“I’m not an angler,” Krohn found himself saying.
“I’ve never killed an innocent person in my entire life,” Finne said. “You need to respect innocence in nature. Abortion...” Finne sucked so hard on his cigarette that Krohn heard the paper crackle. “Tell me, you know all about the law, is there anything that’s a worse crime against the laws of nature? Killing your own innocent offspring. Can you think of anything more perverse?”
“Can we get to the point, Finne? My wife’s waiting for me inside.”
“Of course she’s waiting for you. We’re all waiting for something. Love. Intimacy. Human contact. I waited for Dagny Jensen yesterday. No love, I’m afraid. And now it’s going to be difficult for me to get close to her again. We get lonely, don’t we? And we all need something...” He looked at his cigarette. “Something warm.”
“If you need my help, I suggest we talk about it at the office tomorrow.” Krohn realised he hadn’t struck the authoritative tone he was aiming at. “I... I’ll find time to see you whenever you like.”
“You’ll find time?” Finne let out a short laugh. “After all I’ve done for you, that feather you’ve got in your hat now, that’s all you’ve got to offer me? Your time?”
“What is it you want, Finne?”
His client took a step forward, and the light from the window fell across half his face. He ran his right hand over the red-painted railing. Krohn shuddered when he saw the red paint through the large hole in the back of Finne’s hand.
“Your wife,” Finne said. “I want her.”
Krohn felt his throat tighten.
Finne flashed him a grotesque grin. “Relax, Krohn. Even if I have to admit that I’ve thought a lot about Frida in the past few days, I’m not going to touch her. Because I don’t touch other men’s women, I want my own. As long as she’s yours, she’s safe, Krohn. But obviously you could hardly hold on to a proud, financially independent woman like Frida if she got to hear about the pretty little assistant you had with you when I was questioned. Alise. That was her name, wasn’t it?”
Johan Krohn stared. Alise? He knew about Alise?
Krohn cleared his throat. It sounded like windshield wipers on dry glass. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Finne pointed one finger towards his eye. “Eagle eyes. I’ve seen you. Watching you fucking is like watching a couple of baboons. Fast, efficient, without any great emotion. It won’t last, but you don’t want to go without it, do you? We all need warmth.”
Where? Krohn wondered. At the office? In the hotel room he sometimes booked for them? In Barcelona in October? It was impossible. When they made love it was always high up, where they knew they couldn’t be seen from the other side of the street.
“What will last, on the other hand, unless someone tells Frida about Alise, is this.” Finne jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the house. “Family. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it, Krohn?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about or what you want,” Krohn said. He had put both elbows on the railing behind him. It was supposed to convey relaxed ambivalence, but he knew he probably looked more like a boxer who was already on the ropes.
“I’ll leave Frida alone if I can have Alise,” Finne said, flicking his cigarette into the air. Its glowing tip curved through the darkness like Krohn’s a short while ago before going out in the darkness. “The police are looking for me, I can’t move as freely as I’d like. I need a little...” — he grinned again — “assistance in order to get some warmth. I want you to arrange for me to have the young lady to myself, somewhere safe.”
Krohn blinked in disbelief. “You want me to try to persuade Alise to see you alone? So you can... assault her?”
“Forget ‘try’ and ‘assault.’ You will persuade her, Krohn. And I’m going to seduce her, not assault her. I’ve never assaulted anyone, that’s all a big misunderstanding. The girls don’t always understand what’s best for them, or the task nature has set them, that’s all. But they come to their senses soon enough. Just as Alise will too. She’ll come to realise that if she threatens this family, for instance, she’ll have me to answer to. Hey, don’t look so glum, Krohn, you’re getting two for the price of one here: my silence, as well as the girl’s.”
Krohn stared at Finne. The words were echoing through his head. Your secret’s safe with me.
“Johan?”
Frida’s voice came from inside the house, and he heard her steps on the stairs. Then a voice whispered close to his ear, accompanied by the smell of tobacco and something rancid, bestial. “There’s a grave in Vår Frelsers Cemetery. Valentin Gjertsen. I’ll expect to hear from you within two days.”
Frida reached the top of the stairs and started to walk towards the terrace, but stopped in the light inside the door.
“Brr, it’s cold,” she said, folding her arms. “I heard voices.”
“Psychiatrists say that’s a bad sign.” Johan Krohn smiled, and began to walk towards her, but wasn’t quick enough. She had already stuck her head out of the door and was looking in both directions.
She looked up at him. “Were you talking to yourself?”
Krohn looked around the terrace. Empty. Gone.
“I was practising a defence statement,” he said. He breathed out and walked back in through the terrace door, into the warmth, into their house, into his wife’s arms. When he noticed her let go to look up at him, he kept hold of her so she couldn’t read his face, see that something was wrong. Because Johan Krohn knew that the defense speech he was thinking about would never win the case, not this one. He knew Frida and her thoughts about infidelity too well, she’d condemn him to a lifetime of loneliness, with access to the children but not to her. The fact that Svein Finne also appeared to know Frida so well only made the matter even more unsettling.
Katrine heard the baby crying in the stairwell. It made her quicken her steps, even though she knew the child was in the best of hands. Bjørn’s hands. Pale hands with soft skin and thick, stubby fingers that could do everything that needed doing. No more, no less. She shouldn’t complain. So she tried not to. She had seen what happened to some women when they became mothers, they became despots who thought the sun and all the planets orbited around mother and child. Who suddenly treated their husbands with resigned derision when they didn’t demonstrate lightning-fast reactions and ideally a telepathic understanding of the needs of mother and child. Or, to be more accurate, what the mother decided were the needs of the child.
No, Katrine definitely didn’t want to be one of those. But was that somewhere inside her anyway? Hadn’t she occasionally felt like slapping Bjørn, watching him curl up and submit, humiliate himself? She had no idea why. Nor how on earth it could ever happen, seeing as Bjørn was always one step ahead of her and had already sorted out anything she might be able to base any criticism on. And obviously there’s nothing more frustrating than someone who’s better than you, who constantly holds up a mirror that makes you hate yourself.