Harry raised an eyebrow. “So you know his name?”
“You talk a lot when you’re drunk, Harry. And far too much about your ex-wife and the boy.”
“Oleg isn’t mine, he’s from Rakel’s first marriage.”
“You told me that too, but isn’t that just biology?”
Harry shook his head. “Not for Svein Finne. He didn’t loveValentin Gjertsen as a person, he hardly even knew him. He loved Valentin simply because he was carrying his genes. Finne’s driving force is to spread his seed and father children. Biology is everythingto him. It’s his way of gaining eternal life.”
“That’s sick.”
“Is it?” Harry looked at his cigarette. Wondered where lung cancer was in the list of things queuing up to kill him. “Maybe we’re more tightly bound by biology than we like to think. Maybe we’re all born bloodline chauvinists, racists and nationalists, with an instinctive desire for global domination for our own family. And then we learn to ignore it, to a greater or lesser extent. Most of us, anyway.”
“We still want to know where we come from, in purely biological terms. Did you know that over the past twenty years at the Forensic Medical Institute we’ve seen a 300 percent increase in the number of DNA tests from people who want to know who their father is, or if their child really is theirs?”
“Fun fact.”
“That tells us something about how our identity is bound up with our genetic inheritance.”
“You think?”
“Yes.” She picked up the glass of wine she’d left on the bedside table. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“In bed with me?”
“In Norway. I came here to find my father. My mother never liked talking about him, all I knew was that he was from Norway. When she died, I bought a ticket and came to look for him. That first year I had three different jobs. All I knew about my father was that he was probably intelligent, because my mother was pretty average but I always got top grades in Romania, and it only took me six months to learn Norwegian fluently. But I couldn’t find my father. So I got a grant to study chemistry at NTNU, then got a job at the Forensic Medical Institute, working on DNA analysis.”
“Where you could carry on looking.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I found him.”
“Really? You must have had luck on your side, because as far as I know, you lot delete DNA profiles taken in paternity cases after one year.”
“In paternity cases, yes.”
Then the penny dropped for Harry. “You found your father in the police database. He had a criminal record?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. What had he—”
Harry’s trouser pocket vibrated. He looked at the number. Pressed Answer.
“Hi, Kaja. Did you get my message?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft against his ear.
“And?”
“And I agree, I think you’ve found Finne’s motive.”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
“I don’t know.” In the pause that followed he could hear Kaja’s breathing in one ear, Alexandra’s in the other. “It sounds like you’re lying down, Harry. Are you at home?”
