43
House Call
Kaja lay on her side staring into the darkness of her bedroom. She had heard the gate open and now there were footsteps on the gravel outside. She held her breath and waited. Then the doorbell rang. She slipped out of bed, into her dressing gown and over to the window. Another ring. She opened the curtains a fraction. And sighed.
‘Drunken police officer,’ she said out loud in the room.
She put her feet into slippers and shuffled into the hall towards the door. Opened it and stood in the doorway with crossed arms.
‘Hello there, schweedie,’ the policeman slurred. Kaja wondered if he was trying to perform the drunkard sketch. Or if it was the pitiful original version.
‘What brings you here so late?’ Kaja asked.
‘You. Can I come in?’
‘No.’
‘But you said I could get in touch if I was too lonely. And I was.’
‘Aslak Krongli,’ she said. ‘I’m in bed. Go to your hotel now. We can have a coffee tomorrow morning.’
‘I need a coffee now, I reckon. Ten minutes and we’ll ring for a taxi, eh? We can talk about murders and serial killers to pass the time. What do you say?’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m not on my own.’
Krongli straightened up at once, with a movement that made Kaja suspect he was not as drunk as he had seemed at first. ‘Really? Is he here, that policeman you said you were so hung up on?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Are they his?’ the officer drawled, kicking the enormous shoes beside the doormat.
Kaja didn’t answer. There was something in Krongli’s voice, no, behind it, something she hadn’t heard there before. Like a low-frequency, barely audible growl.
‘Or have you just put the shoes there to frighten off unwanted visitors?’ Laughter in his eyes. ‘There’s no one here, is there, Kaja?’
‘Listen, Aslak-’
‘The policeman you’re talking about, Harry Hole, came a cropper earlier this evening. Turned up at Justisen as drunk as a skunk, picked a fight and got one. A patrol car passed by to give him a lift home. So you must be free tonight after all, eh?’
Her heart beat faster; she was no longer cold under the dressing gown.
‘Perhaps they drove him here instead,’ she said and could hear her voice was different now.
‘No, they rang me and said they had driven him way up the hill to visit someone. When they found out he wanted to go to Rikshospital and they strongly advised against it, he just jumped out at the traffic lights. I like my coffee strong, OK?’
An intense gleam had come into his eyes, the same Even used to get when he wasn’t well.
‘Aslak, go now. There are taxis in Kirkeveien.’
His hand shot out and before she could react he had grabbed her arm and pushed her inside. She tried to free herself, but he put an arm around her and held her tight.
‘Do you want to be just like her?’ his voice hissed in her ear. ‘To cut and run, to scram? To be like all you bloody lot…’
She groaned and twisted, but he was strong.
‘Kaja!’
The voice came from the bedroom where the door stood open. A firm, imperious man’s voice that, under different circumstances, Krongli might have recognised. As he had heard it only an hour earlier at Justisen.
‘What’s going on, Kaja?’
Krongli had already let go and was staring at her, with eyes wide and jaw agape.
‘Nothing,’ Kaja said, not letting Krongli out of her sight. ‘Just a drunken bumpkin from Ustaoset who’s on his way home.’
Krongli backed towards the front entrance without a word. Slipped out and slammed the door. Kaja went over, locked it and rested her forehead against the cold wood. She felt like crying. Not out of fear or shock. But despair. Everything around her was collapsing. Everything she had thought was clean and right had finally begun to appear in its real light. It had been happening for some time, but she hadn’t wanted to see. Because what Even had said was true: no one is as they seem, and most of life, apart from honest betrayal, is lies and deceit. And the day we discover we are no different is the day we no longer want to live.
‘Are you coming, Kaja?’
‘Yes.’
Kaja pushed off from the door through which she would so much have liked to flee. Went into the bedroom. The moonlight fell between the curtains and onto the bed, onto the bottle of champagne he had brought with him to celebrate, onto his naked, athletic torso, onto the face she had once thought the most handsome on this earth. The white patches on his face shimmered like luminous paint. As if he were aglow inside.
44
The Anchor
Kaja stood in the doorway looking at him.Mikael Bellman. To outsiders: a competent, ambitious POB, a happily married father of three and soon-to-be head of the new Kripos leviathan that would lead all murder investigations in Norway. To her, Kaja Solness: a man she had fallen in love with from the moment they’d met, who had seduced her with all the arts at his disposal, plus a few others. She had been easy game, but that wasn’t his fault, it was hers. By and large. What was it Harry had said? ‘He’s married and says he’ll leave his wife and kids for you, but never does?’
He had hit the nail on the head. Of course. That’s how banal we are. We believe because we want to believe. In gods, because that dulls the fear of death. In love, because it enhances the notion of life. In what married men say, because that is what married men say.
She knew what Mikael would say. And then he said it.
‘I have to be off. She’ll start wondering.’
‘I know,’ Kaja sighed and, as usual, did not ask the questions that always popped up when he said that: Why not stop her wondering? Why not do what you’ve said for so long? And now a new question emerged: Why am I no longer sure I want him to do this?
Harry clung to the banisters on his way up to the Haematology Department at Rikshospital. He was soaked in sweat, frozen, and his teeth were chattering like a two-stroke engine. And he was drunk. Drunk on Jim Beam, drunk and full of devilry, full of himself, full of shit. He staggered along the corridor; he could already make out the door to his father’s room at the end.
A nurse’s head poked out from a duty room, looked at him and was gone again. Harry had fifty metres to go to the door when the nurse, plus a skinhead male nurse, skidded into the corridor and cut him off.
‘We don’t keep medicines on this ward,’ the skinhead said.
‘What you are saying is not only a gross lie,’ Harry said, trying to control his balance and the chattering of his teeth, ‘but a gross insult. I’m not a junkie, but a son here to visit his father. So please, move out of my way.’
‘I apologise,’ said the female nurse who seemed quite reassured by Harry’s immaculate pronunciation. ‘But you smell like a brewery, and we cannot allow-’
‘A brewery is beer,’ Harry said. ‘Jim Beam is bourbon. Which would require you to say I smell like a distillery, froken. It’s…’
‘Nevertheless,’ the male nurse said, grabbing Harry by the elbow. And let it go just as quickly when his own
