He leaned back against the wall and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he slowly straightened up, saw the woman pacing with the phone to her ear and a desperate expression on her face and walked towards her. He stood facing her, pulled the coat to one side so that she could see the revolver and said in a slow, clear voice: 'Please come with me. Otherwise I will have to kill you.'
He could see her eyes darken as her pupils dilated with terror and she dropped her mobile phone.
It fell and hit the railway track with a thud. Jon looked at the phone which continued to ring. For a moment, before he saw that it was Thea on the line, he had thought it was the voiceless person from last night ringing again. She hadn't said a word, but it had been a woman, he was sure of that now. It had been her; it had been Ragnhild. Stop! What was going on? Was he going mad? He concentrated on breathing. He mustn't lose control now.
He clung to the black bag as the train glided into the station.
The train doors opened with a puff of air, he boarded, put the suitcase and rucksack in the luggage compartment and found an empty seat.
There was a gap in the row of seats like a missing tooth. Harry studied the faces on either side of the empty seat, but they were too old, too young or the wrong gender. He ran to the first seat in row 19 and crouched down by the old white-haired man sitting there.
'Police. We're—'
'What?' the man shouted with a hand behind his ear.
'Police,' Harry said, louder this time. In a row a bit further forward he noticed a man with a wire behind his ear move and talk to his lapel.
'We're on the lookout for someone who was supposed to be sitting in the middle of this row. Have you seen anyone leave or—'
'What?'
An elderly lady, obviously his companion for the evening, leaned over. 'He just left. The auditorium, that is. During the performance . . .' She said the latter in such a way that it was clear she assumed that this was the reason the police wanted to talk to him.
Harry ran up the aisle, pushed open the door, stormed through the foyer and down the stairs to the front doors. He saw the uniformed back outside and shouted from the stairs. 'Falkeid!'
Sivert Falkeid turned, saw Harry and opened the door.
'Did a man just come out here?'
Falkeid shook his head.
'Stankic is in the building,' Harry said. 'Sound the alarm.'
Falkeid nodded and raised his lapel.
Harry raced back into the foyer, spotted a small, red mobile phone on the floor and asked the women in the cloakroom if they had seen anyone leaving the auditorium. They looked at each other and answered no in unison. He asked if there were other exits apart from down the stairs to the front doors.
'The emergency exit,' one suggested.
'Yes, but the doors make such a noise when they shut we would have heard it,' the other one said.
Harry stood by the auditorium door surveying the foyer from left to right as he tried to figure out escape routes. Had Stankic really been here? Had Martine told him the truth this time? At that very instant he knew she had. There was that sweet smell in the air again. The man who had been standing in the way when Harry arrived. He knew in an instant where Stankic must have made his getaway.
Harry tore open the door to the men's toilet and was met by a gust of ice-cold wind from the open window on the far side. He went to the window, looked down at the cornice and the car park beneath and thumped the sill with his fist. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.'
A sound came from one of the toilet cubicles.
'Hello!' Harry shouted. 'Is there anyone in there?'
By way of an answer the urinal flushed with an angry hiss.
There was that sound again. A sort of sobbing. Harry's eyes ran along the locks on the cubicle doors and found one with red for engaged. He threw himself down on his stomach and saw a pair of legs and pumps.
'Police,' Harry shouted. 'Are you hurt?'
The sobbing ceased. 'Has he gone?' asked a tremulous woman's voice.
'Who?'
'He said I had to stay here for fifteen minutes.'
'He's gone.'
The cubicle door slid open. Thea Nilsen was sitting on the floor, between the bowl and the wall, with make-up running down her face.
'He said he would kill me if I didn't say where Jon was,' she said through her tears. As though to apologise.
'And what did you say?' Harry asked, helping her up onto the toilet lid.
She blinked twice.
'Thea, what did you tell him?'
'Jon texted me,' she said, staring without focus at the toilet walls. 'His father's ill, he said. He's flying to Bangkok tonight. Imagine. This evening of all evenings.'
'Bangkok? Did you tell Stankic?'
