He followed the second hand with his eyes. There. Two o’clock.
Johan Krohn closed his eyes. Naturally it was terrible, something he would have to live with for the rest of his life, but when it came down to it, it was the only solution.
He thought about Alise. What she was having to go through right now. She would survive, but the nightmares would obviously haunt her. All because of the decision he had taken, without saying a word to her. He had deceived her. It was him, not Finne, who had done this to Alise.
He looked at his watch again. In one and a half minutes he would walk into the park, making out that he was just a bit late, comfort her as well as he could, call the police, act appalled. Correction: he would hardly have to act. He would give the police an explanation that was 90 percent true. And Alise an explanation that was 100 percent lie.
Johan Krohn caught sight of his own reflection in the car window.
He hated what he saw. The only thing he hated more was Svein Finne.
Alise looked at Svein Finne, who had sat down on the bench beside her.
“Do you know why we’re here, Alise?” he asked.
He had a red bandana tied around his black hair, with just a few strands of grey.
“Only in general terms,” she said. All Johan had told her was that it was to do with the Rakel Fauke case. Her first thought had been that they were going to press charges against the police for the physical injuries inflicted on their client by Harry Hole in the bunker in Nordstrand. But when she asked, Johan had simply replied curtly that it was to do with a confession, and that he didn’t have time to explain. He had been like that for the past few days. Cold. Dismissive. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought he was starting to lose interest. But she did know better. She had seen him like this before, during the brief periods when his conscience was getting at him and he suggested taking a break, saying he needed to focus on his family, the firm. Yes, he had tried. And she had stopped him. Dear Lord, it didn’t take much. Men. Or, to be more accurate: boys. Because every so often she got the feeling that she was the older of the pair of them, that he was just an overgrown Boy Scout equipped with a razor-sharp legal brain but not much else. Even if Johan liked to play the role of master to her slave, they both knew it was the other way around. But she let him play that role, the way a mother plays a frightened princess when her child wants to pretend to be a troll.
Not that Johan didn’t have his good qualities. He did. He was kind. Considerate. Loyal. He was. Alise had known men who had far fewer scruples about deceiving their wives than Johan Krohn. The question that had begun to worry Alise, though, wasn’t Johan’s loyalty to his family, but what she herself was getting out of it. No, she hadn’t had a carefully thought-out plan when she embarked upon the affair with Johan, it wasn’t that calculated. As a newly qualified lawyer she had obviously been star-struck by the hotshot lawyer who had been permitted to practise in the Supreme Court when he had barely started shaving, and was a partner in one of the best law firms in the city. But Alise was also fully aware of what she, with her average grades, had to offer a law firm, and what with her youth and appearance she had to offer a man. At the end of the day (Johan had stopped correcting her Anglicisms and had instead started to copy them), the reasons why you choose to have an affair with someone were a combination of rational and apparently irrational factors. (Johan would have pointed out that factors lead to a product, not a combination.) It was hard to know what was what, and perhaps it wasn’t that useful to know anyway. What was more important was that she was no longer sure if the combination was positive. She may have got a slightly larger office than the others on the same level as her, and perhaps slightly more interesting cases as a result of working for Johan. But her annual bonus was the same, symbolic amount that the other non-partners got. And there hadn’t been any indication that she could expect anything more. And even if Alise knew how much married men’s promises to leave their wives and families were worth, Johan hadn’t even bothered to make any of those.
“In general terms,” Svein Finne said, and smiled.
Brown teeth, she noted. But also that he didn’t smoke, seeing as he was sitting so close to her that she could feel his breath on her face.
“Twenty-five,” he said. “You kn-know you’re heading past the most fruitful time for having children?”
Alise stared at Finne. How did he know how old she was?
“The best age is your late t-teens, up to twenty-four,” Finne said, as his eyes slid over her. Yes, slid, Alise thought. Like a physical thing, like a snail leaving a trail of slime behind it.
“From then on, the health risks increase, and also the chances of spontaneous miscarriage,” he said, tugging up one cuff of his flannel shirt. He pressed a button on the side of his digital watch. “While the quality of men’s semen remains the same throughout their lives.”
That isn’t true, she thought. She had read that compared to a man her age, the risk of a man over the age of forty-one getting you pregnant was five times lower. And he was five times as likely to give you a child suffering from some sort of autism. She’d googled it. She had been invited by Frank to join him and a couple of fellow students on a trip to the mountains. When she and Frank were together he had been rather too fond of partying, without any clear goal or good grades, and she had written him off as a daddy’s boy with no motivation of his own. That turned out to be wrong, Frank had done surprisingly well in his father’s law firm. But she still hadn’t replied to the invitation.
“So look upon this as my and Johan Krohn’s gift to you,” Finne said, undoing his jacket.
Alise looked at him intently. A thought flew through her head, that he was going to attack her, but she dismissed it. Johan would be here any minute, and they were in a very public place. OK, there was nobody in their immediate vicinity, but she could see someone on the other side of the lake, maybe two hundred metres away, sitting on another bench.
“What...” Alise began, but got no further. Svein Finne’s left hand had locked around her throat, and his right hand was shoving his jacket aside. She tried to breathe but couldn’t. His erect penis had a curve, like a swan’s neck.
“Don’t be scared, I’m not like the others,” Finne said. “I don’t kill.”
Alise tried to get up from the bench, tried to push his arm away, but his hand was like a claw that had locked around her throat.
“Not if you do as I say,” Finne said. “First, look.”
He was still holding her with just one hand, and sat there, legs apart, exposed, as if he wanted her to look at it, see what she had coming. And Alise looked. Saw the white swan’s neck with its veins and a dancing red dot that was moving up the shaft.
What was that? What was that?
Then the head of his penis exploded as she heard a muffled sound, like when she tenderised a steak extra hard with the meat hammer. She felt a warm rain on her face and got something in her eye, and closed them as she heard thunder roll over them.
For a moment Alise thought it was her screaming, but when she opened her eyes again she saw that it was Svein Finne. He was holding both hands to his groin, blood was pumping between his fingers, and he was staring at her with big, shocked, accusing eyes as if she was the person who had done this to him.