I’m sorry for the pain this will cause you, but I can’t bear the loss of Rakel and life without her. Thanks for everything. I’ve enjoyed knowing you. Harry.
He had read the letter three times. Then he had taken out his cigarettes and lighter, lit a cigarette, then the letter, and flushed it down the toilet. There was a better solution. Dying in an accident. So he had got in his car and driven to Peter Ringdal’s, to tug at the last thread, extinguish his last hope.
And now it had been extinguished. In some ways it was a relief.
Harry had another think. Thought things through to see if he had remembered everything. Last night he had sat in his car, like he was now, and had seen the city below him, its lights shining in the darkness, bright enough to join the dots. But now he could see the whole picture, the city laid out beneath a high, blue sky, bathed in the sharp spring light of the new day.
His heart was no longer beating as fast. Unless that was just the way it felt, that the countdown slowed down as it approached zero.
Harry put his foot on the clutch, turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear.
39
Highway 287.
Harry was driving north.
The glare from the snow-covered hillsides was so bright that he had taken his sunglasses out from the glove compartment. His heart had begun to beat more normally after he left Oslo, on roads where there was less and less traffic the farther he got from the city. The sense of calm was presumably because the decision was made, that he in some ways was already dead, that one relatively simple act was all that remained. Or it could be because of the Jim Beam. He had made one stop on his way out of the city, the liquor store on Thereses gate where he had given them the note with Sigrid Undset on it in return for a half-bottle and some change. Then another stop at the Shell garage in Marienlyst where he used up the change to put some petrol in his almost empty tank. Not that he needed that much petrol. But he wasn’t going to need the change either. Now the bottle was lying three-quarters empty on the passenger seat, next to his pistol and phone. He had tried calling Kaja again but there was still no answer. He couldn’t help thinking that was probably just as well.
He’d had to drink almost half the bourbon before he noticed any effect, but now he felt just detached enough from what was going to happen, but not so much that he risked killing anyone who shouldn’t be killed.
The green mile.
The police officer at the site of the accident two days earlier hadn’t told them exactly where on Highway 287 the crash had taken place, but that didn’t really matter. Any of the long straight sections would do the job.
There was a truck in front of him.
After the next bend Harry accelerated, pulled out, slipped past, saw that it was an articulated truck. He pulled in ahead of it. Glanced in the mirror. A tall cab.
Harry sped up a bit more, staying above 120 even though the speed limit was 80. A couple of kilometres farther on he reached another long straight. Towards the end of it was a lay-by on the left-hand side. He indicated, crossed the road and drove into the empty lay-by, past a toilet and some bins, then turned the car around so it was facing south again. He pulled over to the side of the road and let the engine idle in neutral as he looked back down the road. He saw the air shimmering above the pavement, as if it were crossing a desert rather than a Norwegian valley in March with an ice-covered river beyond the crash barriers on the right-hand side. Maybe the alcohol was playing tricks on him. Harry looked at the bottle of Jim Beam. The sunshine made its golden contents shimmer.
Something was telling him that it was cowardly to take his own life.
Possibly, but it still demanded courage.
And if you didn’t have that courage, it could be bought in a bottle for 209.90 kroner.
Harry unscrewed the lid, drank the rest of the bourbon and replaced the lid.
There. Detached enough. Courage.
But, more important: the post-mortem would show that the notorious drunk had such a high percentage of alcohol in his blood when he crashed that it couldn’t be ruled out that he had simply lost control of the car. And there would be no suicide note or anything else to suggest that Harry Hole had planned to kill himself. No suicide, no suspicions, no shadow of the wife-killer falling on anyone who didn’t deserve it.
He could see it way off to the south now. The articulated truck. A kilometre away.
Harry checked in the left wing mirror. They had the road to themselves. He put the engine into first gear and released the clutch, then pulled out onto the road. He looked at the speedometer. Not too fast, because that would encourage suspicions of suicide. And it wasn’t necessary anyway, as the police officer had said at the scene of the accident: when a car drives into the front of a truck at eighty or ninety, seat belts and airbags didn’t count for much. The steering wheel would end up behind the back seat.
The speedometer hit ninety.
One hundred metres in four seconds, a kilometre in forty. If the truck was going at the same speed, they’d meet in less than twenty seconds.
Five hundred metres. Ten... nine...
Harry wasn’t thinking about anything, apart from his intention: to hit the truck in the middle of its radiator. He was grateful he lived in an age where it was still possible to steer your car straight into your own and other people’s deaths, but this funeral was going to be his alone. He would damage the truck and leave its driver scarred for life, prone to recurrent nightmares, but as the years passed hopefully that would happen less and less frequently. Because ghosts really did fade.
Four hundred metres. He steered the Escort onto the other side of the road. Tried to make it look like he was swerving, so the truck driver could tell the police it looked like the driver of the car had simply lost control of his car or fallen asleep at the wheel. Harry heard the howl of the truck’s horn rise in volume and tone. The Doppler effect. It cut into his ear like a knife of disharmony, the sound of approaching death. And to drown out its shriek, to stop himself dying to that music, Harry reached out his right hand and turned the radio on, full blast. Two hundred metres. The speakers were crackling.