His client took a step forward, and the light from the window fell across half his face. He ran his right hand over the red-painted railing. Krohn shuddered when he saw the red paint through the large hole in the back of Finne’s hand.
“Your wife,” Finne said. “I want her.”
Krohn felt his throat tighten.
Finne flashed him a grotesque grin. “Relax, Krohn. Even if I have to admit that I’ve thought a lot about Frida in the past few days, I’m not going to touch her. Because I don’t touch other men’s women, I want my own. As long as she’s yours, she’s safe, Krohn. But obviously you could hardly hold on to a proud, financially independent woman like Frida if she got to hear about the pretty little assistant you had with you when I was questioned. Alise. That was her name, wasn’t it?”
Johan Krohn stared. Alise?Heknew about Alise?
Krohn cleared his throat. It sounded like windshield wipers on dry glass. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Finne pointed one finger towards his eye. “Eagle eyes. I’ve seen you. Watching you fucking is like watching a couple of baboons. Fast, efficient, without any great emotion. It won’t last, but you don’t want to go without it, do you? We all need warmth.”
Where? Krohn wondered. At the office? In the hotel room he sometimes booked for them? In Barcelona in October? It was impossible. When they made love it was always high up, where they knew they couldn’t be seen from the other side of the street.
“What will last, on the other hand, unless someone tells Frida about Alise, is this.” Finne jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the house. “Family. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it, Krohn?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about or what you want,” Krohn said. He had put both elbows on the railing behind him. It was supposed to convey relaxed ambivalence, but he knew he probably looked more like a boxer who was already on the ropes.
“I’ll leave Frida alone if I can have Alise,” Finne said, flicking his cigarette into the air. Its glowing tip curved through the darkness like Krohn’s a short while ago before going out in the darkness. “The police are looking for me, I can’t move as freely as I’d like. I need a little…”—he grinned again—“assistancein order to get some warmth. I want you to arrange for me to have the young lady to myself, somewhere safe.”
Krohn blinked in disbelief. “You want me to try to persuade Alise to see you alone? So you can…assault her?”
“Forget ‘try’ and ‘assault.’ Youwillpersuade her, Krohn. And I’m going to seduce her, not assault her. I’ve never assaulted anyone, that’s all a big misunderstanding. The girls don’t always understand what’s best for them, or the task nature has set them, that’s all. But they come to their senses soon enough. Just as Alise will too. She’ll come to realise that if she threatens this family, for instance, she’ll have me to answer to. Hey, don’t look so glum, Krohn, you’re getting two for the price of one here: my silence, as well as the girl’s.”
Krohn stared at Finne. The words were echoing through his head.Your secret’s safe with me.
“Johan?”
Frida’s voice came from inside the house, and he heard her steps on the stairs. Then a voice whispered close to his ear, accompanied by the smell of tobacco and something rancid, bestial. “There’s a grave in Vår Frelsers Cemetery. Valentin Gjertsen. I’ll expect to hear from you within two days.”
Frida reached the top of the stairs and started to walk towards the terrace, but stopped in the light inside the door.
“Brr, it’s cold,” she said, folding her arms. “I heard voices.”
“Psychiatrists say that’s a bad sign.” Johan Krohn smiled, and began to walk towards her, but wasn’t quick enough. She had already stuck her head out of the door and was looking in both directions.
She looked up at him. “Were you talking to yourself?”
Krohn looked around the terrace. Empty. Gone.
“I was practising a defence statement,” he said. He breathed out and walked back in through the terrace door, into the warmth, into their house, into his wife’s arms. When he noticed her let go to look up at him, he kept hold of her so she couldn’t read his face, see that something was wrong. Because Johan Krohn knew that the defense speech he was thinking about would never win the case, not this one. He knew Frida and her thoughts about infidelity too well, she’d condemn him to a lifetime of loneliness, with access to the children but not to her. The fact that Svein Finne also appeared to know Frida so well only made the matter even more unsettling.
—
Katrine heard the baby crying in the stairwell. It made her quicken her steps, even though she knew the child was in the best of hands. Bjørn’s hands. Pale hands with soft skin and thick, stubby fingers that could do everything that needed doing. No more, no less. She shouldn’t complain. So she tried not to. She had seen what happened to some women when they became mothers, they became despots who thought the sun and all the planets orbited around mother and child. Who suddenly treated their husbands with resigned derision when they didn’t demonstrate lightning-fast reactions and ideally a telepathic understanding of the needs of mother and child. Or, to be more accurate, what the mother decided were the needs of the child.
No, Katrine definitely didn’t want to be one of those. But was that somewhere inside her anyway? Hadn’t she occasionally felt like slapping Bjørn, watching him curl up and submit, humiliate himself? She had no idea why. Nor how on earth it could ever happen, seeing as Bjørn was always one step ahead of her and had already sorted out anything she might be able to base any criticism on. And obviously there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who’s better than you, who constantly holds up a mirror that makes you hate yourself.
No, she didn’t hate herself. That was an exaggeration. She just thought Bjørn was too good for her from time to time. Not “too good” as intoo attractive, buttoo nice, as inannoyingly nice. That they could both have had a slightly better life if he had chosen someone more like himself, a stable, gentle, down-to-earth, kind, slightly plump farmer’s daughter from Østre Toten.
The crying stopped as she was putting the key in the lock. She opened the door.
Bjørn was standing in the hallway with Gert on his arm. The boy looked at her with big, blue, tear-moistened eyes from under those laughably long blond curls that stood out like coiled springs around his head. Gert was named after Katrine’s father, even if it had been Bjørn’s suggestion. And now the child’s face lit up in a smile that was so wonderful that it made Katrine’s heart ache and brought a lump to her throat. She let her coat fall to the floor and walked towards them. Bjørn kissed her cheek before handing her the child. She pressed the little body to her and inhaled the smell of milk, vomit, warm skin and something sweet, irresistible, something that was her child alone. She closed her eyes and was home. Completely at home.
She was wrong. They couldn’t have it any better than this. It was the three of them, now and forever, that was just how it was.
“You’re crying,” Bjørn said.
