“Are you OK?” Liz asked, laying a hand on his shoulder. He intended to answer, opened his mouth, but nothing came out.
“This is Ove Klipra, yes,” Løken said. He crouched down by the dead man, the scene lit by a bare bulb in the ceiling. “How odd. I’ve been watching this guy for months.” He placed his hand on the man’s forehead.
“Don’t touch!”
Harry grabbed Løken’s collar and pulled him up. “Don’t …!” He let go as fast. “Sorry, I … Just don’t touch anything. Not yet.”
Løken said nothing, and stared at him. Liz had her deep wrinkle between her non-existent eyebrows again.
“Harry?”
He slumped down on a chair.
“It’s over now, Harry. I’m sorry, we’re all sorry, but it’s over.”
Harry shook his head.
She leaned over him and laid a big, warm hand on his neck. The way his mother used to do. Shit, shit, shit.
He got up, pushed her away and went outside. He could hear Liz and Løken’s whispers from inside the house. He looked up at the sky, searched for a star, but couldn’t find one.
* * *
It was almost midnight when Harry went to the door. Hilde Molnes opened it. He looked down; he hadn’t phoned in advance and could hear from her breathing that soon she would be in tears.
They sat opposite each other in the living room. He couldn’t see anything left in the gin bottle, and she seemed clearheaded enough. She wiped away the tears. “She was going to be a diver, you know?”
He nodded.
“But they wouldn’t let her take part in normal competitions. They said the judges wouldn’t know how to assess her. Some people said it was unfair. Diving with only one arm gave you an advantage.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was the first thing he had said since he arrived.
“She didn’t know,” she said. “Had she known she wouldn’t have spoken to me in that way.” Her face contorted, she sobbed and the tears ran down the wrinkles by her mouth like small streams.
“Didn’t know what, fru Molnes?”
“That I’m ill!” she shouted, and buried her face in her hands.
“Ill?”
“Why else would I anesthetize myself like this? My body will have been eaten up soon. It’s just rotten, just dead cells.”
Harry said nothing.
“I meant to tell her,” she whispered between her fingers. “The doctors told me six months. But I wanted to tell her on a good day.”
Her voice was barely audible. “But there weren’t any good days.”
Harry, unable to sit, got to his feet. He walked over to the large window overlooking the garden, avoided the family photographs on the wall because he knew who his eyes would meet there. The moon was reflected in the swimming pool.
“Have they rung back, the men your husband owed money?”
She lowered her hands. Her eyes were red from crying and ugly.
“They rang, but Jens was here and he spoke to them. Since then I’ve heard nothing.”
“So he takes care of you, does he?”
Harry wondered why he had asked her that of all questions. Perhaps it had been a clumsy attempt to console her, to remind her she still had someone.
She nodded mutely.
“And now you’re going to get married?”
“Do you object?”
Harry turned to her. “No, why should I?”
“Runa …” She didn’t get any further, and the tears began to roll down her cheeks again. “I haven’t experienced much love in my life, Hole. Is it asking too much to want a few months’ happiness before the end? Couldn’t she allow me that?”
Harry watched a little petal floating into the pool. He was reminded of the freighters from Malaysia.
“Do you love him, fru Molnes?”
In the ensuing silence he listened for a fanfare.
“Love him? What does that matter? I’m capable of imagining I love him. I think I could love anyone who loves me. Do you understand?”
Harry glanced toward the bar. It was three steps away. Three steps, two ice cubes and a glass. He closed his eyes and could hear the ice cubes clink in the glass, the gurgle of the bottle as he poured the brown liquid over and finally the hiss as the soda mixed with the alcohol.
44
Thursday, January 23
It was seven o’clock in the morning when Harry returned to the crime scene. At five he had given up trying to sleep, dressed and got into the hire car in the car park. There was no one else around, the forensics team had finished for the night and wouldn’t appear for another hour at least. He pushed the orange police tape aside and went in.
It looked quite different in the daylight: peaceful and well kept. Only the blood and the chalk outlines of two bodies on the rough wooden floor were testimony to the fact that it was the same room he had been in the night before.