Tuesday 11 November, 11:15
She laid it out on the meeting-room table like a hand of cards: the door logs, a laptop, her notebook with a pen across it.
“Server room first,” she said. “Separate reader, like your boy said. Three cards. From 18:00 last night until Kristin let the police in at 06:12 this morning, one card used that door.” She turned the sheet towards him and put her finger on the line.
21:58:07 SOLHEIM GEIR IN
Nothing under it until Kristin’s card, at 06:12.
“Never came out,” Viktor said.
“Never came out.” She took her finger away. “Now the main entrance.”
The main entrance was busier. Then, in the dark part of the evening, a name that made Viktor sit forward.
22:15:41 LIE JONAS IN
22:19:02 LIE JONAS OUT
“He told me he went home at six,” Viktor said. “Annoyed. Slammed out.”
“He told me the same.” Dahl’s voice did not change at all. “And then there’s this.”
The laptop. Geir had worn a fitness tracker for three years because his GP had told him to, and had never once looked at it. A heart-rate line ran across the screen like a coastline drawn by a steady hand. A man sitting down, working, drinking bad coffee.
At 22:34 the line went up like a flare.
It climbed, stuttered, climbed again. It jagged for three minutes. At 22:37 it fell off the edge of the screen and lay flat along the bottom, and stayed there, and the hours ran on beside it with nobody in them.
“Twenty-two thirty-four,” Viktor said.
“Fear does that,” said Dahl. “So does somebody walking in on you. Fifteen minutes after your boy walked back out of a building he says he left at six.”
Viktor looked at the two printouts and at the line on the screen, and for half a minute the case was a murder again. A young man with a temper and one of three cards. A quarrel at six that had not finished. A door that only logged one name, because you only need one card to hold a door for somebody else.
“Get him,” he said.
Jonas came in white, saw the printout, and settled on outrage.
“My charger,” he said. “I left my charger. I got halfway home with my phone on four per cent and I came back. Four minutes. I didn’t go near the room.”
“You didn’t mention it.”
“You didn’t ask!” It came out loud, and he heard it, and he sat down. “Faen. I didn’t think. I didn’t think it was anything.”
It took Dahl’s people twenty minutes to make it nothing. The camera above the front door had him walking in with his hood up, picking a white cable off the reception desk, and walking out with it wound round his hand. The car-park camera had his headlights swinging out at 22:20 and not coming back. At 22:34 Jonas Lie had been sitting at a red light on the E39 with a dying phone and a grievance.
Dahl’s phone rang at eight minutes to twelve. She listened, wrote, said “Takk” and put it down.
“Gades institutt. Provisional.” She read from her own handwriting. “Cardiac arrest. Known heart condition. His GP knew, his sister in Florø knew, nobody here did, because Geir didn’t talk about Geir. There’s a head wound where he caught the edge of the rack going down. Secondary. He was very likely gone before he reached the floor.”
“The glasses,” Viktor said.
“I asked. She says they see it often. Pain starts in the chest or the arm, and a man thinks he’s tired. He takes his glasses off. Folds them, puts them somewhere safe. Rubs his eyes. Sits down for a minute.” Dahl closed the notebook. “Then he tries to get up and go for help. The full post-mortem’s Thursday.”
The arm flung out towards the door. Viktor had read it in Teodor’s statement as a man reaching for an attacker. It had been a man reaching for a handle.
“He was alone,” Dahl said. “Nobody did this to him. His heart did it.” She sat back. “There’s no murder, Brekke.”
Jonas put both hands over his face. Viktor looked at the laptop instead, where Dahl had pasted a second timestamp beside the flat line.
“When did it fire?”
“03:10. Askøy, Øygarden, Alver. More or less together.”
“Three ten.” He sat forward. “He died at twenty-two thirty-seven. The attack didn’t start for another four and a half hours.”
“So?”
“So the hero’s dead too. The one in the car park, who catches them in the act.” Viktor got up and went to the window. “There was nothing to catch. So what was he doing in that room at ten at night?”
“His job. It was patch night. You said so yourself.”
“Maybe.” Outside, a gull hung over the car park and rode the wind sideways and went nowhere. “Or he’d started to see it. Not the attack. What’s underneath. And he died at the wrong end of an evening, too early to tell anyone.” He turned round. “I want everything he touched yesterday. Every check he ran and every one he stopped running.”
Dahl glanced at the clock on the wall. Five to twelve. “Rød’s on in five minutes. I’m sending him the pathologist’s word now, in writing.” She typed it with her thumb, read it once, sent it. “He’ll say attack anyway. He’s had the word in his mouth since breakfast.”
On the table Jonas’s phone lit up, and lit up again, and he turned it face down without reading it.
“Line.”
“Don’t.” She picked up her notebook. “And don’t get comfortable. Thursday’s Thursday. Until then it’s still a maybe.”