Bjørn fixed his eyes ahead of him.
There was a nice place in Toten, a ridge from which the fields looked like a rolling yellow sea on a moonlit spring night. Where a young guy with a driving license could sit in a car and kiss a girl. Or sit alone with a sob in his throat and dream about one.
“If no one knows, how did you find out?” Bjørn asked, without any real interest in the answer, just to delay his departure for a few more seconds.
“Deduction,” Harry Hole said.
Bjørn Holm smiled tiredly. “Of course.”
—
Harry got out, unfastened the baby carrier from the back seat and lifted it out. He looked down at the sleeping child. Unsuspecting. All the things we don’t know. All the things we will be spared. The simple sentence Alexandra had uttered that night when Harry declined the condom she offered him.
You don’t want another kid, do you?
Anotherkid? Alexandra knew perfectly well that Oleg wasn’t his biological son.
Anotherkid? She knew something, something he didn’t know.
Anotherkid. A slip of the tongue, a simple mistake. In the eighties, psychologist Daniel Wegner claimed that the subconscious constantly makes sure we don’t blurt out things we want to keep secret. But that when the secret pops up from the subconscious, it informs the conscious part of the brain and forces it to think about it. And from then on it’s only a matter of time before the truth slips out by mistake.
Anotherkid. Alexandra had checked the cotton bud Bjørn had sent in against the database. Where the DNA profiles of all police officers who worked at crime scenes were stored, so that there would be no confusion if they messed up and left their own DNA at the scene. So not only did she have Bjørn’s DNA and could rule out the possibility that he was the father—she had both parents’ DNA, and could see that there were two matches: Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole. That was the secret that her oath of confidentiality prevented her from telling anyone except the person who had requested the analysis, Bjørn Holm.
The night Harry had sex, or at least some form of intercourse, with Katrine Bratt, he had been so drunk that he didn’t remember anything. Or, more accurately, he remembered something, but thought it was something he’d dreamed. But then he started to suspect when he noticed that Katrine was avoiding him. And when Gunnar Hagen—rather than Harry—was asked to be the child’s godfather, even though Harry was obviously a much closer friend of both Katrine and Bjørn. No, he hadn’t been able to rule out the possibility that something had happened that night, something that had ruined things between him and Katrine. The way it had ruined things between him and Rakel when, after the christening, just before Christmas, she had turned his life upside down by asking him if he had had sex with Katrine in the past year. And he hadn’t had the sense to deny it.
Harry remembered his own confusion after she had thrown him out and he was sitting on his hotel bed with a bag containing a few clothes and toiletries. He and Rakel were, after all, both adults with realistic expectations, they loved each other with all their faults and idiosyncrasies, they weregoodtogether. So why would she throw all that away because of a simple mistake, something that had happened and was over, which had no consequences for the future? He knew Rakel, and it didn’t make sense.
That was when he figured out what Rakel had already figured out but hadn’t told him. That that nighthadhad consequences, that Katrine’s child was Harry’s, not Bjørn’s. When had she first suspected? At the christening, maybe, when she saw the baby. But why hadn’t Rakel told him, why had she kept it to herself? Simple. Because the truth would help no one, it would just ruin things for even more people than it had already: Rakel herself. But that wasn’t something Rakel could live with. The fact that the man she shared her bed, her life with—but with whom she didn’t have a child—had a child, one that was living among them, one they would have to see.
The sower. Svein Finne’s words on the recording from outside the Catholic church had been echoing through Harry’s head during the past day, like an echo that wouldn’t fade.Because I am the sower. No. It was him, Harry, who was the sower.
He watched as Bjørn turned the key in the ignition and turned the radio on in the same automatic movement. The engine started, then settled into its rhythm, rumbling good-naturedly in neutral. And through the gap at the top of the passenger window, Rickie Lee Jones’s voice floated above Lyle Lovett’s on “North Dakota.” The car slipped into gear and slowly drove away. Harry watched it go. Bjørn, who couldn’t drive without listening to country music. Like gin and tonic. Not even when Harry was lying drugged in the seat beside him and they were on their way to Rakel’s. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange. Bjørn had probably wanted company. Because he could never have felt so alone as he did then. Not even now, Harry thought. Because he had seen it in Bjørn’s eyes before the car drove off. Relief.
50
Johan Krohn opened his eyes. Looked at the time. Five past six. He thought his ears must be mistaken and rolled over to go back to sleep, but then he heard it again. The doorbell downstairs.
“Who’s that?” Frida murmured sleepily beside him.
That, Johan Krohn thought, is the devil himself coming to claim his due. Finne had given him forty-eight hours to leave his response by the gravestone, and that didn’t expire until that evening. But there was no one else who rang doorbells anymore. If there was a murder and they needed a defense lawyer straightaway, they phoned. If there was a crisis at work, they phoned. Even the neighbours phoned if they wanted something.
“It’s probably to do with work,” he said. “Go back to sleep, darling, I’ll go and answer.”
Krohn closed his eyes for a moment and tried to take deep, calm breaths. He hadn’t slept well, had just stared into the darkness all night as his brain chewed over the same question: How on earth was he going to stop Svein Finne?
He, the master tactician of the courtroom, hadn’t managed to come up with an answer.
If he arranged for Finne to get Alise to himself, he would be making himself an accomplice to a crime. Which was bad enough in itself, both for Alise and for him. And if he made himself an accomplice, that would only give Finne an even stronger hand when—and there was no question that it would be when—he showed up with more demands. Unless he could somehow persuade Alise to have sex with Finne, of course, so that it was voluntary. Was that a possibility? And what would he have to promise Alise in return? No, no, it was an impossible idea, as impossible as the one Frida had spontaneously suggested as a way of solving the problem in the fictitious case: hiring a hitman to get rid of Finne.
Should he confess his misdemeanour to Frida instead? A confession. The truth. Atonement. The thought was liberating. But it was no more than a brief, soothing puff of wind under the blazing sun in a desert with an unbroken horizon of hopelessness. She would leave him, he knew that. The firm, the courtroom victories, the newspaper articles, his reputation, the admiring glances, the parties, the women, the offers, to hell with all that. Frida and the children, they were all he had, they always had been. And when Frida was alone, when she was no longer his, hadn’t Finne more or less said straight out that she would be open game, that he would take her? If you looked at it like that, didn’t he have a moral obligation to bear his heavy secret alone and make sure that Frida didn’t leave him, for her own safety’s sake? Which in turn meant that he would have to let Finne have Alise, and the next time Finne…Oh, it was a fiendish Gordian knot! He needed a sword. But he had no sword, just a pen and a babbling mouth.
He swung his legs out of bed and put them into his slippers.
“I’ll be back soon,” he said. As much to himself as Frida.
He went downstairs and through the hall towards the oak door.
And knew that when he opened it, he needed to have his answer ready for Finne.
