“You’ll have to tell me, when you think the time is right,” Bjørn Holm said quietly.
“I will,” Harry said, and heard how odd his voice sounded.
They drove through Norabakken and turned into Lyder Sagens gate.
“Here,” Harry said.
Bjørn stopped. Harry didn’t move.
Bjørn waited a bit, then switched the engine off. They looked at the dark house behind the fence.
“What do you see?” Bjørn asked.
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “I see a woman one-metre-seventy-something tall, but everything else about her is bigger than me. Bigger house. More intelligent. Better morals.”
“Are you talking about Kaja Solness, or the usual?”
“The usual?”
“Rakel.”
Harry didn’t answer. He looked up at the black windows behind the bare witches’ fingers of the branches in the hedge. The house was saying nothing. But it didn’t look like it was asleep. It looked like it was holding its breath.
Three short notes. Don Helms’s steel guitar on “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Bjørn pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. “Text message,” he said, and went to put his phone back.
“Open it,” Harry said. “It’s for me.”
Bjørn did as Harry said.
“I don’t know what this is or who it’s from, but it says benzodiazepine and flunitrazepam.”
“Mm. Familiar substances in rape cases.”
“Yes. Rohypnol.”
“Can be injected into a sleeping man, and if the dose is strong enough he’d be out for at least four or five hours. He wouldn’t even notice if he was being bundled about and carried all over the place.”
“Or raped.”
“Quite. But what makes flunitrazepam such an effective drug for rape is of course that it induces amnesia. Total blackout, the victim doesn’t remember a thing about what happened.”
“Which is presumably why it isn’t manufactured anymore.”
“But it’s sold on the street. And someone who’s worked in the police would know where to get hold of it.”
The three notes rang out again.
“Christ, rush hour,” Bjørn said.
“Open this one too.”
There was a whimper from the back seat and Bjørn turned to look at the baby carrier. Then the breathing settled down again and Harry saw the tension leave Bjørn’s body, and his colleague tapped at his phone.
“It says electricity usage went up by 17.5 kilowatts per hour between 20:00 and 24:00 hours. What does that mean?”
“It means that whoever killed Rakel did it at around 20:15.”
“What?”
