“How’s things?” Bjørn asked in his cheery Toten dialect.
“That depends,” Harry said, going into the bathroom. “Can you lend me three hundred kroner?”
“It’s Sunday, Harry. The liquor store’s closed today.”
“Sunday?” Harry pulled his trousers off and stuffed both them and the duvet cover into the overflowing washing basket. “Bloody hell.”
“Did you want anything else?”
“You were the one who called me, around nine o’clock.”
“Yes, but you didn’t answer.”
“No, looks like my phone’s been under the sofa for the past day or so. I was at the Jealousy.”
“I thought as much, so I called Øystein and he told me you were there.”
“And?”
“So I went over there. You really don’t remember any of this?”
“Shit. What happened?”
Harry heard his colleague sigh, and imagined him rolling his slightly protruding eyes, his pale moon of a face framed by a flat cap and the bushiest, reddest beard in Police Headquarters.
“What do you want to know?”
“Only as much as you think I need to know,” Harry said as he discovered something in the basket of dirty washing. The neck of a bottle, sticking up from the dirty underpants and T-shirts. He snatched it up. Jim Beam. Empty. Or was it? He unscrewed the top, put it to his lips and tipped his head back.
“OK, the short version,” Bjørn said. “When I arrived at the Jealousy Bar at 21:15 you were drunk, and by the time I drove you home at 22:30, you had only spoken coherently about one thing. One single person. Guess who?”
Harry didn’t answer, he was squinting cross-eyed at the bottle, following the drop that was trickling down inside it.
“Rakel,” Bjørn said. “You passed out in the car and I got you up into your flat, and that was that.”
Harry could tell by the speed of the drop that he had plenty of time, and he moved the bottle away from his mouth. “Hm. That was that?”
“That’s the short version.”
“Did we fight?”
“You andme?”
“From the way you stress ‘me,’ it sounds like I had a fight with someone. Who?”
“The Jealousy’s new owner may have taken a bit of a knock.”
“A knock? I woke up with three bloody knuckles and blood on my trousers.”
“Your first punch hit him on the nose, so there was a lot of blood. But then he ducked and you punched the wall instead. More than once. The wall’s probably still got your blood on it.”
“But Ringdal didn’t fight back?”
“To be honest, you were so fucked that there was no way you were going to hurt anyone, Harry. Øystein and I managed to stop you before you did yourself any more damage.”
“Shit. So I’m barred?”
“Oh, Ringdal deserved at least one punch. He’d played the whole of thatWhite Ladderalbum and had just put it on again. Then you started yelling at him for ruining the bar’s reputation, which you claimed you, Øystein and Rakel had built up.”
