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.
Then they contacted the regular uniformed police and got hold of a patrol car to drive Oleg home.
The bleeping noise accompanying the traffic lights cut into the still night air as the couple crossed Uelands gate. The woman had obviously borrowed the man’s jacket and held it over her head. The man’s shirt was stuck to his body and he was laughing out loud. Harry thought there was something familiar about him.
The lights changed to green.
He caught a glimpse of red hair under the woman’s jacket before the couple passed out of sight.
When they passed Vinderen, it suddenly stopped raining. Like curtains on the stage, the clouds slid away and a new moon shone on them from a black sky over Oslo fjord.
‘At last,’ Moller said, turning round in the front passenger seat with a smile.
Harry assumed he was referring to the rain.
‘At last,’ he answered, without taking his eyes off the moon.
‘You’re a very brave boy,’ Moller said, patting the boy’s knee. Oleg gave a wan smile and looked up at Harry.
Moller turned round again and kept his eyes forward on the road ahead.
‘My stomach pains have gone,’ he said. ‘Vanished into thin air.’
They had found Oystein Eikeland in the same place that they took Sven Sivertsen. In the custody block. According to ‘Griever’ Groth’s papers, Oystein had been brought in by Tom Waaler on suspicion of driving a taxi while drunk. The blood sample he had given had in fact also shown some evidence of alcohol. When Moller ordered that Eikeland was to be released and that all formalities were to be dropped, ‘Griever’ Groth, surprisingly enough, had no objections. On the contrary, he was unusually obliging.
Rakel was standing in the doorway as the police car swung onto the crunching gravel of the drive in front of her house.
Harry leaned across Oleg and opened the door. Oleg jumped out and ran towards Rakel.
Moller and Harry stayed in the car and watched the two of them silently hugging each other on the steps.
Moller’s mobile phone rang and he raised it to his ear. He said ‘Yes’ twice and ‘Right’ once and rang off.
‘That was Beate. They’ve found a bag full of cycling equipment in the refuse bin in the yard at Barli’s place.’
‘Mm.’
‘It’s going to be hell,’ Moller said. ‘They’re all going to want a chunk of you, Harry. Akersgata, NRK, TV2. Foreign press as well. Just imagine, they’ve heard about the Courier Killer in Spain. Well, you’ve done all that stuff before, so you know how it goes.’
‘I’ll survive.’
‘I suppose you will. We’ve got some footage of what happened in the student place last night, too. I just wonder how Tangen managed to set up the recording in his bus on Sunday afternoon and then forget to switch it off and catch the train home to Honefoss.’
Moller studied Harry’s face, but Harry remained impassive.
‘And, on top of that, what a stroke of luck that he’d just wiped the hard disk so that there was enough space for several days’ recording. Incredible actually. You could almost think that it had been planned beforehand.’
‘Almost,’ Harry mumbled.
‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry. I have contacted SEFO and informed them about Waaler’s activities. We are not discounting the possibility that this case may have ramifications for the Force. I have the first meeting with them tomorrow. We’ll get to the bottom of this, Harry.’
‘Fine, boss.’
