His brain began its calculations again, couldn’t help it.
And when it had finished, he stood up and looked out across the desolate, windswept landscape. He was struck by how alien it looked, so different from when he had been driving in the opposite direction the day before. Now it might as well be a desert in a foreign country, apparently empty of people but where enemies might be hiding in every depression in the terrain.
He reversed his car alongside the girl, took his white judo outfit from his bag, spread it out across the back seat. Then he tried to lift her. He may have been a former Norwegian judo champion, but she still slid out of his grasp. In the end he carried her like a rucksack and bundled her onto the back seat. He turned the heater up full and drove up to her car. A Mazda. The keys were in the ignition. He got out a tow rope, pulled the Mazda out of the snow and parked it beside the bank of snow on the straight section where other vehicles would be able to see it in time to brake. Then he got back into his own car, turned around and drove back towards Trondheim. After two kilometres he reached a turning that probably led to one of the cabins you could see out on the plateau in better weather. He parked the car ten metres along the track, unwilling to drive any farther in case he got stuck. He took off his jacket and sweater because the hot air from the heater was making him sweat. He looked at the time. Three hours had passed since he had drunk almost a full bottle of champagne with a 12 percent alcohol content. He did the quick calculation he’d had plenty of opportunities to practise in the past few years. Alcohol measured in grams divided by his own weight, times 0.7. Minus 0.15 times the number of hours. He concluded it would be another three hours before he was safe.
It started to snow again. A heavy shower that hung like a wall on all sides of the car.
Another hour passed. Out on the main road a car passed at a snail’s pace. It was hard to guess where it might have come from, seeing as the radio had said the E6 was closed.
Peter looked up the emergency number, the one he was going to call when the time was right, once the alcohol had been burned up. He glanced in the mirror. Weren’t dead bodies supposed to leak? But there was no smell. Maybe she’d been to the toilet just before she set off to drive across Dovrefjell. Lucky for her, lucky for him. He yawned. Fell asleep.
When he woke up the weather was still the same, the darkness was still the same.
He looked at the time. He had been asleep for an hour and a half. He called the number.
“My name is Peter Ringdal, I want to report a car accident on Dovrefjell.”
They said they’d be there as soon as possible.
Peter waited a bit longer. Even if they were coming from the Dombås side, it would take them at least an hour.
Then he moved the body into the boot and drove out onto the main road. He parked and waited. An hour passed. He opened his bag and took out his Nikon camera, the one he’d won at a tournament in Japan, got out of the car into the storm and opened the boot. There was plenty of space for the little body in there. He took a few pictures every time the wind eased and there was a slight pause in the snow. He made sure he took a picture of her watch, which, miraculously enough, was undamaged. Then he closed the boot again.
Why had he taken pictures?
To prove she had been lying in the boot for a long time rather than inside the car? Or was there some other reason, a thought he hadn’t yet managed to decipher, a sense of something he hadn’t yet realised?
When he caught sight of the flashing light, like a lighthouse on top of the snowplough, he switched the heater off altogether. And hoped that his calculations were correct, when it came to both her and him.
A police car and ambulance were following the snowplow. The paramedics concluded at once that the girl in the boot was dead.
“Feel her,” Peter said, putting his hand on the girl’s forehead. “She’s still warm.”
He noticed the policewoman looking at him.
After the paramedics had taken a blood sample from him inside the ambulance, he was asked to get in the back of the police car.
He explained how the girl had come rushing out of the snowdrift and ran into his car.
“More like you ran into her,” the policewoman said, looking down at the pad she was making notes in.
Peter explained about the warning triangle, about the car that was stuck across the road on the bend, how he had moved it to prevent anyone else driving into it.
The older policeman nodded approvingly. “It’s good that you had the sense to think about others in a situation like this, lad.”
Peter felt something in his throat. He tried to clear it before realising that it was a sob. So he swallowed it instead.
“The E6 was closed six hours ago,” the policewoman said. “If you called us as soon as you hit the girl, you took a hell of a long time to get from the barrier to here.”
“I had to stop several times because of the visibility,” Peter said.
“Yes, this is a real spring storm,” the policeman rumbled.
Peter looked out of the window. The wind had eased, and the snow was settling on the road now. They wouldn’t find any sign of where the girl had hit the road. Nor any other tire tracks crossing the trail of blood on the pavement that might prompt them to look for any vehicles that had crossed Dovrefjell at the time in question. They wouldn’t get a witness statement from someone saying that yes, he had seen a car parked along the straight section, and yes, it was the same make as the girl’s, but no, that had been several hours before Peter Ringdal claimed he hit the girl.
“You got away with it,” Harry said.
He had sat Peter Ringdal on the sofa and was himself sitting astride the high-backed armchair. Harry’s right hand was resting on his lap, still holding the pistol.
Ringdal nodded. “There were traces of alcohol in my blood, but not enough. The girl’s parents filed charges against me, but I was acquitted.”
Harry nodded. He remembered what Kaja had said about Ringdal’s criminal record, and the charge of reckless driving when he was a student.
“That was lucky,” Harry said drily.
Ringdal shook his head. “I thought so too, but I was wrong.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t sleep for three years. And by that I mean that I didn’t sleep a single hour, a single minute. That hour and a half I slept up on the plateau, that was the last time I slept. And nothing helped, pills just made me crazy and unhinged, alcohol made me depressed and angry. I thought it was because I was frightened I was going to get caught, that the person who drove across Dovrefjell was going to come forward. And I didn’t get anywhere until I realised that wasn’t the problem. I’d started to have suicidal thoughts and was seeing a psychologist. I told her a different, made-up story but with the same content, with me causing another person’s death. And she told me that the problem was that I hadn’t made amends. You have to make amends. So I made amends. I stopped taking pills, stopped drinking. Started to sleep. Got better.”