Katrine thought he was saying it to Gert until she realised he meant her, and that he was right.
“It’s Harry,” she said.
Bjørn looked at her with a frown as she gave him some time. The time an airbag takes to deploy and hopefully muffle some of the impact. Obviously it’s pointless when things really have gone to hell, because then an airbag can’t save anyone, it’s just left hanging in shreds like a deflated balloon out of the front windshield of a Ford Escort that’s standing on end and looks like it tried to dive through the rock, bury itself, wipe itself out.
“No,” Bjørn said, in an equally vain protest against what her silence was telling him. “No,” he repeated in a whisper.
Katrine waited a little longer, still holding Gert, who was tickling her neck with his tiny hands. Then she told Bjørn about the car. About the truck on Highway 287, about the hole in the ice, about the waterfall, about the car. As she spoke, he put one of those pale hands with those stubby fingers to his mouth, and his eyes filled with tears that hung on his thin, colourless eyelashes before falling, one by one, like icicles dripping in the spring sun.
She had never seen Bjørn Holm like this, never seen the big, solid man from Toten lose it so completely. He cried, sobbed, shaking with a force as if something inside him was fighting to get out.
Katrine took Gert into the living room. It was a reflex, to protect the child from his father’s dark grief. He would inherit enough darkness as it was.
An hour later she had put Gert to bed, and now he was asleep in their bedroom.
Bjørn had gone to sit in the office that would eventually become Gert’s bedroom. She could still hear him crying in there. She was standing at the door, wondering if she should go in, when her phone rang.
She went into the living room and answered it.
It was Ole Winter.
“I know you’d prefer to postpone the announcement that Harry Hole is the dead man,” he said.
“Missing,” she said.
“The divers have found a smashed mobile phone and a pistol in the river below the falls. My team have just confirmed that both belonged to Harry Hole. We’re putting together the last pieces that mean we have a watertight case, and that means we can’t wait, Bratt, I’m sorry. But seeing as this was a personal wish…”
“Not personal, Winter, I’m thinking about the force. We need to be as well prepared as possible when it comes to presenting this to the public.”
“As things stand, it will be Kripos presenting the results of Kripos’s work, not the Oslo Police. But I can see your dilemma—the press will obviously want to ask you, as Hole’s employer, a number of detailed questions, and I can appreciate that you all need some time to discuss among yourselves how to answer those. In order to meet you halfway, Kripos won’t be calling a press conference tomorrow morning, as originally planned, but will delay it until tomorrow evening, at 19:00.”
“Thanks,” Katrine said.
“Assuming you can manage to stop Sigdal Sheriff’s Office from publishing the name of the deceased…”
Katrine took a deep breath and managed to stop herself saying anything.
“…until after we at Kripos have made our own announcement.”
You want breaking news with your name on it, Katrine thought. If Sigdal goes public with the name of the deceased, the public will put two and two together, feel that they’ve solved the case themselves, and that Kripos have been slow, so slow that Hole managed to make a quick exit from life. But if you get your way, Winter, you’ll make it look like it was your team’s incisive detective work that outsmarted master detective Harry Hole, got him on the run and finally drove him to take his own life.
But she said none of this either.
Just a quick “OK.” And: “I’ll inform the Chief of Police.”
They ended the call.
Katrine crept into the bedroom. Leaned over the worn, blue crib Bjørn’s parents had given them, the crib all the family’s children and grandchildren had slept in when they were little.
Through the thin wall she could still hear Bjørn crying in the office. Quieter now, but still with the same despair. And as she looked down at Gert’s sleeping face, she thought that Bjørn’s grief was, in a peculiar way, making hers easier to bear. Now she had to be the strong one, the one who couldn’t allow herself the luxury of reflection and sentimentality. Because life went on, and they had a child to take care of.
A child who suddenly opened his eyes.
Blinked, looked around, trying to find something to focus on.
She ran her hand over those strange blond curls.
“Who would have thought that a black-haired girl from the west and a red-headed lad from Toten would have a blond Viking,” Bjørn’s grandmother had said when they took Gert to see her in her nursing home in Skreia.
