“Yes.” He said no more, just sipped from the cup.
“But?”
The policeman shrugged. “In many ways, a church is perfect. There’s no noise, nothing to stop us getting a good-quality recording. And you’d be in a public place where he couldn’t attack you…”
“We were in a public place last time.”
“…and we could be there to monitor the situation.”
Dagny looked at him. There was something in his eyes she recognised. And now she realised what it was. It was the same thing she’d seen in her own eyes, and at first had thought was a flaw in the mirror. A defect. Something broken. And something about his voice put her in mind of pupils with unsteady voices serving up fake explanations of why they hadn’t done their homework. She went over to the stove, put the coffee pot down and looked out of the window. Down below she could see people out for Sunday walks, but she couldn’t see him. Life, going on around her, had become an unnatural, strained idyll. Dagny had never thought about it like that before, she had just thought that was the way it was supposed to be.
She walked back and sat down on the kitchen chair.
“If I do this, I need to be certain he won’t turn up again. Do you understand that, Hole?”
“Yes, I understand. And you have my word that you’ll never see Svein Finne again. Ever. OK?”
Never. She knew that wasn’t true. Just as she had known that what the female priest said wasn’t true when she spoke of salvation. That it was meant as a comfort. But it worked. Even if we saw through “never” and “salvation,” they were passwords that opened the door to the heart, and the heart believed what it wanted to believe. Dagny could feel herself breathing easier already. She half closed her eyes. And when she looked at him like that, with the daylight coming through the window forming a halo around his head, she could no longer see the hurt in the policeman’s eyes, could no longer hear the false note in his voice.
“OK,” she said. “Tell me how we do this.”
—
Harry stopped in the street outside Kaja Solness’s house and called her number for the third time. Same result again. “The person you are calling has their phone switched off, or is…”
He opened the creaking wrought-iron gate and walked towards the house.
It was crazy. Of course it was crazy. But what else could he do?
He rang the doorbell. Waited. Rang again.
Put his eye to the large peephole in the door and saw her coat, the one she had been wearing at the funeral, hanging on a hook. And her tall black boots were standing on the shoe rack below.
He walked around the house. There were still patches of snow on the withered, flattened grass in the shade of the north side.
He looked up at the window of what had been her bedroom, although obviously she could have moved her bed into one of the other rooms. When he bent down to gather enough snow to make a snowball, he saw it. A footprint in the snow. From a boot. His brain began to search its databases. Found what it was looking for. A boot print in the snow outside the house in Holmenkollen.
His hand reached inside his jacket. Obviously, it could be a completely different print. Obviously, she could have left the house. He clasped the butt of his pistol, a Heckler & Koch P30L, hunched up and walked with long, silent strides back to the front steps. He shifted his grip on the pistol, holding it by the barrel so that he could break the glass in the peephole, but tried the door first.
It was open.
He stepped inside. Listened. Silence. He sniffed. Could only detect a faint smell of perfume—Kaja’s—probably from the scarf hanging from a hook next to her coat.
He walked along the hallway with his pistol in front of him.
The door to the kitchen was open, and the button on the coffee machine was glowing red. Harry tightened his grip on the butt, put his finger on the trigger. He moved farther into the house. The living-room door was ajar. A buzzing sound. Like flies. Harry nudged the door open cautiously with his foot, still holding the pistol in front of him.
She was lying on the floor. Her eyes were closed, and her arms were folded across her chest in that wool cardigan that was too big for her. Her body and pale face were bathed in the daylight streaming through the window.
Harry let the air out of his lungs with a groan. He lowered the pistol and crouched down. He held his thumb and forefinger around her worn slipper and pinched her big toe.
Kaja started, screamed and pulled her headphones off. “Bloody hell, Harry!”
“Sorry, I did try to get hold of you.” He sat down on the rug beside her. “I need help.”
Kaja closed her eyes, put one hand to her chest, still breathless. “So you said.”
What had previously been just a buzzing sound from the headphones was now clearly audible as familiar hard rock, played at loud volume.
