“My wife…Sound doesn’t carry as far there.”
The acoustics were dry and muffled among the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Harry listened as he sat slumped in a deep leather armchair. This time it was his turn not to touch his coffee.
“Mm,” he said when Krohn had finished. “Shall we skip the bit where we beat around the bush?”
“Of course,” said Krohn, who had put a raincoat on and reminded Harry of a flasher who used to hang around in a patch of woodland in Oppsal when Harry was a boy. Øystein and Harry had snuck up on the flasher and shot at him with water pistols. But what Harry remembered most was the look of sorrow in the wet, passive flasher’s eyes before they ran off, and that he regretted it afterwards without really knowing why.
“You don’t want Finne behind bars,” Harry said. “That wouldn’t stop him telling your wife what he knows. You want Finne out of the way. For good.”
“So…” Krohn began.
“That’s your problem with taking Finne alive,” Harry continued. “Mine is that if we manage to find him at all, he may still have an alibi for between 18:00 and 22:00 that we don’t know about. It may be that he was with the pregnant woman during the hours before they went to the maternity ward. Not that I imagine that she’d come forward if Finne was killed, of course.”
“Killed?”
“Liquidated, terminated, annulled.” Harry took a drag on the cigarette, which he had lit without asking permission. “I prefer ‘killed.’ Bad things deserve bad names.”
Krohn let out a short, bemused laugh. “You’re talking about cold-blooded murder, Harry.”
Harry shrugged. “Murder, yes. Cold-blooded, no. But if we’re going to manage this, we need to lower the temperature. If you understand me?”
Krohn nodded.
“Good,” Harry said. “Let me think for a minute.”
“Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
Harry handed him the packet.
The two men sat in silence, watching the smoke rise towards the ceiling.
“If—” Krohn began.
“Shhh.”
Krohn sighed.
His cigarette had almost burned down to the filter when Harry spoke again.
“What I need from you, Krohn, is a lie.”
“OK?”
“You need to say that Finne confessed to killing Rakel. And I’ll be inviting two more people to participate in this. One works at the Forensic Medicine Institute. The other is a sniper. None of you will know the names of the others. OK?”
Krohn had nodded.
“Good. We need to write an invitation to Finne, telling him when and where to meet your assistant, then you need to attach it to the grave with something I’m going to give you.”
“What?”
Harry took one last drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in his coffee cup. “A Trojan horse. Finne collects knives. If we’re lucky, it’ll be enough to kill any other speculation stone dead.”
—
Sung-min heard a crow somewhere among the trees as he looked up at the sheer rock face in front of him. The meltwater was painting black stripes down the grey granite, which rose up some thirty metres above him. He and Kasparov had been walking for almost three hours, and it was obvious that Kasparov was in pain now. Sung-min didn’t know if it was loyalty or the hunting instinct that was driving him on, but even when they had been standing at the end of the muddy forest track looking at the fragile rope-bridge across the river, with snow and pathless forest on the other side, he had been straining at the leash to keep going. Sung-min had seen footsteps in the snow on the other side, but he would have to carry Kasparov over the bridge while at the same time holding on with at least one hand. He found himself wondering: Then what? Sung-min’s hand-sewn Loake shoes were long since soaked through and ruined, but the question now was how far he would get on the slippery leather soles on the rugged, snow-covered terrain on the other side of the river.
Sung-min had crouched down in front of Kasparov, rubbed both hands together and looked into the old dog’s tired eyes.
