“Like I said, I get it.”
“If I get fired now, with a kid and everything…”
“Stop it, Bjørn, you’re not the one who should be apologising. I should, for dragging you into this mess.”
A pause. In spite of what he’d just said, Harry could almost feel Bjørn’s guilty conscience down the phone.
“I’ll pick you up,” Bjørn said.
—
Detective Inspector Felah was sitting with the fan on his back, but his shirt was still sticking to his skin. He hated the heat, hated Kabul, hated his bombproof office. But most of all he hated the lies he had to listen to, day in, day out. Like the ones from the pathetic, illiterate, opium-addicted Hazara sitting in front of him now.
“You’ve been brought to see me because you claimed under questioning that you can give us the name of a murderer,” Felah said. “A foreigner.”
“Only if you protect me,” the man said.
Felah looked at the man cowering in front of him. The battered cap the Hazara was rubbing between his hands wasn’t apakol, but it had at least covered his filthy hair. The dribbling, ignorant Shia bandit evidently thought that escaping the death penalty and getting a long prison sentence instead would be a mercy. A slow, painful death, that was what that was, and he himself would have chosen a quick death by hanging without hesitation.
Felah wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “That depends on what you’ve got to say to me. Spit it out.”
“He killed…” the Hazara said in a shaky voice. “He didn’t think anyone saw him, but I did. With my own eyes, I swear, as Allah is my witness.”
“A foreign soldier, you said.”
“Yes, sir. But this wasn’t in battle, this was murder. Murder, plain and simple.”
“I see. And who was this military foreigner?”
“The leader of the Norwegians. I know that because I recognised him. He’d been in our village, talking about how they’re here to help us, that we’d get democracy and jobs…all the usual.”
Felah felt a moment of longed-for excitement. “You mean Major Jonassen?”
“No, that wasn’t his name. Lieutenant Colonel Bo.”
“Do you mean Bohr?”
“Yes—yes I do, sir.”
“And you saw him murder an Afghan man?”
“No, not that.”
“What, then?”
Felah listened as he felt his excitement and interest fade away. Firstly, Lieutenant Colonel Bohr had gone home, and the chances of getting him extradited were as good as nonexistent. Secondly, a commander who was out of the game was no longer a particularly valuable chess piece in Kabul’s political game, a game that Felah actually hated more than everything else put together. Thirdly, the victim wasn’t someone who qualified for the amount of resources it would require to investigate this opium addict’s claims. And then there was the fourth thing. It was a lie. Of course it was a lie. Everyone was out to save their own skin. And the more detail the man in front of him gave about the murder—and Felah was confident it matched what little they already knew—the more certain Felah was that the man was describing a murder he himself had committed. A crazy idea, and Felah wasn’t about to use the few resources he had at his disposal to investigate the hypothesis. Opium addiction or murder—either way, you still couldn’t hang a man more than once.
27
“Can it really not go any faster?” Harry asked, staring out into the darkness beyond the slush and the hard-working windshield wipers.
“Yes, but I’d rather not go off the road with so much irreplaceable brain capacity in the car.” As usual, Bjørn had his seat so far back that he was more lying than sitting. “Especially in a car with old-fashioned seat belts and no airbags.”
A truck coming around a bend in the opposite direction on Highway 287 passed them so close that Bjørn’s 1970 Volvo Amazon shook.
“Even I’ve got airbags,” Harry said, looking past Bjørn at the low crash barriers and still-frozen river that had been running alongside the road for the past ten kilometres. The Haglebu River, according to the GPS on the phone in his lap. When he looked the other way he saw the steep, snow-covered side of the valley and dark fir forest. Ahead of them: the paved road that swallowed up the light of the headlamps and wound, narrow and predictable, towards mountains, more forest and wilderness. He had read that there were supposed to be brown bears in the area.
And as the sides of the valley towered above them, the voice on the radio—which in between tracks announced that they were listening tonationwideP10 Country—lost all credibility when it was intermittently replaced by static or disappeared altogether.
