Headhunters (29 page)

‘Apropos of tragic ends, I’m afraid we have to say thank you and goodbye to you, Brede Sperre.’ Glasses off, look into camera 1. ‘Should Norway cultivate its own tomatoes at any price? In
News Tonight
we’re going to meet …’

The TV picture imploded as I pressed the ‘off’ button on the remote control with my left thumb. I would usually have done it with my right thumb, but that arm was busy. And even though it was going to sleep through poor blood circulation, I would not have moved it for anything in the world. In fact, it was supporting the most beautiful head I knew. The head turned to me, and her hand pushed away the duvet to have a good look at me.

‘Did you really sleep in her bed after shooting her that night? Next to her? How wide did you say it was?’

‘One hundred and one centimetres,’ I said. ‘According to the IKEA catalogue.’

Diana’s big blue eyes stared at me in horror. But – if I wasn’t mistaken – there was a certain admiration there, too. She was wearing a gauzy negligée, an Yves Saint Laurent creation which was cool when it caressed my skin like now, but burning hot when my body pressed it against hers.

She propped herself up on her elbows.

‘How did you shoot her?’

I closed my eyes and groaned. ‘Diana! We’ve agreed that we won’t talk about this.’

‘Yes, we did, but I’m ready for it now, Roger. I promise.’

‘Darling, listen …’

‘No! Tomorrow the police report will be out and I’ll get to hear the details anyway. I’d rather hear them from you.’

I sighed. ‘Sure?’

‘Absolutely positive.’

‘In the eye.’

‘Which one?’

‘This one.’ I placed my forefinger against her finely formed left eyebrow.

She closed her eyes and took a slow, deep breath. In and out. ‘What did you shoot her with?’

‘A small black pistol.’

‘Where did … ?’

‘I found it at Ove’s place.’ I ran my finger along her eyebrow to the side of her face, stroked it over her high cheekbones. ‘And that was where it stayed, too. Minus my fingerprints of course.’

‘Where were you when you shot her?’

‘In the hall.’

Diana’s breathing was already noticeably faster. ‘Did she say anything? Was she frightened? Did she understand what was happening?’

‘I don’t know. I shot her as soon as I entered.’

‘What did you feel?’

‘Sorrow.’

She gave a faint smile. ‘Sorrow? Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though she tried to lure you into Clas’s trap?’

My finger stopped. Not even now, a month after it was all over, did I like her using his Christian name. But, of course, she was right. Lotte’s mission had been to become my lover; it was she who was to introduce me to Clas Greve and persuade me to invite him to a job interview with Pathfinder and who was to make sure that I selected him. How long had it taken her to hook me? Three seconds? And I had splashed about helplessly as she had reeled me in. But then something unexpected had happened. I had dropped her. A man had loved his wife so much that he had, of his own accord, renounced a self-sacrificing and totally undemanding lover. Very surprising. And they had had to change plans.

‘I suppose I felt sorry for her,’ I said. ‘I think I was just the last in a succession of men who had let Lotte down throughout her life.’

I felt Diana give a little jerk when I articulated her name. Good.

‘Shall we talk about something else?’ I suggested.

‘No, I want to talk about this now.’

‘OK. Let’s talk about how Greve seduced you and persuaded you to take over the role of manipulating me.’

She chuckled. ‘Fine by me.’

‘Did you love him?’

She turned and her eyes lingered on me.

I repeated the question.

She sighed and wriggled closer. ‘I was in love.’

‘In love?’

‘He wanted to give me a child. So I fell in love.’

‘So simple?’

‘Yes. But it’s not simple, Roger.’

She was right, of course. It isn’t simple.

‘And you were willing to sacrifice everything to have this child? Even me?’

‘Yes, even you.’

‘Even though it meant I would have to pay with my life?’

She nudged my shoulder with her temple. ‘No, not that. You know very well that I thought he would only persuade you to write the report in his favour.’

‘Did you really think that, Diana?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Really, Diana?’

‘Yes, I think so anyway. You have to understand that I wanted to believe that.’

‘Enough for you to place the rubber ball filled with Dormicum on the car seat?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when you came down to the garage it was to drive me to the place where he would persuade me, wasn’t it?’

‘We’ve been through all this, Roger. He said this way entailed the least risk for all parties. Of course, I should have known it was madness. And perhaps I did, too. I don’t know what else I can tell you.’

We lay absorbed in our own thoughts while listening to the silence. In the summer we could hear the wind and the rain on the leaves of the trees in the garden outside, but not now. Now everything was stripped bare. And quiet. The only comfort was that it would be spring again. Perhaps.

‘And how long were you in love?’ I asked.

‘Until I realised what I was doing. The night you didn’t come home …’

‘Yes?’

‘I just felt like dying.’

‘I didn’t mean in love with him,’ I said. ‘I meant with me.’

She chuckled. ‘I can’t know that until I’ve stopped loving you.’

Diana almost never lied. Not because she couldn’t, Diana was a wonderful liar, but because she couldn’t be bothered. Beautiful people don’t need shells, are not obliged to learn all the defence mechanisms we others develop in order to protect ourselves against rejection and disappointment. But when women like Diana make up their minds to lie, they are thorough and efficient. Not because they are less moral than men, but because they have greater mastery of this aspect of the treachery. And that was precisely why I had gone to Diana that last evening. Because I knew she was the perfect candidate for the job.

