Kaja squeezed her hand tightly round the handle. Listened. Breathed. Waited. Numb. That was what was so strange: her heart was pounding as if she were on the brink of panic, but at the same time she felt completely indifferent. Scared of dying, but not particularly interested in living. Even so, she had got through the debriefing with the psychologist when they stopped in Tallinn on the way home. And sailed under the radar.
20
Harry woke up, and everything was the same. A few seconds passed before he remembered, realised it wasn’t a nightmare, and the clenched fist hit him in the guts. He rolled onto his side and stared at the picture on the table. Rakel, Oleg and himself, smiling, sitting on a boulder surrounded by autumn leaves, on one of thosehikesRakel was so keen on, and which Harry suspected that he had rather started to enjoy. And for the first time he thought the thought: if this was the start of a day that was only going to get worse, how many more days could he handle? He was in the process of giving himself an answer when he realised he hadn’t been woken by the alarm clock. His phone, lying next to the picture, was vibrating almost silently, like the buzz of a hummingbird. He grabbed it.
It was a text message containing a picture.
Harry’s heart began to beat faster.
He tapped the screen twice with his finger, and it felt as if his heart had stopped.
Svein Finne, “the Fiancé,” was standing with his head bowed, facing the camera, his eyes focused a little way above it. The sky above his head had a reddish glow.
Harry leapt out of bed, picked up his trousers from the floor and pulled them on. Yanked on a T-shirt on his way to the door, pulled on his coat and boots and rushed out into the stairwell. He stuck his hands in his pockets to check that everything he had put in them the previous evening was still there: car keys, handcuffs and the Heckler& Koch pistol.
He burst out of the door, breathed in the cold morning air and jumped in the Escort that was parked on the edge of the pavement. Three and a half minutes if he ran. But he needed the car for part two. Harry quietly cursed the starter motor when it failed to work the first time. It would be game over at the next MOT. He turned the key again and pressed the accelerator.There!Harry skidded up the wet cobbles of Stensberggata, almost deserted so early in the morning. How long did people stand at graves? He cut across the beginnings of the morning rush on Ullevålsveien and parked on the pavement on Akersbakken right in front of the north gate to Vår Frelsers Cemetery. He left the car unlocked with its police badge clearly visible on the dashboard.
He ran, but stopped when he reached the gate. From where he was standing, at the top of the sloping cemetery, he immediately caught sight of the lonely figure standing in front of the grave. His head was bowed, and a long, thick Native American plait was hanging down his back.
Harry clasped the butt of the pistol in his coat pocket and started walking. Not fast, not slow. He stopped when he was three metres from the man’s back.
“What do you want?”
The sound of the man’s voice made Harry shiver. The last time he had heard Svein Finne’s gravelly, resounding priest’s voice they had been sitting in a cell in Ila Prison, when Harry was trying to get help to catch the man who was now lying in the grave in front of them. Back then Harry had had no idea that Valentin Gjertsen was Svein Finne’s son. In hindsight, he couldn’t help thinking he should have suspected something. Should have realised that such sick, violent fantasies must have come from the same source, one way or another.
“Svein Finne,” Harry said, and heard his voice shake. “You’re under arrest.”
He didn’t hear Finne laugh, just saw his shoulders move. “That seems to be your standard line whenever you see me, Hole.”
“Put your hands behind your back.”
Finne let out a deep sigh. He put his hands behind his back with a nonchalant gesture, as if it made his posture more comfortable.
“I’m going to put handcuffs on you. And before you think of doing anything stupid, you should know that I’ve got a pistol aimed at the base of your spine.”
“You’d shoot me in the base of thespine, Hole?” Finne turned his head and grinned. Those brown eyes. The thick, wet lips. Harry breathed through his nose. Cold. He needed to stay cold now, not think about her. Think about what he was going to do, nothing else. Simple, practical things.
“Because you think I’m more frightened of being paralysed than of dying?”
Harry took a deep breath in an attempt to stop himself trembling. “Because I want a confessionbeforeyou die.”
“Like you got from my boy? And then you shot him?”
“I had to shoot him because he was resisting arrest.”
“Yes, I daresay that’s how you choose to remember it. That’s probably how you remember shooting me too.”
Harry saw the hole in Svein Finne’s palm, like Torghatten, the mountain with a hole you can see daylight through. From a bullet fired during an arrest early in Harry’s police career. But it was the other hand that caught his attention. The grey watchstrap around his wrist. Without lowering the pistol, he grabbed Finne’s wrist with his free hand and turned it over. Pressed the face of the watch. Red numbers indicating the time and date lit up.
The click of the handcuffs sounded like a damp kiss in the empty cemetery.
—
Harry turned the ignition key counterclockwise, and the engine died.
“A beautiful morning,” Finne said, looking through the Escort’s windshield down at the fjord below them. “But why aren’t we at Police Headquarters?”
“I was thinking of giving you a choice,” Harry said. “You can give me a confession here and now, and we can drive back down for breakfast and a warm cell in Police Headquarters. Or you can deny it, and you and I can take a little walk into that wartime bunker.”
