He saw Waaler’s one eyebrow suddenly darken. Maybe it was because he had just discovered that the handcuffs were hanging from one of Harry’s wrists. Maybe it was something in Harry’s intonation. Or maybe he felt it too. That the moment had come.
There was an ominous scream in the steel wires as the lift jerked into action. At the same moment Harry took a quick pace forward and stretched up on his toes. There was a dry click as the handcuff locked into place around Waaler’s wrist.
‘Bloody h -’ Waaler began.
Harry lifted one leg. The handcuffs were biting into both of their wrists as Hole’s 95 kilos dragged Waaler down. Waaler tried to take the strain, but his arm was pulled through the window until it was blocked by his shoulder.
A shit day.
‘Let me go, for fuck’s sake!’ Tom screamed, as his chin pressed against the iron door. He tried to pull his arm back, but it was too heavy. He bellowed with rage and slammed his gun against the iron door. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were ruining everything for him. They’d destroyed the sandcastle, kicked it to pieces and now stood there laughing. But they would see, one day they would see. That was when he noticed. That the bars of the grille were touching his lower arm, that the lift was moving. But the wrong way. Downwards. He felt his throat tighten when he realised. That he was going to be crushed. That the lift was now a slow motion guillotine. That he too was about to meet his fate.
‘Hold the grille tight, Sven!’ Harry shouted.
Tom let go of Oleg and tried to pull his arm away. But Harry was too heavy. Tom panicked. He made another desperate attempt to free himself. And another. His feet skidded on the slippery floor. He felt the inside of the lift roof against his shoulder. All reasoning deserted him.
‘Don’t, Harry. Stop.’
He meant to shout, but sobs stifled his words.
‘Mercy…’
43
Monday Night. Rolex.
Tick, tick, tick.
Harry sat listening to the second hand with his eyes closed while he counted. He mused that the time would have to be pretty accurate since the ticking was coming from a gold Rolex watch.
Tick, tick, tick.
If he had counted correctly he had been sitting in the lift for a quarter of an hour now. Fifteen minutes. Nine hundred seconds since he had pressed the stop button between the ground floor and the basement and announced that now they were safe and would have to wait. For nine hundred seconds they had sat as quiet as mice, listening. For footsteps. Voices. Doors being opened and closed. While Harry, his eyes closed, had counted the nine hundred ticks from the Rolex watch on the wrist of the blood-covered arm on the lift floor, and still attached to his handcuffs.
Tick, tick, tick.
Harry opened his eyes. He unlocked the handcuffs and wondered how he was going to get into the boot of the car now that he had swallowed the key.
‘Oleg,’ he whispered and gently shook the sleeping boy’s shoulder. ‘I need you to help me.’
Oleg got to his feet.
‘What’s the point?’ Sven asked, looking up at Oleg who was standing on Harry’s shoulders and detaching the strip lighting from the roof of the lift.
‘Take it,’ Harry said.
Sven reached up to Oleg and took one of the two tubes.
‘Firstly, so that my eyes get used to the dark before I go out into the basement,’ Harry said. ‘Secondly, so that we don’t stand here in the light blinking when the lift door opens.’
‘Waaler? In the basement?’ Sven’s voice was full of disbelief. ‘Come on, no-one can survive that.’
He pointed with the light tube to the already pale, wax-like arm on the floor.
‘Imagine how much blood he lost. And the shock.’
‘I’m trying to anticipate every eventuality,’ Harry said.
Then it went dark.
Tick, tick, tick.
Harry stepped out of the lift, moved quickly to the side and crouched down. He heard the door close softly behind him. He waited until he heard the lift start. The arrangement had been that they should stop the lift between the basement and the ground floor where they would be safe.
Harry listened with bated breath. So far, no sign of ghosts. He stood up. Faint light shone through a door window at the other end of the basement. He made out the shapes of garden furniture, old chests of drawers and the tips of skis behind the wire netting. Harry groped his way along the wall. He found a door and opened it. There was the sweet smell of refuse. He had come to the right place. He trod on torn rubbish bags, eggshells and empty milk cartons as he fumbled his way through the sticky heat generated by the decomposing waste. The gun was over by the wall. One of the bits of tape was still attached. He made sure that it was still loaded before he went out again.
He moved in a crouch towards the door where the light was coming from.
It was only when he was close up that he saw the dark outline against the window. It was a face. Harry automatically dropped onto his haunches before he realised that the person could not see him in the dark. He held the gun in front of him with both hands as he crept two steps forward. The face was pressed up tight against the glass so that all the features were distorted. Harry had the face in the sights of his gun. It was Tom. His wide-open eyes stared beyond him and into the dark.
Harry’s heart thumped so hard he could not keep the sights on the gun still.
He waited. The seconds came and went. Nothing happened.
Then he lowered his gun and straightened up.
He went to the window and looked into Tom’s glazed eyes. They were covered over with a bluish-white film. Harry turned round and tried to penetrate the dark. Whatever Tom had been staring at, it was gone now.
Harry stood still, feeling the dogged, insistent throb of his pulse. Tick, tick, tick, it went. He didn’t quite know what it meant. Except that he was alive, because the man on the other side of the door was dead. And that he could unlock the door, put a hand against that man’s skin and feel the body heat leaving him, feel the skin changing texture, losing the substance of life and becoming packaging.
Harry rested his forehead against Tom Waaler’s. The cold glass of the window burned like ice against his skin.
44
Monday Night. The Mumbling.
They waited at the red lights in Alexander Kiellands plass.
The windscreen wipers beat to the left and right. In one and a half hours the first flashes of dawn would appear, but for the moment it was night and the clouds lay like a grey-black tarpaulin over the town.
Harry was sitting in the back seat with his arm round Oleg.
A woman and a man came staggering down the deserted pavement in Waldemar Thranes gate towards them.
An hour had passed since Harry, Sven and Oleg had got out of the lift, into the rain and onto solid ground. They found a tall birch tree Harry had seen from Marius’s window and threw themselves onto the dry grass. From there Harry had phoned the editor’s desk at Dagbladet first of all and spoken to the journalist on duty. Then he rang Bjarne Moller, told him what had happened and asked him to run a trace on Oystein Eikeland. Finally, he rang Rakel and woke her up. Twenty minutes later the area in front of the student building was lit up by the flashes of cameras and blue lights with press and police in the same wonderful combination as always.
Harry, Oleg and Sven had sat under the birch tree watching them run in and out of the student block.
Then Harry stubbed out his cigarette.
‘Oh well,’ Sven said.
‘“Character”,’ Harry said.
Sven nodded and said: ‘I forgot that one.’
Then they strolled down to the square and Bjarne Moller sprinted out and ushered them into one of the police cars.
First of all they went to Police HQ to be briefly interviewed by the police, or for a ‘debriefing’, as Moller had considerately called it. When Sven was taken into custody, Harry insisted that two front-line officers should stand guard outside his cell 24 hours a day. Moller, somewhat surprised, asked Harry if he really thought that the risk of him escaping was that great. Harry answered with a shake of his head and Moller complied with his wishes without saying another word.