‘He has to feel threatened. In a credible way.’
‘Why threaten him? Why not just kill him now?’
Mikael laughed. Right up to the moment he realised she was serious.
‘Because. .’ Mikael held her eyes, his voice firm. Trying to be the same masterful Mikael Bellman who, half an hour ago, had stood in front of the assembled detectives. Trying to come up with an answer. But she was quicker on her feet.
‘Because you don’t dare. Shall we see if we can find someone under “Active Euthanasia” in the Yellow Pages? You remove the police guard, misuse of resources blah blah blah, and afterwards the patient receives an unexpected visit from the Yellow Pages. Unexpected as far as he’s concerned, that is. Or, no, as a matter of fact, you could send your shadow. Beavis. Truls Berntsen. He’ll do anything for money, won’t he?’
Mikael shook his head in disbelief. ‘First of all, it was the head of Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen, who ordered the twenty-four-hour police supervision. If the patient was killed after I’d overruled Hagen, that would make me look bad, if I can put it like that. Secondly, we’re not going to murder anyone.’
‘Listen, darling, no politician is better than her adviser. That’s why the basic premise for getting to the top is you always surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are. And I’m beginning to doubt that you’re smarter than me, Mikael. First off, you can’t even catch this police killer. And now you don’t know how to solve a simple problem of a man in a coma. So when you don’t want to fuck me either, I have to ask myself: “What am I going to do with him?” Answer me that, please.’
‘Isabelle. .’
‘I’ll take that as a no. So, listen to me. This is how we’re going to play it. .’
He had to admire her. Her controlled, cool professionalism, yet her risk-embracing unpredictability, which made her colleagues sit a little further back on their chairs. Some saw her as a ticking bomb, but they hadn’t realised that creating uncertainty was a feature of Isabelle Skøyen’s game. She was the type to soar further and higher than anyone else, and in a shorter time. And — if she fell — to plummet to a nasty end. It wasn’t that Mikael Bellman didn’t recognise himself in Isabelle Skøyen, he did, but she was an extreme version of himself. And the strange thing was that instead of dragging him along, she made him more cautious.
‘The patient hasn’t come out of the coma yet, so for the time being we do nothing,’ Isabelle said. ‘I know an anaesthetist from Enebakk. Very shady type. He supplies me with pills that as a politician I can’t get on the street. He — like Beavis — does most things for money. And anything at all for sex. Apropos of which. .’
She had perched herself on the edge of the table, raised and spread her legs and unbuttoned his flies in one go. Mikael grabbed her wrists. ‘Let’s wait until Wednesday at the Grand.’
‘Let’s not wait until Wednesday at the Grand.’
‘Well, actually, I vote that we do.’
‘Oh yes?’ she said, freeing her hands and opening his trousers. She looked down. Her voice was throaty. ‘The noes have it by one, darling.’
5
Darkness and the temperature had fallen, and a pale moon was shining in through the window of Stian Barelli’s room when he heard his mother’s voice from the living room downstairs.
‘It’s for you, Stian!’
He had heard their landline ringing and hoped it wasn’t for him. He put down the Wii controller. He was twelve under par with three holes left to play and thus very well on the way to qualifying for the Masters. He was playing Rick Fowler, as he was the only golfer in the Tiger Woods Masters who was cool and anywhere close to his own age, twenty-one. And they both liked Eminem and Rise Against and wearing orange. Of course Rick Fowler could afford his own flat whereas Stian still lived at home. But it was only temporary, until he got a scholarship to go to university in Alaska. All semi-decent downhill skiers went there if they got good results in the Nordic Junior Ski Championship and so on. Of course, no one became a better skier from going there, but so what? Women, wine and skis. What could be better. Perhaps the odd exam if there was time. The qualification could lead to an OK job. Money for his own flat. A life that was better than this, sleeping in the slightly too short bed under posters of Bode Miller and Aksel Lund Svindal, eating Mum’s rissoles and obeying Dad’s rules, training mouthy brats who according to their snow-blind parents had the talent to be a Kjetil André Aamodt or a Lasse Kjus. Operating the ski lifts in Tryvannskleiva for a wage they wouldn’t bloody dare give child workers in India. And that was how Stian knew it was the chairman of the Ski Club on the phone now. He was the only person Stian knew who avoided ringing people on their mobiles because it was a bit more expensive, and who preferred to force them to run downstairs in prehistoric houses that still had landlines.
Stian took the receiver his mother held out for him.
‘Yes?’
‘Hi, Stian, Bakken here.’ Bakken meant slope, and it really was his name. ‘I’ve been told the Kleiva lift’s running.’
‘Now?’ Stian said, looking at his watch. 11.15 at night. Closing time was at nine.
‘Could you nip up and see what’s going on?’
‘Now?’
‘Unless you’re extremely busy, of course.’
Stian ignored the sarcasm in the chairman’s intonation. He knew he’d had two disappointing seasons and that the chairman didn’t think it was down to lack of talent but to the large amounts of time Stian did his best to fill with general idleness.
‘I haven’t got a car,’ Stian said.
‘You can use mine,’ his mother chipped in. She hadn’t gone away; she was standing next to him with her arms crossed.
‘Sorry, Stian, but I heard that,’ the chairman commented laconically. ‘The Heming skateboarders must have broken in. I suppose they think it’s funny.’
It took Stian ten minutes to drive the winding road up to Tryvann Tower. The TV mast was a 118-metre-long javelin drilled into the ground at the top of Oslo’s north-western mountains.
He came to a halt in the snow-covered car park and noted that the only other vehicle there was a red Golf. He took his skis from the roof box, put them on and skated past the main building and up to where the main chairlift, Tryvann Ekspress, marked the top of the skiing facilities. From there he could see down to the lake and the smaller Kleiva lift with T-bars. Even though there was light from the moon it was too dark to check whether the bars were moving, but he could hear it. The hum of the machinery down below.
And as he set off, skiing in long, lazy curves, it struck him how strangely still it was up here at night. It was as if the first hour after they closed was still filled with the echoes of screams of pleasure, girls’ exaggerated whines of terror, boys’ testosterone-filled cries for attention, steel edges cutting into hard-packed snow and ice. Even when they switched off the floodlights the light seemed to hang in the air for a while. But then, gradually, it became quieter. And darker. And even quieter. Until the silence filled all the hollows in the terrain, and the darkness crept out from the forest. And it was as though Tryvann became a different place, a place which even for Stian, who knew it like the back of his hand, was so unfamiliar it might as well have been another planet. A cold, dark and uninhabited planet.
The lack of light meant he had to ski by feeling and try to predict how the snow and the ground would roll and pitch beneath the skis. But that was his special talent, which meant he always did best when there was bad visibility, heavy snow, mist, flat light: he could feel what he couldn’t see, he had that kind of clairvoyance some skiers just have and others — most of them — don’t. He caressed the snow, moving slowly to prolong the enjoyment. Then he was down and pulled up in front of the ski-lift hut.