Why not? Maybe he needed to feed the hate.
He thought about Rakel. Rakel on the stone floor. Svein Finne over her. Feed the hate.
And then it came.
Harry screamed out loud into the darkness and opened his eyes.
What the hell was going on, why was his brain storing these images of himself covered in blood?
—
Svein Finne woke up at the sound of a branch snapping.
He was wide awake in an instant, staring up into the darkness and the roof of his two-man tent.
Had they found him? Here, so far from the nearest buildings, in dense pine forest in such rough terrain that even dogs would have trouble getting through it?
He listened. Tried to identify what it could be from the sounds. A snort. Not human. Heavy steps on the forest floor. So heavy that he could feel a slight vibration through the ground. A large animal. An elk, perhaps. When he was young, Svein Finne had often gone off into the forest, taking his tent with him, and would spend the night in Maridalen or Sørkedalen. The Oslo forests were vast, and provided freedom and refuge for a young lad who often got in trouble, didn’t fit in, who people tended either to avoid or wanted to bully. People often reacted like that when there was something they were afraid of. Svein Finne hadn’t been able to understand how they knew. He kept it hidden from them, after all. He only revealed who he was to a very few people. And he could understand that they got scared. He felt more at home out here in the forest with the animals than in the city that lay just a couple of hours’ walk away. And there were more animals here, right on their doorstep, than most of the people in Oslo knew. Deer, hares, pine martens. Foxes, of course; they thrived on human waste. The occasional red deer. One moonlit night he’d watched a lynx sneak past on the other side of a lake. And birds. Ospreys. Tawny owls and boreal owls. He hadn’t seen any of the goshawks and sparrowhawks that had been common here when he was growing up. But a buzzard had drifted past between the trees above him.
The elk had come closer. It had stopped breaking branches now. Elk break branches. A snout pressed against the tent, sniffed up and down. A snout that was sniffing for food. In the middle of the night. It wasn’t an elk.
Finne rolled over in his sleeping bag, grabbed his flashlight and hit the snout with it. It disappeared and he heard a deep sniff outside. Then the snout was back, and this time it pressed so hard against the tent that when Finne switched his flashlight quickly on and off again, he was able to see what it was. He had seen the outline of the big head and jaw. There was a scratching sound of claws tearing at the fabric of the tent. Finne was as quick as lightning, grabbing the handle of the knife he always kept by the side of the underlay, pulled the zip down and rolled out of the tent, making sure he didn’t have his back to the animal. He had set up camp on a few square metres of snow-free ground on a slope, in front of a large rock that divided the meltwater so that it ran down either side of the tent, and now he tumbled naked down the slope. He felt no pain as twigs and stones cut into his skin, just heard the cracking of the undergrowth as the bear came after him. It had noticed his flight, and its hunting instincts had kicked in, and Svein Finne knew that no one could outrun a bear, not on this terrain. But he had no intention of trying to do that. Nor of lying down and pretending to be dead, the way some people say is a good strategy if you run into a bear. A bear that had just emerged from hibernation is desperate from starvation and would be more than happy to eat even a corpse. Fucking idiots. Finne reached the bottom of the slope, found his feet, pressed his back against a thick tree trunk and straightened up. He switched the flashlight on and aimed it at the noises coming towards him.
The animal stopped abruptly when the light shone in its eyes. Blinded, it stood up on its hind legs and flailed at the air with its paws. It was a brown bear. About two metres tall. Could have been bigger, Finne thought, as he gripped the sheath between his teeth and drew thepuukkoknife. Grandfather Finne had said the last bear to be caught in the forests around Oslo—in 1882, by forest ranger Kjelsås, next to a fallen tree in Grønnvollia below Opkuven—had been almost two and a half metres tall.
The bear fell onto all fours. Its skin was hanging loose around it. It was panting hard, swinging its head from side to side, looking alternately into the forest and towards the light, as if it couldn’t decide.
Finne held the knife up in front of him. “Don’t want to work for your food, Bruin? Feeling a bit weak tonight?”
