The Leopard(99)

‘What’s going on, Kaja?’

Krongli had already let go and was staring at her, with eyes wide and jaw agape.

‘Nothing,’ Kaja said, not letting Krongli out of her sight. ‘Just a drunken bumpkin from Ustaoset who’s on his way home.’

Krongli backed towards the front entrance without a word. Slipped out and slammed the door. Kaja went over, locked it and rested her forehead against the cold wood. She felt like crying. Not out of fear or shock. But despair. Everything around her was collapsing. Everything she had thought was clean and right had finally begun to appear in its real light. It had been happening for some time, but she hadn’t wanted to see. Because what Even had said was true: no one is as they seem, and most of life, apart from honest betrayal, is lies and deceit. And the day we discover we are no different is the day we no longer want to live.

‘Are you coming, Kaja?’

‘Yes.’

Kaja pushed off from the door through which she would so much have liked to flee. Went into the bedroom. The moonlight fell between the curtains and onto the bed, onto the bottle of champagne he had brought with him to celebrate, onto his naked, athletic torso, onto the face she had once thought the most handsome on this earth. The white patches on his face shimmered like luminous paint. As if he were aglow inside.





44


The Anchor


KAJA STOOD IN THE DOORWAY LOOKING AT HIM. MIKAEL Bellman. To outsiders: a competent, ambitious POB, a happily married father of three and soon-to-be head of the new Kripos leviathan that would lead all murder investigations in Norway. To her, Kaja Solness: a man she had fallen in love with from the moment they’d met, who had seduced her with all the arts at his disposal, plus a few others. She had been easy game, but that wasn’t his fault, it was hers. By and large. What was it Harry had said? ‘He’s married and says he’ll leave his wife and kids for you, but never does?’

He had hit the nail on the head. Of course. That’s how banal we are. We believe because we want to believe. In gods, because that dulls the fear of death. In love, because it enhances the notion of life. In what married men say, because that is what married men say.

She knew what Mikael would say. And then he said it.

‘I have to be off. She’ll start wondering.’

‘I know,’ Kaja sighed and, as usual, did not ask the questions that always popped up when he said that: Why not stop her wondering? Why not do what you’ve said for so long? And now a new question emerged: Why am I no longer sure I want him to do this?

Harry clung to the banisters on his way up to the Haematology Department at Rikshospital. He was soaked in sweat, frozen, and his teeth were chattering like a two-stroke engine. And he was drunk. Drunk on Jim Beam, drunk and full of devilry, full of himself, full of shit. He staggered along the corridor; he could already make out the door to his father’s room at the end.

A nurse’s head poked out from a duty room, looked at him and was gone again. Harry had fifty metres to go to the door when the nurse, plus a skinhead male nurse, skidded into the corridor and cut him off.

‘We don’t keep medicines on this ward,’ the skinhead said.

‘What you are saying is not only a gross lie,’ Harry said, trying to control his balance and the chattering of his teeth, ‘but a gross insult. I’m not a junkie, but a son here to visit his father. So please, move out of my way.’

‘I apologise,’ said the female nurse who seemed quite reassured by Harry’s immaculate pronunciation. ‘But you smell like a brewery, and we cannot allow—’

‘A brewery is beer,’ Harry said. ‘Jim Beam is bourbon. Which would require you to say I smell like a distillery, frøken. It’s . . .’

‘Nevertheless,’ the male nurse said, grabbing Harry by the elbow. And let it go just as quickly when his own hand was twisted round. The nurse groaned and grimaced with pain before Harry released him. Harry rose to his full height and eyeballed him.

‘Ring the police, Gerd,’ the nurse said softly without letting Harry out of his sight.

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll deal with this,’ said a voice with a suggestion of a lisp. It was Sigurd Altman. He was walking with a file under his arm and a friendly smile on his face. ‘Have you got time to come with me to where we keep drugs, Harry?’

Harry swayed back and forth twice. Focused on the small, thin man with the round glasses. Then he nodded.

‘This way,’ said Altman, who had already continued walking.

Altman’s office was, strictly speaking, a storeroom. There were no windows, there was no noticeable ventilation, but there was a desk and computer, a camp bed, which he explained was for night shifts, so that he could sleep or be roused whenever needed. And a lockable cabinet Harry assumed contained a range of chemical uppers and downers.