Harry saw flashing blue lights at the end of the straight stretch of road in front of them. They passed a warning triangle. Bjørn slowed down.
An articulated truck was parked by the verge on their side of the road. On the other side lay the wreckage of a car next to the crash barrier in front of the river. What had once been a car reminded Harry of a crushed tin can.
A policeman waved them past.
“Hang on,” Harry said, winding his window down. “That car’s got Oslo plates.”
Bjørn stopped the Amazon next to a policeman with a face like a bulldog, a neck and arms that looked too short sticking out from his over-pumped upper body.
“What’s happened?” Harry asked, holding up his ID.
The policeman looked at it and nodded. “The truck driver’s being questioned, so we should know soon enough. It’s icy, so it could just be an accident.”
“It’s a bit straight for that, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” the police officer said, composing his face into a professional sombre expression. “At worst, we have one a month. We call this stretch of road the green mile. You know, that last walk people sentenced to death in America take on their way to the chair.”
“Mm. We’re looking for a guy who lives in Oslo, so it would be interesting to know who was driving the car.”
The policeman took a deep breath. “To be honest, when a car weighing one thousand three hundred kilos drives at eighty or ninety kilometres an hour into the front of an almost-fifty-ton truck, seat belts and airbags aren’t a lot of use. I couldn’t tell you if my own brother had been driving that car. Or my sister, come to that. But the car’s registered to a Stein Hansen, so for the time being we’re working on the assumption that it’s him.”
“Thanks,” Harry said, and closed the window.
They drove on in silence.
“You seem relieved,” Bjørn said after a while.
“Do I?” Harry said in surprise.
“You think it would be too easy if Bohr had got away like that, don’t you?”
“Dying in a car crash?”
“I mean, leaving you in this world to suffer alone every day. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You want him to suffer the same way.”
Harry looked out of the window. Moonlight was shining through a gap in the clouds, colouring the ice on the river silver.
Bjørn turned the radio on.
The Highwaymen.
Harry listened for a while, then he got his phone out and called Kaja.
No answer.
Weird.
He tried again.
He waited until her voicemail kicked in. Her voice. The memory of Rakel’s. The bleep. Harry cleared his throat. “It’s me. Call me.”
She probably had her headphones on, listening to loud music again.
The wipers cleared the windshield. Over and over again. A fresh start, a blank page every three seconds. The never-ending absolution of sin.
Two-tone yodelling and banjo music played on the radio.
29
Two and a half years earlier
Roar Bohr wiped the sweat from his forehead and looked up at the sky above the desert.
The sun had melted, that was why he couldn’t see it. It had dissolved, spreading out like a layer of golden copper across the hazy blue. And beneath it: a monk vulture, its three-metre wingspan etching a black cross on the yellow copper.
Bohr looked around again. There were only the two of them out here. The two of them, and open, empty, stony desert, sloping hillsides and rocky outcrops. Obviously it was a breach of operational safety manuals to drive out into the field without more protection, just two men in one vehicle. But in his report he would say he judged it to be a gesture to Hala’s home village, an appeal to Afghan hearts, that Hala’s boss had driven her body home in person, with no more protection than she herself had had.
One more month, then he’d be going home, home from his third and final tour in Afghanistan. He was longing to go home, he always longed to go home, but he wasn’t happy. Because he knew that when he got home, after just two or three weeks he would start longing to be back here again.
But there weren’t going to be any more tours, he had applied and been accepted to fill the post of head of the NHRI in Oslo, a newly established national institute for human rights. The NHRI was subject to Parliament, but operated as an independent body. They would be investigating human rights issues, providing information and advice to the national assembly, though beyond that their remit was rather vague. But that just meant that he and the eighteen other members of staff could influence what their purpose should be. In many ways it was a sort of continuation of what he had been doing in Afghanistan, just without guns. So he was going to take the job. He wasn’t going to end up being a general, in any case. That was the sort of thing they let you know in a very respectful, discreet manner. That you weren’t one of the chosen few. But that wasn’t why he had to get away from Afghanistan.
In his mind’s eye he could see Hala lying on the ground. She was usually dressed in Western clothes and a modest hijab, but that night she had been wearing a blue shalwar kameez tunic that was pulled up around her waist. Bohr remembered her bare hips and stomach, the skin with that glow that would slowly fade. The way the life in those beautiful, beautiful eyes had faded. Even when she was dead, Hala had looked like Bianca. He had noticed when she introduced herself as his interpreter, that Bianca was looking out through those eyes, that she had come back from the dead, from the river, to be with him again. But obviously Hala couldn’t know that, it wasn’t the sort of thing he could ever have explained to her. And now she was gone too.
But he had found someone else who resembled Bianca. The head of security at the Red Cross. Kaja Solness. Maybe that was where Bianca lived now, inside her? Or in someone else. He’d have to keep his eyes open.
“Don’t do it,” the man begged as he knelt on the ground behind the Land Rover, parked by the side of the road. His light-coloured camouflage uniform had three stripes on the chest to indicate that he was a sergeant, and on his left arm was the insignia of the Special Forces Division: a winged dagger. His hands were clasped. But perhaps that was only because his wrists were bound together with the narrow white cable ties they used on prisoners of war. A five-metre-long chain ran from the cable ties to a hook on the back of the Land Rover.
“Let me go, Bohr. I’ve got money. An inheritance. I can keep quiet if you can. No one needs to know what’s happened, ever.”
“And what has happened?” Bohr asked, without taking the barrel of his Colt Canada C8 from the sergeant’s forehead.
The officer swallowed. “An Afghan woman. A Hazara. Everyone knows you and she were close, but as long as no one makes a fuss it will soon be forgotten.”
“You shouldn’t have told anyone what you saw, Waage. That’s why I have to kill you. You wouldn’t forget. I wouldn’t forget.”
“Two million. Two million kroner, Bohr. No, two and a half. In cash, when we get to Norway.”
Roar Bohr started to walk towards the Land Rover.