Sara twitched.
“But you wouldn’t leave him alone, apparently. He said there’s a fine line between groupie and stalker, in his experience. That things were simpler with a mature, married woman who accepted things for what they were. A bit of excitement to liven up the daily routine, spice things up a bit. That’s how he put it. A way to spice things up.”
Harry looked at her.
“It was you who borrowed your mother’s phone, not your father. And discovered that she and Andreas had been having an affair.”
Harry checked to see how his conscience was doing. Bulldozing a nineteen-year-old with no lawyer, a lovesick teenager who had been betrayed by her mother and a guy she had managed to convince herself belonged to her.
“Your father isn’t just self-sacrificing, Sara, he’s smart too. He knows that the best lie is one that’s as close to the truth as possible. The lie is that your father was at the local shop picking up some things for dinner before going home, borrowing your mother’s phone, finding the messages and killing her. The truth is that while he was at the shop, you found the messages, and from that point on I’m guessing that if we swap your and your father’s roles in the report, we’d get a fairly accurate description of what happened in the kitchen. You argued, she turned her back on you to walk out, you knew where the knife was, and the rest played out more or less of its own accord. And when your father got home and discovered what had happened, you came up with this plan together.”
Harry saw no reaction in her eyes. Just an even, intense, black hatred. And realised that his conscience felt just fine. The authorities gave guns to nineteen-year-olds and ordered them to kill. And this one had killed her mother and was prepared to let her innocent father throw himself under the bus for her. Sara wasn’t going to be one of the figures who visited Harry in his nightmares.
“Andreas loves me,” she whispered. It sounded like her mouth was full of sand. “But Mum lured him away from me. She seduced him just so I couldn’t have him. I hate her. I…” She was close to tears. Harry held his breath. They were almost there, the race was on, he just needed a few more words on tape, but crying would cause a delay, and in the delay the avalanche might grind to a halt. Sara raised her voice. “I hate that fucking bitch! I should have stabbed her even more, I should have cut off that smug face she was so fucking proud of!”
“Mm.” Harry leaned back in his chair. “You wish you’d killed her more slowly, is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes!”
Confession to murder. Touchdown. Harry cast a quick glance through the doll’s house window and saw that Truls Berntsen had woken up and was giving him the thumbs up. But Harry felt no joy. On the contrary, the excitement he had felt just a few seconds before had been replaced by a weary sadness, almost disappointment. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, it often arose after a long chase where anticipation of solving the case had built up, anticipation of the arrest as a cathartic climax, a hope that it might change something, make the world a slightly better place. Instead, what followed was often a sort of post-case depression with associated alcoholic elements and days or weeks on the bottle. Harry imagined that it resembled a serial killer’s frustration when the murder didn’t provide any prolonged sense of satisfaction, just a feeling of anti-climax that drove him back out into the chase again. Maybe that’s why Harry—for a fleeting moment—felt bitter disappointment, as if he had briefly swapped places with her and was sitting on the other side of the table.
—
“We sorted that out very nicely,” Truls Berntsen said in the lift on the way up to the Crime Squad Unit on the sixth floor.
“We?” Harry said drily.
“I pressed the Record button, didn’t I?”
“I certainly hope so. Did you check the recording?”
“Did I check it?” Truls Berntsen raised one eyebrow questioningly. Then he grinned. “Relax.”
Harry took his eyes off the glowing floor numbers and looked down at Berntsen. And felt that he envied his colleague with the weak chin, protruding brow and the grunting laughter that had earned him the nickname Beavis, which no one dared say out loud, probably because there was something about Truls Berntsen’s passive-aggressive demeanour that meant you didn’t want to be in his line of fire during a critical situation. Truls was even less popular than Harry Hole in Crime Squad, but that wasn’t why Harry envied him. He envied Truls’s ability to not give a damn. Mind you, Harry didn’t give a damn what his colleagues thought of him either. No, it was Berntsen’s ability to shrug off any sense of responsibility, practical as well as moral, for the job he was supposed to do as a police officer. You could say a lot of things about Harry, and he was well aware that plenty of people did, but no one could take away the fact that he was a real police officer. That was one of his few blessings, and probably his greatest curse. Even when Harry was on the skids in his private life, like he had been since Rakel kicked him out, the policeman in him couldn’t just give up and tumble headlong into anarchy and nihilism the way Truls Berntsen had. No one would thank Harry for not giving up, but that was fine, he wasn’t after gratitude, and he wasn’t seeking salvation through good deeds. His tireless, almost compulsive search for the worst offenders in society had been his only reason for getting up each morning until he met Rakel. So he was grateful for that herd instinct or whatever it was, for providing him with an anchor. But part of him longed for total, destructive freedom, cutting the anchor chain and getting crushed by the breakers, or simply disappearing into the deep, dark ocean.
They got out of the lift and walked along the corridor with its red-painted walls that confirmed they had got off at the right floor, past the separate offices towards the open-plan space.
“Hey, Hole!” Skarre called from an open door. He had recently been appointed an inspector and had been given Harry’s old office. “The dragon’s looking for you.”
“Your wife?” Harry asked, not bothering to slow down to wait for Skarre’s presumably furious and failed attempt at a retort.
“Nice,” Berntsen said with a grin. “Skarre’s an idiot.”
Harry didn’t know if that was meant as an outstretched hand, but he didn’t answer. He had no intention of acquiring any more ill-advised friendships.
He turned off left without any word of goodbye and stepped in through the open door to the head-of-department’s office. A man was standing with his back to him, leaning over Katrine Bratt’s desk, but it wasn’t hard to recognise the shiny bald head with its oddly profuse wreath of black hair.
“Hope I’m not disturbing, but I heard I was wanted?”
Katrine Bratt looked up, and the Chief of Police Gunnar Hagen spun around as if he had been caught doing something. They looked at Harry in silence.
He raised an eyebrow. “What? You’ve already heard?”
Katrine and Hagen exchanged a look. Hagen grinned. “Haveyou?”
“What do you mean?” Harry said. “I was the one who questioned her.”
Harry’s brain searched and came up with a suggestion that the police lawyer Harry had called after the interview to discuss the father’s release must have called Katrine Bratt in turn. But what was the Chief of Police doing here?
