She opened a window to air the room.
It was eight in the evening. Terry Våge listened to the metallic whining from the inner courtyard, where the rising wind was making the communal rotary clothes line turn. He had resumed the crime blog. There was so much to write about. Even so, he had been sat staring at the empty white page on the PC screen.
The phone rang.
Maybe it was Dagnija, they’d had a row last night, and she said she wasn’t coming at the weekend. Now she probably regretted it, as usual. He could feel how he hoped it was her.
He looked at the mobile. Unknown number. If it was that phoney from yesterday, he shouldn’t take it, nutcases you had responded to once or twice could be impossible to get rid of. Once — after he had written the truth about The War on Drugs being the most boring band in the world both live and on record — he had been stupid enough to answer a pissed-off fan one time, and had ended up with a pest who phoned, emailed and even collared him at gigs, and whom it took two years of ignoring to shake off.
It continued ringing.
Terry Våge cast another glance at the empty screen. Then he answered the phone.
‘Yeah?’
‘Thanks for coming alone yesterday and waiting on the roof until twenty to ten.’
‘You... were there?’
‘I was watching. I hope you understand that I had to be sure you wouldn’t try and trick me.’
Våge hesitated. ‘Yeah, yeah, OK. But I don’t have time for any more hide-and-seek.’
‘Oh yes you do.’ He heard a small chuckle. ‘But we’ll drop it, Våge. In fact, you’re going to drop everything... right now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re going to go to the end of a road called Toppåsveien in Kolsås as quickly as possible. I’ll call again, I’m not telling you when, it could be in two minutes. If I get an engaged tone, this will be the last time you and I have contact. Understood?’
Våge swallowed. ‘Yes,’ he answered. Because he understood. Understood it was to prevent him from contacting someone, like the police. Understood that this wasn’t a mindless nutjob. Crazy, yes, but not a nutjob.
‘Bring a torch and a camera, Våge. And a weapon if it makes you feel safe. You’re going to find tangible, irrefutable evidence that you’ve been talking to the killer, and you’re free to write about it afterwards. That includes this conversation. Because we want people to believe you this time, don’t we?’
‘What will—’
But the man had hung up.
Harry was lying in Alexandra’s bed, his bare feet sticking out just over the end.
Alexandra was also naked, lying crosswise, with her head on his stomach.
They had made love the night they had been at the Jealousy Bar, and now they had made love again. Now had been better.
He was thinking about Markus Røed. About the fear and hatred in his eyes while he fought for air. The fear had been greater. But had it remained so after he was able to breathe again? In that case — if Røed hadn’t reversed the money transfer — they must have released Lucille by now. As he had been instructed not to try to find her or contact her before the debt was paid, he had decided to wait a couple of days before calling her number. She didn’t have his number or details, so it wasn’t strange he hadn’t heard anything. He had looked up Lucille Owens online and the only hits had been old articles in the Los Angeles Times about the Romeo and Juliet film. Nothing about her being missing or kidnapped. And he had realised what it was they shared, what connected them. It wasn’t the outward danger after what happened in the parking lot. Nor was it that he saw his own mother in Lucille, that she was the woman in the doorway of the classroom or the woman in the hospital bed whom he had a fresh opportunity to save. It was the loneliness. That they were two people who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone noticing.
Alexandra passed him the cigarette they were sharing, and Harry inhaled and looked at the smoke curling up towards the ceiling while ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ came from a little Geneva speaker on the bedside table.
‘Sounds like that’s about us,’ she said.
‘Mm. Lovers who break up?’
‘Yeah. And what Cohen says about not talking of love or chains.’
Harry didn’t respond. Held the cigarette and gazed at the smoke, but was aware of her still lying with her face turned to him.
‘It’s in the wrong order,’ he said.
‘Wrong because Rakel was already in your life when we met?’
‘I was just thinking of something a woman said to me. How we’re fooled when the writer changes the order of the sentences around.’ He took a fresh drag of the cigarette. ‘But, yeah, probably that about Rakel too.’
After a while he felt the warmth of her tears on his stomach. He wanted to cry himself.
The window creaked, as though what was out there wanted to get in to them.
37
Wednesday
Reflex
Toppåsveien didn’t quite live up to the name. The road wound its way between villas a fair way up to higher ground, but the top of Kolsås was still a good distance away when the road ended. Terry Våge parked by the side of the road. There was forest above him. In the darkness he could make out something lighter further up, which he knew were rock faces popular with climbers and other boneheads.
He fiddled with the sheath of the knife he had taken with him, looked over at the torch and the Nikon camera on the passenger seat. The seconds passed. The minutes passed. He peered down towards the lights in the darkness below. Rosenvilde High School was down there somewhere. He knew that because Genie had been a pupil there when he had discovered her. Because it was he, Terry Våge, who had done it, who had used his influence as a music critic to lift her and that talentless band of hers up from the underground into the light, into the mainstream, the marketplace. She had been eighteen, attending school there, and he had driven over a couple of times because he was curious to see her in a school setting. Was there something wrong with that? He had just hung around outside the schoolyard to catch a glimpse of the star he had created, hadn’t even taken any pictures, which he easily could have. The telephoto lens he had taken with him would have rendered razor-sharp pictures of a different Genie from the performer playing a role as a dangerous seductress. It would have shown the innocence, the little girl. But hanging around a schoolyard like that could easily have been misunderstood if he’d been discovered, so he had left it at those two times and sought her out at the concerts instead.
He was about to check the time when the phone rang.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re in position, I see.’
Våge looked around. His car was the only one parked on the road, and he would have seen anyone in the street light. Was the guy watching him from somewhere in the woods? Våge’s hand squeezed the handle of the knife.
‘Take your torch and camera, walk along the forest trail past the barrier, keep an eye on the left-hand side. After about one hundred metres you’ll see reflective paint on a tree trunk. Leave the trail and follow the reflective paint further. Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Våge said.
‘You’ll know when you’ve reached the spot. Once you do, you have two minutes to take pictures. Then you walk back, get into your car and drive straight home. If you haven’t left after those one hundred and twenty seconds, I will come for you. Do you understand?’