Harry didn’t particularly believe what he himself had said. He didn’t believe anything. No matter what the opinions of the others were, he would have advanced an alternative hypothesis, just to show them that there were alternatives. It was a matter of training to keep the mind open, not consciously or unconsciously lock on to one specific idea. If that happened, an investigator ran the risk of new information being misinterpreted as confirmation of what the investigator already believed, so-called confirmation bias, instead of looking at the possibility that new information actually pointed in another direction. Information on a man you already suspected of murder having talked in a friendly manner to the female victim the day before would, for example, be interpreted as him lusting after her, as opposed to viewing it as him not being aggressive towards her.
Ståle Aune had seemed on relatively good form when they had arrived, but now Harry could see his eyes were becoming glazed, and his wife and daughter were due to visit at eight o’clock. In exactly twenty minutes.
‘When we meet again tomorrow, Truls and I will have questioned Markus Røed. What we find out — or don’t find out — will probably decide how we move forward. OK, gentlemen, the office is closed for the night.’
14
Monday
Snuff bullet
It was nine thirty when Harry walked into the bar on the top floor of the Thief.
He sat down at the counter. Tried to moisten his tongue enough to order. It was the anticipation of this drink that had kept him going until now. It was only supposed to be the one, but at the same time he knew that this plan too would soon unravel.
He looked at the cocktail menu the bartender had put down in front of him. Some of the drinks were named after films, and he assumed that actors or directors from those films had been guests here.
‘Do you—’ he began in Norwegian.
‘Sorry, English.’
‘Do you have Jim Beam?’ he asked in English.
‘Certainly, sir, but might I recommend our own specially made—’
‘No.’
The bartender looked at him. ‘Jim Beam it is.’
Harry looked at the clientele and at the city outside. At the new Oslo. Not the rich Oslo, but the filthy rich Oslo. Only the suit and shoes he was wearing belonged here. Or maybe not. A couple of years ago he had come by to check out this place, and before backing out the door, he had seen the lead singer from Turbonegro sitting at a table. He had looked as lonely as Harry was feeling now. He took out his phone. She was listed as A. He tapped in a message.
I’m in town. Can we meet?
Then he put the phone down on the bar, noticed a figure slipping in beside him and heard a soft American voice order ginger beer in an accent he couldn’t quite place. He glanced at the mirror behind the bar. The bottles on the shelf hid the man’s face, but Harry managed to see something bright white around his neck. A clerical collar of the sort visible all the way around, and which they called a dog collar in the USA. The priest was served his beer and disappeared.
Harry was halfway through his drink when the reply from Alexandra Sturdza came.
Yeah, I saw in the paper that you were back. Depends what you mean by meet.
A coffee at the Forensic Med, he typed. After 12 tomorrow for instance.
He had to wait a long time. She probably understood this wasn’t an attempt to get back into the warmth of her bed again, which she had so generously offered after Rakel had kicked him out. Generosity he had been unable to reciprocate in the end, despite how uncomplicated things had been between them. It had been all the rest, everything outside of Alexandra’s bed, he hadn’t been able to handle. Depends what you mean by meet. The worst part was that he wasn’t entirely sure if the answer was that it was solely about the job in hand. Because he was lonely. He knew of no one who needed to be alone as much as he did; Rakel had called it ‘limited social capacity’ and she had also been the only person he could — and wanted to — spend time with without picturing a finishing tape up ahead, knowing that he would be set free at some point. You could of course be alone without being lonely, and lonely without being alone, but now he was lonely. And alone.
Maybe that was why he had been hoping for an unequivocal yes instead of this depends. Had she got a boyfriend? Why not? Would make sense, really. Although the guy would be in for a wild ride.
Only when he had paid for the drink and was on the way down to his room did the phone vibrate again.
1 p.m.
Prim opened the freezer.
Next to a large freezer bag there lay several small ziplock bags, of the type drug dealers used. Two of them contained strands of hair, one some bloody skin fragments, and another pieces of a cloth he had cut up. Items he might one day have use for. He took out a ziplock bag containing moss and made his way past the dining table and the aquarium. Stooped down in front of the glass box on top of the desk. Checked the humidity sensor, removed the lid, opened the ziplock bag and sprinkled moss down onto the black soil. Studied the animal inside, a bright pink slug, almost twenty centimetres in length. Prim never tired of watching it. Not that it was like an action film exactly; if the slug moved at all, it was only a matter of a few centimetres an hour. And neither was there much visible emotional drama or theatrics. The slug’s only way of expressing itself — or of obtaining impressions — was its antennae, which you usually had to observe for a while to register movement. And it was that aspect of the slug that was comparable to looking at Her; even the slightest movement or gesture was a reward. Only by patience could he win Her favour, make Her understand.
It was a Mount Kaputar slug. He had brought two of them all the way home from the mountain in New South Wales in Australia. The pink slug was found only there, in a forested area of ten square kilometres at the foot of Mount Kaputar. As the seller had told him: one single bushfire could at any time wipe out the entire species. Therefore, Prim had no pangs of conscience at sidestepping all export and import bans. Slugs were generally host to so many unpleasant parasite microbes that smuggling them over borders was as legal as smuggling radioactive material. So Prim was fairly certain that these were the only two specimens of the pink slug in all of Norway. And should Australia and the rest of the world burn, that might prove to be the salvation of the species. Yes, for life on the whole that day mankind no longer existed. It was simply a question of time. Because nature only retains that which serves nature. Bowie was right when he sang that Homo sapiens had outgrown their use.
The slug’s feelers moved. It had caught the smell of its favourite dish, the thawed moss Prim had also smuggled from the foot of Mount Kaputar. Now the slug was moving, almost imperceptibly, its smooth, pink surface glistening. Advancing millimetre by millimetre towards its dinner, while laying a trail of slime behind it on the black soil. Closing in on its target, as slowly and surely as Prim was closing in on his. There were cannibal snails in Australia, blind predators that used the slime trail of the Mount Kaputar slug to hunt for it. They were only marginally faster, but slowly, ever so slowly, they closed in on their prey. They would eat the beautiful pink slug alive, scraping it up with a plate of tiny teeth and sucking it in, layer by layer. Was the pink slug aware of them coming? Did it experience fear in the long wait until it was caught? Did it have any solution, any means of escape? Did it, for instance, ever consider crossing the slime trail of another Mount Kaputar slug in the hope the pursuers changed course? That, at least, was his own plan when they came for him.