‘You tell me. Anyway, the last thing I saw before I went to sleep this morning was the clock on the bedside table showing three fives. Three women. Five.’
‘The brain is a wondrous instrument,’ Aune said.
‘I suppose so,’ Harry said. ‘According to a code-savvy friend of mine we have to find the answer to the question “why” before the code is fully cracked. And the answer is not five.’
‘So, why?’
Harry yawned and stretched.
‘“Why” is your field, Stale. I’ll just be happy if we catch him.’
Aune smiled, looked at his watch, then got up.
‘You’re a very strange person, Harry.’
He put on his tweed jacket.
‘I know you’ve been drinking a bit recently, but you look a little better. Are you over the worst this time?’
Harry shook his head.
‘I’m just sober.’
As Harry walked home the sky arced over him in all its splendour.
A woman wearing sunglasses stood on the pavement below the neon sign over Niazi, the little grocery in the block next to where Harry lived. She had one hand on her hip; in her other hand she was holding one of Niazi’s anonymous white plastic bags. She smiled and pretended that she had been standing there waiting for him.
It was Vibeke Knutsen.
Harry knew that she was play-acting. It was a joke she wanted him to join in, so he slowed down and sent her the same smile in return. To show that he had been waiting to see her there. The odd thing was that he had been. He just hadn’t realised it until that moment.
‘Haven’t seen you at Underwater recently, precious,’ she said, lifting her sunglasses and peering out as if the sun still hung low over the rooftops.
‘I’ve been trying to keep my head above water,’ Harry said, taking out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Ooh, a play on words,’ she said, stretching.
She wasn’t wearing anything exotic this evening – a blue summer dress with a plunging neckline. She filled it well and she knew it. He passed her the packet, and she took a cigarette, which she managed to place between her lips in a way that Harry could only characterise as indecent.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘I thought you usually shopped at Kiwi?’
‘Closed. It’s almost midnight, Harry. I had to come down your way to find somewhere still open.’
Her smile spread and her eyes narrowed, like those of a playful cat.
‘This is a dodgy area for a little girl on a Friday night,’ Harry said, lighting her cigarette. ‘You could’ve sent your man out if you needed a bit of shopping…’
‘Mixers,’ she said holding up her bag. ‘To mix drinks so that they aren’t too strong. And my betrothed is away. If it’s so dodgy here, you ought to rescue the girl and take her somewhere safe.’
She nodded towards his block of flats.
‘I can make you a cup of coffee,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘Nescafe. That’s all I have to offer.
When Harry came into the sitting room carrying boiling water and a coffee glass, Vibeke Knutsen was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up underneath her and her shoes on the floor. Her milky white skin shone in the semidarkness. She lit another cigarette, her own this time. A foreign brand Harry had not seen before. No filter tip. In the flickering light from the match he could see that the dark red varnish on her toenails was chipped.
‘I don’t know that I can go on any longer,’ she said. ‘He’s changed. When he comes home he’s just restless and either paces up and down in the sitting room or goes out training. It feels as if he can’t wait to get away and travel again. I try to talk to him, but he cuts me short or else just looks at me in total incomprehension. We really do come from two different planets.’
‘It’s the combination of the distance between the planets and the mutual attraction that keeps them in orbit,’ Harry said, spooning out the freeze-dried coffee grains.
‘More playing with words?’ Vibeke plucked a strand of tobacco off the tip of her pink, wet tongue.
Harry chuckled. ‘Something I read in a waiting room. I probably hoped it was true. For my own sake.’
‘Do you know what the strangest part is? He doesn’t like me. And yet I know that he’ll never let me go.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘He needs me. I don’t know what for, exactly, but it’s like he’s lost something and that’s why he needs me. His parents…’
‘Yes?’
‘He doesn’t have any contact with them. I’ve never met them. I don’t think they even know I exist. Not so long ago the telephone rang and there was a man asking after Anders. I immediately sensed it was his father. You can sort of hear it in the way that parents say the names of their children. In one way it’s something they’ve said so many times it’s the most natural thing in the world. But then in another way it’s so intimate that the word strips them bare to the skin so they say it quickly, almost with embarrassment. ‘Is Anders there?’ When I said that I would have to wake him first the voice suddenly started to babble away in a foreign language, or… not foreign exactly, but more like you and I would speak if we had to find words in a hurry. The way they speak at religious meetings in chapels when they’re well underway, sort of.’
‘Speaking in tongues?’
‘Yes, that’s probably what it’s called. Anders grew up with this stuff, though he never talks about it. I listened for a while. First of all, there was a fair sprinkling of words like “satan” and “sodom”. Then it got dirtier. “Cunt” and “whore” and things like that. So I put the phone down.’
‘What did Anders say to that?’
‘I never mentioned it to him.’
‘Why not?’
‘I… it’s like a place I’ve never been allowed to enter. And I don’t want to go there, either.’
Harry drank his coffee. Vibeke didn’t touch her own.
‘Don’t you get lonely sometimes, Harry?’
His eyes rose to meet hers.
‘Sort of alone. Don’t you wish you were with someone?’
‘That’s two different things. You’re together with someone and you’re lonely.’
She shivered as if a cold front was passing through the room.
‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘I feel like a drink.’
‘Sorry, I’ve run out of that sort of thing.’
She opened her handbag. ‘Can you fetch two glasses, precious?’
‘We’ll only need one.’
‘Well, OK.’
She unscrewed the lid of her hip flask, tipped back her head and drank.
‘I’m not allowed to move at all,’ she said laughing. A shiny brown droplet ran down her chin.
‘What?’
‘Anders doesn’t like me to move. And I have to lie still, without moving. I mustn’t say a word or moan. I have to pretend that I’m asleep. He says that he loses the urge when I show passion.’
‘And?’
She took another swig and screwed the lid back while looking at him.
‘It’s a nigh on impossible feat.’
Her stare was so direct that Harry automatically breathed a little deeper, and to his irritation he could feel his erection beginning to throb against the inside of his trousers.
She raised an eyebrow as if she could feel it too.
‘Come and sit on the sofa,’ she whispered.
Her voice had become rough and husky. Harry saw the bulge in the thick blue artery in her white neck. It’s just a reflex action, Harry thought. A slavering Pavlovian dog that stands up when it hears the signal for food, a
