“And?”
“Presumably Andrea was found, because there’s nothing more about the case in the police’s files.”
Harry stood up and walked towards the kitchen. “How come you’ve got access to police files?” Harry asked. “Did IT forget to cancel your access?”
“No, but I’ve still got my access chip, and you told me your friend’s user ID and password.”
“Did I?”
“BH100 and HW1953. Have you forgotten?”
It’s gone, Harry thought as he got a cup out of the kitchen cupboard and poured himself some coffee from the cafetière. Ståle Aune had warned him about Wernicke — Korsakoff syndrome, which was when alcoholics slowly but surely drank away their ability to remember things. Well, at least he could remember the names Wernicke and Korsakoff. And he hardly ever forgot things he’d done when he was sober. And there were rarely such long, totally blank gaps as there were for the night of the murder. Passwords.
He looked at the pictures hanging on the wall between the cupboards and worktop.
A faded photograph of a boy and a girl in the back seat of a car. Kaja’s sharp teeth were smiling for the photographer, the boy had his arm round her, he must be her older brother, Even. Another picture showed Kaja with a dark-haired woman who was a head shorter than her. Kaja was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers, the other woman in Western dress with a hijab over her head, with a desert landscape behind them. The shadow of a camera tripod was etched on the ground in front of them, but no photographer. Taken using a timer. It was just a photograph, but something about the way they were standing, so close together, put Harry in mind of the same sense he got from the picture taken in the car. An intimacy.
Harry moved on to a photograph of a tall fair man in a linen jacket, sitting at a restaurant table with a whisky glass in front of him and a cigarette dangling from one hand. A playful, self-assured look in his eyes, not focused on the camera but slightly above it. Harry thought about the Swiss guy, the one in the hardcore version of the Red Cross.
The fourth picture was of him, Rakel and Oleg. The same one Harry had in his own flat. He didn’t know how Kaja had got hold of it. This version wasn’t as sharp as his, the dark bits were darker and there was a reflection on one side, as if it was a photograph of a photograph. Obviously she could have taken the picture during the short time they had been together, if that could actually be called being “together.” They were two people who had huddled up next to each other for a bit of warmth during the winter night, seeking shelter from the storm. And when the storm had eased, he had got up and gone off to warmer climes.
Why did anyone stick photographs from their life on the kitchen wall? Because they didn’t want to forget, or because drink or the passage of time had drained colour and definition from the memories? Photographs were a better record, more accurate. Was that why he — apart from this single one — didn’t have any pictures? Because he preferred to forget?
Harry took a sip from the cup.
No, photographs weren’t more accurate. The pictures you chose to hang on the wall were fragments torn from life the way you wished it had been. Photographs revealed more about the person who had hung them up than the images in them. And if you read them right, they could tell you more than any interview. The newspaper cuttings on the wall of Bohr’s cabin. The guns. The picture of the boy with the Rickenbacker guitar on the wall of the girl’s bedroom on Borggata. The trainers. The father’s single wardrobe.
He needed to get into Peter Ringdal’s home. Read his walls. Read about the man who was furious with his investors for not holding out for longer. The man who had threatened his wife with a knife because she criticised him.
“Category three,” he called as he studied Rakel, Oleg and himself. They had been happy. That was true, wasn’t it?
“Category three?” Kaja called back.
“Categories of killer.”
“Which one was number three again?”
Harry carried his cup of coffee to the doorway and leaned against the frame. “The resentful. The ones who can’t handle criticism and direct their rage at people they bear grudges against.”
She was sitting there with her legs tucked beneath her, her cup in one hand as she brushed the hair from her face with the other. And it struck him once again how beautiful she was.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
Rakel, he thought.
“A break-in,” he said.
Øystein Eikeland lived a simple life. He got up. Or not. If he got up, he walked from his flat in Tøyen down to Ali Stian’s kiosk. If it was shut, that meant it was Sunday, and he would automatically check the first thing that stuck in his long-term memory: Vålerenga football club’s fixture list, because he had arranged to have every Sunday when they played a home match off work from the Jealousy. If Vålerenga weren’t playing in their new stadium at Valle-Hovin that day, he went home and lay down again for another half hour before the Jealousy opened. But if it was a weekday, he would get a cup of coffee from Ali Stian, who had a Pakistani father, a Norwegian mother, and — as his name suggested — one foot firmly planted in each culture. One year, Norwegian National Day, 17 May, had fallen on a Friday, and he was seen kneeling on his prayer mat in the local mosque dressed in full national costume.
After leafing through Ali Stian’s newspapers and discussing the most important stories with him, then sticking the papers back in the stand, Øystein would walk to a café where he would meet Eli — an older, overweight woman who was only too pleased to buy him breakfast in return for him talking with her. Or at her, because she didn’t have much to say, she just smiled and nodded no matter what he was running on about. And Øystein didn’t feel remotely guilty. She valued his company, and that value was equivalent to a roll and a glass of milk.
After that, Øystein would walk from Tøyen to the Jealousy Bar in Grünerløkka, and that was his exercise for the day. Even if it took no more than twenty minutes, sometimes he decided it merited a glass of beer. Not a large glass, but he was happy to make do. And that was fine, because that hadn’t always been the case. But having a secure job did him good. Even if he didn’t like Ringdal, his new boss, he liked the job and wanted to keep it. The way he wanted to keep his life simple. As a result, he was deeply unhappy with the phone conversation he was having with Harry.
“No, Harry,” he said. He was standing in the back room of the Jealousy with his phone pressed to one ear and a finger stuck in the other to block out Peter Gabriel, who was singing “The Carpet Crawlers” out in the bar, where Ringdal and the new girl were serving the early evening rush. “I’m not going to steal Ringdal’s keys.”
“Not steal,” Harry said. “Borrow.”
“OK, borrow. That’s what you said when we were seventeen and stole that car in Oppsal.”
“You were the one who said that, Øystein. And it was Tresko’s father’s car. And that was all fine, if you remember?”
“Fine? We got away with it, but Tresko was grounded for two months.”
“Like I said, fine.”
“Idiot.”
“He keeps them in his jacket pocket, you hear them rattle when he hangs it up.”
Øystein stared at the old Catalina jacket hanging on the hook right in front of him. In the eighties those short, overpriced cotton jackets had been the uniform of young Social Democrats in Oslo. In other parts of the world they had been adopted by graffiti artists. But Øystein mostly found himself thinking of Paul Newman. How some people could make even the blandest item of clothing look so cool that you simply had to have one. Even if you already had an idea of the disappointment that would come when you looked at yourself in the mirror. “What do you want his keys for?”