“I asked him after you’d asked me. He said he slept in June’s old room.”
“But you didn’t believe him?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because then you would have told the police that he’d slept in another room. You lied because you were worried we had something else. Something that meant he needed a stronger alibi than the truth.”
“You’re not seriously suggesting that you suspect Roar, Hole?”
Harry looked at a pair of swans that were paddling towards them. He glimpsed a flash of light from the hillside beyond the motorway. A window opening, perhaps.
“Post-traumatic,” Harry said. “What’s the trauma?”
She sighed. “I don’t know. A combination of things. Rough stuff from his childhood. And Iraq. Afghanistan. But when he came home from his last tour and told me he’d left the Army, obviously I realised that something had happened. He’d changed. Was more shut off. After a lot of nagging, I finally got it out of him that he’d killed someone in Afghanistan. Of course that’s what they were there for, but this one had got to him, and he didn’t want to talk about it. But he was able to function, at least.”
“And he isn’t now?”
She looked at Harry with the eyes of someone who’d been shipwrecked. And he realised why she had opened up to him, a stranger, so easily.Not in our neighbourhood. She had wanted this, had been longing desperately for it, she just hadn’t had anyone to talk to about it until now.
“After Rakel Fauke…after your wife’s death, he went completely to pieces. He…he’s not functioning, no.”
That flash of light again. And it struck him that it must be coming from roughly the same part of the hillside where the Bohrs’ house was. Harry stiffened. He had seen something from the corner of his eye, something between them on the white backrest of the bench, something trembling that had moved and disappeared, like a quick, red, silent insect. There were no insects here in March.
Harry leaned forward instantly, dug his heels in the slope, pushed off and threw himself against the back of the bench. Pia Bohr screamed as the bench tipped over and they fell backwards. Harry wrapped his arms round her as they slid off the backrest, pressing her down into the shallow ditch behind the bench. Then he began to snake his way across the mud, pulling Pia behind him. He stopped and peered up towards the hillside. He saw that the willow tree was between them and where he had seen the flash of light. Farther away on the path, a man in a hooded sweater walking a Rottweiler had stopped, and looked like he was considering getting involved.
“Police!” Harry cried. “Get back! There’s a sniper!”
Harry saw an elderly lady turn and hurry away, but the man with the Rottweiler didn’t move.
Pia tried to pull free, but Harry lay with the whole of his body weight on top of the slight woman so that they were lying face to face.
“Looks like your husband’s at home after all,” he said, pulling out his phone. “That’s why I couldn’t come in. That’s why you didn’t lock the door when we left.” He called a number.
“No!” Pia cried.
“Emergency Control,” a voice said on the phone.
“Inspector Harry Hole here. Reporting an armed man—”
The phone was snatched from his hand. “He’s just using the rifle sight as a telescope.” Pia Bohr put the phone to her ear. “Sorry, wrong number.” She ended the call and gave the phone back to Harry. “Isn’t that what you said when you called me?”
Harry didn’t move.
“You’re quite heavy, Hole. Could you…”
“How do I know I’m not going to get a bullet in my forehead when I stand up?”
“Because you’ve had a red dot on your forehead since we sat down on the bench.”
Harry looked at her. Then he put his hands down on the cold mud and pushed himself up. Got to his feet. Squinted towards the hillside. He turned to help Pia, but she was already up. Her jeans and jacket were black and dripping with mud. Harry pulled a bent cigarette from his packet of Camels. “Is your husband going to disappear now?”
“I imagine so,” she sighed. “You need to understand that he’s in a bad way mentally, and very jittery right now.”
“Where does he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know you can be prosecuted for obstructing the police, Mrs. Bohr?”
