After half an hour’s walking I was still on the same endless road, but I saw a blue sign and a hut in the distance. A bus stop.
A quarter of an hour later I got onto a grey country bus, paid cash from Eskild Monsen’s wallet and was told that the bus went to Elverum, from where there was a train connection to Oslo. I sat down opposite two platinum blondes in their thirties. Neither of them graced me with a glance.
I dozed off, but woke up to the sound of a siren and the bus slowing down and pulling in. A police car with a blue light flashing passed us. Patrol car zero two, I mused, noticing one of the blondes look at me. Meeting her gaze, I noted that she instinctively wanted to avert her eyes – I was too direct; she thought I was ugly. But she couldn’t do it. I sent her a wry smile and turned to the window.
The sun was also shining on the old Roger Brown’s home town when the new one alighted from the train at ten minutes past three. But an icy cold wind was blowing into the snarling mouths of the disfigured tiger sculptures in front of Oslo Central Station as I crossed the square and continued towards Skippergata.
The dope dealers and whores in Tollbugata looked at me, but didn’t yell after me with their offers as they had done for the old Roger Brown. I stopped in front of the entrance to Hotel Leon and glanced up at the facade where the plaster had crumbled, leaving white sores. Beneath one of the windows hung a poster promising a room for four hundred kroner a night.
I went inside to the reception desk. Or RESEPTION as the sign hanging above the man behind the counter said.
‘Yes?’ he said instead of the usual warm welcome I was used to from the hotels the old Roger Brown frequented. The receptionist’s face was covered in a veneer of sweat as though he had been working hard. Had drunk too much coffee. Or was just nervous by nature. The roaming eyes suggested the latter.
‘Have you got a single room?’ I asked.
‘Yes. How long for?’
‘Twenty-four hours.’
‘All of them?’
I had never been to a hotel like the Leon before, but I had driven past a few times, and I had an inkling they offered rooms on an hourly basis for those who made love on a professional basis. In other words, those women who didn’t have the beauty or the wit to use their bodies to acquire a house designed by Ove Bang and their own gallery in Frogner.
I nodded.
‘Four hundred,’ said the man. ‘Payment in advance.’ He had a kind of Swedish accent, the kind preferred by dance band vocalists and preachers for some reason.
I threw Eskild Monsen’s credit card on the desk. I know from experience that hotels don’t give a damn whether the signature is a match or not, but to be on the safe side I had been working on a passable imitation on the train. The problem was the photograph. It showed a round-jowled man with long, curly hair and a black beard. Not even under-exposure could hide the fact that he bore absolutely no resemblance to the person standing in front of him with a thin face and a recently shaven skull. The receptionist studied the card.
‘You don’t look like the guy in the photo,’ he said without looking up from the card.
I waited. Until he raised his eyes and they met mine.
‘Cancer,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Cytotoxin.’
He blinked three times.
‘Three courses of treatment,’ I said.
His Adam’s apple gave a jump as he swallowed. I could see he had severe doubts. Come on! I had to lie down soon, my throat was hurting like hell. I didn’t relinquish his gaze. But he relinquished mine.
‘Sorry,’ he said, holding the credit card out to me. ‘I can’t afford to get into trouble. They’re keeping an eye on me. Have you got any cash?’
I shook my head. A two-hundred-krone note and a ten-krone coin was all I had left after the train ticket.
‘Sorry,’ he repeated, stretching out his arm – as if begging – so that the card was touching my chest.
I took it and marched out.
There was no point trying other hotels; if they wouldn’t take the card at the Leon, they wouldn’t anywhere else either. And in the worst-case scenario they would sound the alarm.
I switched to plan B.
I was a new person, a stranger in town. Without money, without friends, without a past or an identity. The facades, the streets and the people who walked in them, appeared different to me from how they had to Roger Brown. A thin strip of cloud had glided in front of the sun and the temperature had sunk another few degrees.
At Oslo Central Station I had to ask which bus went to Tonsenhagen, and as I got onto the bus, for some reason the driver spoke English to me.
From the bus stop to Ove’s house there were a couple of steep hills, yet I was still frozen when I finally passed his place. I circled round the area for a few minutes to make sure there were no policemen in the vicinity. Then I went up to the door and let myself in.
It was warm inside. Time- and thermostat-controlled radiators.
I tapped in
I found the remote control, got into bed beside Ove and switched on the TV. Flicked through teletext, but there was nothing about missing patrol cars or dead policemen. The Elverum police must have had their suspicions for some time and must have launched a search, but they would probably wait for as long as possible before announcing that a patrol car had gone missing in case the whole thing was down to a banal misunderstanding. However, sooner or later they would find it. How long from then until they discovered that the body without fingertips in the green tracksuit was not the detainee, Ove Kjikerud? Twenty-four hours? Forty-eight max.
These were matters, of course, which I was not qualified to judge. I didn’t have the vaguest notion of the process. And the new Roger Brown knew no more about police procedures, but he did at least realise that the situation demanded firm decisions based on uncertain information, risky action instead of hesitation, and toleration of enough fear for the senses to be sharpened, but not so much that you were paralysed.
For that reason I closed my eyes and slept.
When I awoke, the clock on teletext showed 20:03. And beneath it a line about at least four people, of whom three were police officers, killed in a traffic accident outside Elverum. The patrol car had been reported missing in the morning and was located in the afternoon next to a copse by the River Trekk. A fifth person, also a policeman, was missing. The police thought he may have been hurled out of the car into the river and a search had been mounted. The police asked the public for information about the driver of a stolen Sigdal Kitchens lorry that had been found parked on a woodland road twenty kilometres from the accident scene.
When they knew that Kjikerud was the missing person they would sooner or later come here. I had to find myself somewhere else to sleep tonight.
I took a deep breath. Then I leaned across Ove’s body, picked up the phone on the bedside table and dialled the only number I knew by heart.
She answered on the third ring.
Instead of her usual shy but warm ‘Hi’, Lotte answered with an almost inaudible ‘Yes?’
I put down the phone immediately. All I wanted to know was that she was at home. I hoped she would be later that night as well.
I switched off the TV and got up.
After searching for two minutes I had found two guns: one in the bathroom and one squeezed behind the TV. I chose the small black one from behind the TV and went to the kitchen drawer, took out two boxes, one with live ammunition and one labelled ‘blanks’, filled the magazine with live cartridges, loaded the gun and engaged the safety catch. Then I stuffed the gun into my waistband as I had seen Greve do. I went into the bathroom and put the first gun back. After closing the cabinet door, I stood inspecting myself in the mirror. The fine shape of the face and the deep lines, the head’s brutal nakedness, the intense gaze, the almost feverish skin and mouth; relaxed and determined, silent and expressive.
