“One of our detectives has gone to see Gule, Hole’s neighbour,” he said. “They’re reconstructing the circumstances in which he gave Hole his alibi.”
“Bjørn says Harry was dead drunk when he left him in his flat, that Harry couldn’t possibly have…”
“Appeared to be dead drunk,” Sung-min said. “I’m assuming an alcoholic is more than capable of acting intoxicated. But it’s possible he overplayed it.”
“Oh?”
“According to Peter Ringdal, the owner of—”
“I know who he is.”
“Ringdal says he’s seen Hole drunk before, but never in such a state that he had to be dragged out. Hole can handle his drink better than most, and Ringdal says he hadn’t drunk that much more than he had seen him drink before. It may be that Hole wanted to look more incapacitated than he was.”
“I haven’t heard any of this before.”
“Because it was assumed that Hole had an alibi, no one looked into it particularly thoroughly. But I paid a visit to Peter Ringdal this morning, after I’d spoken to Freund. It turns out that he’d just had a visit from Harry Hole, and from what Ringdal says, I get the impression Hole realised that the net was starting to close in around him, and was searching desperately for a scapegoat. But once he realised that Ringdal was no use, he’d run out of options, and…” Sung-min gestured towards the road in front of them, leaving Bratt to finish the sentence for herself if she wanted to.
Katrine Bratt raised her chin, the way men of a certain age do to pull the skin of their necks from shirt collars that are too tight, but here it made Sung-min think of an athlete trying to motivate herself mentally, shake off a lost point before launching into battle for the next. “What other lines of inquiry are Kripos looking into?”
Sung-min looked at her. Had he expressed himself imprecisely? Didn’t she realise that this wasn’t a line of inquiry, but a well-lit four-lane highway where even Ole Winter couldn’t get lost, where they—apart from the fact that they weren’t in possession of the culprit’s earthly remains—had already reached their goal?
“There aren’t any other lines of inquiry now,” he said.
Katrine Bratt nodded and nodded as she alternated between closing her eyes and staring ahead of her, as if this simple fact was something that took a lot of brain power to process.
“But if Harry Hole is dead,” she said, “there isn’t really any rush to go public with the fact that he’s Kripos’s prime suspect.”
Sung-min began to nod too. Not because he was promising anything, but because he realised why she was asking.
“The local police have issued a press statement saying something along the lines of ‘man missing after a car ended up in the river next to Highway 287,’ ” Sung-min said, pretending he didn’t know it was an exact quote, because experience had taught him that it made people nervous and less communicative if you let them see too much of your good memory, your ability to read people, your deductive brain. “I can’t see any pressing reason for Kripos to issue any more information to the public, but of course that’s a decision for my bosses.”
“Winter, you mean?”
Sung-min looked at Bratt, wondering why she had felt it necessary to mention his boss by name. Her face revealed no ulterior motive, and there was no reason to suspect she knew how uncomfortable it made Sung-min every time he was reminded of the fact that Ole Winter was still his superior. Sung-min had never told a soul that he considered Ole Winter a mediocre detective and a distinctly weak leader. Not weak in the sense that he was too soft, quite the reverse, he was old-fashioned, authoritarian and stubborn. Winter lacked the confidence to admit when he was wrong, and to accept that he ought to delegate more of the management to younger colleagues with younger ideas. And, truth be told, sharper detectives. But Sung-min had kept all of this to himself because he assumed he was alone in these opinions within Kripos.
“I’ll talk to Winter,” Katrine Bratt said. “And Sigdal Sheriff’s Office. They won’t want to go public with the name of the missing man until his family have been informed, and if I undertake to inform them, that puts me in control of when the local police can identify Harry Hole.”
“Good thinking,” Sung-min said. “But sooner or later his name’s going to get out, and neither you nor I can stop the public and media speculating when they find out that the dead man—”
“Missing man.”
“…is the husband of the woman who was murdered recently.”
He saw a shiver run through Bratt. Was she going to start crying again? No. But when she was alone in her own car, almost certainly.
“Thanks for the coffee,” she said, feeling for the door handle. “Let’s keep in touch.”
—
At Solevatn, Katrine Bratt pulled off the road into an empty lay-by. She parked and looked out across the large, ice-covered lake as she concentrated on her breathing. When she had got her pulse down she took out her phone and saw that she had received a text from Kari Beal, Dagny Jensen’s bodyguard, but that could wait. She called Oleg. Told him about the car, the river, the accident.
There was silence at the other end. A long silence. And when Oleg spoke again, his voice sounded surprisingly calm, as if it wasn’t as much of a shock to him as Katrine had anticipated.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Oleg said. “He’s committed suicide.”
Katrine was about to reply that she didn’t know, then realised that it wasn’t a question.
“It might take a while to find him,” she said. “There’s still ice on the lake.”