'We were supposed to meet the Prime Minister this evening,' Thea said as a tear rolled down her cheek. 'And he didn't even answer me when I rang, the . . . the—'
'Thea! Did you tell him Jon was catching a plane this evening?' She nodded, like a somnambulist, as though none of this had anything to do with her.
Harry rose to his feet and strode into the foyer where Martine and Rikard were standing and talking to a man Harry recognised as one of the Prime Minister's bodyguards.
'Call off the alarm,' Harry shouted. 'Stankic is no longer in the building.'
The three of them turned towards him.
'Rikard, your sister is sitting in there. Could you look after her? And, Martine, could you come with me?'
Without waiting for an answer, Harry took her arm and she had to jog to keep up with him down the steps towards the exit.
'Where are we going?' she asked.
'Gardemoen Airport.'
'And what are you going to do with me there?'
'You will be my eyes, dear Martine. You will see the invisible man for me.'
He studied his facial features in the reflection from the train window. The forehead, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth, the chin, the eyes. Tried to see what it was, where the secret lay. But he couldn't see anything special above the red neckerchief, just an expressionless face with eyes and hair which, against the walls of the tunnel between Oslo Central and Lillestrøm, were as black as the night outside.
33
Monday, 22 December. The Shortest Day.
I
T TOOK
H
ARRY AND
M
ARTINE EXACTLY TWO MINUTES AND
thirty-eight seconds to run from the concert hall to the platform of the National Theatre station where, two minutes later, they boarded an Inter City train stopping at Oslo Central and Gardemoen Airport on its way to Lillehammer. True, this was a slower train but it was still faster than waiting for the next airport express. They dropped into the two free seats left in a carriage full of soldiers on their way home for Christmas leave and gangs of students with boxes of wine and Santa hats.
'What's going on?' Martine asked.
'Jon's making his getaway,' Harry said.
'Does he know Stankic is alive?'
'He's not fleeing from Stankic, but from us. He knows his cover is blown.'
Martine's eyes widened. 'What do you mean?'
'I hardly know where to begin.'
The train drew into Oslo Central. Harry scrutinised the passengers on the platform, but did not see Jon Karlsen.
'It all started when Ragnhild Gilstrup offered Jon two million kroner to help Gilstrup Invest buy some of the Salvation Army's properties,' Harry said. 'He turned her down because he wasn't convinced she was scrupulous enough to keep a secret. Instead he went behind her back and spoke to Mads and Albert Gilstrup. He demanded five million and they were instructed not to tell Ragnhild about the deal. They agreed.'
Martine's mouth fell. 'How do you know this?'
'After Ragnhild's death Mads Gilstrup more or less broke down. He decided to come clean about the whole business. So he rang the police. A telephone number on Halvorsen's business card. Halvorsen didn't answer, but he left the confession as a voicemail. A few hours ago I played the message. Among many other things he said Jon demanded a written agreement.'
'Jon likes things to be neat and tidy,' Martine muttered. The train pulled out of the station, past the stationmaster's Villa Valle and into east Oslo's grey landscape of backyards with wrecked bikes, bare clothes lines and soot-black windows.
'But what has this got to do with Stankic?' she asked. 'Who took out the contract? Mads Gilstrup?'
'No.'
They were sucked into the tunnel's black void, and in the dark her voice was barely audible above the rattle of the train on the rails. 'Was it Rikard? Say it wasn't Rikard . . .'
'Why do you think it's Rikard?'
'The night Jon raped me Rikard found me in the toilet. I said I had tripped in the dark, but I could see he didn't believe me. He helped me get to bed without waking any of the others. Even though he has never said anything I've always had the feeling that he saw Jon and knows what happened.'
'Mm,' Harry said. 'So that's why he's so protective. Rikard seems to like you, and it's genuine.'
She nodded. 'I suppose that's why I . . .' she began, then paused.
'Yes?'
'Why I don't want it to be him.'
'In that case your wish is granted.' Harry checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until they arrived.
Martine, with a look of alarm: 'You . . . you don't think?'
'What?'
'You don't think that my father knew about the rape, do you? That he . . .'
'No, your father has nothing to do with any of this. The person who took out the contract on Jon Karlsen . . .'
They were out of the tunnel; a black, starry sky hung over white, phosphorescent fields.
'. . . is Jon Karlsen.'
