Phantom(50)

‘Take all the time you need, Oleg, but it’s often easiest to start at the beginning.’

The boy raised his head and looked at Harry. ‘Can I trust you? No matter what?’

Harry was about to say something, but stopped. Just nodded.

‘You have to get something for me …’

It was like someone twisting a knife in Harry’s heart. He already knew how Oleg would continue.

‘They’ve only got boy and speed here, but I need violin. Can you help me, Harry?’

‘Was that why you asked me to come?’

‘You’re the only person who’s managed to get round the ban on visitors.’ Oleg stared at Harry with his solemn, dark eyes. A tiny twitch in the thin skin below one eye revealed the desperation.

‘You know I can’t, Oleg.’

‘Course you can!’ His voice sounded hard and metallic between the cell walls.

‘What about the people you sold for, can’t they supply you?’

‘Sold what?’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ Harry smacked his hand down on the briefcase lid. ‘I found an Arsenal shirt in your locker at Valle Hovin.’

‘Did you break in …?’

‘I found this as well.’ Harry slung the photograph of the family on the desk. ‘The girl in the picture, do you know where she is?’

‘Who …?’

‘Irene Hanssen. Your girlfriend.’

‘How …?’

‘You were seen together at the Watchtower. There’s a jumper smelling of wild flowers and a junkie kit for two in the locker. Sharing your stash is more intimate than sharing the marital bed, isn’t it. Plus your mother told me she saw you in town, looking like a happy idiot. My diagnosis: in love.’

Oleg’s Adam’s apple went up and down.

‘Well?’ Harry said.

‘I don’t know where she is! OK? She just disappeared. Perhaps her brother picked her up again. Perhaps she’s in rehab somewhere. Perhaps she caught a plane and buggered off from all this shit.’

‘Or perhaps the news is not so good,’ Harry said. ‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘You remember to the hour.’

Oleg closed his eyes. ‘One hundred and twenty-two days ago. Long before the stuff with Gusto, so what’s this got to do with the case?’

‘It all slots together, Oleg. A murder is a white whale. A missing person is a white whale. If you’ve seen a white whale twice it’s the same whale. What can you tell me about Dubai?’

‘It’s the biggest town, but not the capital, of the United Arab Emir—’

‘Why are you protecting them, Oleg? What is it you can’t tell me?’

Oleg had found the start button on the Game Boy and flicked it to and fro. Then he flipped off the battery cover at the back, raised the lid of the metal bin beside the desk and dropped the batteries inside before passing the toy back to Harry.

‘Dead.’

Harry looked at the Game Boy and slipped it into his pocket.

‘If you can’t get me violin, I’ll shoot up the diluted shit they’ve got here. Heard of fentanyl and heroin?’

‘Fentanyl is a recipe for an OD, Oleg.’

‘Right. So you can tell Mum afterwards it was your fault.’

Harry didn’t answer. Oleg’s pathetic attempt to manipulate him didn’t make him angry, it made him want to embrace the boy and hold him tight. Harry didn’t need to see the tears in Oleg’s eyes to know the struggle that was taking place in his body and head, he could feel the gnawing hunger in the boy, it was physical. And then there is nothing else, no morality, no love, no consideration, just the eternally pounding thought of the rush, the high, peace. Harry had once in his life been on the verge of accepting a heroin shot, but a chance second of clear-sightedness had made him decline. Perhaps it was the certainty that heroin would do what alcohol still had not been able to do: kill him. Perhaps it was the girl who had told him how she had been hooked from the first shot because nothing, nothing she had experienced or imagined, could surpass the ecstasy of it. Perhaps it was his pal from Oppsal who had gone to rehab to have his tolerance set to zero, because he hoped that when he injected himself afterwards it would be something like the first sweet shot. And who said that when he saw his three-month-old son’s vaccination mark in his thigh, he began to cry because it had triggered such a strong craving for dope that he had been willing to sacrifice everything, to go straight from the clinic to Plata.

‘Let’s make a deal,’ Harry said, conscious of his own thick voice. ‘I’ll get you what you ask and you tell me all you know.’