She thought about the sound of the other woman’s voice.
No, he’s at Alexandra’s.
Her own life. And other people’s.
17
Dagny Jensen stopped abruptly. She had gone for her usual Sunday walk along the banks of the Akerselva. Feeding the ducks. Smiling at families with small children and dogs. Looking for the first snowdrops. Anything to stop herself thinking. Because she had been thinking all night, and all she wanted to do now was forget.
But he wouldn’t let her. She stared at the figure standing outside the door to her building. He was stamping his feet on the ground, as if he was trying to keep warm. As if he had been waiting a long time. She was about to turn and walk away when she realised it wasn’t him. This man was taller than Finne.
Dagny walked closer.
He didn’t have long hair either, but scruffy, fair hair. She walked a bit closer.
“Dagny Jensen?” the man said.
“Yes?”
“Harry Hole. Oslo Police.”
The words sounded like he was grinding them out.
“What’s this about?”
“You wanted to report a rape yesterday.”
“I changed my mind.”
“So I understand. You’re frightened.”
Dagny looked at him. He was unshaven, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had a liver-coloured scar running across one side of his face like a no-entry sign. But even if his face had something of the same brutality as Svein Finne, there was something that softened it, something that made it almost handsome.
“Am I?” she asked.
“Yes. And I’m here to ask for your help to catch the man who raped you.”
Dagny flinched. “Me? You’ve misunderstood, Hole. I’m not the person who was raped. If it was actually a rape at all.”
Hole didn’t answer. Just held her gaze. Now he was the one looking hard at her.
“He was trying to get you pregnant,” the police officer said. “And now that he’s hoping you’re carrying his child, he’s keeping watch over you. Has he been?”
Dagny blinked twice. “How do you know...”
“That’s his thing. Has he threatened you with what will happen if you have an abortion?”
Dagny Jensen swallowed. She was about to ask him to leave, but found herself hesitating. She didn’t know if she could trust what he said about catching Finne, there wasn’t much to go on. But this policeman had something the others hadn’t had. Resoluteness. There was determination in him. Maybe it’s a bit like with priests, Dagny thought; we trust them because we’re so desperate to believe what they say is true.
Dagny poured coffee into the cups on her small, folded-out kitchen table.
The tall policeman had squeezed himself onto the chair between the worktop and the table. “So Finne wants you to meet him at the Catholic church in Vika this evening? At nine o’clock?” He hadn’t interrupted her while she was talking, hadn’t taken any notes, but his bloodshot eyes had stayed on her, giving her the feeling that he was taking in every word, that he was seeing it in his mind’s eye the way she did, frame by frame of the short horror film that kept replaying inside her head.
“Yes,” she said.
“OK. Well, obviously we could pick him up there. Question him.”
“But you haven’t got any evidence.”
“No. Without evidence we’d have to let him go, and because he’d realise it was you who told us...”
“...I’d be in even more danger than I am now.”
The policeman nodded.
“That was why I didn’t report him,” Dagny said. “It’s like shooting a bear, isn’t it? If you don’t bring it down with your first shot, you won’t have time to reload before it gets you. In which case it’s better not to have fired the first shot.”
“Mm. On the other hand, even the largest bear can be brought down by a single, well-aimed shot.”
“How, though?”
The policeman put one hand around his coffee cup. “There are several ways. One is to use you as bait. Fitted with a hidden microphone. Get him to talk about the rape.”
He looked down at the table.
“Go on,” she said.
He raised his head. The blue of his irises looked washed-out. “You’d have to ask him about the consequences if you don’t do as he says. That way we’d have the threats. If we have those and a conversation in which he indirectly confirms the rape, we’d have enough on tape to get him convicted.”
“You still use tape?”
The policeman raised his coffee to his lips.
“Sorry,” Dagny said. “I’m just so...”
“Of course,” the policeman said. “And I’d understand completely if you said no.”
“You said there were several ways?”
“Yes.” He said no more, just sipped from the cup.
“But?”
The policeman shrugged. “In many ways, a church is perfect. There’s no noise, nothing to stop us getting a good-quality recording. And you’d be in a public place where he couldn’t attack you...”
“We were in a public place last time.”
“...and we could be there to monitor the situation.”
Dagny looked at him. There was something in his eyes she recognised. And now she realised what it was. It was the same thing she’d seen in her own eyes, and at first had thought was a flaw in the mirror. A defect. Something broken. And something about his voice put her in mind of pupils with unsteady voices serving up fake explanations of why they hadn’t done their homework. She went over to the stove, put the coffee pot down and looked out of the window. Down below she could see people out for Sunday walks, but she couldn’t see him. Life, going on around her, had become an unnatural, strained idyll. Dagny had never thought about it like that before, she had just thought that was the way it was supposed to be.
She walked back and sat down on the kitchen chair.
“If I do this, I need to be certain he won’t turn up again. Do you understand that, Hole?”
“Yes, I understand. And you have my word that you’ll never see Svein Finne again. Ever. OK?”
Never. She knew that wasn’t true. Just as she had known that what the female priest said wasn’t true when she spoke of salvation. That it was meant as a comfort. But it worked. Even if we saw through “never” and “salvation,” they were passwords that opened the door to the heart, and the heart believed what it wanted to believe. Dagny could feel herself breathing easier already. She half closed her eyes. And when she looked at him like that, with the daylight coming through the window forming a halo around his head, she could no longer see the hurt in the policeman’s eyes, could no longer hear the false note in his voice.
“OK,” she said. “Tell me how we do this.”
Harry stopped in the street outside Kaja Solness’s house and called her number for the third time. Same result again. “The person you are calling has their phone switched off, or is...”
He opened the creaking wrought-iron gate and walked towards the house.
It was crazy. Of course it was crazy. But what else could he do?
He rang the doorbell. Waited. Rang again.
Put his eye to the large peephole in the door and saw her coat, the one she had been wearing at the funeral, hanging on a hook. And her tall black boots were standing on the shoe rack below.
He walked around the house. There were still patches of snow on the withered, flattened grass in the shade of the north side.
He looked up at the window of what had been her bedroom, although obviously she could have moved her bed into one of the other rooms. When he bent down to gather enough snow to make a snowball, he saw it. A footprint in the snow. From a boot. His brain began to search its databases. Found what it was looking for. A boot print in the snow outside the house in Holmenkollen.