room.
Then he sat down in the wing chair staring into the black void.
After he had sat there for a while, his mobile rang.
‘Hole.’
‘Felix Rost.’
‘Mm?’ Harry said. The voice sounded as if it belonged to a slender, petite woman.
‘Frida Larsen, his sister. He asked me to ring and say that the stones you found are mafic, basalt lava. Alright?’
‘Just a minute. What does that mean? Mafic?’
‘It’s hot lava, over a thousand degrees C, low viscosity, which thins it and allows it to spread over a wide distance on eruption.’
‘Could it have come from Oslo?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? Oslo is built on lava.’
‘Old lava. This lava is recent.’
‘How recent?’
He heard her put her hand over the phone and speak. But he couldn’t hear any other voices. She must have received an answer though, because soon afterwards she was back.
‘He says anything from five to fifty years. But if you were thinking of establishing which volcano it comes from, you’ve got quite a job on your hands. There are over one and a half thousand active volcanoes in the world. And that’s just the ones we know about. If there are any other queries, Felix can be contacted by email. Your assistant has got the address.’
‘But…’
She had already rung off.
He considered calling back, but changed his mind and punched in another number.
‘Oslotaxi.’
‘Hi, Oystein, this is Harry H.’
‘You’re kidding. Harry H is dead.’
‘Not quite.’
‘OK, then I must be dead.’
‘Feel like driving me from Sofies gate to my childhood home?’
‘No, but I’ll do it anyway. Just have to do this trip.’ Oystein’s laugh morphed into a cough. ‘Harry H! Bloody hell… Call you when I’m there.’
Harry rang off, went into the bedroom, packed a bag in the light from the street lamp outside the window and chose a couple of CDs from the sitting room in the light from his mobile. Carton of smokes, handcuffs, service pistol.
He sat in the wing chair, making use of the dark to repeat the revolver exercise. Started the stopwatch on his wrist, flicked out the cylinder of his Smith amp; Wesson, emptied and loaded. Four cartridges out, four in, without a speed-loader, just nimble fingers. Flicked the cylinder back in so that the first cartridge was first in line. Stop. Nine sixty-six. Almost three seconds over the record. He opened the cylinder. He had messed up. The first chamber ready to fire was one of the two empty ones. He was dead. He repeated the exercise. Nine fifty. And dead again. When Oystein rang, after twenty minutes, he was down to eight seconds and had died six times.
‘Coming,’ Harry said.
He walked into the kitchen. Looked at the cupboard under the sink. Hesitated. Then he took down the photos of Rakel and Oleg and put them in his inside pocket.
‘Hong Kong?’ sniffed Oystein Eikeland. He turned his bloated alky face with huge hooter and sad drooping moustache to Harry in the seat next to him. ‘What the hell d’you do there?’
‘You know me,’ Harry said as Oystein stopped on red outside the Radisson SAS Hotel.
‘I bloody do not,’ Oystein said, sprinkling tobacco into his roll-up. ‘How would I?’
‘Well, we grew up together. Do you remember?’
‘So? You were already a sodding enigma then, Harry.’
The rear door was torn open and a man wearing a coat got in. ‘Airport express, main station. Quick.’
‘Taxi’s taken,’ Oystein said without turning.
‘Nonsense, the sign on the roof ’s lit.’
‘Hong Kong sounds groovy. Why d’you come home actually?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the man on the back seat.
Oystein poked the cigarette between his lips and lit up. ‘Tresko rang to invite me to a get-together tonight.’
‘Tresko hasn’t got any friends,’ Harry said.
‘He hasn’t, has he. So I asked him, “Who are your friends then?” “You”, he said, and asked me, “And yours, Oystein?” “You,” I answered. “So it’s just us two.” We’d forgotten all about you, Harry. That’s what happens when you go to…’ He funnelled his lips and, in a staccato voice, said, ‘Hong Kong!’
‘Hey!’ came a shout from the back seat. ‘If you’ve finished, perhaps we might…’
The lights changed to green, and Oystein accelerated away.
‘Are you coming then? It’s at Tresko’s place.’
‘Stinks of toe-fart there, Oystein.’
‘He’s got a full fridge.’
‘Sorry, I’m not in a party mood.’
‘Party mood?’ Oystein snorted, smacking the wheel with his hand. ‘You don’t know what a party mood is, Harry. You always backed off parties. Do you remember? We’d bought some beers, intending to go to some fancy address in Nordstrand with loads of women. And you suggested you, me and Tresko went to the bunkers instead and drank on our own.’
‘Hey, this isn’t the way to the airport express!’ came a whine from the back seat.
Oystein braked for red again, tossed his wispy shoulder-length hair to the side and addressed the back seat. ‘And that was where we ended up. Got rat-arsed and that fella started singing “No Surrender” until Tresko chucked empty bottles at him.’
‘Honest to God!’ the man sobbed, tapping his forefinger on the glass of a TAG Heuer watch. ‘I just have to catch the last plane to Stockholm.’
‘The bunkers are great,’ Harry said. ‘Best view in Oslo.’
‘Yep,’ Oystein said. ‘If the Allies had attacked there, the Germans would’ve shot them to bits.’
‘Right,’ Harry grinned.
‘You know, we had a standing agreement, him and me and Tresko,’ Oystein said, but the suit was now desperately scanning the rain for vacant taxis. ‘If the sodding Allies come, we’ll bloody shoot the meat off their carcasses. Like this.’ Oystein pointed an imaginary machine gun at the suit and fired a salvo. The suit stared in horror at the crazy taxi driver whose chattering noises were causing small, foam-white drops of spit to land on his dark, freshly ironed suit trousers. With a little gasp he managed to open the car door and stumble out into the rain.
Oystein burst into coarse, hearty laughter.
‘You were missing home,’ Oystein said. ‘You wanted to dance with Killer Queen at Ekeberg restaurant again.’
Harry chuckled and shook his head. In the wing mirror he saw the man charging madly towards the National Theatre station. ‘It’s my father. He’s ill. He hasn’t got long left.’
‘Oh shit.’ Oystein pressed the accelerator again. ‘Good man, too.’
‘Thank you. Thought you would want to know.’
‘Course I bloody do. Have to tell my folks.’
‘So, here we are,’ Oystein said, parking outside the garage and the tiny, yellow timber house in Oppsal.
