“What?”
“Svein Finne. He’s got a knife.”
The policeman stared at her for a moment before he unfastened the holster on his hip and drew his pistol. He inserted an earpiece with his free hand, then pulled off the radio that was attached to his chest.
“Zero-one,” he said. “I need backup.”
“He’s escaping,” Dagny said. “You have to get him.”
The policeman looked at her. Opened his mouth as if to explain that his prime objective was to protect her, not take offensive action.
“Otherwise he’ll come back,” Dagny said.
Maybe it was something about her voice, or the expression on her face, but he closed his mouth. He took a step towards the door, put his head next to it and listened for a few seconds, with both hands round the pistol, which was pointing at the floor. Then he shoved the door open. “Police! Hands above your head!” He disappeared into the bathroom.
Dagny waited.
She heard the cubicle doors being thrown open.
All eight of them.
The policeman came back out.
Dagny took a trembling breath. “The bird has flown?”
“God knows how,” the policeman said, reaching for his radio again. “He must have climbed up the bare wall and out through the window right up by the ceiling.”
“Flown,” Dagny repeated quietly while the policeman called 01, central command, again.
“What?”
“Not climbed.Flown.”
41
“Twenty metres, you said?” asked Kripos detective Sung-min Larsen.
He gazed up towards the top of Norafossen, where the torrent of water was gushing out. He wiped his face, which was wet from the spray the westerly wind carried all the way to the bank of the river. The roar of the falls drowned out the traffic on the main road that ran along the top of the slope they had scrambled down to reach the river.
“Twenty metres,” the police officer confirmed. He had a bulldog face, and had introduced himself as Jan from Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. “It only takes a couple of seconds, but by the time you hit the ground you’re already going at seventy kilometres an hour. You don’t stand a chance.” He pointed one of his short, slightly protruding arms at the compressed wreckage of a white Ford Escort that was perched on top of a large, black rock that the water had worn smooth as it struck it and sprayed out in all directions. Like an art installation, Sung-min Larsen thought. An imitation of Lord, Marquez and Michels’s ten half-buried Cadillacs in the desert at Amarillo in Texas, where he had driven with his father when he was fourteen. His father was a pilot, and had wanted to show his son the wonderful country where he had learned to fly the Starfighter, a plane that his father claimed was more of a danger to its pilot than the enemy, a joke that his father had repeated many times on that trip, between coughing fits. Lung cancer.
“There’s no question at all,” Jan from Sigdal said, pushing his police cap farther back on his head. “The driver shot out through the windshield, hit the rocks and died instantly. The body’s been carried downstream in the river. The water’s so high right now that it probably won’t have stopped until it reached Solevatn. And that’s still frozen, so we won’t see any sign of him for a while.”
“What did the truck driver say?” Sung-min Larsen asked.
“He said the Escort veered across into his lane, the driver must have been looking for something in the glove compartment, something like that, then suddenly realised what was about to happen and lurched back onto the right side of the road in the nick of time. The driver said it all happened so fast that he didn’t really have time to see what happened, but when he looked in the mirror the car was gone. But, seeing as the road was straight, he should have been able to see it. So he stopped and called us. There’s rubber on the road, white paint on the crash barrier and a hole in the ice where the Escort went through.”
“What do you think?” Larsen asked. There was another gust of wind and he automatically put his hand over his tie, even if it was held in place with a tie clip with the Pan-Am logo on it. “Dangerous driving or attempted suicide?”
“Attempted? He’s dead, I tell you.”
“Do you think he intended to drive into the truck and lost his nerve at the last moment?”
The policeman stamped the mixture of mud and snow from his knee-length boots. Looked down at Sung-min Larsen’s smartly polished Loake shoes. Shook his head. “They don’t usually.”
“They?”
“People who come here to the green mile. They’ve made their minds up. They’re…” He took a deep breath. “Motivated.”
