“Ståle...”
He opened his eyes and felt his wife Ingrid’s hand shaking his shoulder. There you go, the professor was right again.
The bedroom was dark, and he was lying on his side with the alarm clock on the bedside table right in front of him. The luminous numbers said it was 3:13.
“Someone’s at the door, Ståle.”
And there it was again. The siren.
Ståle heaved his overweight body out of bed and into his silk dressing gown, and pushed his feet into the matching slippers.
He was downstairs and on his way to the front door when the thought struck him that whoever was outside might be less than welcome. A paranoid schizophrenic patient with voices in his head telling him to kill his psychologist, for instance. But on the other hand, perhaps the air-raid shelter had been a dream within a dream, perhaps this was the real dream. So he opened the door.
And once again the professor was proved right. The person outside was less than welcome. It was Harry Hole. More precisely: the Harry Hole you don’t want to see. The one with eyes that were more bloodshot than usual, with the hunted, desperate expression that could only mean trouble.
“Hypnosis,” Harry said. He was out of breath, and his face was wet with sweat.
“Good morning to you too, Harry. Would you like to come in? Assuming the door isn’t too small, of course.”
“Too small?”
“I dreamed I couldn’t get through the door to an air-raid shelter,” Ståle said, then followed his stomach through the hallway and into the kitchen. When his daughter Aurora was little, she used to say it always looked like Daddy was walking uphill.
“And the Freudian interpretation of that is?” Harry asked.
“That I need to lose weight.” Aune opened the fridge. “Truffle salami and cave-aged Gruyère?”
“Hypnosis,” Harry said.
“Yes, so you said.”
“The husband in Tøyen, the one we thought had killed his wife. You said he had suppressed his memories of what happened. But that you could bring them back with hypnosis.”
“If the subject was susceptible to hypnosis, yes.”
“Shall we find out if I am?”
“You?” Ståle turned towards Harry.
“I’ve started to remember things from the night Rakel died.”
“Things?” Ståle closed the fridge door.
“Images. Random pictures.”
“Fragments of memory.”
“If I can get them to link up, or dig out more of them, I think I might know something. Know something I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”
“Put them together into a sequence? I can try, obviously, but there are no guarantees. To be honest, I fail more often than I succeed. It’s hypnosis as a method rather than me that’s at fault, of course.”
“Of course.”
“When you say you think you know something, what sort of knowledge are we talking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“But it’s clearly urgent.”
“Yes.”
“OK. Do you remember anything definite from these fragments of memory?”
“The crystal chandelier in Rakel’s living room,” Harry said. “I’m lying right under it, looking up, and can see the pieces of glass form the letter S.”
“Good. That gives us a location and a situation, so we can try associative memory retrieval. Just let me get my pocket watch first.”
“You mean the sort you can swing in front of me?”
Ståle Aune raised an eyebrow. “Any objections?”
“No, not at all, it just seems... a bit old-school.”
“If you’d rather be hypnotised in a more modern way, I can recommend a number of respected but obviously less qualified psychologists who—”
“Get the watch,” Harry said.
“Fix your eyes on the face of the watch,” Ståle said. He had sat Harry on the tall-backed armchair in the living room, and was himself sitting on a footstool alongside. The old watch was swinging on its chain, back and forth, twenty centimetres in front of the detective’s pale, anguished face. Ståle couldn’t remember ever having seen his friend in such a state before. And he felt guilty about not going to see Harry since the funeral. Harry wasn’t the sort of person who found it easy to ask other people for help, and when he did it meant that things were pretty bad.
“You’re safe and relaxed,” Ståle chanted slowly. “Safe and relaxed.”
Had Harry ever been that? Yes, he had. When he was with Rakel, Harry had become someone who seemed to be at peace with both himself and his surroundings. He had — however much of a cliché it might sound — found the right woman for him. And on the occasions when Harry had invited Ståle to give guest lectures at Police College, Ståle got the distinct impression that Harry was genuinely happy with his job and his students.
So what had happened? Had Rakel thrown Harry out, had she left him just because he had fallen off the wagon? When you choose to marry a man who has been an alcoholic for so long, who has fallen apart so many times, you know that the chances of him doing so again are pretty high. Rakel Fauke had been an intelligent and realistic woman, would she really wreck a driveable car just because there was a dent in it, because it had gone into the ditch? The thought had obviously occurred to him that Rakel might have met someone else, and that she had used Harry’s alcohol abuse as an excuse to leave him. Maybe the plan was to wait until the dust had settled, until Harry had come to terms with the break-up, before showing herself in public with her new man.
“You’re sinking deeper and deeper into a trance each time I count down from ten.”
Ingrid had had lunch with Rakel after they broke up, but Rakel hadn’t mentioned another man. On the contrary, when she got home Ingrid had said Rakel seemed sad and lonely. They weren’t close enough friends for Ingrid to feel comfortable asking Rakel, but she said that if there had been another man, she thought Rakel had already dumped him and was trying to find a way back to Harry. Nothing Rakel had said gave any basis for that sort of speculation, but the professor of psychology was under no illusions that when it came to reading other people, Ingrid was far superior to him.
“Seven, six, five, four...”
Harry’s eyelids were half closed now, and his irises looked like pale blue half-moons. People’s susceptibility to hypnosis varied. Only 10 percent were what were regarded as extremely unreceptive, and some didn’t react at all to this sort of intervention. In Ståle’s experience, you could pretty much assume that people with imagination, who were open to new experiences, and who often worked in the creative industries, were the easiest to hypnotise. Anyone who had anything to do with engineering was harder. This made it tempting to believe that murder detective Harry Hole, who wasn’t exactly a tea-drinking daydreamer, would be a tough nut to crack. But without Ståle ever having performed any of the more popular personality tests on Harry, he had a suspicion that he would score unusually highly on one point: imagination.
Harry’s breathing was even, like someone asleep.
Ståle Aune counted down one more time.