“Same way as you, Harry. By trying to save enough innocent lives to make up for the ones you’re responsible for losing.”
Harry looked at the short, dark-haired man on the sofa.
“I devoted my life to a project,” Ringdal said, looking out at the satellite sculpture, which the rays of sunlight had now reached, casting sharp shadows into the living room. “A future where lives aren’t ruined by pointless, unnecessary traffic accidents. And by that I don’t just mean the girl’s life, but my own.”
“Self-driving cars.”
“Carriages,” Ringdal corrected. “And they’re not self-driving, they’re controlled centrally, like the electronic impulses in a computer. They can’t crash, they maximise speed and choice of route from the position of the other carriages right from the start. Everything follows the logic of the matrix and physics, and eliminates human drivers’ fatal fallibility.”
“And the photograph of the dead girl?”
“…I’ve had that in front of me right from the start so I never forget why I’m doing this. Why I’ve let myself be ridiculed in the media, yelled at by investors, why I’ve gone bankrupt and had trouble from car manufacturers. And why I still sit up at night working, when I’m not working in a bar that I hope will make enough profit to finance the project and employ engineers and architects and get the whole thing back on the agenda.”
“What sort of trouble?”
Ringdal shrugged. “Letters with a certain subtext. People showing up at the door a few times. Nothing you could ever use against them, but enough to make me get hold ofthat.” He nodded towards the pistol that was still lying on the floor.
“Mm. This is a lot to take in, Ringdal. Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s true.”
“When did that become a reason?”
Ringdal let out a short laugh. “You might not believe this either, but when you were standing behind me with your arm out and the pistol against my head, you were standing in the perfect position for aseoi nage. If I’d wanted to, you would have been lying on the floor before you realised what was happening, disarmed and with all the air knocked out of you.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
Ringdal shrugged again. “You showed me the photograph.”
“And?”
“It was time.”
“Time for what?”
“To talk. To tell the truth. The whole truth.”
“OK. So would you like to go on?”
“What?”
“You’ve already confessed to one murder. How about confessing to the other one?”
“What do you mean?”
“Rakel’s.”
Ringdal jerked his head back in a movement that made him look like an ostrich. “You think I killed Rakel?”
“Tell me quickly and without giving yourself time to think, why your fingerprints were found on a blue glass in Rakel’s dishwasher, a dishwasher where nothing dirty is allowed to sit for more than a day, and why you haven’t told the police you were there. And why you’ve got this in a drawer in your hall?” Harry pulled Rakel’s red scarf out of his jacket pocket and held it up.
“That’s easy,” Ringdal said. “They both have the same explanation.”
“Which is?”
“That she was here the morning of the day before she was killed.”
“Here? What for?”
