The light from the headlamps narrowed, the darkness was closing in. Tunnel vision again. Consciousness would soon fail me. I breathed in as deeply as I could. Oxygen to the brain. Be frightened, be alert, stay alive!
The monotonous roar of the engine was now accompanied by a higher tone.
I knew what it was and gripped the wheel tighter.
Another engine.
The lights flashed in my mirror.
The car approached from behind at a sedate pace. And why not? We were alone here in the wilds. We had all the time in the world.
My only hope was to keep him behind me so that he couldn’t block the way. I positioned myself in the centre of the gravel road and sunk over the wheel so as to make myself the smallest possible target for the Glock. We came out of a bend where the road suddenly straightened and widened. And, as though well acquainted with the area, Greve had already accelerated and was alongside me. I swung the tractor to the right to force him into the ditch. But it was too late, he had slipped past, and I was on my way into the ditch. I lunged desperately at the wheel and skidded on the gravel. I was still on the road. But ahead of me a blue light flashed. Or two red ones at any rate. The brake lights on the car in front showed that he had stopped. I stopped, but sat with the engine idling. I didn’t want to die here, alone in a bloody field, like a dumb sheep. My only chance now was to get him out of the car and run him over, flatten him with the ginormous rear wheels, crush him like a ginger snap beneath the huge tread.
The car door on the driver’s side opened. I revved up with the tip of my toe to get a sense of how quickly the engine would respond. Not quickly. I went dizzy, and my eyes began to blur again, but I could see a figure get out and come towards me. I took aim while clinging ferociously onto consciousness. Tall, thin. Tall, thin? Greve wasn’t tall and thin.
‘Sindre?’
‘What?’ I said in English, although my father had drummed it into me that I should say ‘I beg your pardon’, ‘Sorry, sir’ or ‘How can I help you, madam?’ I half slumped into the seat. He had forbidden Mum to have me on her lap. Said it would make the child soft. Can you see me now, Dad? Did I become soft? Can I sit on your lap now, Dad?’
I heard a voice with wonderful Norwegian sing-song intonation hesitate in the darkness.
‘Are you from the, er… er, reception centre for asylum seekers?’
‘Reception centre for asylum seekers?’ I repeated.
He had come up alongside the tractor and, still clinging to the steering wheel, I gave him a sidelong glance.
‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘You looked like a… erm… Did you fall into the muck heap?’
‘I did have an accident, yes.’
‘I can see that. I stopped you because I can see that’s Sindre’s tractor. And because there’s a dog hanging from the tail end.’
So much for my concentration then. Ha ha. I had forgotten all about the sodding dog, do you hear that, Dad? Not enough blood to the brain. Too much…
I lost the sensation in my fingers, watched them slip off the wheel. Then I passed out.
15 VISITING TIME
I WOKE UP and was in heaven. Everything was white and an angel with gentle eyes was looking down on me where I lay in the cloud, asking me if I knew where I was. I nodded and she said someone wanted to talk to me, but there was no hurry, he could wait. Yes, I thought, he can wait. For when he hears what I have done, he will throw me out on the spot, out of all this soft, lovely whiteness, and I will fall and fall until I am down where I belong, in the blacksmith’s workshop, in the smelting room, in the eternal acid bath for my sins.
I closed my eyes and whispered that I would prefer not to be disturbed just yet.
The angel nodded sympathetically, tucked the cloud in tighter around me and disappeared to the clatter of wooden clogs. The sound of voices in the corridor reached my ears before the door closed behind her.
I touched the bandaged wound around my throat. A few fragmented moments appeared in my memory. The tall, thin man’s face above me, the back seat of a car driving at great speed down winding roads, two men in white nurses’ uniforms helping me up onto a stretcher. The shower. I had been on my back having a shower! Lovely hot water, then I had drifted off again.
I felt like doing the same now, but my brain informed me that this luxury was very provisional, that the sands of time were still running, that the earth was still turning, that the course of events was inevitable. That they had just decided to wait for a while, hold their breath for a moment.
To think.
Yes, it hurt to think, it was easier to desist, to be resigned, not to rebel against the gravity of fate. It’s just that the stupid, trivial course of things is so irritating that you simply lose your temper.
So you think.
There was no way it could be Greve waiting outside, but it might be the police. I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock in the morning. If the police had already found Sindre Aa’s body and suspected me, it was unlikely they would send one man who would then, in addition, wait outside politely. It might be an officer who simply wanted to ask what had happened, perhaps it was because I had left the tractor in the middle of the road, perhaps… Perhaps I hoped it was the police. Perhaps I had had enough, perhaps all I could do now was save my skin, perhaps I should tell them everything as it was. I lay examining my feelings. And felt the laughter bubbling up inside me. Yes, an EXPLOSION!
At that moment the door opened, the sounds of the corridor reached me and a man in a white coat strode in. He was peering at something on a clipboard.
‘Dog bite?’ he asked, raising his head and smiling at me.
I recognised him instantly. The door slammed behind him, and we were alone.
‘Sorry I couldn’t wait any longer,’ he whispered.
The white doctor’s coat suited Clas Greve. God knows where he had got hold of it. God knows how he had found me; as far as I knew my mobile phone was at the bottom of a stream. But both God and I knew what was awaiting me. And as if to confirm my apprehensions Greve stuffed his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a pistol. My pistol. Or to be more accurate: Ove’s pistol. Or to be painfully accurate: a Glock 17 with nine-millimetre lead bullets which fragmented on impact with human tissue, splintering up in such a way that the collective mass of lead takes with it a disproportionately large mass of flesh, muscle, bone and cerebral matter which – after passing through your body – it plasters over the wall behind you like something not dissimilar to Barnaby Furnas’s paintings. The muzzle of the pistol was pointed at me. It is often alleged that your mouth goes dry in situations such as these. It does.
‘Hope it’s alright if I use your pistol, Roger,’ said Greve. ‘I didn’t bring mine with me to Norway. There’s so much hassle with planes and weapons nowadays. Anyway, I could hardly have anticipated -’ he opened his arms – ‘this. In addition, it’s pretty good that the bullet can’t be traced back to me, isn’t it, Roger?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated.
‘Why…?’ I started with a voice that was as hoarse as a desert wind.
Clas Greve waited with a genuinely interested facial expression for me to go on.
‘Why are you doing all this?’ I whispered. ‘Just because of a woman you have only known five minutes?’
He furrowed his brow. ‘Are you referring to Diana? Did you know that she and I-’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted to be spared the continuation.
He chuckled. ‘Are you an idiot, Roger? Do you really think this is about her and me and you?’
I didn’t answer. That
‘Diana was only a means to an end, Roger. I had to use her to get close to you. Since you didn’t take the first bait.’
‘Get close to me?’
