‘Speed-cuffing,’ Harry said. ‘Learned it the year I did an FBI course in Chicago. Cabrini Green, digs were the pits. For a white man, there was nothing to do in the evenings unless you wanted to go out and get yourself robbed. So I sat indoors practising two things. Loading and unloading my service pistol as fast as I could in the dark. And speed-cuffing on a table leg.’

Harry levered himself up onto his elbows.

The man was still standing with his short arms stretched up above his head. His wrists were shackled to the handcuffs on either side of the pipe. He stared blankly at Harry.

‘Mr Kluit send you?’ Harry asked, in English.

The man held Harry’s gaze without blinking.

‘The Triad? I’ve paid my debts, haven’t you heard?’ Harry studied the man’s expressionless face. The features could have been Asian, but he didn’t have a Chinese face or complexion. Mongolian maybe? ‘So what do you want from me?’

No answer. Which was bad news, as the man had most probably not come to ask for anything, but to do something.

Harry stood up and walked in a semicircle so that he could approach him from the side. He held the revolver to the man’s temple while slipping his left hand inside the man’s suit jacket. His hand ran over the cold steel of a weapon, then found a wallet and plucked it out.

Harry stepped back three paces.

‘Let’s see… Mr Jussi Kolkka.’ Harry held an American Express card up to the light. ‘Finnish? I suppose you know some Norwegian then?’

No answer.

‘You’ve been a policeman, haven’t you. When I saw you in arrivals at Gardemoen, I thought you were an undercover narco cop. How did you know I was catching that particular flight, Jussi? It’s alright if I call you Jussi, isn’t it? It feels sort of natural to address a guy with his schlong hanging out by his first name.’

There was a brief throaty noise before a gobbet of spit came whirling through the air, rotating on its axis, and landed on Harry’s chest.

Harry looked down at his T-shirt. The black snus-spit had drawn a diagonal line through the second ‘o’ and it now read ‘Snow Patrol’.

‘So you do understand Norwegian,’ Harry said. ‘Who do you work for then, Jussi? And what do you want?’

Not a muscle stirred in Jussi’s face. Someone shook the door handle outside, swore and went away.

Harry sighed. Then he raised his revolver until it was level with the Finn’s forehead and cocked it.

‘You might suppose, Jussi, that I’m a normal, sane person. Well, this is how sane I am. My father is lying helpless in his sickbed in there. You’ve found out, and that presents me with a problem. There’s only one way to solve it. Fortunately, you’re armed so I can tell the police it was self-defence.’

Harry pressed the hammer back still further. And felt the familiar nausea.

‘Kripos.’

Harry stopped the hammer. ‘Repeat.’

‘I’m in Kripos,’ he hissed in Swedish, with the Finnish accent of which witty speech-makers at Norwegian wedding receptions are so fond.

Harry stared at the man. He didn’t have a second’s doubt that he was telling the truth. Yet it was totally incomprehensible.

‘In my wallet,’ the Finn snarled, not letting the fury in his voice reach his eyes.

Harry opened the wallet and checked inside. Removed a laminated ID card. There wasn’t much information, but it was adequate. The man in front of Harry was employed by Krimpolitisentralen, Kripos for short, the central crime unit in Oslo that assisted in – and usually led – the investigations into murder cases affecting the whole of the country.

‘What the hell does Kripos want with me?’

‘Ask Bellman.’

‘Who’s Bellman?’

The Finn uttered a brief sound; it was difficult to determine whether it was a cough or laughter. ‘POB Bellman, you poor sod. My chief. Let me go now, handsome.’

‘Fuck,’ Harry said, inspecting the card again. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ He dropped the wallet on the floor and made for the door.

‘Hey! Hey!’

The Finn’s shouts faded as the door slid to behind Harry and he walked down the corridor to the exit. The nurse who had been with his father was coming from the opposite direction and nodded with a smile when they were close enough. Harry tossed the tiny key for the handcuffs up in the air.

‘There’s a flasher in the boys’ room, Altman.’

Out of instinct, the nurse caught the key with both hands. Harry could feel the open-mouthed stare on his back until he was out of the door.

9

The Dive

It was a quarter to eleven at night. Nine degrees centigrade, and Marit Olsen remembered that the weather forecaster had said it would be even milder tomorrow. In Frogner Park there wasn’t a soul to be seen. Something about the lido made her think of laid-up ships, of abandoned fishing villages with the wind whispering through house walls, and fairgrounds out of season. Fragmented memories of her childhood. Like the drowned fishermen who haunted Tronholmen, who emerged from the sea at night, with seaweed in their hair and fish in their mouths and nostrils. Ghosts without breath, but who were wont to scream cold, hoarse seagull cries. The dead with their swollen limbs, which snagged on branches and were wrenched off with a ripping sound, not that this halted their advance towards the isolated house in Tronholmen. Tronholmen where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Where she herself lay trembling in the children’s room. Marit Olsen breathed out. Kept breathing out.

Down there the wind was still, but up here at the top of the ten-metre-high diving platform you could feel the air moving. Marit felt her pulse throbbing in her temples, in her throat, in her groin, blood streaming through every limb, fresh and life-giving. Living was wonderful. Being alive. She had hardly been out of breath after scaling all the steps of the tower, had just felt her heart, that loyal muscle, racing wildly. She stared down at the empty diving pool beneath her, to which the moonlight lent an almost unnatural bluish sheen. Further away, at the end of the pool, she could see the large clock. The hand had stopped at ten past five. Time stood still. She could hear the city, see car lights in Kirkeveien. So close. And yet too far. Too far away for anyone to hear her.

She was breathing. And was dead nonetheless. She had a rope as thick as a hawser around her neck and could hear the gulls screaming, ghosts she would soon be joining. But she was not thinking about death. She was thinking about life, how much she would have liked to live. All the small things, and the big things, she would like to have done. She would have travelled to countries she hadn’t seen, watched her nephews and nieces grow, seen the world come to its senses.

It had been a knife; the blade had glistened in the light from the street lamp, and it had been held to her throat. Fear is said to release energy. Not in her case, it had stolen all her energy, deprived her of the power to act. The thought of steel cutting into her flesh had turned her into a quivering bundle of helplessness. So when she had been told to climb over the fence, she had not been able to and had fallen to the ground and lain there like a beanbag, tears streaming down her cheeks. Because she knew what was going to happen. She would do everything she could not to be cut and knew she would not be able to prevent it. Because she wanted so much to live. A few more years, a few more minutes, it was the same crazy, blind rationality that drove everyone.

She had started to explain that she couldn’t climb over; she had forgotten that he had told her to keep her mouth shut. The knife had writhed like a snake, sliced her mouth, twisted round, crunched against her teeth and then been pulled out. The blood had gushed at once. The voice had whispered something behind the mask and nudged her forward along the fence. To a place in the bushes where she was pushed through a gap in the fence.