“What are you saying?”
“It’s too much to explain now, I haven’t got enough money. I need you to do something for me.”
A pause.
“Oleg?”
“I’m here.”
“The house is yours now, which means you can check the electricity consumption online. It shows the usage from hour to hour.”
“So?”
Harry explained what he needed, and told him to text the results to Bjørn Holm.
When he was done, he took a deep breath and called Kaja Solness’s number.
The phone rang six times. He was about to hang up, and almost jumped when he heard Kaja’s voice.
“Kaja Solness.”
Harry moistened his mouth. “It’s Harry.”
“Harry? I didn’t recognise the number.” She sounded stressed. Talking quickly.
“I tried calling you several times from my own phone,” Harry said.
“Did you? I haven’t checked. I... I have to go. The Red Cross. I’ve had to drop everything, that’s how it is when you’re on standby.”
“Mm. Where are they sending you?”
“To... it’s all happened so quickly that I don’t even remember the name. Earthquake. A small island in the Pacific, a hell of a long journey. That’s why I haven’t called you back, I’ve basically been sitting in a transport plane.”
“Mm. You sound like you’re nearby.”
“Phones are pretty good these days. Listen, I’m in the middle of something. What did you want?”
“I need somewhere to sleep.”
“Your flat?”
“Too risky. I need somewhere to hide.” Harry could see the amount of money left on the phone shrinking. “I can explain later, but I need to find somewhere else fast.”
“Hang on!”
“What?”
A pause.
“Come to mine,” Kaja said. “To my house, I mean. There’s a key under the doormat.”
“I can sleep at Bjørn’s.”
“No! I insist. I want you to go there. Really.”
“OK. Thanks.”
“Great. See you soon. I hope.”
Harry stood there looking in front of him for a few moments after he hung up. He found himself looking at a television screen above the counter of a café that jutted out into the concourse. It showed a clip of him walking into Oslo Courthouse. From the vampirist case, again. Harry quickly turned back towards the phone. Called Bjørn’s number, which he also knew by heart.
“Holm.”
“Harry.”
“No,” Bjørn said. “He’s dead. Who are you?”
“Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
“I said, who are you?”
“I’m the person you gave Road to Ruin to.”
Silence.
“I still like Ramones and Rocket to Russia better,” Harry said. “But it was a bloody good thought.”
Harry heard a noise. It took him a few moments to realise that it was crying. Not a child’s crying. A grown man’s.
“I’m at Central Station,” Harry said, pretending he hadn’t heard. “They’re looking for me, I’ve got a wounded knee, not a single krone to my name, and I need free transport to Lyder Sagens gate.”
Harry heard heavy breathing. A half-stifled “bloody hell” muttered to himself. Then Bjørn Holm said in a voice so thin and shaky it was as if Harry had never heard it before.
“I’m on my own with the lad. Katrine’s at a press conference up at Kripos. But...”
Harry waited.
“I’ll bring the baby, he needs to get used to cars,” Bjørn said. “Shopping centre entrance in twenty?”
“A couple of people have been looking at me a bit too closely, so if you could manage fifteen?”
“I’ll try. Stand by the tax—”
His voice was cut off by a long bleeping tone. Harry looked up. His last coin was gone. He put his hand inside his jacket and stroked his chest and rib.
Harry was standing in the shade outside the north-side entrance to Oslo Central Station when Bjørn’s red Volvo Amazon slid past the armada of waiting taxis and stopped. A couple of the drivers who were standing talking glanced over suspiciously, as if they thought the vintage car was a black-market taxi or, even worse, Uber.
Harry limped over to the car and got in the passenger seat.
“Hello, ghost,” Bjørn whispered from his usual half-lying position. “To Kaja Solness’s?”
“Yes,” Harry said, realising that the whispering was because of the baby carrier that was strapped to the back seat.
They pulled out onto the roundabout next to Spektrum, where Bjørn had persuaded Harry to go to a Hank Williams tribute concert last summer. Then Bjørn had called Harry on the morning of the concert to say he was at the maternity ward, and that things had started a bit earlier than expected. And that he suspected the little kid was eager to get out so he could go with his dad to hear his first Hank Williams songs.
“Does Miss Solness know you’re on your way?” Bjørn asked.
“Yes. She says she’s left a key under the doormat.”
“No one leaves keys under the doormat, Harry.”
“We’ll see.”
They passed beneath Bispelokket and the government buildings. Past the mural of The Scream and Blitz, past Stensberggata where Bjørn and Harry had driven on the way to Harry’s flat early on the night of the murder. When Harry had been so out of it that he wouldn’t have noticed a bomb going off. Now he was concentrating hard, hearing every change in the sound of the engine, every creak of the seats, and — when they stopped at a red light on Sporveisgata close to Fagerborg Church — the child’s almost silent breathing in the back seat.
“You’ll have to tell me, when you think the time is right,” Bjørn Holm said quietly.
“I will,” Harry said, and heard how odd his voice sounded.
They drove through Norabakken and turned into Lyder Sagens gate.
“Here,” Harry said.
Bjørn stopped. Harry didn’t move.
Bjørn waited a bit, then switched the engine off. They looked at the dark house behind the fence.
“What do you see?” Bjørn asked.
Harry shrugged his shoulders. “I see a woman one-metre-seventy-something tall, but everything else about her is bigger than me. Bigger house. More intelligent. Better morals.”
“Are you talking about Kaja Solness, or the usual?”
“The usual?”
“Rakel.”
Harry didn’t answer. He looked up at the black windows behind the bare witches’ fingers of the branches in the hedge. The house was saying nothing. But it didn’t look like it was asleep. It looked like it was holding its breath.
Three short notes. Don Helms’s steel guitar on “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Bjørn pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. “Text message,” he said, and went to put his phone back.
“Open it,” Harry said. “It’s for me.”
Bjørn did as Harry said.
“I don’t know what this is or who it’s from, but it says benzodiazepine and flunitrazepam.”
“Mm. Familiar substances in rape cases.”
“Yes. Rohypnol.”
“Can be injected into a sleeping man, and if the dose is strong enough he’d be out for at least four or five hours. He wouldn’t even notice if he was being bundled about and carried all over the place.”
“Or raped.”
“Quite. But what makes flunitrazepam such an effective drug for rape is of course that it induces amnesia. Total blackout, the victim doesn’t remember a thing about what happened.”
“Which is presumably why it isn’t manufactured anymore.”
“But it’s sold on the street. And someone who’s worked in the police would know where to get hold of it.”