Jon entered the vast departures hall. He had been here before, but had never seen as many people as there were now. The noise of voices, feet and announcements rose to the steeple-high vaulted ceiling. An excited cacophony, a hotchpotch of languages and fragments of opinions he didn't understand. Home for Christmas. Going away for Christmas. Stationary queues at the check-in counters coiled round like overfed boa constrictors between the barriers.
Take a deep breath, he told himself. Plenty of time. They don't know anything. Not yet. Maybe they never will. He stood behind an elderly lady and bent down to help her move her suitcase as the queue shuffled forward twenty centimetres. When she turned to him with a smile of gratitude he could see that her skin was only a thin, deathly pale fabric stretched over a bony skull.
He returned the smile, and at length she looked away again. But through the noise of living people he could always hear her scream. The unbearable, unending scream struggling to drown out the roar of an electric motor.
After being taken to hospital and finding out that the police were searching his flat, he had realised they might stumble on the contract with Gilstrup Invest in his bureau. The one that stated that Jon would receive five million kroner if the Salvation Army board of management supported the offer, signed by Albert and Mads Gilstrup. After the police had driven him to Robert's flat he had gone to Gøteborggata to collect the contract. But when he arrived someone was already there. Ragnhild. She hadn't heard him because of the vacuum cleaner. She was sitting down reading the contract. She had seen. Seen his sins as his mother had seen the semen stains on the bedding. And, like his mother, Ragnhild would humiliate him, destroy him, tell everyone. Tell his father. She mustn't see. I took her eyes, he thought. But she is still screaming.
'Beggars don't say no to charity,' Harry said. 'It's in the very nature of things. That was what struck me in Zagreb. Quite literally. A Norwegian twenty-kroner coin that was hurled at me. And as I watched it spinning on the floor I remembered the Crime Scene Unit had found a Croatian coin trodden into the snow outside the shop on the corner of Gøteborggata. They automatically connected it with Stankic who had been escaping that way while Halvorsen lay bleeding further up the street. I am by inclination a doubter, but when I saw this coin in Zagreb it was as though a higher authority wanted to make me aware of something. The first time I met Jon a beggar threw a coin at him. I remember because I was surprised that a beggar would reject charity. Yesterday I tracked down the beggar to the Deichmanske library and showed him the coin the Crime Scene Unit had found. He confirmed he had hurled a foreign coin at Jon and that it could well have been the one I showed him. Yes, it could indeed have been that one, he said.'
'So Jon must have been to Croatia at some point. That's not illegal, I suppose?'
'Not at all. Yet he told me he had never been abroad in his life, except to Denmark and Sweden. I checked with the passport office and no passport has ever been issued in Jon Karlsen's name. However, a passport had been issued to Robert Karlsen almost ten years ago.'
'Perhaps Jon got the coin from Robert?'
'You're right,' Harry said. 'The coin proves nothing. But it makes sluggish brains like mine think a little. What if Robert never went to Zagreb? What if it had been Jon who went? Jon had keys to all the Salvation Army's rental flats, including Robert's. What if he had borrowed Robert's passport, travelled to Zagreb in his name and pretended to be Robert Karlsen when he organised the hit on Jon Karlsen? And the plan had always been to kill Robert?'
Martine chewed a nail, deep in thought. 'But if Jon wanted to kill Robert, why take out a contract on yourself?'
'To give yourself the perfect alibi. Even if Stankic was arrested and confessed, Jon would never be suspected. He was the intended victim, wasn't he. Jon and Robert swapping shifts on that day of all days would be seen as the hand of fate. Stankic was merely following instructions. And when Stankic, and Zagreb, discovered later that they had killed their own customer there would be no reason for them to fulfil the contract by killing Jon. After all, there was no one to pay the bill. In fact that was part of the genius of the plan. Jon could promise Zagreb as much money as they wanted after the event as there would be no billing address. And the one person who could have refuted that Robert was in Zagreb that day or who might have had an alibi for the date the contract was agreed – Robert Karlsen – was dead. The plan was like a circle of logic that worked, the illusion of a snake eating itself, a self-destructing creation that would guarantee nothing would be left afterwards, no loose threads.'