‘I’ll wait in the boat,’ he said.

Bjorn set to work immediately. He placed the coil on the long table, opened the little rucksack he had with him, switched on a torch attached to a cord with a fish hook on the end and secured it into position between two boards in the ceiling. He took out his laptop and a portable microscope shaped like a hammer, plugged the microscope into the USB port on the laptop, checked it was transmitting pictures to the screen and clicked on an image he had transferred to the laptop before they departed.

Harry stood beside the bride and gazed down at the lake. In the boat he could see the glow of a cigarette. He eyed the rails that went down into the water. The deep end. Harry had never liked swimming in fresh water, especially after the time he and Oystein had skipped school, gone to Lake Hauktjern in Ostmarka and jumped off the Devil’s Tip, which people said was twelve metres high. And Harry – seconds before he hit the water – had seen a viper gliding through the depths beneath him. Then he was enveloped by the freezing cold, bottle-green water and in his panic he swallowed half the lake and was sure he would never see daylight or breathe air again.

Harry smelt the fragrance that told him Kaja was standing behind him.

‘Bingo,’ he heard Bjorn Holm whisper.

Harry turned. ‘Same type of rope?’

‘No doubt about it,’ Bjorn said, holding the microscope against the rope end and pressing a key for high-resolution images. ‘Linden and elm. Same thickness and length of fibre. But the bingo is reserved for the recently sliced rope end.’

‘What?’

Bjorn Holm pointed to the screen. ‘The photo on the left is the one I brought with me. It shows the rope from Frogner Lido, magnified twenty-five times. And on this rope I have a perfect…’

Harry closed his eyes so as to relish to the full the word he knew was coming.

‘… match.’

He kept his eyes closed. The rope Marit Olsen was hung with had not only been made here, it had been cut from the rope they had before them. And it was a recent cut. Not so long ago he had been standing where they were standing. Harry sniffed the air.

An all-embracing darkness had fallen. Harry could hardly make out anything white in the window as they left.

Kaja sat at the front of the boat with him. She had to lean close so that he could hear her over the drone of the motor.

‘The person who collected the rope must have known his way around this area. And there can’t be many links in the chain between that person and the killer…’

‘I don’t think there are any links at all,’ Harry said. ‘The cut was recent. And there are not many reasons for rope to change hands.’

‘Local knowledge, lives nearby or has a cabin here,’ Kaja mused aloud. ‘Or he grew up here.’

‘But why come all the way to a disused ropery to get a few metres of rope?’ Harry asked. ‘How much does a long rope cost in a shop? A couple of hundred kroner?’

‘Perhaps he happened to be in the vicinity and knew the rope was there.’

‘OK, but in the vicinity would mean he must have been staying in one of the nearby cabins. For everyone else it’s a fair old boat trip. Are you making…?’

‘Yes, I’m making a list of the closest neighbours. By the way, I tracked down the volcano expert you asked for. A nerd up at the Geological Institute. Felix Rost. He seems to do a bit of volcano-spotting. Travelling all over the world to look at volcanoes and eruptions and that sort of thing.’

‘Did you talk to him?’

‘Just his sister, who lives with him. She asked me to email or text. He doesn’t communicate in any other way, she said. Anyway, he was out playing chess. I sent him the stones and the information.’

They advanced at a snail’s pace through the shallow channel to the pontoon. Bjorn held up the torch as a lantern to light their way through the hazy mist drifting across the water. The officer cut the motor.

‘Look!’ whispered Kaja, leaning even closer to Harry. He could smell her scent as he followed her index finger. From the rushes behind the jetty emerged a large, lone, white swan through the veil of mist into the torchlight.

‘Isn’t it just… beautiful,’ she whispered, entranced, then laughed and fleetingly squeezed his hand.

Skai accompanied them to the treatment plant. Then they got into the Volvo Amazon and were about to set off when Bjorn feverishly wound down the window and shouted to the officer: ‘FRITJOF!’

Skai stopped and turned slowly. The light from a street lamp fell onto his heavy, expressionless face.

‘The funny guy on TV,’ Bjorn shouted. ‘Fritjof from Ytre Enebakk.’

‘Fritjof?’ Skai said and spat. ‘Never heard of him.’

As the Amazon turned onto the E-road by the incinerator in Gronmo twenty-five minutes later, Harry had made a decision.

‘We must leak this information to Kripos,’ he said.

‘What?!’ Bjorn and Kaja said in unison.

‘I’ll talk to Beate, then she’ll pass the message on so that it looks like her people at Krimteknisk have discovered the business with the rope and not us.’

‘Why?’ Kaja asked.

‘If the killer lives in the Lyseren area, there’ll have to be a door-to-door search. We don’t have the means or the manpower for that.’

Bjorn Holm smacked the steering wheel.

‘I know,’ Harry said. ‘But the most important thing is that he’s caught, not who catches him.’

They drove on in silence with the false ring of the words hanging in the air.

20

Oystein

No electricity. Harry stood in the dark hall flipping the light switch on and off. Did the same in the sitting room.

Then he sat down in the wing chair staring into the black void.

After he had sat there for a while, his mobile rang.

‘Hole.’

‘Felix Rost.’

‘Mm?’ Harry said. The voice sounded as if it belonged to a slender, petite woman.

‘Frida Larsen, his sister. He asked me to ring and say that the stones you found are mafic, basalt lava. Alright?’

‘Just a minute. What does that mean? Mafic?’

‘It’s hot lava, over a thousand degrees C, low viscosity, which thins it and allows it to spread over a wide distance on eruption.’

‘Could it have come from Oslo?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? Oslo is built on lava.’

‘Old lava. This lava is recent.’

‘How recent?’

He heard her put her hand over the phone and speak. But he couldn’t hear any other voices. She must have received an answer though, because soon afterwards she was back.

‘He says anything from five to fifty years. But if you were thinking of establishing which volcano it comes from, you’ve got quite a job on your hands. There are over one and a half thousand active volcanoes in the world. And that’s just the ones we know about. If there are any other queries, Felix can be contacted by email. Your assistant has got the address.’

‘But…’

She had already rung off.

He considered calling back, but changed his mind and punched in another number.

‘Oslotaxi.’

‘Hi, Oystein, this is Harry H.’

‘You’re kidding. Harry H is dead.’

‘Not quite.’

‘OK, then I must be dead.’

‘Feel like driving me from Sofies gate to my childhood home?’

‘No, but I’ll do it anyway. Just have to do this trip.’ Oystein’s laugh morphed into a cough. ‘Harry H! Bloody hell… Call you when I’m there.’

Harry rang off, went into the bedroom, packed a bag in the light from the street lamp outside the window and chose a couple of CDs from the sitting room in the light from his mobile. Carton of smokes, handcuffs, service pistol.

He sat in the wing chair, making use of the dark to repeat the revolver exercise. Started the stopwatch on his wrist, flicked out the cylinder of his Smith amp; Wesson, emptied and loaded. Four cartridges out, four in, without a speed-loader, just nimble fingers. Flicked the cylinder back in so that the first cartridge was first in line. Stop. Nine sixty-six. Almost three seconds over the record. He opened the cylinder. He had messed up. The first chamber ready to fire was one of the two empty ones. He was dead. He repeated the exercise. Nine fifty. And dead again. When Oystein rang, after twenty minutes, he was down to eight seconds and had died six times.