Truls was driving home. He turned the radio up when he heard them playing the Motörhead song he had always thought was called ‘Ace of Space’ until Mikael yelled out at a high-school party: ‘Beavis here thinks Lemmy’s singing Ace of … Space!’ He could still hear the roars of laughter drowning out the music, and see the twinkle in Ulla’s beautiful, laughing eyes.
That was fine, Truls still thought ‘Ace of Space’ was a better title than ‘Ace of Spades’. One day when Truls had taken the risk of sitting down at the same table as the others in the cafeteria, Bjørn Holm had been in the middle of explaining – in that ridiculous Toten dialect of his – that he thought it would have been more poetic if Lemmy had lived till he was seventy-two. When Truls asked why, Bjørn replied: ‘Seven and two, two and seven, right? Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, the whole lot.’
Truls had merely nodded when he saw the others nodding. He still didn’t know what it meant. Only that he had felt excluded.
Still, excluded or not, this evening Truls had become thirty thousand kroner richer than Bjørn fucking Holm and all his nodding cafeteria buddies.
Mona had brightened up considerably when Truls told her about the teeth, or iron dentures, as Holm had put it. She had called her editor and got him to agree that it was precisely what Truls had said: a three-course meal. The starter was the fact that Elise Hermansen had been on a Tinder date. The main course that the killer was probably already inside her flat when she got home. And the dessert that he had murdered her by biting her throat with teeth made of iron. Ten thousand for each course. Thirty. Three and zero, zero and three, right?
‘Ace of space, the ace of space!’ Truls and Lemmy roared.
‘Not going to happen,’ Katrine said, pulling her trousers back up. ‘If you haven’t got a condom, you can forget it.’
‘But I got checked out two weeks ago,’ Ulrich said, sitting up in bed. ‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’
‘Try that on someone else …’ Katrine had to take a deep breath before buttoning her trousers. ‘Anyway, that’s hardly going to stop me getting pregnant.’
‘Don’t you use anything, then, girl?’
Girl? Oh, she did like Ulrich. It wasn’t that. It was … God knows what it was.
She went out into the hall and put her shoes on. She’d made a note of where he’d hung her leather jacket, and had checked that there was just an ordinary lock on the inside of the door. Yep, she was good at planning her escape. She walked out and went down the stairs. When she emerged onto Gyldenløves gate the fresh autumn air tasted of freedom and a sense of having had a narrow escape. She laughed. Walked down the path that ran between the trees in the middle of the wide, empty street. God, how stupid. But if she was really so good at escaping, if she had already made sure she had a way out when she and Bjørn moved in together, why hadn’t she had a coil fitted, or at least gone on the pill? She remembered a conversation in which she explained to Bjørn that her already brittle psyche didn’t need the mood swings that were the inevitable consequence of that sort of hormone manipulation. And it was true, she had stopped taking the pill when she got together with Bjørn. Her thoughts were interrupted when her phone rang, the opening riff of ‘O My Soul’ by Big Star, installed by Bjørn, of course, who had gone to great lengths to explain the significance of the largely forgotten Southern States band from the seventies to her, and complained that the Netflix documentary had deprived him of his mission in life. ‘Fuck them! Half the pleasure of secret bands is the fact that they are secret!’ There wasn’t much chance of him growing up any time soon.
She answered. ‘Yes, Gunnar.’
‘Murdered with iron teeth?’ Her otherwise placid boss sounded upset.
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s the lead story on VG’s website. It says the murderer was already inside Elise Hermansen’s flat, and that he bit through her carotid artery. From a reliable source in the police, it says.’
‘What?’
‘Bellman has already called. He’s … what’s the word I’m looking for? Livid.’
Katrine stopped walking. Tried to think. ‘To start with, we don’t know that he was already there, and we don’t know that he bit her, or that it was a he.’
‘Unreliable source in the police, then! I don’t give a damn about that! We need to get to the bottom of this. Who’s the leak?’
‘I don’t know, but I know that VG will protect the identity of its source as a matter of principle.’
‘Principles be damned – they want to protect their source because they want more inside information. We need to plug this leak, Bratt.’
Katrine was more focused now. ‘So Bellman’s worried the leak might harm the investigation?’
‘He’s worried it’ll make the whole force look bad.’
‘I thought as much.’
‘You thought what?’
‘You know what, and you’re thinking the same.’
‘We’ll deal with this first thing tomorrow,’ Hagen said.
Katrine Bratt put her phone in her jacket pocket and looked ahead along the path. One of the shadows had moved. Probably just a gust of wind in the trees.
For a moment she considered crossing the road to the well-lit pavement, before deciding against it and walking on, quicker than before.
Mikael Bellman was standing by the living-room window. From their house in Høyenhall he could see the whole of the centre of Oslo, stretching out westward towards the low hills below Holmenkollen. And tonight the city was sparkling like a diamond in the moonlight. His diamond.
His children were sleeping soundly. His city was sleeping relatively soundly.
‘What is it?’ Ulla wondered, looking up from her book.
‘This latest murder, it needs solving.’
‘So do all murders, surely?’
‘This one’s a big case now.’
‘It’s one single woman.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘Is it because VG is running so hard with it?’
He could hear the trace of derision in her voice, but it didn’t bother him. She had calmed down, she was back in her place. Because, deep down, Ulla knew her place. And she wasn’t the sort of person who looked for conflict. What his wife liked more than anything was looking after the family, fussing over the children and reading her books. So the tacit criticism in her voice didn’t really demand an answer. And she would hardly have understood it anyway – that if you want to be remembered as a good king, you have two choices. Either you are a king in good times, with the good fortune to sit on the throne during years of plenty. Or you’re the king who leads the country out of a time of crisis. And if it isn’t a time of crisis, you can pretend, start a war and show how deep a crisis the country would be in if it didn’t go to war, and make out that things are really terrible. It didn’t matter if it was only a small war, the important thing was winning it. Mikael Bellman had opted for the latter when he had appeared in the media and in front of the City Council, exaggerating the amount of crime committed by migrants from the Baltic States and Romania, and making dire predictions about the future. And he had been granted extra resources to win what was actually a very small war, albeit a big one in the media. And with the latest figures he had provided twelve months later, he had been able indirectly to declare himself the triumphant victor.
But this new murder case was a war he wasn’t in charge of, and – judging from VG’s coverage that evening – he knew it was no longer a small war. Because they all danced to the media’s tune. He remembered a landslide on Svalbard which had left two people dead and many more homeless. A few months before there had been a fire in Nedre Eiker, in which three people had died and far more been left homeless. The latter story had received the usual modest coverage granted to house fires and road accidents. But a landslide on a distant island was a far more media-friendly story, just like these iron jaws, meaning that the media had leapt into action as if it was a national disaster. And the Prime Minister – who jumps whenever the media says jump – had addressed the country in a live broadcast. And the viewers and residents of Nedre Eiker might well have wondered where she was when their homes were burning. Mikael Bellman knew where she had been. She and her advisers had, as usual, had their ears to the ground, listening out for tremors in the media. And there hadn’t been any.