Then the penny dropped for Harry. “You found your father in the police database. He had a criminal record?”
“Yes.”
“Mm. What had he—”
Harry’s trouser pocket vibrated. He looked at the number. Pressed Answer.
“Hi, Kaja. Did you get my message?”
“Yes.” Her voice was soft against his ear.
“And?”
“And I agree, I think you’ve found Finne’s motive.”
“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”
“I don’t know.” In the pause that followed he could hear Kaja’s breathing in one ear, Alexandra’s in the other. “It sounds like you’re lying down, Harry. Are you at home?”
“No, he’s at Alexandra’s.” Alexandra’s voice cut into Harry’s ear.
“Who’s that?” Kaja asked.
“That...” Harry said, “was Alexandra.”
“In that case I won’t disturb you. Goodnight.”
“You’re not disturbing...”
Kaja had already hung up.
Harry looked at his phone. Put it back in his pocket. He stubbed the cigarette out on the cube light on the bedside table and swung his legs off the bed.
“Where are you going?”
“Home,” Harry said, then bent over and kissed her on the forehead.
Harry was walking west quickly as his brain worked things through.
He took out his phone and called Bjørn Holm.
“Harry?”
“It was Finne.”
“We’ll wake the baby, Harry,” Bjørn said. “Can we do this tomorrow?”
“Svein Finne is Valentin Gjertsen’s father.”
“Oh, shit.”
“The motive’s blood vengeance. I’m certain of it. You need to put out an alert for Finne, and once you’ve got his address, you need to get a search warrant. If you find the knife, it’s case closed...”
“I hear you, Harry. But Gert is finally asleep, and I need to get some rest as well. And I’m not so sure we’d get a search warrant on those grounds. They’ll probably want something more concrete.”
“But this is blood vengeance, Bjørn. It’s in our nature. Wouldn’t you happily do the same if someone had killed Gert?”
“That’s one hell of a question.”
“Think about it.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Harry.”
“You don’t know?”
“Tomorrow. OK?”
“Of course.” Harry closed his eyes tightly and swore silently to himself. “Sorry if I’m behaving like an idiot, Bjørn, I just can’t bear to—”
“It’s fine, Harry. Let’s talk about it tomorrow. And while you’re suspended, it would probably be best if you don’t tell anyone we’re talking about the case.”
“Of course. Get some sleep, mate.”
Harry opened his eyes and slipped his phone back into his pocket. Saturday night. Ahead of him on the pavement stood a drunk, sobbing girl with her head pressed against the wall. A guy was standing behind her with his head bowed; he had one hand consolingly on her back. “He’s fucking other women!” the girl cried. “He doesn’t care about me! No one cares about me!”
“I do,” the guy said quietly.
“You, yeah,” she sniffed derisively, and went on sobbing. Harry caught the guy’s eye as he passed them.
Saturday night. There was a bar on this side of the street one hundred metres ahead. Maybe he ought to cross the road to avoid it. There wasn’t much traffic, just a few taxis. Actually, there were a lot of taxis. And they formed a wall of black vehicles that made it impossible to cross the road. Bloody hell.
Truls Berntsen was watching the seventh and final season of The Shield. He wondered about taking a quick look at Pornhub, then decided against it: someone in IT probably kept a log of what staff had gone surfing for on the Internet. Did people still say “surfing”? Truls looked at the time again. The Internet was slower at home, and it was time he got to bed anyway. He pulled on his jacket, zipped it up. But something was bothering him. He didn’t know what it could be, because he had spent the day at taxpayers’ expense without having to do anything useful, a day when he could go to bed secure in the knowledge that the balance sheet was once again in his favour.
Truls Berntsen looked at the phone.
It was stupid, but if it stopped him thinking about it, great.
“Duty officer.”
“This is Truls Berntsen. That woman you sent up here, did she file a report against Svein Finne when she got back down to you?”
“She never came back.”
“She just left?”
“Must have done.”
Truls Berntsen hung up. Thought for a moment. He tapped at the phone again. Waited.
“Harry.”
Truls could only just make out his colleague’s voice over the music and shouting in the background. “Are you at a party?”
“Bar.”
“They’re playing Motörhead,” Truls said.
“And that’s the only positive thing worth saying about the place. What do you want?”
“Svein Finne. You’ve been trying to keep an eye on him.”
“And?”
Truls told him about his visitor earlier in the day.
“Mm. Have you got the woman’s name and phone number?”
“Dagny something. Jensen, maybe. You can ask the duty officer if they took any other details, but I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“I think she’s frightened Finne will find out she was here.”
“OK. I can’t call the duty officer, I’m suspended. Can you do it for me?”
“I was about to go home.”
Truls listened to the silence at the other end. Lemmy was singing “Killed by Death.”
“OK,” Truls grunted.
“One more thing. My ID card’s been deactivated, so I can’t get into the office anymore. Can you bring my service pistol from my bottom drawer and meet me outside Olympen in twenty minutes?”
“Your pistol? What do you want that for?”
“To protect myself against the evils of the world.”
“Your drawers are locked.”
“But you’ve got a copy of the key.”
“What? What makes you think that?”
“I’ve noticed you moving things about in there. And on one occasion you used it to store a lump of hash that Narcotics had seized, according to the bag it was in. So it wouldn’t be found in your drawers if they started looking for it.”
Truls didn’t answer.
“Well?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Truls grunted. “On the dot. I’m not going to stand there freezing.”
Kaja Solness was standing with her arms folded, staring out of the living-room window. She was freezing. She was always cold. In Kabul, where the temperature veered from minus five to well over thirty, her nocturnal shivers were just as likely to strike in July as they were in December, and there’d been little she could do but wait for morning, when the desert sun would warm her up again. Her brother had been the same, and once she had asked him if he thought they were born cold-blooded, that they were incapable of regulating their own body temperature and were reliant on external heat to stop them seizing up and freezing to death like reptiles. For a long time she had thought that was true. That she wasn’t in control. That she was helplessly dependent on her surroundings. Dependent on others.
She stared out into the darkness. Let her gaze slip along the garden fence.
Was he standing out there somewhere?
It was impossible to know. The blackness was impenetrable, and a man like him knew perfectly well how to keep himself hidden.
She was shivering, but she wasn’t afraid. Because now she knew she didn’t need other people. She could shape her own life.