“I advised the daughter to bring a lawyer, but she declined,” Harry said. “And I repeated the offer before the start of the interview, but she declined again. We’ve got that on tape. Well, not tape, but on the hard drive.”
Neither of them smiled, and Harry could tell that something was wrong. Very wrong.
“Is it the father?” Harry asked. “Has he…done something?”
“No,” Katrine said. “It’s not the father, Harry.”
Harry’s brain unconsciously noted the details: the fact that Hagen had let Katrine, the one of them who was closer to him, take over. And that she had used his first name when she didn’t have to. To soften the blow. In the silence that followed, he felt the clawing at his chest again. And even if Harry didn’t have any great belief in telepathy and foresight, it felt as if what was coming was what the claw, the little glimpses, had been trying to tell him all along.
“It’s Rakel,” Katrine said.
6
Harry held his breath. He had read that it was possible to hold your breath for so long that you died. And that you don’t die from too little oxygen, but from too much carbon dioxide. That people can’t usually hold their breath for more than a minute or a minute and a half, but that one Danish free diver had held his for over twenty minutes.
Harry had been happy. But happiness is like heroin; once you’ve tasted it, once you’ve found out that happiness exists, you will never be entirely happy with an ordinary life without happiness again. Because happiness is something more than mere satisfaction. Happiness isn’t natural. Happiness is a trembling, exceptional state; seconds, minutes, days that you know simply can’t last. And sorrow at its absence doesn’t come afterwards, but at the same time. Because with happiness comes the terrible insight that nothing can be the same again, that you are already missing what you have, you’re worrying about the withdrawal pangs, grief at the loss, cursing the awareness of what you are capable of feeling.
Rakel always used to read in bed. Sometimes she read out loud to him, if it was something he liked. Like Kjell Askildsen’s short stories. That made him happy. One evening she read a sentence that stuck in his mind. About a young girl who had lived her whole life alone with her parents in a lighthouse, until a married man, Krafft, arrived and she fell in love. And she thought to herself:Why did you have to come and make me so lonely?
Katrine cleared her throat, but her voice still sounded muffled. “They’ve found Rakel, Harry.”
He felt like asking how they could have found someone who wasn’t missing. But to do that he would have to breathe. He breathed. “And…that means what?”
Katrine was struggling to keep control of her face, but gave up and clapped her hand to her mouth, which was contorted into a grimace.
Gunnar Hagen took over. “The worst, Harry.”
“No,” Harry heard himself say. Angry. Pleading. “No.”
“She—”
“Stop!” Harry held his hands up defensively in front of him. “Don’t say it, Gunnar. Not yet. Just let me…just wait a bit.”
Gunnar Hagen waited. Katrine had covered her face with her hands. She was sobbing silently, but her shaking shoulders gave her away. His eyes found the window. There were still greyish-white islands and small continents of snow on the brown sea of Botsparken. But in the past few days buds had begun to appear on the lime trees that led up to the prison. A month or so from now, those buds would suddenly burst into life, and Harry would wake up and see that Oslo had once again been invaded by the blitzkrieg of spring overnight. And it would be utterly meaningless. He had been alone most of his life. It had been fine. Now it wasn’t fine. He wasn’t breathing. He was full of carbon dioxide. And he hoped it would take less than twenty minutes.
“OK,” he said. “Say it.”
“She’s dead, Harry.”
7
Harry weighed his mobile phone in his hand.
Eight digits away.
Four less than the time he had lived in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, those four grey tower blocks that were a small community in themselves, with hostels for guest workers from Africa and the Philippines, restaurants, prayer rooms, tailors, money-changers, maternity rooms and funeral parlours. Harry’s room had been on the second floor of C-block. Four square metres of bare concrete with space for a shabby mattress and an ashtray, where a dripping air-conditioning unit had counted the seconds, while he himself lost count of the days and weeks as he slid in and out of an opium haze that decided when he came and went. In the end, Kaja Solness from the Crime Squad Unit had turned up to take him home. But before then he had fallen into a rhythm. And every day, after eating glass noodles at Li Yuan or walking down Nathan Road and Melden Row to buy a lump of opium in a baby’s bottle, he had walked back, waited by the lift doors of the Chungking Mansions and looked at the payphone hanging on the wall.
He had been on the run from everything. From his work as a murder detective, because it was eating away at his soul. From himself, because he had become a destructive force that killed everyone near him. But first and foremost from Rakel and Oleg, because he didn’t want to hurt them as well. No more than he already had done.
And every day, as he waited for the lift, he had stood there staring at the payphone. Touching the coins in his trouser pocket.
Twelve numbers, and he would be able to hear her voice. Reassure himself that she and Oleg were OK.
But he couldn’t know thatuntilhe called.
Their lives had been in chaos, and anything could have happened since he’d left. It was possible that Rakel and Oleg had been dragged down into the maelstrom left in the Snowman’s wake. Rakel was strong, but Harry had seen it happen in other murder cases, where the survivors also ended up as victims.
But as long as hedidn’tcall, they were there. In his head, in the payphone, somewhere in the world. As long as he didn’t know better—or worse—he could carry on seeing them in front of him, hiking in Nordmarka in October. Where he, Rakel and Oleg had gone walking. The young boy running ahead of them, excitedly trying to catch falling leaves. Rakel’s warm, dry hand in Harry’s. Her voice, laughing as she asked what he was smiling for, him shaking his head when he realised that he had actually been smiling. So he never touched the payphone. Because as long as Harry resisted pressing those twelve numbers, he could always imagine that it could be like that again.
