A shrill diabolical sound penetrated his consciousness. At first he couldn’t make out what it was, and rolled over in confusion to squint at the alarm clock. He had an old-fashioned clockwork one that ticked, with a face of ordinary numerals and a key on the back that reminded him of the screw-on ice skates of his childhood. It had to be wound up tight every evening until it groaned if it wasn’t to stop by about four in the morning. It was ten to seven, and he lashed out at the big bell on the top. It made no difference. He sat up in bed to clear his mind and realised it was the telephone ringing. Groping clumsily for the receiver he knocked the whole instrument to the floor with a clatter. He finally succeeded in getting hold of it and blurrily announced himself.
“Hakon Sand. Who’s calling?”
“Hello, Sand. It’s Myhreng here. Sorry to…”
“
Half past eight was an acceptable hour to wake up. Nevertheless he didn’t hurry himself, in the hope that whoever was there would lose patience before he got to the door. As he was cleaning his teeth it rang again. Even more aggressively. But Hakon took his time washing his face, and felt a sense of relaxed and demonstrative freedom as he wrapped his dressing gown round him and put on the kettle before going to the entry phone.
“Yes?”
“Hello, it’s Myhreng here. Can I talk to you?”
This bloke didn’t give up. But nor did Hakon Sand.
“No,” he said, replacing the receiver firmly.
But a second later the raucous noise was reverberating again through the flat like an enraged hornet. Hakon pondered for a moment before picking up the entry phone again.
“Go and buy some fresh rolls from the 7-Eleven round the corner. And fruit juice. The sort with real fruit in. And newspapers. All three.”
He meant
“Damn fine flat,” he declared, taking a long look into the bedroom.
As inquisitive as a policeman, thought Hakon, closing the door.
He ushered Myhreng into the living room, and went to the bathroom and put out an extra toothbrush and a very feminine bottle of perfume left behind after a relationship a year ago. It was as well not to appear too pathetic.
Fredrick Myhreng hadn’t come just for a chat. The coffee hadn’t even brewed before he was in full flood.
“Have you brought him in, or what? I can’t find him anywhere. The woman in his office tells me he’s out of the country, but at home there’s just a young boy who says his father can’t come to the telephone. Nor his mother. Wondered whether I should ring the child care people when I got nothing but a five-year-old or whatever on the line half a dozen times.”
Hakon shook his head, fetched the coffee, and sat down.
“Are you some kind of child abuser? If it occurred to you that we’d arrested Lavik, shouldn’t it have dawned on you that it wasn’t particularly pleasant for the boy or the rest of the family to be harrassed by you on the telephone?”
“Journalists can’t afford to be too considerate,” Myhreng retorted, seizing an unopened can of mackerel in tomato sauce.
“Yes, fine, you can open it,” said Hakon sarcastically, after half the contents of the can were already on Myhreng’s roll.
“Mackerel burger! Brilliant!”
With his mouth full of food and tomato sauce dripping onto the white tablecloth he babbled on.
“Admit it, you’ve brought him in. I can see it in your face. Thought there was something funny about that guy all along. I’ve worked out quite a lot, you know.”
The look in his eyes above his ridiculously small glasses was challenging but not entirely confident. Hakon allowed himself a smile, and didn’t hurry with the margarine.
“Give me one good reason why I should tell you anything at all.”
“I can give you several. For a start, good information is the best protection against misinformation. Secondly, the newspapers will be full of it tomorrow anyway. And you can be bloody sure that the other papers won’t let the arrest of a lawyer go unnoticed for more than a day. And thirdly…”
He interrupted himself, wiped the tomato off his chin with his fingers, and leant across the table ingratiatingly.
“And thirdly, we’ve worked well together in the past. It would be to our mutual advantage to carry on.”
Hakon Sand gave the impression that he’d been persuaded. Fredrick Myhreng took more credit for this than was his due. Fired by the promise of exciting information, he sat waiting as obediently as a schoolboy, while Hakon took a long and invigorating shower. The file that he’d sat up with until late into the night went with him to the bathroom.
The shower took almost a quarter of an hour, and in that time Hakon had sketched out in his mind a newspaper story that would instil terror in the person or persons out there in the November gloom nervously biting their fingernails. For he was convinced there was someone. It was simply a question of luring-or rather, frightening-them out.
MONDAY 23 NOVEMBER
It was like some outlandish circus. Three television cameras, countless press photographers, at least twenty journalists, and a huge crowd of curious onlookers had assembled in the entrance hall on the ground floor of the courthouse. The Sunday papers had tried to outdo one another, but on closer analysis they had little more to say than that a thirty-five-year-old Oslo lawyer had been arrested on suspicion of being the organiser of a drugs syndicate. That was all the journalists knew, but they’d certainly filled up enough space. They’d made a sumptuous repast of the scanty ingredients, and been greatly assisted by Lavik’s colleagues who, in lengthy interviews, were highly critical of the monstrous action of the police in arresting a popular and respected fellow lawyer. The fact that these honourable colleagues knew absolutely nothing about the matter did not deter them from availing themselves of the widest possible range of expression to articulate their concern. The only one who remained silent was the one who actually knew something: Christian Bloch-Hansen.
It was difficult to carve a path through the crowd obstructing the entrance to Court 17. Even though no more than two or three of the journalists present could have recognised him, the crowd reacted like a flock of pigeons when a TV reporter held out a microphone to him. The reporter was attached by a cable from his microphone to the photographer, a man over six feet tall who lost control of his legs when the interviewer suddenly whipped the flex taut. He struggled for some seconds to keep his balance and was momentarily held upright by the throng around him. But only briefly before overbalancing and bringing down several others with him, giving Bloch-Hansen the opportunity to slip into Court 17 in the ensuing chaos.
Hakon Sand and Hanne Wilhelmsen hadn’t even tried. They sat behind the dark-tinted windows of the Black Maria until Lavik had been taken into the entrance at one side of the main door, with the customary jacket over his head. Hardly anyone bothered about poor old Roger from Sagene, looking rather comical with his beige parka pulled up round his ears. The whole crowd had swarmed into the court after them, and Hanne and Hakon were able to sneak in through the back door reserved for the police. They came directly up into the courtroom from the basement.
A frail court attendant was having his work cut out endeavouring to keep order in the room. It could be no more than an attempt: the elderly uniformed man hadn’t the slightest chance of holding out against the crush from the multitude outside. Hakon saw the consternation in his face and used the phone on the magistrate’s bench to call for
