The invoice hung above the desk on a drawing pin that had rusted a ring into the paper. He had never framed it. Framing was for people who expected visitors.
Kr 86 250,00. Due 30.06.2016. Underneath, in his own biro, a date a year later and the word settled, crossed out so hard the pen had gone through. He could still tell you the colour of their lawyer’s tie. After that, the buses. Contracts that ended in March. A call centre where they timed your toilet breaks.
At noon he made coffee, forgot it, and sat with the laptop on his knees and watched the press conference live.
A police chief with a good haircut said attack. He said it twice, enjoying it, and behind him the logo stood very blue and very certain. He smiled at that. It was a big word. He had given it to them, and now it was theirs.
Then the police chief said lost his life.
He stopped the stream. He ran it back and played it again, and then a third time, leaning in as though there might be another word hidden under the first one. The smile went first. Something else came after it, and he looked at it for a while, and put it away where he kept things.
The news cut to footage from the morning. A car park in the rain. Police tape. People in office clothes holding their elbows. And walking past the camera, not looking at it, a man in a coat that had been wet for hours, his shoulders up, his hands in his pockets.
He knew the walk before he knew the face. He had watched it every evening for a year: down a gangway at the bottom of the hill, across a deck, under a light that was never switched off. The man on the boat who never slept.
It took him longer to find the rest. A newspaper photograph, small and grey, from a long time ago. A review. A case in Oslo. A name he had read twice back then because he liked stories in which a clever man was made to sit in a room and listen.
“Brekke,” he said, to the flat.
He went to the window. Between the roofs, in the view he paid four thousand a month extra for, the boat sat low against its fenders, and the deck light was still burning, in broad daylight, for nobody.
He pulled the sleeve of the grey hoodie down over his hand. Without noticing, he had chewed the cuticle on his thumb back to the quick. He put the thumb in his mouth and tasted iron, and the coffee on the desk had a skin on it.