Farther along we’ll know more about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why;
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it all by and by.
Harry had heard the song many times. It wasn’t just about the idea that the truth would come out one day. It was about how the deceitful lived happy lives, while those they had deceived suffered.
48
The driver of the new Eggedal Express to Oslo looked at the tall man who had just climbed up the steps into her bus. The bus stop was situated on a deserted stretch of Highway 287, and the man was wearing camouflage trousers, so she assumed he was one of the hunters who came up from Oslo to shoot their wildlife. There were three things that didn’t quite make sense, though. It wasn’t hunting season. His clothes were at least two sizes too small, and he had a white bandage sticking out from below the edge of his black woolly hat. And he had no money for a ticket.
“I fell in the river, injured myself and lost both my phone and my wallet,” he said. “I’m staying in a cabin, and I have to get into the city. Can you let me have an invoice?”
She looked at him, considering the situation. The bandage and the ill-fitting clothes seemed to fit his story. And the express bus to Oslo hadn’t been an overnight success; people still seemed to prefer taking the local bus to Åmot and changing to the hourly express service there, so there were plenty of free seats. The question was, what was likely to cause more trouble: turning him away from the bus, or letting him come on board?
He may have noticed her hesitation, because he cleared his throat and added: “If I could borrow a phone, I can arrange for my wife to meet me at the bus station with money.”
She looked at his right hand. He had a prosthetic middle finger made of some sort of greyish-blue metal. On the next finger he was wearing a wedding ring. But she had no inclination to let that hand touch her phone.
“Sit down,” she said, then pressed a button and the door closed behind him with a drawn-out hiss.
—
Harry limped towards the back of the bus. He noticed that the other passengers, or at least those who had overheard his conversation with the driver, averted their gaze. He knew they were praying silently that this slightly disconcerting man who looked like he had come straight from the battlefield wasn’t going to sit down next to them.
He found a free double seat.
He looked out at the forest and landscape gliding past. He looked at his watch, which had confirmed what the advertisements had claimed: it could survive most things, including a waterfall or two. Five minutes to five. He’d be in Oslo just after it got dark. Darkness suited him fine.
Something was sticking into him just beneath his sore rib. He put his hand inside his jacket and moved the barrel of the High Standard pistol he had taken with him from the cabin. He closed his eyes when they passed the lay-by where he had turned the car around before. He felt the bus and his heart rate speed up.
It had come to him in a moment of clarity. The song with the line “We’ll understand it all” hadn’t been a piece of a puzzle, but a door that had swung open in the darkness and shown him the light. Not the whole picture, not the context, but enough for him to know that the story didn’t make sense, that something was missing. Or, to be more accurate, that something had been inserted into it. Enough for him to change his mind and wrench the steering wheel.
He had spent the past twenty-four hours piecing the whole thing together. And he was now reasonably sure that he knew what had happened. It had been relatively easy to imagine how the crime scene could have been manipulated and cleaned by someone with a degree of insight into detection methods. And how the murder weapon with Rakel’s blood had been planted in his record collection, seeing as only two other people had been to his flat since the murder. He just had to prove either the manipulation of the scene or the planting of evidence.
It had been trickier to figure out the motive.
Harry had ransacked his memory for signs, for an explanation. And this morning, when he was lying half awake, half asleep in the bunk bed, when he finally found it—or it found him—he had at first dismissed it as nonsense. That couldn’t be it. He chewed it over. Could it? Could it really be so straightforward that the motive had come out that night he had been lying in bed in Alexandra’s flat?
—
Sung-min Larsen slipped unseen into a seat at the back of the conference centre in Kripos’s new premises at Nils Hansens vei 25.
In front of him sat an unusually large gathering of journalists and photographers, even though the press conference had been called outside normal working hours. He guessed Ole Winter had made sure someone had leaked the name that had lured them here: Harry Hole. Now Winter was sitting with Landstad—Winter’s latest favourite detective—behind the table on the podium, checking the second hand on his watch. Presumably they wanted to synchronise the start with the news on some television channel or other. Beside Winter and Landstad sat another detective from the team, and the head of the Criminal Forensics Unit, Berna Lien. And, slightly apart from the others, on the far right, sat Katrine Bratt. She looked out of place, and was staring down at some papers in front of her. Sung-min doubted there was anything relevant there, or that she was even reading it.
He saw Ole Winter take a deep breath, literally inflating himself. Winter had swapped his cheap old suit for a new one Sung-min thought he recognised from the Swedish label Tiger. He guessed it had been bought specially after he had conferred with the recently appointed female head of PR, who seemed to have a degree of fashion sense.
“So, welcome to this press conference,” Winter said. “My name is Ole Winter, and as head of the preliminary investigation I’d like to give an account of our work on the murder of Rakel Fauke, in which we have had a number of breakthroughs, and—after a lot of intensive teamwork—are now confident that we have solved.”
Winter should have left a dramatic pause at that point, Sung-min thought, for maximum effect, but the detective ploughed on, and who knows, perhaps that came across as more professional, more credible. You shouldn’t make a spectacle of murder. Sung-min made a mental note, storing it for later use. Because one day he would be the person sitting up there. If he hadn’t known it before, he knew it now. He was going to pull that tired, grizzled old monkey down from his perch.
“We hope and believe that this will reassure those directly involved, those around them, and the public in general,” Winter said. “Tragically, it appears that the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fauke’s murder has taken his own life. I shan’t speculate about the motives for that, but obviously we can’t help wondering if it’s connected to the fact that he realised that Kripos were closing in on him.”
Sung-min noted that Winter said “the person we have now found evidence to link to Rakel Fauke’s murder” rather than “the suspect,” “taken his own life” rather than “missing,” and “closing in on” rather than “about to arrest.” And that Winter was churning out speculations in the same sentence as saying he wasn’t going to speculate. Sung-min also noted that a more cautious, professionally sober choice of words would have worked better.
“When I say ‘appears to have taken his own life,’ ” Winter said, “that’s because the person in question is still officially missing. Some of you will be aware that a car drove into the river beside Highway 287 yesterday morning. We can now make public the fact that the car belonged to the suspect, Harry Hole…”
