“Not at all. I’ve even driven the stretch. I started at nine o’clock, waited at the cabin for half an hour and drove back.”
“And?”
“I was back at a quarter past twelve.”
“See. It doesn’t add up.”
“Do you remember what Dim said about the car when we questioned her?”
Liz bit her top lip.
“She didn’t remember any car,” Harry said. “Because it wasn’t there. At a quarter past twelve they were in reception waiting for the police and didn’t notice the ambassador’s car sneak in.”
“Christ, I thought we were dealing with a careful murderer. The police might have been waiting for him when he got back.”
“He was careful, but he couldn’t anticipate that the murder would have been discovered before his return. The agreement was that Dim wouldn’t go to the room until he rang her, wasn’t it. But Wang Lee became impatient and almost ruined the whole plan. The murderer can’t have suspected anything when he was replacing the car keys.”
“So blind luck then?”
“This man doesn’t base anything on luck.”
He must be a Manchurian, Løken thought. From Jilin province perhaps. During the Korean War he had been told that the Red Army recruited many of its soldiers from there because they were so tall. Whatever the logic of that was, they sank deeper into the mud and were bigger targets. The other person in the room stood behind him humming a song. Løken couldn’t swear to it, but it sounded like “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
The Chinese man had picked up a knife from the table, if you can call a seventy-centimeter curved saber a knife. He weighed it in his hands, like a baseball player choosing a bat, then raised it above his head without a word. Løken clenched his teeth. At the same time the pleasant drowsiness of his barbiturate sedation wore off, the blood froze in his veins and he lost his self-control. As he screamed and tugged at the leather straps binding his hands to the table, the humming approached from behind. A hand grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, and a tennis ball was stuffed into his mouth. He could feel the hairy surface on his tongue and palate; it attracted saliva to it like blotting paper and his screams became feeble groans.
The tourniquet around his forearm had been pulled so tight that he had long lost any feeling in his hand, and when the saber came down with a dull thud and he didn’t feel anything he thought for a moment it had missed him. Then he saw his right hand on the other side of the blade. It had been clenched and now it was slowly opening. The cut was clean. He could see two severed white bones protruding. The radius and the ulna. He had seen them in other people, but never his own. Because of the tourniquet, there wasn’t a lot of blood. It wasn’t true what people say, that sudden amputations don’t hurt. The pain was unbearable. He waited for the shock, the paralyzing state of nothingness, but that avenue was closed at once. The man who had been humming stuck a syringe in his upper arm, through his shirt, not even attempting to find a vein. That was what was so great about morphine. It worked wherever you put it. He was aware that he could survive this. For quite a long time. As long as they wanted.
“What about Runa Molnes?” Liz was cleaning her teeth with a matchstick.
“He could have picked her up whenever he wanted,” Harry said.
“And then he took her up to Klipra’s hideaway. What happened after that?”
“The blood and bullet hole in the window suggest that she was shot inside the cabin. Probably as soon as they arrived.”
It was almost easy when he talked about her like this, as a murder victim.
“I don’t understand that,” Liz said. “Why would he kidnap her and kill her right away? I thought the whole point was to use her to stop your investigation. He could only do that if Runa Molnes was alive. You might have wanted proof that she was safe before submitting to his demands.”
“And how would I submit to his demands?” Harry asked. “Go back to Norway—and then Runa would run home smiling? And the kidnapper could breathe a sigh of relief just because I had promised he would be left in peace, even though he had no other means of applying pressure? Was that how you saw events unfolding? Did you think he would just let her …?”
Harry noticed Liz’s eyes and realized he had raised his voice. He shut up.
“I didn’t, no. I’m talking about what the murderer was thinking,” Liz said, still with her gaze fixed on him. The worried frown between her eyebrows was back again.
“Sorry, Liz.” He pressed his fingertips against his jawbone. “I must be tired.”