‘Don’t worry,’ Alexandra said. ‘I only know because I did the DNA analysis, and I have an oath of confidentiality. Got a cig we can share?’
‘I quit.’
‘You? Really?’
Harry nodded and looked up at the sky. Clouds had appeared. Leaden grey on the underside, white where they grew upward and the sunlight hit them.
‘So you’re single,’ Harry said. ‘Happy with that?’
‘No,’ Alexandra said. ‘But I probably wouldn’t be happy if I was with someone either.’ She laughed that husky laugh of hers. And Harry could feel that it had the same effect now as then. So perhaps it was true. Perhaps those kinds of feelings never quite died, no matter how fleeting they had seemed.
Harry cleared his throat.
‘Here it comes,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The reason you wanted to have a coffee.’
‘Maybe,’ Harry said, pulling out the plastic box with the square of kitchen roll inside. ‘Could you analyse this for me?’
‘I knew it!’ she snorted.
‘Mm. And yet you still agreed to meet me for coffee?’
‘I suppose I was hoping to be wrong. That you’d been thinking about me.’
‘I can see that telling you now that I have thought about you isn’t going to look good, but actually I have.’
‘Say it anyway.’
Harry gave a crooked smile. ‘I’ve thought about you.’
She took the box from him. ‘What is it?’
‘Mucus and saliva. I just want to know if it originates from the same person as the samples you lifted from Susanne’s breast.’
‘How do you know about that? No, I don’t want to know. What you’re asking for might be within the law, but you know I’ll still be in trouble if anyone finds out?’
‘Yes.’
‘So why should I do it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘OK, I will. Because you’re going to take me to the spa at that snooty hotel you’re staying at. And after that you’re going to treat me to a bloody nice dinner. And you’re going to dress up.’
Harry pinched the lapels of his suit jacket. ‘You don’t think I’m presentable?’
‘A tie. You’re going to wear a tie as well.’
Harry laughed. ‘Deal.’
‘A nice tie.’
‘A millionaire like Røed setting up his own investigation is contrary to our democratic traditions and idea of equality,’ Chief Superintendent Bodil Melling said.
‘Aside from the purely practical inconvenience of having an outside party treading on our toes,’ said Ole Winter, Kripos’s senior inspector. ‘It simply makes our job more difficult. Now, I’m aware you can’t prohibit Røed’s investigation based on paragraphs in the penal code, but the department must have some way of stopping this.’
Mikael Bellman stood looking out the window. He had a nice office. Large, new and modern. Impressive. But it was located in Nydalen. Far from the other departments in government buildings downtown. Nydalen was a sort of business park on the outskirts of the city; continue further north and you wound up in dense forest after just a few minutes. He hoped the new government quarter would soon be finished, that his Labour Party would still be in power and that he would still hold the post of Minister of Justice. There was nothing to suggest otherwise. Mikael Bellman was popular. Some had even hinted that he should already begin to position himself, because the day the Prime Minister suddenly decided to step down could be upon us. And at one morning meeting, the day after one political journalist had written that someone in government, Bellman for example, should seize the highest office in the land in a coup, the Prime Minister had, to everyone’s laughter, asked if someone could check Mikael’s briefcase, a reference to Bellman’s eyepatch and resemblance to Claus von Stauffenberg, the Wehrmacht colonel who attempted to assassinate Hitler with a bomb. But the Prime Minister had nothing to fear. Mikael simply didn’t want the job. Of course, being Minister of Justice meant you were exposed, but being Prime Minister — numero uno — was something else entirely. The pressure was one thing, but it was the light he feared. Too many stones being turned and too much of the past being uncovered, even he didn’t know what they might find.
He turned to face Melling and Winter. Many levels of hierarchy separated him from them, but the two must have believed they could go straight to Bellman on account of him being a former police detective in Oslo, meaning he was one of them.
‘Obviously, as a Labour Party man I’m all in favour of equality,’ Bellman said. ‘And of course the Department of Justice wants the police to have as good working conditions as possible. But I’m not so sure we can expect a very sympathetic response among...’ he searched for a different word to the giveaway ‘voters’ — ‘the public in general if we impede one of the few renowned investigators we have. Especially when he wants to tackle a case in which your departments have made so little headway. And, yes, you’re right, Winter. There are no laws which proscribe what Røed and Hole are doing. But you can always hope that Hole does what he eventually always did in my time.’
He looked at the bemused expressions on the faces of Melling and Winter.
‘Break the rules,’ Bellman said. ‘All you need to do is watch him closely, then I’m fairly certain you’ll see it happen. Send me a report when it does, and I’ll personally make sure he’s frozen out.’ He glanced at his Omega Seamaster watch. Not because he had another meeting, but to show that this one was over. ‘Does that sound OK?’
On their way out they shook his hand as though he had gone along with their suggestion and not the other way round. Mikael had that effect. He smiled and held eye contact with Bodil Melling a half-second longer than necessary. Not because he was interested, more out of habit. And noticed that she’d finally got a bit of colour in her face.
17
Tuesday
The more interesting portion of humanity
‘We learn to lie as children between the ages of two and four, and by the time we’ve reached adulthood, we’ve become experts,’ Aune said, adjusting his pillow. ‘Believe me.’
Harry saw Øystein grin and Truls frown in confusion. Aune went on.
‘A psychologist called Richard Wiseman believes most of us tell a lie or two each day. Proper lies, that is, not just white, your-hair-looks-lovely lies. What are the chances of us being found out? Well, Freud contended that no mortal could keep a secret, that if the lips are sealed, then the fingertips chatter. But he was wrong. Or rather, the listener isn’t capable of sorting through the different ways a liar gives themselves away, because they vary from person to person. That’s why a lie detector was needed. They had one in China three thousand years ago. The suspected criminal had his mouth filled with grains of rice and was asked if he was guilty. If he shook his head, he was asked to spit out the rice, and if any grains remained in his mouth, the logic was that it was dry due to his being nervous, and therefore guilty. Useless, of course, because you could, after all, be nervous due to fear of becoming nervous. And similarly useless is the polygraph which John Larson invented in 1921, and is, in principle, the lie detector in use to this very day, even though everyone knows it’s a piece of junk. Even Larson regretted inventing it in the end, calling it his Frankenstein monster. Because it lives...’ Aune raised his hands and clawed at the air with his fingers. ‘But it lives due to so many people believing it works. Because it’s fear of the lie detector which can sometimes actually force a confession, whether true or false. Once, in Detroit, the police captured a suspect, put his hand on the photocopier they’d convinced him was a lie detector and asked him questions as the machine spat out A4 sheets with HE IS LYING written on them, until the man became so terrified he confessed everything.’