The Redeemer

She let go.

'Keep your eyes closed,' she whispered by his ear.

Harry leaned back and resisted the temptation to put his hands on her hips. The seconds passed. Then he felt the soft cotton material on the back of his hand as her blouse slipped to the floor.

'Now you can open them,' she whispered.

Harry did as instructed. And sat watching her. Her face expressed a mixture of anxiety and anticipation.

'You're so beautiful,' he said in a voice which had become constricted and odd. Also bewildered.

He noticed her swallow. Then a triumphant smile spread across her face.

'Raise your arms,' she commanded. She grabbed hold of his T-shirt at the bottom and pulled it over his head.

'And you're ugly,' she said. 'Wonderful and ugly.'

Harry felt an intoxicating stab of pain as she bit into his nipple. One of her hands had moved behind her back and between his legs. Her breathing against his neck began to race and her other hand grabbed his belt. He held his arm against her lithe back. That was when he felt it. An involuntary quiver of her muscles, a tension she had managed to hide. She was frightened.

'Wait, Martine,' Harry whispered. Her hand froze.

Harry lowered his mouth to her ear. 'Do you want this? Do you know what you're getting yourself into here?'

He could feel her breathing, quickened and moist against his skin as she gasped: 'No, do you?'

'No. Then perhaps we shouldn't…'

She sat up. Looking at him with wounded, desperate eyes. 'But I. .. I can feel that you…'

'Yes,' Harry said, caressing her hair. 'I want you. I have wanted you from the first moment I saw you.'

'Is that the truth?' she said, taking his hand and laying it against a hot, flushed cheek.

Harry smiled. 'The second anyway.'

'The second time?'

'OK, the third then. All good music takes a little time.'

'And I'm good music?'

'I'm lying. It was the first time. But that doesn't mean I'm a pushover, OK?'

Martine smiled. Then she started laughing. Harry, too. She leaned forward and rested her forehead against his chest. Sobbed with laughter and banged against his shoulder, and it was only then that Harry felt her tears running down his stomach and realised she was crying.

Jon was woken by the cold. He thought. Robert's flat was dark and there could be no other explanation. But then his brain rewound and he knew that what he assumed were the final fragments of a dream were not. He had heard a key in the lock. And the door opening. Now someone was in the room, breathing.

With a sense of deja vu, that everything in this nightmare was repeating itself, he whirled round.

A figure stood over the bed.

Jon gasped for air as the fear of death attacked, its teeth sinking into his flesh and striking the nerves beneath. For he had total certainty, was quite sure that this person wished him dead.

'Stigla sam,' the figure said.

Jon didn't know many Croatian words, but the ones he had picked up from the tenants from Vukovar were enough for him to be able to work out what the voice had said. 'I have come.'

'Have you always been lonely, Harry?'

'I think so.'

'Why?'

Harry shrugged. 'I've never been the sociable type.'

'Is that all?'

Harry blew a ring of smoke up to the ceiling and could feel Martine sniffing at his sweater and his neck. They were in the bedroom, him on top of the duvet, her beneath.

'Bjarne Moller, my former boss, says people like me always choose the line of most resistance. It's in what he calls our "accursed nature". That's why we always end up on our own. I don't know. I like being alone. Perhaps I have grown to like my self-image of being a loner, too. What about you?'

'I want you to talk.'

'Why?'

'I don't know. I like listening to you. How can anyone like the selfimage of a loner?'

Harry took a deep breath. Held the smoke in his lungs thinking how good it would be if you could blow smoke patterns to explain everything. Then he released the smoke in one long exhalation.

'I think you have to find something about yourself that you like in order to survive. Some people say being alone is unsociable and selfish. But you're independent and you don't drag others down with you, if that's the way you're heading. Many people are afraid of being alone. But it made me feel free, strong and invulnerable.'

'Strong from being alone?'

'Yep. As Dr Stockman said: "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."'

'First Suskind and now Ibsen?'

Harry grinned. 'That was a line my father used to quote.' He sighed and then added, 'Before my mother died.'

'You said it made you invulnerable. Is that no longer the case?'

Harry felt the ash fall from his cigarette onto his chest. He left it where it was.

'I met Rakel and… well, Oleg. They attached themselves to me. It opened my eyes to the fact that there could be other people in my life. People who were friends and who cared about me. And that I needed them.' Harry blew on his cigarette making it glow. 'And, even worse, that they might need me.'

'So you weren't free any longer?'

'No. No, I wasn't free any longer.'

They lay staring into the dark.

Martine nestled her nose into his neck. 'You really like them, don't you?'

'Yes.' Harry pulled her close. 'Yes, I do.'

After she had fallen asleep, Harry slipped out of the bed and tucked the duvet in around her. He checked the time. Two o'clock on the dot. He walked into the hall, put on his boots and opened the door to the starry night. Heading for the outside toilet, he studied the footprints while trying to remember whether it had snowed since Saturday morning.

The toilet was not lit, so he struck a match and orientated himself. As it was about to go out he spotted two letters carved into the wall under a fading picture of Princess Grace of Monaco. In the dark Harry mused that someone had been sitting here, as he was, diligently forming the simple declaration: R+M.

Coming out of the toilet, he caught a quick movement by the corner of the barn. He stopped. There was a set of footprints going that way.

Harry hesitated. There it was again. The feeling that something was about to happen, right now, something fated which he could not prevent. He put a hand inside the toilet door and found the spade he had seen standing there. Then he began to follow the prints to the barn.

At the corner he paused and took a firm grip of the spade. His breathing thundered in his ears. He stopped breathing. Now. It was going to happen now. Harry plunged round the corner with the spade at the ready.

Ahead of him, in the middle of the field shining so bewitchingly and so white in the moonlight that he was dazzled, he saw a fox running towards the woods.

He slumped back against the barn door and inhaled trembling lungfuls of air.

There was a knock at the door and he backed away out of instinct.

Had he been seen? The person on the other side of the door must not come inside.

He cursed his carelessness. Bobo would have scolded him for breaking cover in such an amateur way.

The door was locked, but he still cast around for an object he could use in case whoever it was should manage to make their way in.

A knife. Martine's bread knife that he had just been using. It was in the kitchen.

There was another knock.

And then there was his gun. Empty, it was true, but enough to scare off a sensible man. The problem was that he doubted if this one was.

The person had arrived in a car and parked outside Martine's flat in Sorgenfrigata. He hadn't seen him until he chanced by the window and scanned the cars parked by the pavement. That was when he had seen the motionless silhouette inside one of them. On seeing it move, lean forwards to see better, he knew it was too late. He had been seen. He had come away from the window, waited for half an hour, then lowered the blinds and switched off all the lights in Martine's flat. She had said he could leave them on. The radiators all had thermostats and since 90 per cent of the energy of a light bulb is heat, the electricity you save by turning them off would be counterbalanced by the radiators compensating for the heat loss.