Harry could hear from his voice that the masquerade was over; this was Jens Brekke speaking now, the same person he had spoken to in the office the first time. The same teasing, provocative tone of a man who knows he is going to win, but wants to enjoy it before delivering the coup de grâce. Harry tried to grasp what it was that could have swung the odds against him.
“I’ve been waiting for you to call, Harry.” This was not the voice of a desperate man, but one who was in the driving seat, with one nonchalant hand on the wheel.
“Well, you’re ahead of the game, Jens.”
Jens laughed. “It seems I always am, Harry. How does it feel?”
“Wearing. Where’s Løken?”
“Would you like to know what Runa said before she died?”
Harry felt a tingling sensation underneath the skin on his forehead. “No,” he heard himself say. “I just want to know where Løken is, what you’ve done to him and where we can find you.”
“Harry, that’s three wishes at once!”
The membrane in the telephone microphone vibrated with his laughter. But there was something else struggling to capture Harry’s attention, something he couldn’t quite identify. The laughter stopped abruptly.
“Do you know how much self-sacrifice is required to execute a plan like this, Harry? To check and double-check, to follow all the little detours to make it infallible? Not to mention the physical discomfort. Killing is one thing, but do you think I enjoyed sitting in prison all that time? You might not believe me, but what I said about being locked up is true.”
“So why did you bother with all the detours?”
“I’ve told you before, eliminating risks has a cost, but it’s worth it, it’s always worth it. Framing Klipra required painstaking work.”
“So why didn’t you make it simple? Mow them all down and blame the mafia?”
“You think like one of the losers you usually chase, Harry. You’re like gamblers, you forget the whole picture, the consequences. Of course I could have killed Molnes, Klipra and Runa in simpler ways and made sure I didn’t leave any traces. But that wouldn’t have been enough. Because when I took over the Molnes fortune and Phuridell it would have been pretty obvious I had a motive for killing all three of them, wouldn’t it? Three murders and one person with a motive for all of them. Even the police would have been able to suss that one, don’t you think? Even if you hadn’t found any damning evidence you could have made life fairly unpleasant for me. So I had to create an alternative scenario for you. Where one of the victims was the perpetrator. A solution that wasn’t so difficult that you couldn’t sort it out or so easy that you wouldn’t be happy with it. You ought to thank me, Harry. I made you look good when you were on Klipra’s trail, didn’t I.”
Harry was only half listening; he had gone back in time. Then he’d had a murderer’s voice in his ear as well. Then it had been the water in the background that had given him away, but now all Harry could hear was the faint hum of music that could have been anywhere at all.
“What do you want, Jens?”
“What do I want? Well, what do I want? Just a chat, I suppose.”
To keep me on the line, Harry thought. He wants to keep me on the line. Why? Synthetic drums splashed and a clarinet warbled.
“But if you’d like to know precisely, I was just ringing to say …”
Harry could hear “I Just Called to Say I Love You” playing.
“… that your colleague could do with a facelift. What do you think, Harry? Harry?”
The receiver swung to and fro in an arc just above the floor.
Harry felt the sweet rush of adrenalin as though it had been injected into him while he ran down the corridor. The girl with the plaits had backed up against the wall in fear as he dropped the receiver, pulled out his borrowed Ruger SP101 from his calf holster and loaded it in one smooth movement. Had she understood when he shouted to her to call the police? No time to wonder about that now, he was there. Harry kicked open the first door and squinted straight into four shocked faces above the gunsights.
“Sorry.”
In the next room he almost fired a shot out of sheer fright. In the middle of the floor stood a tiny, dark-skinned Thai with his legs akimbo wearing a glittering silver suit and porno-style sunglasses. It took Harry a couple of seconds to realize what he was doing, but by then the rest of “Hound Dog” was stuck in the Thai Elvis’s throat.
Harry stared down the corridor. There had to be at least fifty rooms in all. An alarm bell had been sounding somewhere in his head, but his brain had been so overloaded already that he had tried to shut it out. Now he could hear it loud and clear. Liz! Shit, shit, shit. Jens had kept him on the line.