Racing away.
And it had been doing that ever since the moment he saw the bloody knife on his shelf.
That was ten hours ago now, and his brain had spent those hours frantically searching for an answer, for a way out, for alternatives to the only explanation he could think of, skittering hither and thither like a rat below deck on a sinking ship, finding nothing but closed doors and dead ends as the water rose higher and higher towards the ceiling. And that half of his heart was beating faster and faster, as if it knew what was coming. Knew it was going to have to speed up if it was going to have time to use up the two billion heartbeats the average human life was made up of. Because he had woken up now. Had woken up, and was going to die.
That morning — after the hypnosis, but before he went to see Ringdal — Harry had rung the doorbell of the flat immediately below his, on the first floor. Gule — who worked nights on the trams — had come to the door in just his boxers, but if he thought it was early he didn’t mention it. Gule hadn’t been living in the building back when Harry had his own flat on the third floor, so Harry didn’t really know him. Perched on his nose was a pair of round, steel-rimmed glasses that must somehow have survived the seventies, eighties and nineties and had therefore achieved retro status. A bit of wispy hair that wasn’t entirely sure what it was doing meant that he could just about avoid being described as bald. He spoke in a jerky, toneless way, like the voice of a satnav. Gule confirmed what he had told the police, which was in the report. He had got home from work at quarter to eleven in the evening, when he had met Bjørn Holm who was on his way down the stairs, having put Harry to bed. When Gule went to bed at three o’clock in the morning, he still hadn’t heard a sound from Harry’s flat.
“What were you doing that night?” Harry had asked.
“I was watching Broadchurch,” Gule said. When Harry showed no reaction, he added: “It’s a British television series. Crime.”
“Mm. Do you watch a lot of television at night?”
“Yes, I suppose so. My daily routine is a bit different to most people’s. I work late and it always takes me a while to wind down after I finish.”
“It takes a while to wind down after driving trams?”
“Yes. But three o’clock is bedtime. Then up at eleven. You don’t want to fall outside normal society altogether.”
“If the soundproofing here is as bad as you say, and you watch television at night, how come I live right above you, and sometimes go up and down the stairs late at night, and have never heard anything from your flat?”
“That’s because I’m considerate and wear headphones.” A couple of seconds passed before Gule asked: “Is there anything wrong with that?”
“Tell me,” Harry said. “How can you be so sure you would have heard me going out if you were wearing headphones?”
“It was Broadchurch,” Gule said. Then, when he remembered his neighbour hadn’t seen it: “It’s not exactly loud, if I can put it like that.”
Harry persuaded Gule to put on his headphones and start watching Broadchurch, which he said he could find on the NRK website, then see if he could hear anything from Harry’s flat or the stairwell. When Harry rang the doorbell again, Gule answered and asked him if they were going to start the test soon.
“Something’s come up, we’ll have to do this some other time,” Harry had said. He decided not to tell Gule that he’d just walked from his bed, downstairs to the front door, then back again.
Harry didn’t know much about panic attacks. But what he had heard fitted pretty well with what he was feeling right now. His heart, the sweating, the feeling of not being able to sit still, thoughts that wouldn’t settle and kept swirling around his head to the beat of his racing heart, as he careered towards the wall. The daily wish to carry on living, not forever, but another day, and therefore forever, like a hamster constantly running faster so the wheel doesn’t overtake it, and dying of a heart attack long before it realises that that’s all it is, a wheel, a meaningless race against time where time has already reached the finish line and is waiting for you, waiting for you, counting down, tick-tock, tick-tock.
Harry hit his head on the steering wheel.
He had woken up from his slumber, and now it was true.
He was guilty.
