And he needed a break. He needed a... coffee. Strong, Turkish coffee. Harry reached behind the bar for the cezve, the Turkish coffeepot Mehmet had left, and realised that Øystein had changed the music. Still hip-hop, but the jazz and intricate bassline were gone.
“What’s this, Øystein?”
“Kanye West, ‘So Appalled,’ ” Øystein called from the back room.
“And just when you almost had me. Please, turn it off.”
“This is good stuff, Harry! Give it time. We mustn’t let our ears get stale.”
“Why not? There are thousands of albums from the last millennium I haven’t heard, and that’s enough to last the rest of my life.” Harry swallowed. What a relief it was to take a break from the heavy stuff, with these feather-light, meaningless exchanges with someone you knew inside out, like table tennis with a three-gram ball.
“You need to make more of an effort.” Øystein came back into the bar with a broad, toothless grin. He had lost his last front tooth in a bar in Prague, it had just fallen out. And even if he had discovered the gap in the airport toilet, called the bar and had the brownish-yellow tooth returned to him by post, there was nothing that could be done. Not that Øystein seemed particularly bothered.
“These are the classics hip-hop fans will be listening to when they’re old, Harry. This isn’t just form, it’s content.”
Harry held the memory card up to the light. He nodded slowly. “You’re right, Øystein.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“I’m thinking wrong because I’m focusing on form, on how the murder was carried out. I’m ignoring what I always used to go on about to my students. Why. The motive. The content.”
The door opened behind them.
“Oh, shit,” Øystein said in a low voice.
Harry glanced up at the mirror in front of him. A man was approaching. Short, with a light step, shaking his head, with a grin under his black, greasy fringe. It was the sort of grin you see on golfers or footballers when they’ve just shot the ball high into the stands, a grin that’s probably supposed to suggest that it was such a fuck-up that all they can do is smile.
“Hole.” A high, disconcertingly friendly voice.
“Ringdal.” Not high. Not disconcertingly friendly.
Harry saw Øystein shiver, as if the temperature in the bar had just plunged below zero.
“So, what are you doing in my bar, Hole?” There was a jangle of keys and coins in Ringdal’s pockets as he took off his blue Catalina jacket and hung it on the hook behind the door to the back room.
“Well,” Harry said. “Would ‘seeing how the inheritance is being managed’ be a satisfactory answer?”
“The only satisfactory answer is ‘getting out of here.’ ”
Harry put the memory card in his pocket and pushed himself off the bar stool. “You don’t look as badly hurt as I’d hoped, Ringdal.”
Ringdal was rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Hurt?”
“To deserve a lifetime ban I should have broken your nose at the very least. But perhaps you haven’t got any bones in your nose?”
Ringdal laughed as if he genuinely thought Harry was funny. “You landed your first punch because I wasn’t expecting it, Hole. A bit of a nosebleed, but not enough to break anything, I’m afraid. And after that you hit nothing but air. And that wall over there.” Ringdal filled a glass with water from the tap behind the bar. Perhaps it was a paradox that a teetotaller was running a bar. Perhaps not. “But all credit to you for trying, Hole. Maybe you should try to be a bit less drunk next time you attempt to take on a Norwegian judo champion.”
“And there we have it,” Harry said.
“What?”
“Have you ever heard of anyone involved in judo who has good taste in music?”
Ringdal sighed, Øystein raised his eyebrows and Harry realised that the ball had ended up in the stand.
“Getting out of here,” Harry said, and stood up.
“Hole.”
Harry stopped and turned around.
“I’m sorry about Rakel.” Ringdal raised his glass of water in his left hand as if in a toast. “She was a wonderful person. A shame she didn’t have time to carry on.”
“Carry on?”
“Oh, didn’t she tell you? I asked her to stay on as chair after you were gone. Well, let’s draw a line under all that, Harry. You’re welcome here, and I promise to listen to Øystein here when it comes to the choice of music. I can see that takings have dropped a bit, although of course that could be due to something other than a slightly less...” — he searched for the right words — “strict music policy.”
Harry nodded and opened the door.
He stopped in the doorway and looked around.
Grünerløkka. The scraping sound of a skateboard, ridden by a guy closer to forty than thirty, wearing Converse and flannels. Harry guessed design studio, clothing boutique or one of the hipster burger joints that Helga, Oleg’s girlfriend, had said “sold the same shit, same wrapping as everywhere else, but they put truffles on the fries so they can charge three times the price and still be on-trend.”
Oslo. A young man with an impressive, unkempt beard — like an Old Testament prophet — hanging like a bib over his tie and impeccable suit, his Burberry coat open. Finance? Irony? Or just confusion?
Norway. A couple in Lycra suits, jogging with skis and sticks in their hands, ski wax worth a thousand kroner, energy drinks and protein bars in their bumbags, on their way to the last patches of snow in the highest shadows of Nordmarka.
Harry pulled out his phone and called Bjørn’s number.
“Harry?”
“I’ve found the memory card from the wildlife camera.”
Silence.
“Bjørn?”
“I just needed to get away from everyone. That’s crazy! What can you see?”
“Not much, sadly. I was wondering if you could help me get it analysed. It’s dark, but you’ve got methods of getting more out of the images than I can manage. There are a few silhouettes and reference points, the height of the door frame, that sort of thing. A 3-D specialist might be able to come up with a decent description.” Harry rubbed his chin. He was itching somewhere, he just didn’t know where.
“I can try,” Bjørn said. “I can use an external expert. Because I’m assuming you’d like this done discreetly?”
“If I’m to have any chance of following this line of inquiry undisturbed, yes.”
“Have you made copies of the recordings?”
“No, it’s all on the memory card.”
“OK. Leave it in an envelope at Schrøder’s and I’ll call in and pick it up later today.”
“Thanks, Bjørn.” Harry ended the call. Tapped in R for Rakel. The other entries in his contacts were O for Oleg, Ø for Øystein, K for Katrine, B for Bjørn, S for Sis and A for Ståle Aune. That was all. That was enough for Harry, even if Rakel had told Ståle that Harry was open to meeting new people. But only if those letters weren’t already taken.
He keyed in Rakel’s work number without her extension.
“Roar Bohr?” he said when the receptionist answered.
“It looks like Bohr isn’t here today.”
“Where is he, and when will he be back?”
“It doesn’t say anything about that here. But I’ve got a mobile number.”
Harry made a note of the number and tapped it into the app for directory inquiries. It came up with an address between Smestad and Huseby, and a landline number. He looked at his watch. Half past one. He called the number.
“Yes?” a woman’s voice said after the third ring.
“Sorry, wrong number.” Harry hung up and started to walk towards the tram stop at the top of Birkelunden. He rubbed his upper arm. That wasn’t where the itch was either. It wasn’t until he was on the metro heading towards Smestad that he realised that the itch was probably in his head. And that it had almost certainly been triggered by Ringdal’s possibly well-meant, possibly calculated gesture. And that he would actually have preferred to have gone on being barred, rather than be the recipient of irritating, broad-minded benevolence. And that he might possibly have underestimated judo.