‘They’re starting now.’
It was Katrine. Her lips were almost touching his ear. The organ notes soared, grew into music, music he knew. Bjørn swallowed hard.
Gunnar Hagen closed his eyes for a second and listened only to the music, not wanting to think. But thoughts came. The case was over. Everything was over. They had buried what had to be buried now. Yet there was this one matter, one he could not bury, never managed to get underground. And which he still hadn’t mentioned to anyone. He hadn’t mentioned it because it could no longer be of any use. The Swedish words Asayev had whispered in his hoarse voice the seconds he had spent with him that day at the hospital. ‘What can you offer me if I agree to testify against Isabelle Skøyen?’ and ‘I don’t know who, but I know she worked with someone high up in the police force.’
The words were dead echoes of a dead man. Unprovable claims that would be damaging rather than beneficial now that Skøyen was off the scene.
So he had kept this to himself.
Like Anton Mittet with the bloody baton.
The decision had been taken, but it still kept him awake at night.
‘I know she worked with someone high up in the police force.’
Gunnar Hagen opened his eyes again.
Slowly, he ran his eyes across the assembled congregation.
Truls Berntsen sat with the window of the Suzuki Vitara rolled down so that he could hear the organ music from the small church. The sun shone from a cloudless sky. Warm and awful. He had never liked Oppsal. Just hooligans. He had given a lot of beatings. Taken a lot of beatings. Not as bad as in Hausmanns gate of course. Luckily it had looked worse than it was. And in hospital Mikael had said it didn’t matter with people as ugly as he was and how serious could concussion be for someone who didn’t have a brain?
It was meant to be a joke, and Truls had tried with his grunted laughter to show he appreciated it, but the broken jawbone and the smashed nose had hurt too much.
He was still taking strong painkillers, he still wore big bandages around his head, and of course he was not allowed to drive, but what could he do? He couldn’t sit at home waiting for the dizziness to go and the wounds to heal. Even Megan Fox had begun to bore him and he didn’t actually have the doctor’s permission to watch TV either. So he might just as well sit here. In a car outside a church to. . well, to do what? To show his respect for a man he had never had any respect for? An empty gesture for a sodding idiot who didn’t know what was good for him, who saved the life of the one man whose death he had everything to gain by? Truls Berntsen couldn’t bloody fathom it. He only knew he wanted to be back working as soon as he was well enough. And the town to be his again.
Rakel breathed in and out. Her fingers round the bouquet felt clammy. Stared at the door. Thought about the people sitting inside. Friends, family, acquaintances. The priest. Not that there were so many, but they were waiting. Couldn’t start without her.
‘You promise you won’t cry?’ Oleg said.
‘No,’ she said, smiled fleetingly and stroked his cheek. He had grown so tall. He was so good-looking. Towered above her. She’d had to buy a dark suit for him, and it was only when they were standing in the shop and measuring up that she realised her son was close to Harry’s one metre ninety-two. She sighed.
‘We’d better go in,’ she said, threading her arm through his.
Oleg opened the door, was given a nod by the verger inside and they began to walk up the aisle. And when Rakel saw all the faces turned to her, she felt her nervousness vanish. This had not been her idea, she had been against it, but in the end Oleg had persuaded her. He thought it was only right that it should all finish like this. That was precisely the word he had used: finish. But wasn’t it above all else a beginning? The start of a new chapter in their lives? At least that was how it felt. And suddenly this did feel right. Being here, now.
And a smile spread across her face. She smiled at all the other smiling faces. For a moment she thought that if their smiles or her own got any broader there could be a serious accident. And the notion of this, the sound of tearing faces, which ought to have made her shudder, caused bubbles of laughter in her stomach. Don’t laugh, she told herself. Not now. She noticed that Oleg, who so far had been concentrating on walking in time with the organ, sensed her mood, and she glanced at him. Met his surprised, admonitory expression. But then he had to look away; he had seen. That his mother was having a fit of the giggles. Here, now. And he found that so inappropriate that he started laughing as well.
To focus her mind on something else, on what was about to happen, on the solemnity, she fixed her gaze on the man who was waiting by the altar. Harry. In black.
He stood facing them with an idiotic grin plastered across his handsome, pug-ugly face. As tall and proud as a peacock. When he and Oleg had stood back-to-back at Gunnar Øye’s, the outfitter’s, the assistant with the tape measure had announced that only three centimetres separated them, in Harry’s favour. And the two overgrown schoolboys had high-fived as though both were satisfied with the outcome of some competition.
But now, at this moment, Harry looked very adult. The rays from the June sun falling through the stained-glass windows enveloped him in a kind of celestial light and he seemed taller than ever. And as relaxed as he had been throughout. At first she didn’t understand how he could be so relaxed after all that had happened. But gradually it had rubbed off, this calm, this unshakeable belief that everything had sorted itself out. She hadn’t been able to sleep for the first few weeks after Arnold Folkestad had come to their home, even though Harry had snuggled up close and whispered in her ear that it was over. That it had gone well. That they were out of danger. He had repeated the same words night after night like a soporific mantra, which still hadn’t been enough. But then, gradually, she had begun to believe it. And after a few more weeks to know it. Everything had sorted itself out. And she had begun to sleep. Deep sleep without any dreams she could remember, until she was woken by him slipping out of bed in the morning light, thinking as usual she didn’t notice, and as usual she pretended she didn’t notice because she knew how proud and happy he would be if he thought she had only woken up when he coughed and stood there with a breakfast tray in his hands.
Oleg had given up trying to keep in rhythm with Mendelssohn and the organist now, and it made no difference to Rakel, she had to take two steps for his one anyway. They had decided that Oleg would perform a double function. It had felt completely natural as soon as she’d thought about it. Oleg should accompany her to the altar, give her away to Harry and also be best man.
Harry didn’t have a best man. He had the witness he had first chosen, though. The chair on his side by the altar was empty, but a photo of Beate Lønn had been placed on the seat.
They were there now. Harry hadn’t let her out of his sight for an instant.
She had never understood how a man with such a low resting pulse, who could go for days in his own world, almost without speaking and without any need for outside stimulation, could press a switch and was suddenly conscious of everything, every ticking second, every quivering tenth and hundredth of a second. With a calm, husky voice that in very few words could express more emotions, information, astonishment, foolishness and wisdom than all the windbags she had ever met could manage over a seven-course meal.
And then there were the eyes. Which in their own good-natured, almost bashful, way had this ability to hold your attention, to force you to be there.