Harry stared down at his folded hands. ‘The pain he has . . .’
‘Physical pain is not the worst thing a human has to deal with,’ Altman said. ‘Believe me, I see it every day. Not death, either. Nor even fear of death.’
‘What is the worst then?’
‘Humiliation. To be deprived of honour and dignity. To be disrobed, to be cast out by the flock. That’s the worst punishment, it’s akin to burying a person alive. And the only consolation is that the person will perish fairly quickly.’
‘Mm.’ Harry kept eye contact with Altman. ‘You don’t have anything in that cupboard to lighten the atmosphere, do you?’
45
Questioning
MIKAEL BELLMAN HAD BEEN DREAMING ABOUT FREE FALL again. Climbing solo in El Chorro, the fingerhold that isn’t, the mountain wall racing past your eyes, the ground accelerating towards you. The alarm clock ringing at the last moment. He wiped the egg yolk from his mouth and looked up at Ulla standing right behind him and filling his cup with coffee from the cafetière. She had learned to recognise the precise moment when he was ready to eat, and it was then and not a second before that he wanted his coffee, boiling hot, poured into the blue cup. And that was only one of the reasons he appreciated her. Another was that she kept herself in such good shape that she still attracted admiring glances at the parties they were invited to more and more often. Ulla had, after all, been Manglerud’s undisputed beauty queen when they got together, he had been eighteen, she nineteen. A third reason was that Ulla, without making any great fuss about it, had set aside her dreams of further education so that he could prioritise his job. But the three most important reasons sat around the table arguing about who should have the plastic figure in the cornflakes box and who should sit in front today when she drove them to school. Two girls, one boy. Three perfect reasons to appreciate the woman and her genes’ compatibility with his.
‘Will you be late again tonight?’ she asked, furtively stroking his hair. He knew she loved his hair.
‘It might be a long session,’ he said. ‘We’re starting with the suspect today.’ He knew that over the course of the day the papers would publish what they already knew: that the arrestee was Tony Leike. But he had made it a principle never to reveal confidentialities even at home. That also enabled him to explain overtime regularly with ‘I can’t talk about that, darling’.
‘Why didn’t you question him yesterday?’ she asked while buttering the children’s bread for their packed lunches.
‘We had to gather more facts. And finish searching his house.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Afraid I can’t be that specific, darling,’ he said and gave her the regretful confidentiality look so as not to reveal the fact that she had actually put her finger on a sensitive point. Bjørn Holm and the crime scene officers hadn’t found anything during the search that could have linked Leike to any of the murders. Fortunately, for the moment, however, that was of minor importance.
‘Softening him up in a cell overnight won’t hurt,’ Bellman said. ‘It’ll just make him more receptive when we start. And the first part of the questioning is always the crunch.’
‘Is it?’ she asked, and he could tell she was trying to sound interested.
‘I have to be off.’ He got up and kissed her on the cheek. Yes, he certainly did appreciate her. The thought of forgoing her and the children, the framework and infrastructure that had enabled him to rise through the ranks, through the classes, was of course absurd. To follow the impulses of his heart, to throw up everything for love or whatever it was, was utopian, a dream he could think and talk about, with Kaja as a listener. But if you were going to dream, Mikael Bellman preferred dreams that were grander than that.
He inspected his front teeth in the hall mirror and checked his silk tie was straight. The press were bound to be out in force.
How long would he be able to keep Kaja? He thought he had detected some doubts in her last night. And a lack of enthusiasm in their lovemaking. But he also knew that as long as he was heading for the top, as he had been doing so far, he would be able to control her. It wasn’t that Kaja was a gold-digger with clear objectives of what he, as overall boss, could do for her own career. It wasn’t about intellect; it was pure biology. Women could be as modern as they liked, but when it came to submitting to the alpha male they were still at primate level. However, if she was beginning to entertain doubts because she thought that he would never renounce his wife for her sake, perhaps it was time to give her some encouragement. After all, he needed her to feed him with inside info about Crime Squad for a while yet, until all the loose ends were tied, until this battle was over. And the war won.