In the blackness of that night, on that windswept hillside in a storm of alcohol and God knows what else — because of course it was still a total, utter blank — it had happened. He had got home and was put to bed. He had got up as soon as Bjørn had left. He had driven to Rakel’s, arriving there at 23:21, according to the wildlife camera, which all fitted. Still so drunk that he was hunched over as he walked up to the house and straight in through the unlocked door. He had gone down on his knees and begged, and Rakel told him she had thought about it, but had made her mind up: she didn’t want him back. Or had he, in the full madness of drink, already decided before he went in that he was going to kill her, and himself, because he didn’t want to live without her? Then stuck the knife into her before she had time to tell him what he didn’t know at the time, that she had spoken to Oleg and had made up her mind to give Harry another chance? The thought of that was unbearable. He hit his head against the wheel again and felt the skin on his forehead tear.
Killing himself. Had he been thinking about that even then?
Even if the hours before he woke up on the floor of Rakel’s house were still blank, he had realised — and then suppressed the fact — that he was guilty. And had immediately started looking for a scapegoat. Not for his own sake, but for Oleg’s. But now, when it had proved impossible to find a scapegoat, or at least one who deserved to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice, Harry had played out his role. He could leave the stage. Leave everything.
Kill himself. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it.
He had stood over bodies where as a murder detective he had to decide if this was someone who had taken their own life, or if someone else had done it. He was rarely in any doubt. Even where brutal means of death had been chosen, and the scenes were chaotic and bloody, most suicides had something simple and lonely about them: a decision, an act, no interaction, few complicated forensic issues. And the scenes tended to be still. Not that the scenes of suicides didn’t speak to him, because they did, but it wasn’t a cacophony of voices and conflict. Just an internal monologue that he — on a particularly good or a particularly bad day — could hear. And that always made him think about suicide as a possibility. A way of exiting the stage. An escape route for the rat on a sinking ship.
During the course of some of those investigations, Ståle Aune had guided Harry through the most common motives for suicide. From the infantile — revenge on the world, now-you’ll-be-sorry — through self-loathing, shame, pain, guilt, loss, all the way to the “small” motive — people who saw suicide as a comfort, a consolation. Who weren’t seeking an escape route, but just liked knowing it was there, the way a lot of people live in big cities because they offer everything from opera to strip clubs that they never think of making use of. Something to fend off the claustrophobia of being alive, of living. But then, in an unbalanced moment, prompted by drink, pills, romantic or financial problems, they take a decision, as heedless of the consequences as having another drink or punching a bartender, because the consolation thought has become the only thought.
Yes, Harry had considered it. But it had never — until now — been the only thought. He might be suffering from angst, but he was sober. And the thought had more to it than merely a conclusive end to pain. There was consideration of others, those who would go on living. He had thought it through. A murder investigation was supposed to serve several purposes. To bring certainty and peace to those left behind and society in general was only one of them. Others — such as removing a dangerous person from the streets, maintaining order by showing potential criminals that criminals got punished, or by fulfilling society’s tacit need for vengeance — fell by the wayside if the perpetrator was dead. In other words: society expended fewer resources on an investigation that they suspected would at best give them a dead perpetrator, than on one where they risked the perpetrator remaining at large. So if Harry were to disappear now, there was a good chance that the investigation would focus on everything except the dead man Gule had already given an alibi for at the time of the murder. The only thing that could come out — and that pointed vaguely in Harry’s direction — was a 3-D expert who claimed that the perpetrator could be taller than one metre ninety, and that the car could be a Ford Escort. But for all Harry knew, that information may get no further than Bjørn Holm, whose loyalty to Harry was unshakeable and who over the years had crossed the line of professional ethics on more than one occasion. If Harry died now, there would be no trial; Oleg would be the focus of a lot of publicity, but he wouldn’t be stigmatised for the rest of his life, nor would Harry’s younger sister Sis, or Kaja, or Katrine, Bjørn, Ståle, Øystein or anyone else whose name was marked by a single letter in his phone. It was for them he had composed the three-sentence letter it had taken him an hour to write. Not because he thought the words in themselves would mean much either way, but because his suicide could obviously rouse suspicions that he was guilty, and because he wanted to give the others — the police — the answer they needed to put the case to bed.