The bear roared, as if in frustration, and Finne laughed so loud that it echoed off the rock face above them. “My grandfather was one of the men who ate your grandfather back in 1882,” Finne called. “He said it tasted terrible, even with plenty of seasoning. But I could imagine taking a bite of you all the same, Bruin, so come on! Come on, you stupid bastard!”
Finne took a step towards the bear, which backed away slightly, shifting its weight from side to side. It looked confused, almost cowed.
“I know how it feels,” Finne said. “You’ve been shut up for ages, then suddenly you get out, and there’s too much light, too little food, and you’re all alone. Not because you’ve been cast out—because you’re not like them, you’re not a herding animal, you’re the one who’s cast them out.” Finne took another step closer. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel lonely, does it? Spread your seed, Bruin, make others who are like you, who understand you. Who understand how to honour their father! Hah! Hah! Get lost, because there are no females in Sørkedalen. Get lost, this is my territory, you poor, starving bastard! All you’ll find here is loneliness.”
The bear pressed down on its front paws, as if it was about to stand up again but couldn’t manage it.
Finne saw it now. The bear was old. Maybe sick. And Finne detected an unmistakable smell. The smell of fear. It wasn’t the far smaller, two-legged creature in front of it that was making it frightened, but the fact that this creature wasn’t emitting the same smell. It was fearless. Crazy. Capable of anything.
“Well, old Bruin?”
The bear snarled, revealing a set of yellow teeth.
Then it turned and padded away until it was swallowed up by the darkness.
Svein Finne stood and listened to the sound of twigs snapping farther and farther away.
The bear would be back. Either when it was even hungrier, or when it had eaten and felt strong enough to conquer the territory. Tomorrow he would have to start looking for somewhere that was even less accessible, possibly somewhere with walls that could keep a bear out. But first he had to go into the city and buy a trap. And visit the grave. The herd.
—
Katrine couldn’t sleep. But her son was asleep in his crib over by the window, that was the important thing.
She rolled over in bed and looked directly into Bjørn’s pale face. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t snoring. And that meant he wasn’t asleep either. She studied him. His thin, reddish eyelids with their visible veins, his pale eyebrows, white skin. It was as if he’d swallowed a lit lightbulb. Inflated and illuminated from within. Plenty of people had been surprised when they got together. No one had asked straight out, obviously, but she had seen the question on their faces: what makes a beautiful, self-sufficient woman choose a less than averagely attractive man with no money? A female MP on the Justice Committee had taken her aside at a networking cocktail party for “women in important positions” and told her she thought it was great that Katrine had married a male colleague whose status was lower than hers. Katrine had replied that Bjørn was bloody good in bed, and asked the politician if she felt ashamed of having a high-status husband who earned more than her, and what did she think the chances were that her next husband would be lower-status? Katrine had no idea who the woman’s husband was, but from the look on her face she could tell that she had got pretty close to the mark. She hated those “influential women” gatherings anyway. Not because she didn’t support the cause, not because she didn’t think that true equality was something worth fighting for, but because she couldn’t summon up the forced sisterly solidarity and emotional rhetoric. Occasionally she felt like telling them to shut up and stick to asking for equal opportunities and equal pay for equal work. Sure, a change was long overdue, and not only when it came to direct sexual harassment, but also the indirect and often intangible sexual-control tactics men used. But that mustn’t be allowed to rise to the top of the agenda and draw attention away from what equality was really about. Women would only harm themselves yet again if they prioritised hurt feelings over the size of their pay packets. Because only better wages, more economic power, would make them invulnerable.
Perhaps she would have felt differently if she’d been the most vulnerable person in the bedroom. She had sought out Bjørn when she was at her weakest, her most fragile, when she needed someone who would love her unconditionally. And the slightly plump but kind and charming forensic specialist had hardly been able to believe his luck, and responded by proclaiming her his queen, almost to the point of self-negation. She had told herself that she wouldn’t exploit that, that she had seen too many people—women and men alike—turn into monsters simply because their partner invited it. And she had tried. She really had.
She had been tested before, but when the real test came along—the third person, the baby—the survival instinct that got you through the day took over and consideration for your partner had to give way.
