Dagny looked at him. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had a liver-coloured scar running across one side of his face like a no-entry sign. But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softened it, something that made it almost handsome.
“Am I?” she asked.
“Yes. And I’m here to ask for your help to catch the man who raped you.”
Dagny flinched. “Me?You’ve misunderstood, Hole. I’m not the person who was raped. If it was actually a rape at all.”
Hole didn’t answer. Just held her gaze. Now he was the one looking hard at her.
“He was trying to get you pregnant,” the police officer said. “And now that he’s hoping you’re carrying his child, he’s keeping watch over you. Has he been?”
Dagny blinked twice. “How do you know…”
“That’s his thing. Has he threatened you with what will happen if you have an abortion?”
Dagny Jensen swallowed. She was about to ask him to leave, but found herself hesitating. She didn’t know if she could trust what he said about catching Finne, there wasn’t much to go on. But this policeman had something the others hadn’t had. Resoluteness. There was determination in him. Maybe it’s a bit like with priests, Dagny thought; we trust them because we’re so desperate to believe what they say is true.
—
Dagny poured coffee into the cups on her small, folded-out kitchen table.
The tall policeman had squeezed himself onto the chair between the worktop and the table. “So Finne wants you to meet him at the Catholic church in Vika this evening? At nine o’clock?” He hadn’t interrupted her while she was talking, hadn’t taken any notes, but his bloodshot eyes had stayed on her, giving her the feeling that he was taking in every word, that he was seeing it in his mind’s eye the way she did, frame by frame of the short horror film that kept replaying inside her head.
“Yes,” she said.
“OK. Well, obviously we could pick him up there. Question him.”
“But you haven’t got any evidence.”
“No. Without evidence we’d have to let him go, and because he’d realise it was you who told us…”
“…I’d be in even more danger than I am now.”
The policeman nodded.
“That was why I didn’t report him,” Dagny said. “It’s like shooting a bear, isn’t it? If you don’t bring it down with your first shot, you won’t have time to reload before it gets you. In which case it’s better not to have fired the first shot.”
“Mm. On the other hand, even the largest bear can be brought down by a single, well-aimed shot.”
“How, though?”
The policeman put one hand around his coffee cup. “There are several ways. One is to use you as bait. Fitted with a hidden microphone. Get him to talk about the rape.”
He looked down at the table.
“Go on,” she said.
He raised his head. The blue of his irises looked washed-out. “You’d have to ask him about the consequences if you don’t do as he says. That way we’d have the threats. If we have those and a conversation in which he indirectly confirms the rape, we’d have enough on tape to get him convicted.”
“You still use tape?”
The policeman raised his coffee to his lips.
“Sorry,” Dagny said. “I’m just so…”
“Of course,” the policeman said. “And I’d understand completely if you said no.”
“You said there were several ways?”
