He squeezed the trigger more tightly.
Why was it so difficult? He couldn’t even see the face of the person in the chair. For all he knew there might be no one there, just a hat.
“It’s only a hat,” a hoarse voice whispered in his ear. “But what you can feel against the back of your head is a very real pistol. So drop yours and stand very still, or I’ll shoot you with a very real bullet right through the brain I’m suggesting you now use for your own good.”
Without turning round, Ringdal dropped the pistol, which hit the floor with a thud.
“What do you want, Hole?”
“I want to know why your fingerprints are on a glass in Rakel’s dishwasher. Why you’ve got her scarf in the drawer in your hallway. And who this woman is.”
Ringdal stared at the black-and-white photograph the man behind him held up in front of his face. The photograph from his office in the basement. The photograph of the woman he, Peter Ringdal, had killed. And then stuffed into a cold car boot and photographed as she lay there.
37
Peter Ringdal was staring bitterly through the front windshield of the car, into the snowdrift. He couldn’t see much, but put his foot down anyway. There wasn’t much traffic up here on the mountain on a Saturday night, not in this weather, anyway.
He had set off from Trondheim two hours earlier, and realised from the weather reports on the radio that he must have been one of the last vehicles allowed onto the E6 across Dovrefjell before it was closed to traffic because of the bad weather. He’d had a hotel room in Trondheim, but couldn’t bear the thought of the banquet. Why not? Because he was a bad loser and had just lost the final of the featherweight class at the Norwegian Judo Championship. If only he had lost against someone better than him instead of sabotaging himself in such an unnecessary way. There had been only seconds to go in the match, and he was leading by two yuko to one koka, and all he had to do was see it through. And he had been in control, he really had! But then he had started thinking about his victory interview, and something funny he could say, and had lost concentration for a fraction of a second, and suddenly he was flying through the air. He managed to avoid landing on his back, but his opponent was awarded a waza-ari, and therefore emerged victorious when the match was over a few seconds later.
Peter hit the steering wheel hard.
In his locker room afterwards he opened the bottle of champagne he had bought for himself. Someone had made a comment, and he had replied that the point of holding the senior finals on a Saturday afternoon for once instead of on Sunday morning was surely that they could have a bit of a party, so what the hell? He had managed to drink more than half the bottle before his coach came in, snatched the bottle away from him and said he was sick of seeing Peter drunk after every meeting, whether he won or lost. And then Peter had said he was sick of having a coach who couldn’t even help him beat people who were obviously worse than him. His coach had started with the philosophical bullshit about judo meaning “soft power,” that Peter needed to learn to give way, let his opponent find himself, show humility, not believe he was best, because after all it was only two years since he had been a junior, and that pride came before a fall. And Peter had replied that judo was all about fake humility. About tricking your opponent by pretending to be weak and submissive, luring him into a trap and then striking without mercy, like a beautiful, wide-open carnivorous plant, a lying whore. It was a stupid, fake sport. And Peter Ringdal had stormed out of the locker room, yelling that he’d had enough. How many times had he done that?
Peter steered the car around a bend as the headlights swept across banks of snow that were still one and a half metres high, even though it was the end of March, so close to the edge of the road that it felt like driving through a tunnel that was far too narrow.
He emerged onto a straight section and accelerated, more out of anger than haste. Because he had been planning to make a move on Tina at the banquet. He knew she had her eye on him as well. But the fair-haired girl had won gold in the lightweight class, and a female Norwegian champion doesn’t fuck a loser, especially not one who’s half a head shorter than her, and who she might now think she could floor on the judo mat. That’s how evolution works.
As if by magic it stopped snowing, and the road — which stretched off between the banks of snow like a long, black pencil line on a white page — lay bathed in moonlight. Was this the eye of the storm? No, for fuck’s sake, this wasn’t some tropical storm, it was just a Norwegian one, and they didn’t have eyes, just teeth.
Peter looked at the speedometer. He felt tiredness settling over him, the result of the long drive to Trondheim yesterday after his lectures at business school, the matches today, the champagne. Hell, he’d thought out some fucking funny remarks for his victory interview, he was going to say—
And there she was. Tina. Right in front of him in the light of the headlamps, with her long fair hair, a flashing red star above her head, waving her arms as if to welcome him. She wanted him after all! Peter smiled. Smiled because he realised he was only imagining this, and his brain told his foot to press the brake pedal. It wasn’t Tina, he thought, it couldn’t be her, Tina was at the banquet dancing with one of the winners, probably welterweight, and his foot pressed the pedal, because it wasn’t his imagination that there was a girl standing in the middle of the road, in the middle of Dovrefjell, in the middle of the night, with a red star above her head, a real-life girl with fair hair.
And then the car hit the girl.
There were two quick thuds, one of them from the roof, and she was gone.
Peter took his foot off the brake, pulled the seat belt away from his chest and drove on slowly. He didn’t look in the mirror. Didn’t want to look in the mirror. Because maybe he had imagined it after all? The windshield had a large white rose on it where it had hit Tina. Tina or another girl.
He reached a bend where he wouldn’t be able to see if there was anyone lying on the road behind him. He kept his eyes fixed ahead of him, then slammed the brakes on. A car that had evidently lost its grip or got caught by a gust of wind was standing with its front pressed into the bank of snow, sideways, blocking the road.
Peter sat there until he got his breath back before putting the car into reverse. He accelerated, heard the engine complain, but he wasn’t about to turn back, he was going to Oslo. He stopped when he saw something in the road, something glinting in the glare of the rear lights. He got out. It was the red star. Or rather, it was a warning triangle. The girl was lying on the windswept pavement just beyond it. An unmoving, shapeless bundle, like a sack of wood someone had stuck a fair-haired head on. Parts of her trousers and jacket had been torn off. He sank to his knees. The whistling of the wind rose and fell in an ominous melody over the moonlit banks of snow.
She was dead. Shattered. In pieces.
Peter Ringdal felt sober now. More sober than he had ever felt in his twenty-two-year life. Which was already over. He had been driving at 140 before he started to brake, sixty above the speed limit, and for all he knew they could probably work out what speed the car had been going from the extent of her injuries. Or the length of the trail of blood, the distance between where her body had first hit the ground and where it had ended up. His brain automatically began to identify the variables in that sort of calculation, as if he could somehow escape the more pressing realities that way. Because his speed wasn’t the worst of it. Or the fact that he hadn’t reacted quickly enough. He could blame the weather, he could say visibility had been poor. But what he couldn’t deny, and what was a measurable fact, was the amount of alcohol in his blood. The fact that he had been driving drunk. That he had made a choice, and that choice had killed someone. No, he had killed someone. Peter Ringdal repeated it to himself, he didn’t know why: I have killed someone. And his blood would be tested for alcohol; it always was in car accidents when someone got hurt.