The Redbreast(126)

everything went quiet was the human voice.

Streaks of quivering raindrops fought their way

across the carriage windows. Harry peered out at

the flat, wet fields and the electric cables rising

and falling between the posts alongside the track.

On the platform in Fredrikstad a Janizary band

had been playing. The conductor on the train had

explained to him that they were practising for

Independence Day on 17 May.

‘Every Tuesday, every year at this time,’ he said.

‘The band leader thinks that rehearsals are more

realistic when they are surrounded by people.’

Harry had thrown a few clothes in a bag. The

apartment in Klippan was supposed to be simple,

but very well furnished. A television, a stereo,

even some books.

‘ Mein Kampf and that sort of thing,’ Meirik had

said with a grin. He had not called Rakel. Even

though he could have done with hearing her voice.

A last human voice.

‘The next station is Halden,’ came the nasal

crackle from the loudspeaker, interrupted by the

strident, off-key tone of the train’s brakes.

Harry ran a finger across the window as he

juggled the sentence in his head. A strident, off-key

tone. An off-key strident tone. A tone which is

strident . . .

A tone can’t be off-key, he thought. A tone isn’t off-key until it is set alongside other tones. Even Ellen, the most musical person he had known,

needed a few moments, a few tones, to hear the

music. Even she was unable to pinpoint a single

moment and say with total certainty that it was off-

key. It was wrong, it was a lie.

And yet this tone sang in his ear, high-pitched and

gratingly offkey. He was going to Klippan to stake

out a potential sender of a fax which as yet had

provoked no more than a couple of newspaper

headlines. He had combed the day’s newspapers

and it was obvious that they had already forgotten

the story about the threatening letters of which they

had made so much a mere four days ago. Instead,

Dagbladet wrote about the skier Lasse Kjus, who

hated Norway, and Bernt Brandhaug, the Under

Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, who, if

quoted correctly, had said that traitors should be

given the death sentence.

There was another tone that was off-key. But

perhaps because he wanted it to be. Rakel’s

departure from the restaurant, the expression in her

eyes, almost a declaration of love before she cut it

short, leaving him in free fall and with a bill of

eight hundred kroner that she had boasted she

would pay. It didn’t make sense. Or did it? Rakel

had been in Harry’s flat, seen him drinking, heard

him talking tearfully about a dead colleague he had

known for barely two years as if she was the only

person he had ever had a close relationship with.

Pathetic. Humans should be spared the sight of

each other stripped bare. So why hadn’t she called

it a day then and there? Why hadn’t she said to

herself that this man was more trouble than she

could handle?

As usual, he had escaped into his work when his

private life became too much of a burden. It was

typical of a certain type of man, he had read. That

was probably why he had spent the weekend

brewing conspiracy theories and scenarios which

placed all the various elements – the Märklin rifle,

Ellen’s murder, the murder of Hallgrim Dale – in

one pot so that he could stir it up into one foul-

smelling broth. That was pathetic too.

He ran an eye over the paper spread out over the

collapsible table in front of him, focused on the

photograph of the FO head. There was something

familiar about that face.

He rubbed his chin with his hand. From

experience he knew that the brain tended to make

its own associations when an investigation was in

a rut. And the investigation into the rifle was a

closed chapter. Meirik had made that clear – he

had called it a non-case. Meirik had wanted him to

write reports about neo-Nazis and do undercover

work among rootless youths in Sweden. Well, fuck

him!

‘. . . the platform is on the right hand side.’

What if he simply got off the train? What was the

worst that could happen? As long as the Foreign

Office and POT were frightened that the shooting

incident at the toll barrier last year would leak out,

Meirik couldn’t give him the boot. And as far as

Rakel was concerned . . . as far as Rakel was

concerned, he didn’t know.

The train came to a halt with a final groan and the

carriage fell quiet. Outside in the corridor, doors

slammed. Harry remained in his seat. He could

hear the song from the Walkman more clearly. It

was one he had heard many times before; he just

couldn’t remember where.

72

Nordberg and the Continental Hotel. 9