“I know the access code of someone who has. Because he was pissed off that IT had given him his bust measurement: BH100. I guessed the password.”
“His date of birth?”
“Almost. HW1953.”
“Which is?”
“The year Hank Williams was found dead in a car on New Year’s Day.”
“So, nothing but random thoughts, then. Shall we go and think them somewhere warmer than this?”
“Yes,” Harry said, about to take a last drag on the cigarette.
“Hold on,” Kaja said, holding out her hand. “Can I…?”
Harry looked at her before passing her the cigarette. It wasn’t true that he was able to see. He was more blind than any of them, blinded by tears, but now it was as if he had managed to blink them away for a moment and, for the first time since they’d met again, actuallysawKaja Solness. It was the cigarette. And the memories flooded back, suddenly and unexpectedly. The young police officer who had travelled to Hong Kong to fetch Harry home so he could hunt a serial killer the Oslo Police hadn’t managed to catch. She had found him on a mattress in Chungking Mansions, in a kind of limbo between intoxication and indifference. And it wasn’t exactly clear who had needed rescuing most: the Oslo Police or Harry. But here she was again. Kaja Solness, who denied her own beauty by showing her sharp, irregular teeth as often as she could, thereby spoiling her otherwise perfect face. He remembered the morning hours they had spent in a large, empty house, the cigarettes they had shared. Rakel used to want the first drag of a cigarette, Kaja always wanted the last.
He had abandoned them both and fled to Hong Kong again. But he had come back for one of them. Rakel.
Harry saw Kaja’s raspberry lips close around the yellow-brown filter and tense ever so slightly as she inhaled. Then she dropped the butt onto the damp brown earth between the puddle and the gravel, trod on it and set off towards the car. Harry was about to follow her, but stopped.
His eyes had been caught by the squashed cigarette butt.
He thought about pattern recognition. They say that the human brain’s ability to recognise patterns is what distinguishes us from animals, that our automatic, never-ending search for patterns repeating is what allowed our intelligence to develop and made civilisation possible. And he recognised the pattern in the shoeprint. From the pictures in the file titled “Crime-scene photographs” in the investigative team’s material. A short comment attached to the photograph said they hadn’t found a match in Interpol’s database of shoe-sole patterns.
Harry cleared his throat.
“Kaja?”
He saw her thin back stiffen as she made her way to the car. God knows why, perhaps she detected something in his voice that he himself hadn’t heard. She turned towards him. Her lips were drawn back, and he could see those sharp teeth.
26
“All infantry soldiers have dark hair,” the stocky, fit-looking man sitting in the low armchair at the end of the coffee table said. Erland Madsen’s chair was positioned at a ninety-degree angle to Roar Bohr’s, instead of directly opposite him. That was so Madsen’s patients could decide for themselves if they wanted to look at him or not. Not having to see the person you were talking to had the same effect as talking in a confessional: it gave the patient a feeling of talking to themselves. When you don’t see a listener’s reactions in the form of body language and facial expressions, the threshold for what you tell them is lowered. He had toyed with the idea of getting hold of a couch, even if that would have a been a cliché, something of a showpiece.
Madsen glanced down at his notepad. At least they had been allowed to keep those. “Can you elaborate?”
“Elaborate on dark hair?” Roar Bohr smiled. And when the smile reached those slate-grey eyes, it was as if the tears in them—the silent, dry tears that just lay there—emphasised the smile, the way the sun shines extra strongly when it’s at the edge of a cloud. “They have dark hair, and they’re good at putting a bullet in your skull from a couple of hundred metres. But the way to recognise them when you approach a checkpoint is that they have dark hair and are friendly. Terrified and friendly. That’s their job. Not to shoot the enemy as they’ve been trained, but the last thing they ever thought they’d have to do when they applied to join the corps and went through hell to be accepted into Special Forces. Smiling and being friendly to civilians passing through a checkpoint that has been blown to pieces by suicide bombers twice in the previous year. It’s called winning hearts and minds.”
“Did it ever win any?”
“No,” Bohr said.
As a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder, Madsen had become a sort of Doctor Afghanistan, the psychologist whom people who were struggling after their experiences in war-torn areas heard about and sought out. But even if Madsen had learned a lot about the life and feelings they talked about, he also knew from experience that it was better to be a blank page. To let the patients talk as long as they liked about concrete, simple things. Nothing could be taken for granted, he needed to get them to realise that they had to paint thewholepicture for him. His patients weren’t always aware of where their pressure points were; occasionally they lay in things the patients themselves regarded as trivial and unimportant, in things they may otherwise have skipped over, in things their unconscious was working through in secret, out of sight. But right now, it was a sort of limbering up.
“So no hearts?” Madsen said.
“No one in Afghanistan really understood why ISAF were there. Not even everyone in ISAF. But no one believes that ISAF were there solely to bring democracy and happiness to a country that has no concept of democracy, nor any interest in the values it represents. The Afghans say what they think we want to hear as long as we help them with drinking water, supplies and mine clearance. But apart from that, we can go to hell. And I’m not just talking about people sympathetic to the Taliban.”
“So why did you go?”
“If you want to get on in the Army, you need to have been part of ISAF.”
“And you wanted to get on?”
“There’s no other way. If you stop, you die. The Army has a slow, painful and humiliating death in store for anyone who thinks they can stop striving to get ahead.”
“Tell me about Kabul.”
