“OK,” Aune said. “You said you caught a glimpse of someone who looked like Finne, locked up?”
“No, that’s what you said. It wasn’t Finne.”
“No?”
“No, it was... me.”
Ståle Aune ran his hand through his thinning hair. “And now you want a diagnosis?”
“Come on. Anxiety?”
“I think your brain is looking for reasons why Rakel would need you. For instance, to protect her from external threats. But you’re not locked up, Harry — you’ve been locked out. Accept it and move on.”
“Apart from the ‘accept it’ stuff, any medication you can prescribe?”
“Sleep. Exercise. And maybe you could try meeting someone who could take your mind off Rakel.”
Harry stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and held up his clenched fist with his thumb sticking out. “Sleep. I drink myself senseless every night. Check.” His index finger shot up. “Exercise. I get into fights with people in bars I used to own. Check.” The grey, titanium finger. “Meet someone. I fuck women, nice ones, nasty ones, and afterwards I have meaningful conversations with some of them. Check.”
Aune looked at Harry. Then he let out a deep sigh, stood up and fastened his tweed jacket. “Well, you should be fine, then.”
Harry sat there staring out of the window after Aune had gone. Then he got up and walked through the rooms in the flat. The married couple’s bedroom was tidy, clean, the bed neatly made. He looked in the cupboards. The wife’s wardrobe was spread across four spacious cupboards, while the husband’s clothes were squeezed into one. A considerate husband. There were rectangles on the wallpaper in the daughter’s room where the colours were brighter. Harry guessed they had been made by teenage posters she had taken down now she was nineteen. There was still one small picture, a young guy with a Rickenbacker electric guitar slung round his neck.
Harry looked through the little collection of records on the shelf by the mirror. Propagandhi. Into It. Over It. My Heart to Joy. Panic! at the Disco. Emo stuff.
So he was surprised when he switched on the record player to listen to the album already on it and heard the gentle, soothing tones of something that sounded like early Byrds. But despite the Roger McGuinn — style twelve-string guitar, he quickly recognised that it was a far more recent production. It didn’t matter how many valve amps and old Neumann microphones they used, retro production never fooled anyone. Besides, the vocalist had a distinct Norwegian accent, and you could tell he’d listened to more 1995-vintage Thom Yorke and Radiohead than Gene Clark and David Crosby from 1965. He glanced at the album sleeve lying upside down next to the record player and, sure enough, the names all looked Norwegian. Harry’s eyes moved on to a pair of Adidas trainers in front of the wardrobe. They were the same sort as his, he’d tried to buy a new pair a couple of years ago but they had already stopped making them then. He thought back to the interview transcripts, in which both father and daughter had said she left the flat at 20:15 and returned thirty minutes later after a run to the top of the sculpture park in Ekeberg, coming back via the Ekeberg Restaurant. Her running gear was on the bed, and in his mind’s eye he could see the police letting the poor girl in and watching as she got changed and packed a bag of clothes. Harry crouched down and picked up the trainers. The leather was soft, the soles clean and shiny, the shoes hadn’t been used much at all. Nineteen years. An unused life. His own pair had split. He could buy new ones, obviously, a different type. But he didn’t want to, he’d found the only design he wanted from now on. The only design. Maybe they could still be repaired.
Harry went back into the living room. He wiped the cigarette ash from the floor. Checked his phone. No messages. He put his hand in his pocket. Two hundred kroner.
4
“Last orders, then we’re closing.”
Harry stared down at his drink. He had managed to drag it out. Usually he necked them because it wasn’t the taste he liked, but the effect. “Liked” wasn’t really the right word, though. Needed. No, not needed either. Had to have. Couldn’t live without. Artificial respiration when half your heart had stopped beating.
Those running shoes would just have to be repaired.
He took out his phone again. Harry only had seven people in his contacts, and because they all had names starting with different letters, the list consisted of single letters, not first and last names. He tapped on R and saw her profile picture. That soft, brown gaze that asked to be met. Warm, glowing skin that asked to be stroked. Red lips that asked to be kissed. The women he had got undressed and slept with in the past few months — had there been a single second when he hadn’t been thinking about Rakel while he was with them, hadn’t imagined that they were her? Had they realised, had he even told them, that he was being unfaithful to them with his wife even as he fucked them? Had he been that cruel? Almost certainly. Because his half-heart was beating weaker and weaker with each passing day, and he had returned from his temporary life as a real person.
He stared at the phone.
And he thought the same thing he had thought every day as he passed the phone box in Hong Kong so many years ago. That she was there. Right then, her and Oleg. Inside the phone. Twelve tapped digits away.
But even that was long after Rakel and Harry met for the first time.
That happened fifteen years ago. Harry had driven up the steep, winding road to her wooden house in Holmenkollen. His car had breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived, and a woman emerged from the house. Harry asked after Sindre Fauke as she locked the front door, and it wasn’t until she turned round and came closer that he noticed how pretty she was. Brown hair; pronounced, almost wild eyebrows above brown eyes; high, aristocratic cheekbones. Dressed in a simple, elegant coat. In a voice that was deeper than her appearance suggested, she told him that was her father, that she had inherited the house and he no longer lived there. Rakel Fauke had a confident, relaxed way of speaking, with exaggerated, almost theatrical diction, and she looked him right in the eye. When she walked off, she walked in an absolutely straight line, like a ballet dancer. He had stopped her, asked for help jump-starting his car. Afterwards he gave her a lift. They discovered that they had studied law at the same time. That they had attended the same Raga Rockers concert. He liked the sound of her laughter; it wasn’t as deep as her voice, but bright and light, like a trickling stream. She was going to Majorstua.
“It’s by no means certain this car’s going to make it that far,” he had said. And she agreed with him. As if they already had an idea of what hadn’t yet begun, what really couldn’t happen. When she was about to get out, he had to shove the broken passenger door open for her, breathing in her scent. Only thirty minutes had passed since they’d met, and he wondered what the hell was going on. All he wanted to do was kiss her.
“Maybe see you around,” she said.
“Maybe,” he replied, then watched as she disappeared down Sporveisgata with a ballerina’s steps.
The next time they met was at a party in Police Headquarters. It turned out that Rakel Fauke worked in the foreign section of POT, the Police Surveillance Agency. She was wearing a red dress. They stood talking together, laughing. Then they talked some more. He about his upbringing, his sister Sis who had what she herself described as “a touch of Down’s Syndrome,” about his mother who died when Harry was young, and that he had had to look after his father. Rakel had told him about studying Russian in the Armed Forces, her time at the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow, and the Russian man she had met, who ended up becoming the father of her son, Oleg. And that when she left Moscow, she had also left her husband, who had alcohol problems. And Harry had told her that he was an alcoholic, something she might already have guessed when she saw him drinking Coke at a staff party. He didn’t mention the fact that his intoxicant that evening was her laughter — clear, spontaneous, bright — and that he was willing to say the most revealing, idiotic things about himself just to hear it. And then, towards the end of the evening, they had danced. Harry had danced. To a turgid version of “Let It Be” played on panpipes. That was the proof: he was hopelessly in love.