“What did you say?” Øystein Eikeland called over David Bowie, staring at his boss.
“I said the two of you can manage!” Ringdal cried, putting his hand on the back of the door of the back room and pulling on his jacket.
“B-but...” Øystein stammered. “She’s only just started!”
“And she’s proved to us that she’s worked behind a bar before,” Ringdal said, nodding at the girl who was pouring two glasses of beer at the same time as she chatted to a customer.
“Where are you going?” Øystein asked.
“Home,” Ringdal said. “Why?”
“So early?” Øystein muttered desperately.
Ringdal laughed. “That’s kind of the point of employing someone else, Eikeland.” He zipped his jacket up and took his car keys out of his trouser pocket. “See you tomorrow.”
“Hold on!”
Ringdal raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Øystein just stood there, scratching the back of his hand hard, trying to think fast, which wasn’t one of his strong points. “I... I was wondering if I could leave early this evening instead. Just this once.”
“What for?”
“Because... the clan are practising some new songs tonight.”
“Vålerenga’s supporters club?”
“Er, yes.”
“They can manage without you.”
“Manage? We could get relegated!”
“Two matches into the season? I doubt that. Ask me again in October.” Ringdal smiled as he walked through the back room towards the door. Then he was gone.
Øystein pulled out his phone, leaned back against the inside of the bar and called Harry.
A woman’s voice answered after two rings.
“The person you have called has turned their phone off...”
“No!” Øystein exclaimed, ending the call and trying again. Three rings this time. But the same woman’s voice and the same message. Øystein tried for a third time, and thought he could detect a note of irritation in the woman’s voice this time.
He tapped out a text message.
“Øyvind!” A woman’s voice. Definitely irritated. The new bargirl was mixing a cocktail as she nodded towards the queue of impatient, thirsty drinkers behind him.
“Øystein,” he said quietly, before turning and glaring at a young woman who ordered a beer with a resigned, patronising sigh. Øystein’s hand was shaking so much that he spilled the drink, so he wiped the glass and put it down on the bar as he looked at the time. Kjelsås? All hell would break loose in ten minutes. Harry locked up and him with no job. Fuck Harry, the crazy idiot! The young woman had evidently tried to communicate with him, because now she was leaning forward and shouting into his ear: “I said a small glass, you jerk, not half a litre!”
“Suffragette City” was blaring from the speakers.
Harry was standing in front of the photograph. Taking in the details. The woman was lying in the boot of a car. Now that he was standing closer, he could see two things. That it wasn’t Rakel, but a younger woman with the same colouring and facial features as Rakel. And that what had initially made him think it was a drawing and not a photograph was that there were several things wrong with the body. It had indentations and protrusions where it shouldn’t, as if the artist didn’t quite know his anatomy. This body wasn’t just dead, it had been shattered, with rage and force, as if it had been thrown off a mountain. There was nothing about the picture to indicate where it had been taken, or who had taken it. Harry turned the picture over without removing the tape. Glossy photographic paper. Nothing on the back.
He sat down at the desk, which was strewn with drawings of small, two-person carriages hanging from rails running between masts. In one someone was using a laptop, in another someone was sleeping on a chair that had been folded back, and in a third an elderly couple were kissing. There were ramps for people to get on every hundred metres or so along the street, with empty carriages waiting beside them. Another drawing showed a bird’s-eye view of a cross, the rails forming a four-pointed star. One large sheet of paper showed a map of Oslo with a grid that Harry assumed was the network of rails.
He opened the desk drawers. Pulled out futuristic sketches of aerodynamically shaped carriages hanging from cables or rails, bright colours, extravagant lines, smiling people, an optimistic view of the future that made Harry think of adverts from the sixties. Some of them had captions in English and Japanese under them. The pictures evidently weren’t Ringdal’s own idea, just related proposals. But no more pictures of bodies, just the one stuck to the wall right in front of him. What did it mean, what were the walls telling him this time?
He tapped the keyboard in front of him and the screen lit up. No password. He clicked the email icon. Tapped Rakel’s address into the search box, but got no results. Not surprising, seeing as all the folders turned out to be empty. Either they weren’t used, or he emptied them as he went along, which might explain why he wasn’t worried about protecting access to his computer. The police’s IT experts might be able to reconstruct Ringdal’s email correspondence, but Harry was aware that had become harder rather than easier in the past few years.
He looked through the list of documents, opened a couple of them. Notes about transport. An application for increased opening hours for the Jealousy Bar. Six-monthly accounts that showed the bar had made a healthy profit. Nothing of interest.
Nothing on the shelves of files — about transport theory, research into urban development, traffic accidents, game theory — either. But one worn hardback book. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. When he was younger, Harry had leafed through this mythologised book out of curiosity without finding anything about Übermensch or the purported Nazi ideology, just a story about an old man in the mountains who — except for the bit about God being dead — said completely incomprehensible things.
He looked at the time. He had been there half an hour. With no charge in his phone he couldn’t take a picture of the dead girl so he could find out who she was. But there was no reason to believe that the photograph and Rakel’s scarf would be gone when they came back with a search warrant.
Harry stood up and left the office, screwed the door hinges back in place, hung the screwdriver on the board, jogged up the stairs, switched off the light and went out into the hallway. He heard the neighbour’s dog barking outside. On his way to the front door, he opened the door to the only room he hadn’t been in. A combination of toilet and utility room. He was about to close it again when he caught sight of a white sweater lying on the tiled floor in the heap of dirty underwear and T-shirts in front of the washing machine. The sweater had a blue cross on the chest. And flecks of what looked like blood. To be more precise: sprays of blood. Harry closed his eyes. The cross had triggered something in his memory. He saw himself walk into the Jealousy Bar, Ringdal behind the counter. That was the sweater Ringdal had been wearing that night, the night Rakel died.