was Harry Hole. More precisely: the Harry Hole you don’t want to see. The one with eyes that were more bloodshot than usual, with the hunted, desperate expression that could only mean trouble.
“Hypnosis,” Harry said. He was out of breath, and his face was wet with sweat.
“Good morning to you too, Harry. Would you like to come in? Assuming the door isn’t too small, of course.”
“Too small?”
“I dreamed I couldn’t get through the door to an air-raid shelter,” Ståle said, then followed his stomach through the hallway and into the kitchen. When his daughter Aurora was little, she used to say it always looked like Daddy was walking uphill.
“And the Freudian interpretation of that is?” Harry asked.
“That I need to lose weight.” Aune opened the fridge. “Truffle salami and cave-aged Gruyère?”
“Hypnosis,” Harry said.
“Yes, so you said.”
“The husband in Tøyen, the one we thought had killed his wife. You said he had suppressed his memories of what happened. But that you could bring them back with hypnosis.”
“If the subject was susceptible to hypnosis, yes.”
“Shall we find out if I am?”
“You?” Ståle turned towards Harry.
“I’ve started to remember things from the night Rakel died.”
“Things?” Ståle closed the fridge door.
“Images. Random pictures.”
“Fragments of memory.”
“If I can get them to link up, or dig out more of them, I think I might know something. Know something I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”
“Put them together into a sequence? I can try, obviously, but there are no guarantees. To be honest, I fail more often than I succeed. It’s hypnosis as a method rather than me that’s at fault, of course.”
“Of course.”
“When you say you think you knowsomething, what sort of knowledge are we talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s clearly urgent.”
“Yes.”
“OK. Do you remember anything definite from these fragments of memory?”
