“Idiot!” Kasko groaned loudly to anyone and everyone.
His thighs and buttocks felt numb beneath him. It took its toll, sitting on your arse all day on a hard, stone floor looking like you were suffering. Well, he was suffering. And it was high time he got his evening fix.
“Thanks!” he sang out when a coin fell into the paper cup. It was important to show you were in good spirits.
Kasko had put the sunglasses on because he thought they made him less recognisable. Not that he was frightened of the police, he had told them what he knew. But they hadn’t found and caught David yet, and if David had found out that Kasko had blabbed to the Chinese detective, there was a good chance he was looking for Kasko now. Which was why it made sense to sit here in the crowd in front of the ticket desk at Central Station, where at least no one could threaten to kill you.
And perhaps the mixture of decent spring weather and fewer delays on the trains had put people in a better mood. They had certainly dropped more money than usual into the paper cup in front of him. Even a couple of kids in the emo gang that usually hung around the steps down to Platform 19 had given him a bit of change. The evening fix was as good as sorted; he wouldn’t have to sell the sunglasses tonight.
Kasko noticed a figure in camouflage uniform. Not because he was limping, had a bandage under his hat and generally looked dishevelled, but because he was walking in a way that broke the pattern, he was walking across everyone else, like a predator fish in a shoal of plankton-eaters. To be more precise, he was heading straight for Kasko. Kasko didn’t like that. The people who gave him money were on their way past him, not towards him. Towards him wasn’t good.
The man stopped in front of him.
“Can I borrow a couple of coins from you?” His voice was as rough as Kasko’s.
“Sorry, mate,” Kasko said. “You’ll have to get your own, I’ve only got enough for myself.”
“I only need twenty, thirty kroner.”
Kasko gave a short laugh. “I can see you need medicine but, like I said, so do I.”
The man crouched down beside him. Pulled something from his inside pocket. It was a police ID. Shit, not again. The man in the picture looked vaguely like the man in front of him.
“I am hereby seizing your takings from illegal begging in a public place,” he said, reaching for the cup.
“Like fuck you are!” Kasko yelled, snatching the cup. He clutched it to his chest.
A couple of passersby glanced at them.
“You’re giving that to me,” the man said. “Or I’ll take you down to the station, have you arrested, then there’ll be no fix for you until sometime later on tomorrow. How does a night like that sound?”
“You’re bluffing, you fucking junkie bastard! At a vote in the City Council on 16 December 2016, both primary and subsidiary proposals to ban fundraising in public, including begging, were chucked out.”
“Mm,” the man said, pretending to think this over. He moved closer to Kasko, screening him from people walking past, and whispered: “You’re right. It was a bluff. But this isn’t.”
Kasko stared. The man had put his hand inside his camouflage jacket, and was now holding a pistol aimed at Kasko. A big, noisy fucking pistol in the middle of evening rush hour at Central Station! The guy must be completely fucking deranged. The bandage around his head and a scary fucking scar from his mouth to his ear. Kasko knew all too well what drug cravings could do to otherwise perfectly normal people — he’d only recently seen what an iron bar could do, and here was this guy with a gun. He would have to sell the sunglasses after all.
“Here,” he groaned, giving the guy the paper cup.
“Thanks.” The man took it and looked inside.
“How much for the shades?”
“Huh?”
“The sunglasses.” The man pulled out all the notes that were in the cup and offered them to him. “Is this enough?”
Then he snatched the shades from Kasko, put them on, stood up and limped across the flow of people, towards the old phone box outside the 7-Eleven.
First Harry called his own voicemail, tapped in the code and checked that Kaja Solness hadn’t left a message to suggest she had tried to answer any of his calls. The only message was from a shaken Johan Krohn: “I need to ask you to keep this message between the two of us. Svein Finne is engaged in blackmail. Of me. And my family. I... er, please, get back to me. Thanks.”
He’ll have to call someone else, I’m dead, Harry thought as he watched the coins drop into the phone.
He called directory inquiries. Got the numbers he asked for, making a note of them on the back of his hand.
The first number he called was Alexandra Sturdza’s.
“Harry!”
“Don’t hang up. I’m innocent. Are you at work?”
“Yes, but—”
“How much do they know?”
He heard her hesitate. Heard her make a decision. She gave him a brief summary of her conversation with Sung-min Larsen. She sounded close to tears by the time she finished.
“I know how it looks,” Harry said. “But you have to believe me. Can you do that?”
Silence.
“Alexandra. If I believed I’d killed Rakel, would I have bothered to rise from the dead?”
Still silence. Then a sigh.
“Thanks,” Harry said. “Do you remember that last evening I was at yours?”
“Yes,” she sniffed. “Or no.”
“We were lying on your bed. You asked me to use a condom because you were sure I didn’t want another kid. There was a woman who rang.”
“Oh yes. Kaja. Nasty name.”
“Right,” Harry said. “Now I need to ask you something I’m sure you don’t want to answer.”
“OK?”
Harry asked a yes/no question. He heard Alexandra pause. That was almost enough of an answer. Then she said yes. He had what he needed.
“Thanks. One more thing. Those trousers with blood on them. Can you run an analysis of it?”
“Rakel’s blood?”
“No. I was bleeding from my knuckles, so there’s my blood on the trousers as well, if you remember.”
“Yes.”
“Good. I want you to analyse my blood.”
“Yours? What for?”
Harry explained what he was after.
“That’s going to take a bit of time,” Alexandra said. “Let’s say an hour. Can I call you somewhere?”
Harry thought for a moment. “Send the results by text to Bjørn Holm.”
He gave her Bjørn’s number, then hung up.
Harry fed more money into the phone, noting that the coins were going faster than his words. He needed to be more efficient.
He knew Oleg’s number.
“Yes?” His voice sounded distant. Either because he was a long way away, or because his thoughts were. Possibly both.
“Oleg, it’s me.”
“Dad?”
Harry had to swallow.
“Yes,” Harry said.
“I’m dreaming,” Oleg said. It didn’t sound like a protest, just a sober statement of fact.
“You’re not,” Harry said. “Unless I’m dreaming too.”
“Katrine Bratt said you’d driven into a river.”
“I survived.”
“You tried to kill yourself.”
Harry could hear his stepson’s astonishment start to give way to rising anger.
“Yes,” Harry said. “Because I thought I had killed your mother. But at the last moment I realised that that’s what I was supposed to think.”