“We’ve got a case,” Oleg said. “Two neighbours, childhood friends, who fell out at a party. There’d never been any trouble between them before, solid types. They each went home, then the next morning one of them, a maths teacher, showed up at the other’s door with a jack in his hand. Afterwards the neighbour accused the maths teacher of attempted murder, said he’d hit out at his head before he managed to close the door. I questioned the maths teacher. And I’m sitting there thinking: no, if he’s capable of murder, then we all are. And we aren’t. Are we?”
Harry didn’t answer.
Oleg stopped rowing for a moment. “I thought the same thing when they told me that Kripos had evidence against you. That it just couldn’t be true. I know you’ve had to kill in the course of duty, to save your own or someone else’s life. But a premeditated, planned murder, the sort of murder where you clean up all the evidence afterwards... You couldn’t have done that, could you?”
Harry looked at Oleg, sitting there waiting for him to answer. The boy, almost a man, with his journey still ahead of him, with the possibility of becoming a better man than him. Rakel had always had a note of concern in her voice when she told him how much Oleg looked up to him, tried to copy him down to the smallest details, the way he walked, with his feet turned out slightly, a bit like Charlie Chaplin. That he used Harry’s special words and expressions, such as the archaic “indubitably.” He copied the way Harry rubbed the back of his neck when he was thinking hard. Repeated Harry’s arguments about the rights and limitations of the state.
“Of course I couldn’t have done it,” Harry said, pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “It takes a particular type of person to plan a cold-blooded murder, and you and I, we’re not like that.”
Oleg smiled. Looked almost relieved. “Can I bum a—”
“No, you don’t smoke. Keep rowing.”
Harry lit a cigarette. The smoke rose straight up, then drifted off towards the east. He squinted towards the horizon that wasn’t there.
Krohn had looked utterly confused, standing there in the doorway in just his boxer shorts and slippers. He had hesitated for a moment before asking Harry in. They had sat down in the kitchen, where Krohn had served tasteless espresso from a black machine while Harry briefly checked that everything he said was in confidence, then he served up the whole story.
When he had finished, Krohn’s coffee cup was still standing untouched.
“So what you want is to clear your name,” Krohn said. “But without identifying your colleague, Bjørn Holm.”
“Yes,” Harry said. “Can you help me?”
Johan Krohn had scratched his chin. “That’s going to be difficult. As you know, the police don’t like to let go of one suspect unless they’ve got another one. And what we’ve got, the analysis of some blood on a pair of trousers that shows you were drugged with Rohypnol, and the electricity usage that shows the thermostat had been turned up and then down again, those are just corroborating factors. The blood could have come from another occasion, the electricity could have been used in another room, it doesn’t prove anything at all. What we need... is a scapegoat. Someone who hasn’t got an alibi. Someone with a motive. Someone everyone would accept.”
Harry had noted that Krohn said “we,” as if they were already a team. And something else had changed in Krohn. His face had a bit of colour in it again, he was breathing deeper, his pupils had dilated. Like a carnivore that’s caught sight of some prey, Harry thought. The same prey as me.
“There’s a widespread misconception that a scapegoat has to be innocent,” Krohn said. “But the purpose of the scapegoat isn’t to be innocent, but to take the blame, regardless of what he has or hasn’t done. Even under the current rule of law, we see that offenders who arouse public disgust but who are only tangentially guilty receive disproportionately severe sentences.”
“Shall we get to the point?” Harry said.
“The point?”
“Svein Finne.”
Krohn looked at Harry. Then gave a brief nod to indicate that they understood each other.
“With this new information,” Krohn said, “Finne no longer has an alibi for the time of the murder, he hadn’t arrived at the maternity ward by then. And he has a motive: he hates you. You and I can ensure that an active rapist ends up behind bars. And he isn’t an innocent scapegoat. Think about all the suffering he’s caused people. Do you know, Finne admitted... no, he boasted about assaulting the daughter of Bishop Bohr, who lived just a couple of hundred metres away from here.”
Harry took his cigarette packet from his pocket. He tapped out a bent cigarette. “Tell me what Finne’s got on you.”
Krohn laughed. Raised his cup to his lips to camouflage the fake laughter.
“I haven’t got time for games, Krohn. Come on, all the details.”
Krohn swallowed. “Of course. I’m sorry, I haven’t slept. Let’s go and have coffee in the library.”
“What for?”
“My wife... Sound doesn’t carry as far there.”
The acoustics were dry and muffled among the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Harry listened as he sat slumped in a deep leather armchair. This time it was his turn not to touch his coffee.
“Mm,” he said when Krohn had finished. “Shall we skip the bit where we beat around the bush?”
“Of course,” said Krohn, who had put a raincoat on and reminded Harry of a flasher who used to hang around in a patch of woodland in Oppsal when Harry was a boy. Øystein and Harry had snuck up on the flasher and shot at him with water pistols. But what Harry remembered most was the look of sorrow in the wet, passive flasher’s eyes before they ran off, and that he regretted it afterwards without really knowing why.
“You don’t want Finne behind bars,” Harry said. “That wouldn’t stop him telling your wife what he knows. You want Finne out of the way. For good.”
“So...” Krohn began.
“That’s your problem with taking Finne alive,” Harry continued. “Mine is that if we manage to find him at all, he may still have an alibi for between 18:00 and 22:00 that we don’t know about. It may be that he was with the pregnant woman during the hours before they went to the maternity ward. Not that I imagine that she’d come forward if Finne was killed, of course.”
“Killed?”
“Liquidated, terminated, annulled.” Harry took a drag on the cigarette, which he had lit without asking permission. “I prefer ‘killed.’ Bad things deserve bad names.”
Krohn let out a short, bemused laugh. “You’re talking about cold-blooded murder, Harry.”
Harry shrugged. “Murder, yes. Cold-blooded, no. But if we’re going to manage this, we need to lower the temperature. If you understand me?”
Krohn nodded.
“Good,” Harry said. “Let me think for a minute.”
“Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
Harry handed him the packet.
The two men sat in silence, watching the smoke rise towards the ceiling.
“If—” Krohn began.
“Shhh.”
Krohn sighed.
His cigarette had almost burned down to the filter when Harry spoke again.
“What I need from you, Krohn, is a lie.”
“OK?”
“You need to say that Finne confessed to killing Rakel. And I’ll be inviting two more people to participate in this. One works at the Forensic Medicine Institute. The other is a sniper. None of you will know the names of the others. OK?”
Krohn had nodded.
“Good. We need to write an invitation to Finne, telling him when and where to meet your assistant, then you need to attach it to the grave with something I’m going to give you.”