“No thanks.”
“No? You don’t want another kid, do you?”
“I didn’t mean the condoms.” Harry put one hand on the two of hers that had started to undo his belt.
“What the hell?” she snapped. “What’s the point of you if you don’t want to fuck?”
“Good question.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Low testosterone levels, at a guess.”
With an angry sniff Alexandra rolled onto her back. “She isn’t just your ex-wife, Harry, she’sdead. When are you going to accept that?”
“You think five days of celibacy is excessive?”
She looked at him. “Funny. But you’re not dealing with it as well as you’re pretending to, are you?”
“Pretending is half the job,” Harry said, raising his hips and pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “Research shows that you end up in a better mood if you exercise your smile muscles. If you want to cry, laugh. I sleep. What’s the smoking policy in your bedroom?”
“Everything’s allowed. But when people smoke in front of me, my policy is to read what it says on the packet. Tobacco kills, my friend.”
“Mm. That bit about ‘my friend’ is nice.”
“It’s to make you recognise that it isn’t just something you’re doing to yourself, but to everyone who cares for you.”
“I got that. So, at the risk of cancer and feeling even more guilty, I am hereby lighting a cigarette.” Harry inhaled and blew the smoke up at the ceiling lamp. “You like lights,” he said.
“I grew up in Timisoara.”
“Oh?”
“The first town in Europe to have electric streetlamps. Only New York beat us to it.”
“And that’s why you like lights?”
“No, but you like fun facts.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Such as the fact that Finne had a rapist for a son.”
“That’s a bit more than a fun fact.”
“Why?”
Harry took a drag on the cigarette, but it tasted of nothing. “Because the son gives Finne a strong enough motive for revenge. I hunted down his son in connection with several murder investigations. And it ended with me shooting him.”
“You…”
“Valentin Gjertsen was unarmed, but provoked me to shoot by pretending he was reaching for a gun. Unfortunately I was the only witness, and Internal Investigations found it problematic that I had fired three shots. But I was cleared. They couldn’t, as they put it, prove that I hadn’t acted in self-defense.”
“And Finne found out about this? And you think he killed your ex-wife as a result?”
Harry nodded slowly. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
“Logically, he ought to have killed Oleg.”
