'After Ragnhild's death Mads Gilstrup more or less broke down. He decided to come clean about the whole business. So he rang the police. A telephone number on Halvorsen's business card. Halvorsen didn't answer, but he left the confession as a voicemail. A few hours ago I played the message. Among many other things he said Jon demanded a written agreement.'
'Jon likes things to be neat and tidy,' Martine muttered. The train pulled out of the station, past the stationmaster's Villa Valle and into east Oslo's grey landscape of backyards with wrecked bikes, bare clothes lines and soot-black windows.
'But what has this got to do with Stankic?' she asked. 'Who took out the contract? Mads Gilstrup?'
'No.'
They were sucked into the tunnel's black void, and in the dark her voice was barely audible above the rattle of the train on the rails. 'Was it Rikard? Say it wasn't Rikard…'
'Why do you think it's Rikard?'
'The night Jon raped me Rikard found me in the toilet. I said I had tripped in the dark, but I could see he didn't believe me. He helped me get to bed without waking any of the others. Even though he has never said anything I've always had the feeling that he saw Jon and knows what happened.'
'Mm,' Harry said. 'So that's why he's so protective. Rikard seems to like you, and it's genuine.'
She nodded. 'I suppose that's why I…' she began, then paused.
'Yes?'
'Why I don't want it to be him.'
'In that case your wish is granted.' Harry checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until they arrived.
Martine, with a look of alarm: 'You… you don't think?'
'What?'
'You don't think that my father knew about the rape, do you? That he…'
'No, your father has nothing to do with any of this. The person who took out the contract on Jon Karlsen…'
They were out of the tunnel; a black, starry sky hung over white, phosphorescent fields.
'… is Jon Karlsen.'
Jon entered the vast departures hall. He had been here before, but had never seen as many people as there were now. The noise of voices, feet and announcements rose to the steeple-high vaulted ceiling. An excited cacophony, a hotchpotch of languages and fragments of opinions he didn't understand. Home for Christmas. Going away for Christmas. Stationary queues at the check-in counters coiled round like overfed boa constrictors between the barriers.
Take a deep breath, he told himself. Plenty of time. They don't know anything. Not yet. Maybe they never will. He stood behind an elderly lady and bent down to help her move her suitcase as the queue shuffled forward twenty centimetres. When she turned to him with a smile of gratitude he could see that her skin was only a thin, deathly pale fabric stretched over a bony skull.
He returned the smile, and at length she looked away again. But through the noise of living people he could always hear her scream. The unbearable, unending scream struggling to drown out the roar of an electric motor.
After being taken to hospital and finding out that the police were searching his flat, he had realised they might stumble on the contract with Gilstrup Invest in his bureau. The one that stated that Jon would receive five million kroner if the Salvation Army board of management supported the offer, signed by Albert and Mads Gilstrup. After the police had driven him to Robert's flat he had gone to Goteborggata to collect the contract. But when he arrived someone was already there. Ragnhild. She hadn't heard him because of the vacuum cleaner. She was sitting down reading the contract. She had seen. Seen his sins as his mother had seen the semen stains on the bedding. And, like his mother, Ragnhild would humiliate him, destroy him, tell everyone. Tell his father. She mustn't see. I took her eyes, he thought. But she is still screaming.
'Beggars don't say no to charity,' Harry said. 'It's in the very nature of things. That was what struck me in Zagreb. Quite literally. A Norwegian twenty-kroner coin that was hurled at me. And as I watched it spinning on the floor I remembered the Crime Scene Unit had found a Croatian coin trodden into the snow outside the shop on the corner of Goteborggata. They automatically connected it with Stankic who had been escaping that way while Halvorsen lay bleeding further up the street. I am by inclination a doubter, but when I saw this coin in Zagreb it was as though a higher authority wanted to make me aware of something. The first time I met Jon a beggar threw a coin at him. I remember because I was surprised that a beggar would reject charity. Yesterday I tracked down the beggar to the Deichmanske library and showed him the coin the Crime Scene Unit had found. He confirmed he had hurled a foreign coin at Jon and that it could well have been the one I showed him. Yes, it could indeed have been that one, he said.'
'So Jon must have been to Croatia at some point. That's not illegal, I suppose?'
'Not at all. Yet he told me he had never been abroad in his life, except to Denmark and Sweden. I checked with the passport office and no passport has ever been issued in Jon Karlsen's name. However, a passport had been issued to Robert Karlsen almost ten years ago.'
'Perhaps Jon got the coin from Robert?'
'You're right,' Harry said. 'The coin proves nothing. But it makes sluggish brains like mine think a little. What if Robert never went to Zagreb? What if it had been Jon who went? Jon had keys to all the Salvation Army's rental flats, including Robert's. What if he had borrowed Robert's passport, travelled to Zagreb in his name and pretended to be Robert Karlsen when he organised the hit on Jon Karlsen? And the plan had always been to kill Robert?'
Martine chewed a nail, deep in thought. 'But if Jon wanted to kill Robert, why take out a contract on yourself?'
'To give yourself the perfect alibi. Even if Stankic was arrested and confessed, Jon would never be suspected. He was the intended victim, wasn't he. Jon and Robert swapping shifts on that day of all days would be seen as the hand of fate. Stankic was merely following instructions. And when Stankic, and Zagreb, discovered later that they had killed their own customer there would be no reason for them to fulfil the contract by killing Jon. After all, there was no one to pay the bill. In fact that was part of the genius of the plan. Jon could promise Zagreb as much money as they wanted after the event as there would be no billing address. And the one person who could have refuted that Robert was in Zagreb that day or who might have had an alibi for the date the contract was agreed – Robert Karlsen – was dead. The plan was like a circle of logic that worked, the illusion of a snake eating itself, a self- destructing creation that would guarantee nothing would be left afterwards, no loose threads.'
'A man of ordered habits,' Martine said.
Two of the male students had started singing a drinking song: a twovoice experiment, accompanied by the loud snoring of one of the recruits.
'But why?' Martine asked. 'Why would he kill Robert?'
'Because Robert represented a threat. According to Sergeant Major Rue, Robert supposedly threatened Jon that he would 'destroy' him if he ever approached a certain woman again. The first thing that came to my mind was that they were talking about Thea. But you were right when you said that Robert did not entertain any special feelings for her. Jon claimed Robert had a sick obsession with Thea so that it would seem as though Robert had a motive for wishing to kill Jon. The threat that Robert made, however, concerned Sofia Miholjec. A Croatian girl of fifteen who has just told me everything. How Jon forced her to have sex with him on regular occasions, saying he would evict her family from the Salvation Army flat and have them thrown out of the country if she put up any resistance or told anyone. When she became pregnant, however, she went to Robert, who helped her and promised to stop Jon. Unfortunately Robert did not go straight to the police or those in command in the Salvation Army. He must have considered it a family affair and wanted to solve the problem within the organisation. I gather there's a bit of a tradition of that in the Salvation Army.'
Martine was staring out at the snow-covered, night-faded fields rolling by like the swell of the sea.
'So that was the plan,' she said. 'What went wrong?'
'What always goes wrong,' Harry said. 'The weather.'
'The weather?'
'If the flight to Zagreb had not been cancelled because of snow that night, Stankic would have travelled home, found out that they had killed their go-between by mistake and the story would have finished there. Instead Stankic had to spend a night in Oslo and he discovers he has killed the wrong person. But he doesn't know that
