‘Mm. So?’
‘Do you know what this is?’ Bellman held up a bit of shiny metal between his thumb and first finger.
‘No,’ Harry said, signalling to the waiter clearing away the breakfast buffet that he wanted a cup of coffee.
Bellman hummed the verse of Wergeland’s ‘Pixies and Dwarfs’ about building in the mountains and blowing the rock to pieces.
‘Pass.’
‘You disappoint me, Harry. Well, OK, I may have a head start on you. I grew up in Manglerud in the seventies in an expanding satellite town. They dug plots around us on all sides. The soundtrack of my childhood was dynamite charges going off. After the builders had left I went around finding bits of red plastic cable and tiny fragments of paper off the dynamite sticks. Kaja told me that they have a special way of fishing up here. Sticks of dynamite are more common than moonshine. Don’t say the thought didn’t cross your mind.’
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘That’s a bit of a blasting cap. When and where did you find it?’
‘After you were transported out last night. A couple of the guys and I had a little recce around where the avalanche started.’
‘Any tracks?’ Harry took the coffee from the waiter and thanked him.
‘No. It’s so exposed up there that the wind had swept away any ski tracks there might have been. But Kaja said she thought she had heard a snowmobile.’
‘Barely. And there was quite a time between her hearing it and the avalanche. He might have parked the snowmobile well before he got there so that we wouldn’t hear it.’
‘I had the same idea.’
‘And what now?’ Harry took a tentative sip.
‘Look for snowmobile tracks.’
‘The local officer . . .’
‘No one knows where he is. But I’ve got us a snowmobile, map, climbing rope, ice axe, provisions. So don’t get too comfortable with that coffee, there’s snow forecast for this afternoon.’
To reach the top of the avalanche zone, the Danish hotel manager had explained that they would have to drive in a wide arc west of the Håvass cabin, but not too far north-west, where they would come into the area known as Kjeften. It had been given this name, ‘jaws’, on account of the fang-shaped rocks scattered about. Sudden crevices and precipices were carved into the plateau, making it an extremely dangerous place to roam in poor weather if you weren’t familiar with the surroundings.
It was around twelve o’clock when Harry and Bellman looked down the mountainside, where they could make out the excavation of the chimney at the bottom of the valley.
Clouds had already moved in from the west. Harry squinted to the north-west. Shadows and contours were erased without the sun.
‘It must have come from there,’ Harry said. ‘Otherwise we would have heard it whatever.’
‘Kjeften,’ Bellman said.
Two hours later, after crossing the snowscape from south to north in crab-like manner without finding any snowmobile tracks, they had a break. Sat next to each other on the seat, drinking from the Thermos Bellman had brought with them. A light covering of snow fell.
‘I once found an unused stick of dynamite on the estate in Manglerud,’ Bellman said. ‘I was fifteen years old. In Manglerud there were three things kids could do. Sport, Bible or dope. I wasn’t interested in any of them. And certainly not in sitting on the post office window ledge waiting for life to take me from hash and heroin, via glue-sniffing, to the grave. As happened to four boys in my class.’
Harry noticed how the old Manglerud patois had crept back into his Norwegian.
‘I hated all that,’ Bellman said. ‘So my first step towards policing was to take the stick of dynamite behind Manglerud church where the dopeheads had their earth bong.’
‘Earth bong?’
‘They had dug a pit in which they placed, upside down, a decapitated beer bottle with a grille inside, where the hash smoked and stank. They had laid plastic tubes under the ground, running from the pit to various points half a metre away. Then they lay on the grass around the bong each sucking on their tube. I don’t know why . . .’
‘To cool the smoke,’ Harry chortled. ‘You get more of a buzz from less dope. Not bad coming from dopeheads, that one. I’ve obviously underestimated Manglerud.’
‘Nevertheless, I pulled out one of the tubes and replaced it with dynamite.’
‘You blew up the earth bong?’
Bellman nodded, and Harry laughed.
‘Soil hailed down for thirty seconds,’ Bellman smiled.
Silence. The wind rushed, low and rasping.
‘Actually, I wanted to say thank you,’ Bellman said, looking down at his cup. ‘For getting Kaja out in the nick of time.’