“I only need twenty, thirty kroner.”
Kasko gave a short laugh. “I can see you need medicine but, like I said, so do I.”
The man crouched down beside him. Pulled something from his inside pocket. It was a police ID. Shit, not again. The man in the picture looked vaguely like the man in front of him.
“I am hereby seizing your takings from illegal begging in a public place,” he said, reaching for the cup.
“Like fuck you are!” Kasko yelled, snatching the cup. He clutched it to his chest.
A couple of passersby glanced at them.
“You’re giving that to me,” the man said. “Or I’ll take you down to the station, have you arrested, then there’ll be no fix for you until sometime later on tomorrow. How does a night like that sound?”
“You’re bluffing, you fucking junkie bastard! At a vote in the City Council on 16 December 2016, both primary and subsidiary proposals to ban fundraising in public, including begging, were chucked out.”
“Mm,” the man said, pretending to think this over. He moved closer to Kasko, screening him from people walking past, and whispered: “You’re right. It was a bluff. But this isn’t.”
Kasko stared. The man had put his hand inside his camouflage jacket, and was now holding a pistol aimed at Kasko. A big, noisy fucking pistol in the middle of evening rush hour at Central Station! The guy must be completely fucking deranged. The bandage around his head and a scary fucking scar from his mouth to his ear. Kasko knew all too well what drug cravings could do to otherwise perfectly normal people—he’d only recently seen what an iron bar could do, and here was this guy with a gun. He would have to sell the sunglasses after all.
“Here,” he groaned, giving the guy the paper cup.
“Thanks.” The man took it and looked inside.
“How much for the shades?”
“Huh?”
“The sunglasses.” The man pulled out all the notes that were in the cup and offered them to him. “Is this enough?”
Then he snatched the shades from Kasko, put them on, stood up and limped across the flow of people, towards the old phone box outside the 7-Eleven.
—
First Harry called his own voicemail, tapped in the code and checked that Kaja Solness hadn’t left a message to suggest she had tried to answer any of his calls. The only message was from a shaken Johan Krohn: “I need to ask you to keep this message between the two of us. Svein Finne is engaged in blackmail. Of me. And my family. I…er, please, get back to me. Thanks.”
He’ll have to call someone else, I’m dead, Harry thought as he watched the coins drop into the phone.
He called directory inquiries. Got the numbers he asked for, making a note of them on the back of his hand.
The first number he called was Alexandra Sturdza’s.
“Harry!”
“Don’t hang up. I’m innocent. Are you at work?”
“Yes, but—”
“How much do they know?”
He heard her hesitate. Heard her make a decision. She gave him a brief summary of her conversation with Sung-min Larsen. She sounded close to tears by the time she finished.
“I know how it looks,” Harry said. “But you have to believe me. Can you do that?”
Silence.
“Alexandra. If I believed I’d killed Rakel, would I have bothered to rise from the dead?”
Still silence. Then a sigh.
