“It won’t take long. There are just a couple of things I need to know.” Harry’s eyes roamed across the shoe rack behind her. “Can I come in?”
Harry noticed the hesitation. And found what he was looking for on the bottom shelf of the rack. A pair of black, Soviet military boots.
“Now isn’t a good time, I’m in the middle of…something.”
“I can wait.”
Pia Bohr smiled quickly. Not obviously beautiful, but cute, Harry decided. Possibly what Øystein would call a Toyota: not the boys’ first choice when they were teenagers, but the one that stayed in the best shape as the years passed.
She looked at her watch. “I need to go and get something from the chemist. We can talk while we walk, OK?”
She grabbed a coat from a hook, came out onto the steps and closed the door behind her. Harry had noted that the lock was the same sort as Rakel’s, no self-locking mechanism, but Pia Bohr didn’t bother to look for a key. Safe neighbourhood. No strange men who’d just walk into your house.
They walked past the garage, through the gate and down the road, where the first Tesla cars were humming home from their short days at work.
Harry put a cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Are you going to pick up sleeping pills?”
“Sorry?”
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “Insomnia. You told our detective that your husband was at home all night of the tenth and eleventh of March. To know that for certain, you can’t have slept much.”
“I…Yes, it’s sleeping pills.”
“Mm. I needed sleeping pills after Rakel and I split up. Insomnia eats away at your soul. What have they put you on?”
“Er…Imovane and Somadril.” Pia was walking faster.
Harry lengthened his stride as he clicked the lighter beneath the cigarette but failed to get it to light. “Same as me. I’ve been on them for two months. You?”
“Something like that.”
Harry put the lighter back in his pocket. “Why are you lying, Pia?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Imovane and Somadril are heavy stuff. If you take them for two months, you’re hooked. And if you’re hooked, you take themeverynight. Because they work. So well that if you did take them that night, you were in a coma and would have no idea what your husband was doing. But you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’s hooked on sedatives. You’re a little too energetic, a little too quick-witted.”
Pia Bohr slowed down.
“But of course you could easily prove me wrong,” Harry said. “By showing me the prescription.”
Pia stopped walking. She put her hand in the back pocket of her tight jeans. Pulled out and unfolded a piece of blue paper.
“See?” she said with a light vibrato in her voice, holding it up and pointing. “So-ma-dril.”
“I see,” Harry said, taking the paper from her before she had time to react. “And when I look more closely, I see that it’s been prescribed for Bohr. Roar Bohr. He evidently hasn’t told you how strong the medication he needs is.”
Harry handed the prescription back to her.
“Perhaps there are other things he hasn’t told you, Pia?”
“I…”
“Was he at home that night?”
She swallowed. The colour in her cheeks was gone, her energetic vitality punctured. Harry adjusted his estimate of her age by five years.
“No,” she whispered. “He wasn’t.”
