Yes, he had been proud. Far too proud. Perhaps she had noticed too. And this pride, which was so hard to hide, may in the end have prompted her to ask herself the same question: How did he manage to catch me? And she had left him. Though that wasn’t how he described it to himself — he thought of it as a pause, a temporary break in their relationship, caused by a bout of claustrophobia. Anything else was unthinkable. And eventually she had come back. It happened a few weeks later, maybe a couple of months, he didn’t really remember, he had suppressed that whole period, but it was just after they thought they’d solved the vampirist case. Katrine had fallen pregnant at once. It was as if she had emerged from sexual hibernation, and Bjørn found himself thinking that perhaps the break hadn’t been such a bad thing, that perhaps people needed a break from each other from time to time to realise what they had together. A child conceived in the joy of reconciliation. That was how he had seen it. And he had travelled around Toten with their child, showing him off to family, friends, ever more distant relatives, showing him off like a trophy, proof of his manhood to anyone who had doubted him. It had been stupid, but everyone’s allowed to be stupid once or twice in their life.
And then the humiliation.
It had been unbearable. It was like sitting on a plane during takeoff or landing on the occasions when the narrow passageways inside his ear and nose didn’t manage to even out the pressure and he was sure his head was going to explode, had wanted it to explode, anything to escape the pain that just kept getting worse, even when you thought it must have reached its apex. And sent you mad. Willing to jump out of the plane, shoot yourself in the head. An equation with only one variable: pain. And with death as the only liberating common denominator. Your death, other people’s deaths. In his confusion he had thought that his pain — like the difference in pressure — could be evened out by the pain of others. Of Harry Hole.
He had been wrong.
Killing Rakel had been easier than he’d thought. Possibly because he had been planning it for so long, had worked out his game plan, as sportsmen would say. He had gone through it in his mind so many times that when he was actually there and it was about to happen in real life, it had felt almost as if he was still only in his thoughts, looking on from the outside. As Harry said, he had walked down Holmenkollveien, but not towards Sørkedalsveien. Instead he had turned left, into Stasjonsveien, then Bjørnveien, before weaving through smaller streets towards Vinderen, where a pedestrian would be less conspicuous. He had slept well the first night, didn’t even wake up when Gert, according to Katrine, had cried hysterically from five o’clock in the morning. Exhaustion, presumably. The second night he didn’t sleep as well. But it wasn’t until Monday, when he saw Harry at the crime scene, that what he had done began to sink in. Seeing Harry had been like watching a church going up in flames. Bjørn thought back to the footage of Fantoft Stave Church burning in 1992, a fire started by a Satanist at six o’clock in the morning, on the sixth day of the sixth month. There was often an element of beauty to catastrophes, something that meant you couldn’t take your eyes off them. As the walls and roof burned, the skeleton of the church, its true form and personality emerged, naked, unadorned. He had watched the same thing happen to Harry in the days that followed Rakel’s death. And he couldn’t take his eyes off it. Harry was stripped back to his true, pitiful self. He, Bjørn, had become a pyromaniac, fascinated by the spectacle of his destruction. But as he looked on, he suffered. He too was burning. Had he known that would happen from the start? Had he consciously poured the last remnants of the petrol over himself, and stood so close to Harry that he too would be consumed when the church burned? Or had he believed that Harry and Rakel would disappear, and that he would live on, move on with his family, make it his, become whole again?
Whole.
They had rebuilt Fantoft Church. It was possible. Bjørn took a deep, trembling breath.
“You know all this is just your imagination, Harry? A radio station and the adjustment of a car seat, that’s all you’ve got. Anyone could have drugged you. With your history of substance abuse it isn’t even implausible that you did it yourself. You have absolutely no evidence.”
“Are you sure? What about the married couple who say they saw a large man walking down Holmenkollveien at quarter to midnight?”
Bjørn shook his head. “They weren’t able to give a description. And seeing pictures of me wouldn’t prompt their memory, because the man they saw was wearing a false black beard, glasses, and limped whenever anyone could see him.”
“Mm. OK.”
“OK?”
Harry nodded slowly. “If you’re confident you haven’t left any evidence, then OK.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“There aren’t that many people who need to know.”
Bjørn stared at Harry. There was nothing triumphant in his eyes. No trace of hatred towards the man who had killed his beloved. All Bjørn could see in those blank eyes was vulnerability. Nakedness. Something approaching sympathy.
Bjørn looked down at the pistol Harry had given him. He had realised now.
They would know. Harry. Katrine. That was enough. Enough to make it impossible to go on. But if it stopped here, if Bjørn put a stop to it here, no one else would have to know. His colleagues. His family and friends in Toten. And, most important of all, the boy.
Bjørn swallowed. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Harry said.
Bjørn nodded. He almost smiled at the thought that he would finally get what he had wanted. That his head would explode.
“I’m going now,” Harry said.
Bjørn nodded towards the back seat. “Will you... will you take the lad with you? He’s yours.”
“He’s yours and Katrine’s,” Harry said. “But yes, I know I’m his father. And that no one who isn’t under an oath of confidentiality knows. And that’s how it will stay.”
Bjørn fixed his eyes ahead of him.
There was a nice place in Toten, a ridge from which the fields looked like a rolling yellow sea on a moonlit spring night. Where a young guy with a driving license could sit in a car and kiss a girl. Or sit alone with a sob in his throat and dream about one.
“If no one knows, how did you find out?” Bjørn asked, without any real interest in the answer, just to delay his departure for a few more seconds.
“Deduction,” Harry Hole said.
Bjørn Holm smiled tiredly. “Of course.”
Harry got out, unfastened the baby carrier from the back seat and lifted it out. He looked down at the sleeping child. Unsuspecting. All the things we don’t know. All the things we will be spared. The simple sentence Alexandra had uttered that night when Harry declined the condom she offered him.
You don’t want another kid, do you?
Another kid? Alexandra knew perfectly well that Oleg wasn’t his biological son.
Another kid? She knew something, something he didn’t know.
Another kid. A slip of the tongue, a simple mistake. In the eighties, psychologist Daniel Wegner claimed that the subconscious constantly makes sure we don’t blurt out things we want to keep secret. But that when the secret pops up from the subconscious, it informs the conscious part of the brain and forces it to think about it. And from then on it’s only a matter of time before the truth slips out by mistake.
Another kid. Alexandra had checked the cotton bud Bjørn had sent in against the database. Where the DNA profiles of all police officers who worked at crime scenes were stored, so that there would be no confusion if they messed up and left their own DNA at the scene. So not only did she have Bjørn’s DNA and could rule out the possibility that he was the father — she had both parents’ DNA, and could see that there were two matches: Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole. That was the secret that her oath of confidentiality prevented her from telling anyone except the person who had requested the analysis, Bjørn Holm.