“Great. See you soon. I hope.”
Harry stood there looking in front of him for a few moments after he hung up. He found himself looking at a television screen above the counter of a café that jutted out into the concourse. It showed a clip of him walking into Oslo Courthouse. From the vampirist case, again. Harry quickly turned back towards the phone. Called Bjørn’s number, which he also knew by heart.
“Holm.”
“Harry.”
“No,” Bjørn said. “He’s dead. Who are you?”
“Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
“I said, who are you?”
“I’m the person you gaveRoad to Ruinto.”
Silence.
“I still likeRamonesandRocket to Russiabetter,” Harry said. “But it was a bloody good thought.”
Harry heard a noise. It took him a few moments to realise that it was crying. Not a child’s crying. A grown man’s.
“I’m at Central Station,” Harry said, pretending he hadn’t heard. “They’re looking for me, I’ve got a wounded knee, not a single krone to my name, and I need free transport to Lyder Sagens gate.”
Harry heard heavy breathing. A half-stifled “bloody hell” muttered to himself. Then Bjørn Holm said in a voice so thin and shaky it was as if Harry had never heard it before.
“I’m on my own with the lad. Katrine’s at a press conference up at Kripos. But…”
Harry waited.
“I’ll bring the baby, he needs to get used to cars,” Bjørn said. “Shopping centre entrance in twenty?”
“A couple of people have been looking at me a bit too closely, so if you could manage fifteen?”
“I’ll try. Stand by the tax—”
His voice was cut off by a long bleeping tone. Harry looked up. His last coin was gone. He put his hand inside his jacket and stroked his chest and rib.
—
Harry was standing in the shade outside the north-side entrance to Oslo Central Station when Bjørn’s red Volvo Amazon slid past the armada of waiting taxis and stopped. A couple of the drivers who were standing talking glanced over suspiciously, as if they thought the vintage car was a black-market taxi or, even worse, Uber.
Harry limped over to the car and got in the passenger seat.
“Hello, ghost,” Bjørn whispered from his usual half-lying position. “To Kaja Solness’s?”
“Yes,” Harry said, realising that the whispering was because of the baby carrier that was strapped to the back seat.
They pulled out onto the roundabout next to Spektrum, where Bjørn had persuaded Harry to go to a Hank Williams tribute concert last summer. Then Bjørn had called Harry on the morning of the concert to say he was at the maternity ward, and that things had started a bit earlier than expected. And that he suspected the little kid was eager to get out so he could go with his dad to hear his first Hank Williams songs.
“Does Miss Solness know you’re on your way?” Bjørn asked.
“Yes. She says she’s left a key under the doormat.”
“No one leaves keys under the doormat, Harry.”
“We’ll see.”
They passed beneath Bispelokket and the government buildings. Past the mural ofThe Screamand Blitz, past Stensberggata where Bjørn and Harry had driven on the way to Harry’s flat early on the night of the murder. When Harry had been so out of it that he wouldn’t have noticed a bomb going off. Now he was concentrating hard, hearing every change in the sound of the engine, every creak of the seats, and—when they stopped at a red light on Sporveisgata close to Fagerborg Church—the child’s almost silent breathing in the back seat.
