“A little,” Larsen said. “Same as human beings.”
Katrine looked at Sung-min Larsen. Was he referring to Ole Winter?
“Get going,” she said, patting Kasparov’s head. “Good hunting.”
And, as if the old dog recognised what she said, its tail, which had been drooping down, started to wag.
Katrine walked around the lake.
Krohn and his assistant both looked pale and cold. A slight but chill north wind had started to blow, the sort that puts a temporary stop to Oslo’s inhabitants’ thoughts of spring.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through everything again, from the start,” Katrine said, taking out her notebook.
Krohn nodded. “It started when Finne came to see me a few days ago. All of a sudden he was just standing there on my terrace. He wanted to tell me he’d killed Rakel Fauke, so I could help him if and when you started to close in on him.”
“And Harry Hole?”
“After the murder he drugged Harry Hole and left him at the scene. He fiddled with the thermostat to make it look like Rakel was killed after Hole arrived there. Finne’s motive was that Harry Hole had shot his son when he was trying to arrest him.”
“Really?” Katrine didn’t know why she didn’t instantly buy this story. “Did Finne tell you how he got inside Rakel Fauke’s house? Seeing as the door was locked from the inside, I mean.”
Krohn shook his head. “The chimney? I have no idea. I’ve seen that man arrive and leave in the most inexplicable ways. I agreed to meet him here because I wanted him to hand himself in to the police.”
Katrine stamped her feet on the ground. “Who do you think shot Finne? And why?”
Krohn shrugged. “A man like Svein Finne, who assaulted children, gets plenty of enemies in prison. He managed to stay alive in there, but I know that several of them who’d been released were just waiting for Finne to get out. Men like that often have access to firearms, sadly, and some of them know how to use them as well.”
“So we’ve got loads of potential suspects, all of whom have served time for serious offences, some of them for murder, is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying, Bratt.”
Krohn was a persuasive storyteller, there was no doubt about that. Maybe Katrine’s skepticism was based on the fact that she had heard too many of the stories he had told in court. She looked at Alise. “I’ve got a few questions, if that’s OK?”
“Not yet,” Alise said, folding her arms over her chest. “Not until six hours have passed. New research shows that dwelling on dramatic experiences before that increases the risk of long-term trauma.”
“And we’ve got a killer who’s getting a bit harder to catch with each minute that passes,” Katrine said.
“Not my responsibility, I’m a defense lawyer,” the woman said, with a defiant look in her eyes but in a shaky voice.
Katrine felt sorry for her, but this wasn’t the time for kid gloves.
“In that case you’ve done a terrible job, because your client’s dead,” she said. “And you’re not a defense lawyer, you’re a young woman with a law degree and a boss you’re fucking because you think it’ll help you climb the ladder. It won’t. And it won’t help you to try and play tough with me, OK?”
Alise Krogh Reinertsen stared at Katrine. Blinked. A first tear began to make its way through the powder on the young woman’s cheek.
Six minutes later, Katrine had all the details. She had asked Alise to close her eyes, relive the first shot, and say “now” when the bullet hit, and “now” when she heard the rumble. There was over a second between them, so the shot had come from at least four hundred metres away. Katrine thought about the points of impact. The man’s genitals, then one of his eyes. That wasn’t an accident. The killer had to be either a competitive marksman or have specialist military training. There couldn’t be many people like that who had served time at the same time as Svein Finne. Probably none, at a guess.
And a suspicion, almost a hope — no, not even that, just a vain wish — ran through her. Then disappeared. But that glimpse of an alternative truth left something warm and soothing behind it, like the faith religious people cling to even though their intellect rejects it. And for a few moments Katrine couldn’t feel the northerly wind as she looked at the park in front of her and imagined it in the summer, the island with the willow tree, the flowers, insects buzzing, birds singing. All the things she would soon be able to show Gert. Then another thought struck her.
The stories she was going to tell Gert about his father.
The older he got, the more he would want to know about that part of him, the man he had come from.
Something that would make him either proud or ashamed.
It was true that the badger in her had woken up. And that a badger, in theory, could dig right through the planet in the course of its lifetime. But how deeply did she want to dig? Maybe she’d found out all she wanted to know.
She heard a sound. No, it wasn’t a sound. Silence.
The watch on the other side of the lake. It had stopped bleeping.
A dog’s sense of smell is, roughly speaking, a hundred thousand times more sensitive than a human’s. And, according to recent research that Sung-min had read, dogs can do more than just smell. A dog’s Jacobson’s organ, located in its palate, also allows it to detect and interpret scentless pheromones and other information without any smell. This means that a dog — in perfect conditions — can follow the trail left by a human being up to a month later.
The conditions weren’t perfect.
The worst of it was that the trail they were following ran along a sidewalk, which meant that other people and animals had confused the scent. And there wasn’t much vegetation for scent particles to cling to.
On the other hand, both Sørkedalsveien and the sidewalk — which ran through a residential area — weren’t as heavily trafficked as the city centre. And it was cold, which helped preserve scent. But, more important, even if there were large clouds blowing in from the northwest, it hadn’t rained since Svein Finne had been there.
Sung-min felt tense each time they approached a bus stop, sure that the trail was about to end, that that was where Finne had got off a bus. But Kasparov just kept going, straining at his leash — he seemed to have forgotten all about his aching hips — and on the slopes heading up towards Røa, Sung-min began to regret not changing out of his suit into jogging gear.
But as he sweated he was getting more and more excited. They had been going for almost half an hour, and it seemed unlikely that Finne would have used public transport at all, only to walk such an unnecessarily long way after he got off.
Harry stared out across Porsanger Fjord, towards the sea, towards the North Pole, towards the end and the beginning, towards where there was probably a horizon on clearer days. But today, the sea, sky and land all blurred together. It was like sitting under a huge, grey-white dome, and it was as quiet as a church, the only sounds the occasional plaintive cry of a gull and the sea lapping gently against the rowing boat the man and boy were sitting in. And Oleg’s voice:
“...and when I got home and told Mum that I put my hand up in class and said that Old Tjikko isn’t the oldest tree in the world, but the oldest roots, she laughed so much I thought she was going to start crying. And then she said that the three of us had roots like that. I didn’t tell her, but I thought that couldn’t be right, because you’re not my father the way the roots are Old Tjikko’s father and mother. But as the years passed, I realised what she meant. That roots are something that grow. That when we used to sit there talking about... I don’t know, what did we talk about? Tetris. Skating. Bands we both like...”