Because there was still someone who could be — who needed to be — saved.
Harry already knew he wasn’t afraid of any personal punishment. On the contrary, any punishment, especially death, would feel like liberation, like finding a window on the hundredth floor of a burning skyscraper when you’re surrounded by flames. And no matter how irrational, crazy or simply unfortunate he had been at the moment of the deed, he knew he deserved this punishment.
But Oleg didn’t deserve it.
Oleg didn’t deserve to lose his father, his real, non-biological father, at the same time as he had lost his mother. To lose the beautiful story of his life, the story of growing up with two people who loved each other so much, the story that in and of itself was proof that love did exist, could exist. Oleg, who was now standing on the threshold of settling down with someone, perhaps of having a family of his own. He may have had to watch Rakel and Harry split up a few times, but he had also been the closest witness to the fact that two people loved each other, two people who always wanted what was best for the other. And that they had therefore always found their way back to each other. Taking that idea — no, that truth, damn it! — away from Oleg would destroy him. Because it wasn’t true that he had murdered Rakel. There was no doubt that she was lying there on the floor, and that he had caused her death, but all the associations, the conclusions that followed automatically when it was discovered that a spurned husband had murdered his wife, were lies. That wasn’t why.
The chain of events was always more complicated than you assumed at first, but the motives were simple and clear. And he hadn’t had any motive, any desire to kill Rakel, never! That was why Oleg needed to be protected from this lie.
Harry had cleaned up after him as well as he could without looking at Rakel’s body, telling himself it would only shake his resolve, and that he had seen what he needed to see: that she wasn’t here, that all that was left was an uninhabited body. Harry couldn’t give a detailed account of what this cleaning had entailed, he had been feeling dizzy and was now trying in vain to remember the critical moment, to push through the total darkness that shrouded the hours from when he reached a certain level of intoxication in the Jealousy Bar until he woke up here. How much does anyone really know about themselves? Had he gone to see her, had she, as she stood there in the kitchen with this raving, drunk man, realised that she couldn’t actually do what she had intimated to Oleg that she might do: take Harry back? Had she said as much to Harry? Was that what had tipped him over the edge? The rejection, the sudden awareness that he would never, ever get her back, had that managed to turn love into uncontrollable hatred?
He didn’t know, he didn’t remember.
All he could remember was that after he woke up, as he was cleaning up, an idea had started to take shape. He knew he would be the police’s first prime suspect, that much was obvious. So to mislead them, to save Oleg from the lie about the classic murder, to save his young, unsullied faith in love, save him from the realisation that he’d had a murderer as his role model, he needed someone else. A lightning rod. An alternative suspect, someone who could and should be hung on the cross. Not a Jesus, but a sinner worse than him.
Harry stared out through the windshield, where the condensation from his breath made the lights of the city below him look like they were dissolving.
Was that what he had been thinking? Or had his brain, like the manipulative illusionist it was, merely invented this business about Oleg, clutching at any excuse instead of admitting the real, simpler motive: to escape. To evade punishment. To hide somewhere and suppress the whole thing because it was a memory, a certainty that it was impossible to live with, and survival was, when it came down to it, the only real function of the body and brain.
That, at any rate, was what he had done. Suppressed it. Suppressed the fact that he had left the house, making sure to leave the door unlocked so it couldn’t be concluded that the killer must have a key to the house. He had got in his car, then remembered that the wildlife camera could give him away if the police found it. He tore it down. Removed the memory card and ditched it in one of the bins outside the Ready sports club. Later, a fragment had swirled up from the suppressed sludge when, in a moment of deep concentration, he reconstructed the killer’s probable line of retreat and where he might have got rid of the memory card. How could he have imagined it was a coincidence that he had guided Kaja and himself back there, when there were a million other possibilities? Even Kaja had been astonished at his confidence.
But then Harry’s suppressed memories had turned against him, threatened to bring him down. Without a moment’s hesitation he had handed the memory card to Bjørn, and as a result Harry’s meticulous investigation, the intention of which had been to find another deserving culprit — a violent rapist like Finne, a killer like Bohr, an enemy like Ringdal — had begun to close in on himself.
Harry’s thoughts were interrupted when his phone rang.
It was Alexandra.
On his way to see Ståle he had stopped off to see Alexandra and given her a cotton bud with blood on it. He hadn’t told her it was blood from the presumed murder weapon, the knife he had found among his records. While he was driving he had realised why he had left the knife between The Rainmakers and the Ramones. Simple. Rakel.
“Did you find anything?” Harry asked.
“It’s the same blood group as Rakel’s,” she said. “A.”
The most common, Harry thought. Forty-eight percent of the Norwegian population belong to blood group A. A match was like tossing a coin, it didn’t mean anything. All the same, right now it did mean something. Because he had decided in advance — like Finne and his dice — to let this toss of a coin decide.
“There’s no need to do a full DNA analysis,” Harry said. “Thanks. Have a good day.”
There was just one loose thread, one other possibility, one thing that could save Harry: breaking an apparently solid alibi.
It was ten o’clock in the morning when Peter Ringdal woke up in his bed.
It wasn’t his alarm clock that had woken him, that was set for eleven. It wasn’t the neighbour’s dog, the neighbour’s car setting off to work, kids on their way to school or the garbage truck — his sleeping brain had learned to ignore all those noises. It was something else. It had been a loud noise, like a cry, and it sounded like it had come from the floor below him.
Ringdal got up, pulled on a pair of trousers and a shirt and grabbed the pistol that he kept on the bedside table every night. He felt a cold draft around his bare feet as he crept down the stairs, and when he reached the hall he discovered the cause. There was broken glass on the floor. Someone had smashed the half-moon-shaped window in the front door. The door to the basement was standing half open, but the light was off. They had arrived. It was time.
The scream, or whatever it had been, had sounded like it had come from the living room. He crept in, holding the pistol out in front of him.
He realised at once that the sound hadn’t been made by someone screaming, but that the noise that had woken him had been made by a chair leg scraping against the parquet floor. One of the heavy armchairs had been moved, turned around so its back was facing him, with a view of the picture window and the garden containing the satellite sculpture. A hat was sticking up above the back of the chair. Peter assumed that the man in the chair hadn’t heard him coming, but obviously it was possible he had positioned the chair like that so he could see anyone entering the room reflected in the window without them seeing him. Peter Ringdal took aim at the back of the chair. Two bullets to the base of the spine, two higher up. The neighbours would hear the shots. It would be difficult to get rid of the body without being discovered. And even more difficult to explain why he had done it. He could tell the police it was self-defence, that he had seen the broken glass, that his life had been threatened.