He sat down on the sofa.
Looked at the High Standard pistol lying beside the Yahtzee game. Bohr had said E14 had got hold of them without them being registered. He turned the pistol over in his hand.
Was he likely to need it?
Maybe, maybe not.
Harry Hole looked at the time. Thirty-six hours had passed since he had stumbled out of the forest towards the cabin, to the broken window, and let himself in. He had got out of his wet clothes, cleaned himself off, found clean clothes, a sweater, long johns, a camouflage uniform, thick woollen socks. He’d put everything on and laid down under a blanket on the bunk bed, and stayed there until the worst of the shivering stopped. He had considered lighting the stove but decided against it; someone might see the smoke from the chimney and get it into their head to investigate. He had looked through the cupboards until he found a first-aid kit, and managed to staunch the bleeding from the wound on his forehead. He wrapped a bandage around his head, then used the remainder to cover his knee, which was already so swollen it looked like it had eaten an ostrich egg. He breathed in and out, and tried to figure out if the pain meant his ribs were broken, or if he was just badly bruised. Otherwise he was in one piece. Some would doubtless call it a miracle, but it was really just simple physics and a bit of luck.
Harry breathed in again, heard it whistle and felt a stab of pain in his side.
OK, more than a bit of luck.
He had tried to avoid thinking about what had happened. That was the new advice for police officers who had suffered serious trauma: not to talk about it, not to think about it until at least six hours had passed. Recent research showed—in marked contrast to previous assumptions—that “talking things through” directly after a traumatic experience didn’t reduce the probability of developing PTSD, but the opposite.
Obviously it hadn’t been possible to shut it out altogether. It kept playing in his head like a YouTube clip that’s gone viral. The way the car had toppled over the edge of the waterfall, the way he had hunched up in his seat to see out of the windshield; the weightlessness when everything was falling at the same speed, which had made it oddly easy to grip the seat belt with his left hand and the buckle with his right, it just made his movements slower because they were happening underwater. The way he had seen the white foam bursting from the huge black rock that was rushing towards him as he pushed the seat belt into the lock. And then the pressure. And then the noise.
And then he was dangling in the seat belt with his head against the airbag on the steering wheel, and realised he could breathe, that the sound of the waterfall was no longer muffled, but sharp, hissing as it crashed and spat at him through the shattered back window. It took him a few seconds to realise that he wasn’t just alive, but remarkably unharmed.
The car was standing on end, the front and the steering wheel pressed towards the seats, or the other way around, but not so badly that his legs were cut or trapped. All the windows were broken, so the water inside the car must have drained out within a second or two. But the resistance of the dashboard and front windshield had probably stopped the water draining away just long enough for it to act as an extra cushion for Harry’s body, counteracting the crumpling of the chassis. Because water’s strong. The reason deep-sea fish don’t get squashed flat in the depths of the ocean under pressure that would crumple an armoured tank to the size of a tin can is because the fishes’ bodies largely consist of something that can’t be compromised, no matter how much pressure it’s put under: water.
Harry closed his eyes and played the rest of the film.
The way he had hung from his seat, unable either to undo the buckle or slip out of the belt, because both the buckle and the spool mechanism were wrecked. He had looked around, and in the broken wing mirror it looked as if two waterfalls were crashing down on him. He managed to free one piece of the mirror. It was sharp, but his hands were shaking so much that it seemed to take him an eternity to cut through the seat belt. He fell against the steering wheel and what was left of the airbag, tucked the piece of mirror into his jacket pocket in case he needed it again later, then climbed carefully out through the windshield and hoped the car wasn’t going to fall on top of him. Then he swam the short distance from the black rock to the right-hand side of the river, waded ashore, and that was when he realised that his chest and left knee hurt. The adrenaline had probably acted as a painkiller, and the Jim Beam still was, so he knew it was only going to get worse. And as he stood there, so cold that his head was throbbing, he felt something warm running across his cheek and down his neck, pulled out the fragment of mirror and saw that he had a large cut on one side of his forehead.
He looked up at the hillside. Pine trees and snow. He waded one hundred metres down the river before he found somewhere the slope seemed easy enough to climb, and started to make his way upward, but his knee gave way and he slid on a mixture of mud and snow back towards the river again. The pain in his chest was so bad that he felt like screaming, but the air had gone out of him and all that came out was an impotent wheeze, like a puncture. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t know how long he’d been out, ten seconds or several minutes. He couldn’t move. And it dawned on him that he was so cold that his muscles wouldn’t obey him. Harry howled up at the blue, innocent, merciless sky above him. Had he survived all that, only to freeze to death here on dry land?
Like hell he would.
He staggered to his feet, broke a branch off a dead tree that was half lying in the river, and used it as a crutch. After struggling ten metres up the wretched slope, he found a path through the patches of snow. Ignoring the throbbing pain in his knee, he walked north, against the current. Because of the waterfall and the chattering of his own teeth he hadn’t heard any traffic, but when he got a bit higher he saw that the road was on the other side of the river. Highway 287.
He saw a car drive past.
He wasn’t going to freeze to death.
He stood there, breathing as carefully as he could to avoid the pain in his chest.
He could get back down to the river, cross it, stop a car and get back to Oslo. Or, even better, he could call Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and get them to pick him up. Maybe they were already on their way; if the truck driver had seen what happened on 287 he had probably called them. Harry felt for his phone. Then he remembered it had been lying on the passenger seat along with the Jim Beam and his pistol, and was now lying dead and drowned somewhere in the river.
And that was when it struck him.
That he too was dead and drowned.
That he had a choice.
He walked back along the path, and stopped where he had scrambled up the slope. He used his hands and feet to shovel snow back over his tracks. Then he began to limp north again. He knew that the road followed the river, and if the path did the same, it wasn’t far to Roar Bohr’s cabin. As long as his knee held out.
His knee hadn’t held out. It took two and a half hours.
Harry looked down at the swelling bulging out from either side of the tight bandage.
It had had one night’s rest, and could have a few more hours.
Then it would just have to bear his weight.
He pulled on the woolen hat he had found, then took out the fragment of the Escort’s mirror again to see if it covered the bandage. He thought about Roar Bohr, who’d had to make his way from Oslo to Trondheim with just ten kroner. He had no money at all, but the distance was shorter.
Harry closed his eyes. And heard the voice in his head.