After unlocking the door, standing in the hallway and listening to her footsteps on the parquet floor for a while, I had gone upstairs to the living room. I had heard her steps stop, the phone fall onto the coffee table, the whispered half-sob ‘Roger …’, seen the tears welling up in her eyes. And I had done nothing to stop her when she had thrown herself around my neck. ‘Thank God you’re alive! I kept ringing you all day yesterday and I’ve been trying all day today … where have you been?’

And Diana was not lying. She was crying because she thought she had lost me. Because she had sent me and my love out of her life like a dog to the vet to be put down. No, she was not lying. Said my gut instinct. But, as I have said, I am no great judge of human beings, and Diana is a wonderful liar. So when she had gone to dry
her
tears in the bathroom, I picked up her phone and checked that it was in fact my phone number she had been trying to ring. To be on the safe side.

When she came back, I told her everything. Absolutely everything. Where I had been, who I had been, what had happened. About the art thefts, about the phone under the bed in Greve’s apartment, about Danish Lotte who had pulled the wool over my eyes. About the conversation with Greve at the hospital. The one that had made me see that he knew Lotte, that she was his closest ally, that the person who had rubbed the gel containing transmitters into my hair was not Diana but the brown-eyed pallid-faced girl with the magical fingers, the translator who spoke Spanish and liked others’ stories better than her own. That I had had the gel in my hair since the evening before I had found Kjikerud in the car. Diana had stared at me in silence with wonder-filled eyes while I had told her.

‘At the hospital Greve said I’d persuaded you to have an abortion because the baby had Down’s syndrome.’

‘Down’s?’ It was the first thing Diana had said for several minutes. ‘Where did he get that idea from? I didn’t say—’

‘I know. It was something I made up when I told Lotte about the abortion. She told me her parents had forced her to have an abortion when she was a teenager. So I made up the Down’s syndrome story because I thought she might see me in a better light.’

‘So she … she …’

‘Yes. She’s the only one who could have told Greve that.’

I had waited. Let it sink in.

Then I had told Diana what would happen now.

She had stared at me in horror and shouted: ‘I can’t do it, Roger!’

‘Yes, you can,’ I had said. ‘You can and you will, my love.’ Said the new Roger Brown.

‘But … but …’

‘He was lying to you, Diana. He can’t give you a child. He’s sterile.’

‘Sterile?’

‘I’ll give you the child. I promise. Just do this for me.’

She had refused. Cried. Begged. And then she had promised.

When I went down to Lotte’s to become a murderer later that evening, I had instructed Diana and knew she would accomplish the mission. I could see her before me, receiving Greve when he came, the dazzling perfidious smile, the cognac already in the glass, passing it to him, toasting the victor, the future, the as yet unconceived child. Which she insisted should be conceived as soon as possible, tonight, now!

I recoiled as Diana pinched one of my nipples. ‘What are you thinking about right now?’

I pulled up the duvet. ‘The night Greve came here. Him lying with you where I am now.’

‘So what? You were lying with a dead body that night.’

I had desisted from asking, but now I couldn’t restrain myself any longer. ‘Did you have sex?’

She chuckled. ‘You did well to restrain yourself for so long, darling.’

‘Did you?’

‘Let me put it like this: the drops of Dormicum that were left in the rubber ball and that I squeezed into his welcome drink worked faster than I had imagined. I dolled myself up and when I came in here, he was already sleeping like a baby. The following day, however …’

‘I withdraw the question,’ I said with alacrity.

Diana stroked my stomach with her hand and laughed again. ‘The next morning he was very much awake. Not
because
of me, but because of a phone call that had woken him up.’

‘My warning.’

‘Yes. At any rate he was dressed and off at once.’

‘Where was his gun?’

‘In his jacket pocket.’

‘Did he check the gun before he left?’

‘I don’t know. He wouldn’t have noticed the difference anyway, the weight was about the same. I just exchanged the top three cartridges in the magazine.’

‘Yes, but the blank cartridges I gave you have a red B on the end.’

‘If he’d checked he would probably have thought it stood for “back”.’

The laughter of two people filled the bedroom. I enjoyed the sound. If all went well and the litmus test was positive, the room would soon be filled by the laughter of three people. And it would suppress the other sound, the echo I could still wake up to in the night. The bangs as Greve fired, the flash of the muzzle, the fraction of a second thinking that Diana had not switched the cartridges after all, that she had changed sides again. And then, the echo, the clink of empty cartridge cases landing on the parquet floor that was already covered with cartridges, live and blank, old and new, so many that the police would not be able to tell them apart regardless of whether they suspected that the video recording was a put-up job.

‘Were you frightened?’ she asked.

‘Frightened?’

‘Yes. You never told me how it felt. And you don’t appear in the pictures …’

‘Pic—’ I moved away to be able to see her face. ‘Do you mean to say you’ve been on the Net looking at the film?’

She didn’t answer. And I thought there was still a lot I didn’t know about this woman. Perhaps there would be enough mysteries for a whole lifetime.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was scared.’

‘What of? You knew his gun didn’t have any—’

‘Only the top three cartridges were blanks. I had to make sure he fired all of them so that the police wouldn’t find unused blanks in the magazine and see through the plan, didn’t I? But he could have fired some of the live bullets too. And he could have changed the magazine before coming. And he could also have brought along a sidekick I knew nothing about.’

Silence fell. Until she asked in a whisper: ‘So there was nothing else you were frightened of?’

I knew she was thinking what I was thinking.

‘Yes, there was,’ I said, turning to her. ‘I was frightened of one more thing.’

Her breathing on my face was fast and hot.

‘He might have killed you during the night,’ I said. ‘Greve didn’t have any plans to start a family with you, and you were a dangerous witness. I knew I was putting your life in danger when I asked you to be the decoy.’