“Grünerløkka,” Harry said. “Seilduksgata.”
“Clever boy. An hour from now?”
As Harry hung up and called Kaja Solness, a thought struck him. The fact that he had remembered Seilduksgata regardless of how drunk he had been... he always remembered something, his memory was never completely blank. Maybe it wasn’t the long-term effects of drinking that meant he couldn’t remember that evening at the Jealousy Bar, maybe there was something he didn’t want to remember.
“Hello, you’ve reached Kaja’s voicemail.”
“I’ve got the motive you were asking about,” Harry said after the bleep. “His name is Valentin Gjertsen, and it turns out that he was Svein Finne’s son. Valentin Gjertsen is dead. He was killed. By me.”
16
Alexandra Sturdza let out a long sound as she stretched her arms over her head so that her fingers and bare feet touched the brass bedstead at either end of the mattress. Then she rolled onto her side, pushed the duvet between her thighs and put one of the big white pillows under her head. She was grinning so much that her dark eyes almost disappeared into her hard face.
“I’m glad you came,” she said, putting one hand on Harry’s chest.
“Mm.” Harry was lying on his back staring into the bright light from the ceiling lamp. She had been wearing a long silk dressing gown when she opened the door for him, then took him by the hand and led him straight into the bedroom.
“Are you feeling guilty?” she asked.
“Always,” Harry said.
“For being here, I mean.”
“Not particularly. It just fits into the scale of indicators.”
“Indicators of what?”
“That I’m a bad man.”
“If you’re already feeling guilty, you might as well get undressed.”
“So there’s no doubt that Valentin Gjertsen was Svein Finne’s son?” Harry folded his hands behind his head.
“No.”
“Christ, it really is an absurd chain of events. Think about it. Valentin Gjertsen was probably the product of a rape.”
“Who isn’t?” She rubbed her crotch against his thigh.
“Did you know that Valentin Gjertsen raped the prison dentist during an appointment? Afterwards he pulled her nylon tights over her head and set light to them.”
“Shut up, Harry, I want you. There are condoms in the drawer of the bedside table.”
“No thanks.”
“No? You don’t want another kid, do you?”
“I didn’t mean the condoms.” Harry put one hand on the two of hers that had started to undo his belt.
“What the hell?” she snapped. “What’s the point of you if you don’t want to fuck?”
“Good question.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“Low testosterone levels, at a guess.”
With an angry sniff Alexandra rolled onto her back. “She isn’t just your ex-wife, Harry, she’s dead. When are you going to accept that?”
“You think five days of celibacy is excessive?”
She looked at him. “Funny. But you’re not dealing with it as well as you’re pretending to, are you?”
“Pretending is half the job,” Harry said, raising his hips and pulling his cigarettes from his pocket. “Research shows that you end up in a better mood if you exercise your smile muscles. If you want to cry, laugh. I sleep. What’s the smoking policy in your bedroom?”
“Everything’s allowed. But when people smoke in front of me, my policy is to read what it says on the packet. Tobacco kills, my friend.”
“Mm. That bit about ‘my friend’ is nice.”
“It’s to make you recognise that it isn’t just something you’re doing to yourself, but to everyone who cares for you.”
“I got that. So, at the risk of cancer and feeling even more guilty, I am hereby lighting a cigarette.” Harry inhaled and blew the smoke up at the ceiling lamp. “You like lights,” he said.
“I grew up in Timisoara.”
“Oh?”
“The first town in Europe to have electric streetlamps. Only New York beat us to it.”
“And that’s why you like lights?”
“No, but you like fun facts.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Such as the fact that Finne had a rapist for a son.”
“That’s a bit more than a fun fact.”
“Why?”
Harry took a drag on the cigarette, but it tasted of nothing. “Because the son gives Finne a strong enough motive for revenge. I hunted down his son in connection with several murder investigations. And it ended with me shooting him.”
“You...”
“Valentin Gjertsen was unarmed, but provoked me to shoot by pretending he was reaching for a gun. Unfortunately I was the only witness, and Internal Investigations found it problematic that I had fired three shots. But I was cleared. They couldn’t, as they put it, prove that I hadn’t acted in self-defense.”
“And Finne found out about this? And you think he killed your ex-wife as a result?”
Harry nodded slowly. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
“Logically, he ought to have killed Oleg.”
Harry raised an eyebrow. “So you know his name?”
“You talk a lot when you’re drunk, Harry. And far too much about your ex-wife and the boy.”
“Oleg isn’t mine, he’s from Rakel’s first marriage.”
“You told me that too, but isn’t that just biology?”
Harry shook his head. “Not for Svein Finne. He didn’t love Valentin Gjertsen as a person, he hardly even knew him. He loved Valentin simply because he was carrying his genes. Finne’s driving force is to spread his seed and father children. Biology is everything to him. It’s his way of gaining eternal life.”
“That’s sick.”
“Is it?” Harry looked at his cigarette. Wondered where lung cancer was in the list of things queuing up to kill him. “Maybe we’re more tightly bound by biology than we like to think. Maybe we’re all born bloodline chauvinists, racists and nationalists, with an instinctive desire for global domination for our own family. And then we learn to ignore it, to a greater or lesser extent. Most of us, anyway.”
“We still want to know where we come from, in purely biological terms. Did you know that over the past twenty years at the Forensic Medical Institute we’ve seen a 300 percent increase in the number of DNA tests from people who want to know who their father is, or if their child really is theirs?”
“Fun fact.”
“That tells us something about how our identity is bound up with our genetic inheritance.”
“You think?”
“Yes.” She picked up the glass of wine she’d left on the bedside table. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”
“In bed with me?”
“In Norway. I came here to find my father. My mother never liked talking about him, all I knew was that he was from Norway. When she died, I bought a ticket and came to look for him. That first year I had three different jobs. All I knew about my father was that he was probably intelligent, because my mother was pretty average but I always got top grades in Romania, and it only took me six months to learn Norwegian fluently. But I couldn’t find my father. So I got a grant to study chemistry at NTNU, then got a job at the Forensic Medical Institute, working on DNA analysis.”
“Where you could carry on looking.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I found him.”
“Really? You must have had luck on your side, because as far as I know, you lot delete DNA profiles taken in paternity cases after one year.”
“In paternity cases, yes.”