Winter smiled. “Right now we need good heads like yours on another murder. The Lysaker case.” It was a mean, thin smile, as if his mouth wasn’t flexible enough to manage anything more expressive.
The Lysaker murder, Sung-min thought. A drug-related killing. Clearly an internal conflict between junkies. Those involved would talk at the slightest mention of a reduced sentence out of fear of being denied access to drugs. It was the lowest form of murder case, the sort of thing you left to new recruits and those of limited abilities. Winter couldn’t be serious, saying he was going to take him, the lead investigator, off the case now, right in front of the line, snatching all the honour and glory away, and for what? For playing his cards a bit too close to his chest for a little too long?
“I want a written report with all the details, Larsen. In the meantime, the others will carry on working on the lines of inquiry you’ve uncovered. Then I’ll have to see when we go public with what we’ve found out.”
Lines of inquiry you’ve uncovered? He had solved the case, for fuck’s sake!
Give me a bollocking, Sung-min thought. A reprimand. Winter couldn’t just decapitate one of his detectives like this. Until he realised that Winter not only could do it, but wanted to and was going to do it. Because it had just dawned on Sung-min what this was all about. Winter was also aware that Sung-min was the only Messi they had on the team. And that meant he was a threat to Winter as leader, now and in the future. Winter was the alpha male who had spotted that a rival was on the move. Sung-min’s solo performance had shown he was ready to challenge Winter’s authority. So Winter had decided it was best to dispatch the younger man now, before he grew any bigger and stronger.
45
Johan Krohn and his wife, Frida, had met while they were studying law at the University of Oslo. He would never know what it was about him that she had fallen for. Maybe he had just presented his own case so well that she eventually had to give in. There weren’t many other people back then who understood why pretty, sweet Frida Andresen had picked a socially inept nerd who showed little interest in anything much apart from law and chess. Johan Krohn, who was more aware than anyone that he had managed to get a girlfriend who was at least one division above him in the attractiveness league, courted her, watched over her, chased away potential rivals. In short, he clung on to her with everything he had. Even so, everyone thought it was only a matter of time until she found herself someone more exciting. But Johan was a brilliant student, and a brilliant lawyer. He became the youngest lawyer since John Christian Elden to earn the right to practise in the Supreme Court, and was offered work others his age could only dream about. His social confidence rose in line with his status and income. Suddenly new doors were open to him, and Krohn — after due consideration — walked through most of them. One of them led to a life he had missed out on in his youth, and could be summarised by the words “women,” “wine” and “song.” More precisely: women who actually became more amenable when you introduced yourself as a partner at a well-known law firm. Wine in the form of exclusive whisky from windswept places like the Hebrides and Shetland Islands, as well as cigars and — in ever greater quantity — cigarettes. He never quite got the hang of song, but there were exonerated criminals who claimed that his defense statements were more beautiful than anything that had ever come out of Frank Sinatra’s mouth.
Frida looked after the children, and managed the family’s social circle, which wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for her, and she worked part-time as a lawyer for two cultural foundations. If Johan Krohn had gone past her in the attractiveness league table, it didn’t alter the balance in their relationship. Because that balance had always been so unequal, he so grateful for his luck, she so used to being courted, that it had become part of the DNA of their relationship, the only way they knew how to relate to each other. They showed each other respect and love, and outwardly were comfortable letting it look like it was Johan who was steering the ship. But at home neither of them was in any doubt about who decided what went where. Or where Johan Krohn should smoke his cigarettes now that he — and he was secretly rather proud of this — was addicted to nicotine.
So when darkness had fallen, the children were in bed and the television news had told him what was going on in Norway and the U.S.A., he would take his cigarettes, go upstairs and out onto the terrace, which looked out upon Mærradalen and Ullern.
He leaned against the railing. The view included Hegnar Media’s office complex and part of Smestaddammen that lay just beyond. He was thinking about Alise. And how he was going to solve the matter. It had become too intense, had gone on too long, it couldn’t continue, they were going to be found out. Well, they had actually been found out long ago, the wry smiles from the other partners in the firm when they were sitting in meetings and Alise came in with a file or an important phone message for him left no room for doubt. But Frida didn’t know, and that was what he meant by being found out, as he had explained to Alise. She had taken it with almost irritating pragmatism and said he shouldn’t worry.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” she had said.
And perhaps it was this very statement that worried him.
Your secret, not ours (she was single), and with me, as if it were a legal document stored in her bank vault. Where it was safe, but only as long as she kept the vault locked. Not that he suspected that her choice of words was meant as a threat, but it still struck home. That she was protecting him. The way she might expect him to offer a protective hand to her. There was stiff competition between young, recently qualified lawyers, and the rewards for those who rose to the top were considerable, with a correspondingly merciless demise for those who sank to the bottom. Getting help to float could have a decisive effect.
“A lot on your mind?”
Johan Krohn started and dropped his cigarette, which fell like a falling star through the darkness down towards the orchard below him. It’s one thing to hear a voice behind you when you think you’re alone and unobserved. It’s something else entirely when that voice belongs to someone who doesn’t belong there, and the only way that person could have got onto the terrace on the second floor was either by flying or teleportation. The fact that the person in question is a brutal criminal who has been convicted of more assaults than anyone else in Oslo in the past thirty years only makes the situation more unexpected.
Krohn turned and saw the man leaning against the wall in the darkness on the other side of the terrace door. In the choice between “What are you doing here?” and “How did you get here?”, he found himself asking the former.
“Rolling a cigarette,” Svein Finne said, raising his hands to his mouth, and a grey tongue slipped out between his thick lips to lick the cigarette paper.
“Wh... what do you want?”
“A light,” Finne said, sticking the cigarette between his lips and looking expectantly at Krohn.
The lawyer hesitated before holding out his hand and clicking his lighter. He saw the flame tremble. Saw it get sucked into the cigarette, as the glowing strands of tobacco curled up.
“Nice house,” Finne said. “Nice view too. I used to hang out in this neighbourhood a lot, many years ago.”
For a moment Krohn imagined his client literally hanging out, floating in the air.
Finne pointed towards Mærradalen with his cigarette. “I occasionally slept in that bit of forest, along with the other homeless. And I remember one particular girl who used to walk through there, she lived on the Huseby side. Old enough for sex, obviously, but no older than fifteen, sixteen. One day I gave her a crash course in how to make love.” Finne laughed gruffly. “She was so frightened I had to comfort her afterwards, poor thing. She cried and cried, saying her father, who was a bishop, and her big brother would come and get me. I told her I wasn’t afraid of bishops or big brothers, and that she didn’t have to be either, because now she had a man of her own. And possibly a child on the way. And then I let her go. I let them go, you see. Catch and release, isn’t that what anglers call it?”