Then he opened the door and walked into the backyard. The rubbish container was standing where it always did. Harry pushed open the lid. He had promised Hagen he would take a look at the case file. Mostly so that his boss would not lose face – after all, the passport had cost Crime Squad quite a few kroner. Harry dropped the file onto the burst plastic bags leaking coffee grounds, nappies, rotten fruit and potato peelings. He inhaled and wondered at how surprisingly international the smell of rubbish was.
Nothing had been touched in his two-room flat, yet something was different. A powder-grey hue, as though someone had just left but their frosty breath was still there. He went into the bedroom, put down his bag and fished out the unopened carton of cigarettes. Everything was the same there, grey as the skin of a two-day-old corpse. He fell back onto the bed. Closed his eyes. Greeted the familiar sounds. Such as the drip from the hole in the gutter onto the lead flashing around the window frame. It wasn’t the slow, comforting drip-drip from the ceiling in Hong Kong, but a feverish drumming, somewhere in the transition between dripping and running water, like a reminder that time was passing, the seconds were racing, the end of a number line was approaching. It had made him think of La Linea, the Italian cartoon figure who after four minutes always ended up falling off the edge of the cartoonist’s line into oblivion.
Harry knew that there was a half-full bottle of Jim Beam in the cupboard under the sink. Knew that he could start where he had left off in this flat. Shit, he had been wrecked even before he got into the taxi to the airport that day several months ago. No wonder he had not managed to drag himself to Manila.
He could go straight into the kitchen now and pour the contents down the sink.
Harry groaned.
Wondering who she resembled was so much nonsense. He knew who she resembled. She resembled Rakel. They all resembled Rakel.
7
Gallows
‘But I’m scared, Rasmus,’ said Marit Olsen. ‘That’s what I am!’
‘I know,’ said Rasmus Olsen, in that muted, congenial voice that had accompanied and comforted his wife for more than twenty-five years through political decisions, driving tests, bouts of fury and the odd panic attack. ‘It’s just natural,’ he said, putting his arm round her. ‘You work hard, you have a lot on your mind. Your brain doesn’t have any spare capacity to shut out that kind of thought.’
‘That kind of thought?’ she said, turning to face him on the sofa. She had lost interest in the DVD they were watching – Love Actually – a long time before. ‘That kind of thought, that kind of rubbish, is that what you mean?’
‘The important thing is not what I think,’ he said, his fingertips poised to touch. ‘The important-’
‘-thing is what you think,’ she mimicked. ‘For Christ’s sake, Rasmus, you’ve gotta stop watching that Dr Phil show.’
He released a silky smooth chuckle. ‘I’m just saying that you, as a member of Stortinget, can obviously ask for a bodyguard to accompany you if you feel threatened. But is that what you want?’
‘Mmm,’ she purred as his fingers began to massage the exact spot where she knew he knew she loved it. ‘What do you mean by what you want?’
‘Give it some thought. What do you imagine is going to happen?’
Marit Olsen gave it some thought. Closed her eyes and felt his fingers massaging calm and harmony into her body. She had met Rasmus when she had been working at the Norwegian Employment Service in Alta, in Finnmark. She had been elected as an official for NTL, a union for state employees, and they had sent her south on a training course to the Sormarka conference centre. There a thin man with vivid blue eyes beneath a fastreceding hairline had approached her the first evening. He had talked in a way that was reminiscent of redemption-happy Christians at the youth club in Alta. Except that he was talking politics. He worked in the secretariat for the Socialist Party, helping MPs with practical office jobs, travel, the press and even, on the odd occasion, writing a speech for them.
Rasmus had bought her a beer, asked if she wanted to dance and after four increasingly slow evergreen numbers with increasingly close physical contact had asked if she wanted to join him. Not in his room, but in the party.
After returning home she had started going to party meetings in Alta, and in the evenings she and Rasmus had long telephone conversations about what they had done and thought that day. Of course, Marit had never said it aloud: that sometimes she thought the best time they had spent together was when they were two thousand kilometres apart. Then the Appointments Committee had rung, put her on a list and, hey presto, she was elected to Alta Town Council. Two years later she was the vice chairperson of Alta Socialist Party, the year after she was sitting on the County Council, and then there was another telephone call, and this time it was the Appointments Committee for Stortinget.
And now she had a tiny office in Stortinget, a partner who helped her with her speeches, and prospects of climbing the ladder so long as everything went to plan. And she avoided blunders.
‘They’ll detail a policeman to keep an eye on me,’ she said. ‘And the press will want to know why a woman MP no one has ever heard of should be walking around with a bloody bodyguard at the taxpayer’s expense. And when they find out why – she suspected someone had been following her in the park – they will write that with that kind of reasoning every woman in Oslo will be asking for state-subsidised police protection. I don’t want any protection. Drop it.’
Rasmus laughed silently and used his fingers to massage his approval.
The wind howled through the leafless trees in Frogner Park. A duck with its head drawn deep into its plumage drifted across the pitch-black surface of the lake. Rotting leaves stuck to the tiles of the empty pools at Frogner Lido. The place seemed abandoned for all eternity, a lost world. The wind blew up a storm in the deep pool and sang its monotonous lament beneath the ten-metre-high diving tower that stood out against the night sky like a gallows.
8
Snow Patrol
It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Harry awoke. He opened his bag, put in a set of clean clothes, found a woollen coat in the wardrobe and went out. The drizzle roused Harry enough for him to look moderately sober as he entered the brown, smoky rooms of Schroder’s. His table was taken, so he went into the corner, under the TV.
He looked around. He spotted a couple of faces he hadn’t seen before, hunched over beer glasses, otherwise time had stood still. Rita came and placed a white mug and a steel jug of coffee in front of him.
‘Harry,’ she said. Not as a form of welcome, but to confirm that it was indeed he.
Harry nodded. ‘Hi, Rita. Old newspapers?’
Rita scuttled off to the back room and returned with a pile of yellowing papers. Harry had never been given a clear explanation as to why they kept newspapers at Schroder’s, but he had benefited from this arrangement on more than one occasion.
‘Been a long time,’ said Rita and was gone. And Harry remembered what he liked about Schroder’s, apart from its being the closest taproom to his flat. The short sentences. And respect for your private life. Your return was noted; no elucidation was required.
