‘It’s very simple. All I need to know is who. Is it someone in the police? Is it one of those who were at Havass that night?’
‘Which night?’ he sobbed.
‘You know which night. They’re almost all dead now. Come on.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t got anything to do with this, you have to believe me. Water. Please. Plea…’
‘… se? Please as in… please?’
The smell. The smell of his body burning. The words he stuttered were no more than a hoarse whisper. ‘It w-was… just m-me.’
Gentle laughter. ‘Smart. You’re trying to make it sound like you would do anything to avoid the pain. So that I believe you when you can’t cough up the name of your collaborator. But I know you can stand more. You’re made of tougher stock.’
‘Charlotte-’
The man swung the poker. He didn’t even feel the blow. Everything went black for one wonderfully long second. Then he was back in hell.
‘She’s dead!’ the man yelled. ‘Come up with something better.’
‘I meant the other one,’ he said, trying to get his brain to work. He remembered now, he had a good memory, why was it failing him? Was he really in such bad shape? ‘She’s Australian-’
‘You’re lying!’
He felt his eyes wander again. Another shower of water. A moment of clarity.
The voice. ‘Who? How?’
‘Kill me! Mercy! I… you know I’m not protecting anyone. Lord Jesus, why should I?’
‘I know nothing of the sort.’
‘So why not kill me? I killed her. Do you hear me? Do it. Revenge is thine.’
The man put down the bucket, flopped into a chair, leaned forward with his elbows on the armrests and chin resting on his fists, and answered slowly as though he hadn’t heard what had been said, but was thinking about something else. ‘You know, I’ve dreamed about this for so many years. And now, now we’re here… I had been hoping it would taste sweeter.’
The man struck him with the poker one more time. Tilted his head and studied him. With a sour expression, probingly, he stabbed the poker into his ribs.
‘Perhaps I lack imagination. Perhaps this justice lacks the appropriate spice?’
Something made the man turn. To the radio. It was on low. The man went over to it, turned up the volume. News. Voices in a large room. Something about the cabin in Havass. A witness. Reconstruction. He froze, his legs were no longer there. He closed his eyes and again prayed to his God. Not to be liberated from the pain, as he had been doing until now. He prayed for forgiveness, for all his sins to be cleansed by the blood of Jesus, for someone else to bear all that he had done. He had taken a life. Yes, he had. He prayed that he would be bathed in the blood of forgiveness. And then be allowed to die.
PART SIX
56
Decoy
A Hell of lights. Even with sunglasses Harry’s eyes smarted. The sun was shining on the snow, which was shining back at the sun; it was like looking into an ocean of diamonds, of frantically glittering lights. Harry retreated from the window, although he was aware that, seen from the outside, the panes were black, impenetrable mirrors. He checked his watch. They had arrived at Havass the previous night. Jussi Kolkka had installed himself in the cabin with Harry and Kaja, the others had dug themselves into the snow in two groups of four at opposite ends of the valley, separated by about thirty kilometres.
There were three reasons for choosing Havass to lay the bait. First of all, because their being there made sense. Secondly, the killer would, they hoped, think he knew the area well enough to feel comfortable about an attack. Thirdly, because it was a perfect trap. The dip where the cabin lay allowed entry from only the north-east and the south. In the east the mountain was too steep and in the west there were so many precipices and crevices that you had to know the terrain very well to make any progress at all.
Harry grabbed the binoculars and tried to spot the others, but all he could see was white. And lights. He had spoken to Mikael Bellman, who was south of him, and Milano, who was in the north. Usually they would have used their mobile phones, but up here in the uninhabited mountains the only network that had coverage was Telenor. The former stateowned telephone monopoly had had the capital to build base stations on every wind-blown crag, but as several of the policemen, including Harry, subscribed to other companies, they were using walkie-talkies. So that they could get hold of him in case anything happened at Rikshospital, Harry had left a message on his voicemail before he left, saying that he would have no network coverage and had given Milano’s Telenor number.
Bellman claimed they hadn’t been cold during the night, that the combination of sleeping bags, heat-reflecting ground pads and paraffin stoves was so efficient that they’d had to take off clothing. And that now melted water was dripping from the ceiling of the snow caves they had scraped out from the side of the mountain.
The press conference had been so well covered on TV, radio and in the newspapers that you would have had to be absolutely indifferent to the case not to know that Iska Peller and a police officer had gone to Havass. Every now and then Kolkka and Kaja went out and pointed to the cabin, the way they had come and the outside toilet. Kaja in her role as Iska; Kolkka as the lone detective helping her to reconstruct the events of the fateful night. Harry hid in the sitting room, where he kept his skis and ski poles, so that only the other two had their skis embedded in the snow outside where they could be seen.
Harry followed a gust of wind blowing a furrow across the bare wastes, swirling up the light fresh snow that had fallen in the hollow overnight. The snow was driven towards mountain peaks, precipices, slopes, irregu – larities in the terrain where it formed frozen waves and great drifts, similar to the one that protruded like a hat brim from the top of the mountain behind the cabin.
Harry knew of course that there was no guarantee that the man they were hunting would even show up. For some reason or other Iska Peller may not have been on the hit list, he may not consider this opportunity appropriate, he may have other plans for Iska. Or he may have smelt a rat. And there might be more banal reasons. Ill, on a trip…
Nonetheless. If Harry had counted up all the times his intuition had misled him, the number would have told him to give up intuition as a method and guide. But he didn’t count them. Instead, he counted all the times intuition had told him something he didn’t know he already knew. And now it was telling him the killer was on his way to Havass.
Harry glanced at his watch again. The killer had twenty hours. In the huge fireplace the spruce crackled and spat behind the fine-mesh fireguard. Kaja had gone for a nap in one of the bedrooms while Kolkka sat by the coffee table oiling a disassembled Weilert P11. Harry recognised the German weapon by the fact that it had no gun sights. The Weilert pistol was made especially for close combat, when you had to remove it from a holster, belt or pocket at speed and with minimal risk of it snagging. In such situations sights were superfluous anyway; you pointed it at the target and shot, you didn’t take aim. The spare pistol, a SIG Sauer, lay next to it, assembled and loaded. Harry felt the shoulder holster of his Smith amp; Wesson. 38 chafe against his ribs.
They had landed by helicopter during the night by Lake Neddalvann, a few kilometres away, and had covered the rest of the way on skis. Under different circumstances Harry might have taken in the beauty of a snowclad expanse bathed in moonlight, of the Northern Lights playing on the sky, or Kaja’s almost euphoric expression as they glided through the white silence as if in a fairy tale, the lack of sound so complete that he had the feeling the scraping noises of their skis would carry for kilometres across the mountain plateau. But there was too much at stake, too little he could afford to lose for him to have his eyes on anything except the job, the hunt.
It was Harry who had cast Kolkka in the role of ‘one detective’. Not because Harry had forgotten Kafe Justisen, but if things didn’t go to plan, they could use the Finn’s close combat skills. Ideally, the killer would make a
