Thursday 13 November, 11:40
The safe opened on the second try, because Kristin’s hands were shaking and she wouldn’t let anyone else do it. She used the odd-coloured card from her lanyard. It opened nothing else in the building. Geir had insisted she carry it, so that the tapes were never only his.
The tapes were real: grey cartridges in a plastic rack, each with a strip of masking tape across the spine and a date in Geir’s square, unhurried capitals. SØN 09.11. The drive they belonged to sat in a corner of the server room under a skin of dust, three metres from the police tape on the floor that marked where he had lain. Someone had stuck a label to the top of it, a long time ago, in the same hand.
DO NOT UNPLUG. EVER. THIS MEANS YOU, JONAS.
Jonas read it twice. Then he went out and stood in the corridor, looking at a fire extinguisher on the wall as though it had said something to him. Viktor let him stand there.
The restore started at eight minutes to twelve. The progress bar thought about it and then offered an estimate: 6 h 14 min remaining. Somewhere inside the drive something began to turn with a soft, ancient whirr, like a ship’s engine heard through a hull.
The client tables came back first, a little after one, and Ingrid from support was waiting at the printer. By two there were three cardboard boxes of paper on the reception desk: names, addresses, door codes, medication, the dose and the hour, which daughter to ring. Kristin took Askøy. Ingrid took Øygarden. Alver went in the back of a patrol car with an officer Dahl could spare.
Viktor drove Kristin. She didn’t ask why, and he didn’t tell her that she looked like a woman who would put her car into the fjord at the first roundabout.
The wind came off Byfjorden in long hard shoves and the car shuddered on the Askøy bridge. Below them the water was the colour of a filleting knife. Kristin held the box on her knees with both arms round it.
“Everyone is very polite,” she said to the windscreen. “Datatilsynet. HelseCERT. Everyone.” She said nothing else until Kleppestø.
The nurse was waiting in the car park behind the care centre, in a blue uniform under a man’s anorak, with her own car door open and the engine running for the heat. Thirty-something, hair scraped back, the face of someone who had not had a whole night’s sleep since Monday. Siri Mjelde. Viktor knew the name from the incident log: the bus shelter at Kleppestø, 05:12 on Tuesday.
She took the box from Kristin with both hands.
Viktor stood back by the car. It wasn’t his conversation. But he heard it, because the wind brought it to him, and because he had been waiting two days to hear one sentence and hadn’t let himself know it.
“Ragnar had his insulin by nine,” Siri said. “Tuesday. Late, but he had it.”
Kristin made a sound that wasn’t a word.
“I couldn’t get in. The code was in the app.” Siri said it flatly, like a fact in a report she had already written several times. “His daughter lives in Florvåg. I had her number on paper, so I rang her, and she drove over with her key in her dressing gown. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his coat on. He’d eaten at six. Of course he had.” Something moved at the corner of her mouth. “The dog was very pleased to see us.”
She reached into her own car and brought out a ring binder, swollen with damp, the cover held on with two rubber bands. Inside were photocopied lists in plastic sleeves, old ones, with names crossed out in biro and new ones written in above.
“We were told to shred these,” she said. “Data protection. Everything’s in the app now.” She put the binder on top of Kristin’s box, squaring the edges. “I didn’t.”
“No,” Kristin said.
“We asked for this. A folder. A spare tablet. Something.” Siri shut the binder. “Two years. It was always next year’s budget.”
She put the box on her passenger seat and, before she drove off, reached across and pulled the seat belt over it and clicked it home.
They drove back to Kokstad in the dark, which comes down on Bergen in November at about four o’clock like a lid on a pot. Kristin cried for a while, without fuss, somewhere around Danmarksplass, and then blew her nose and rang Ingrid.
At half past four the restore stood at seventy-one per cent. In the open-plan office Jonas was hunched at a new machine that had never touched the old network, rebuilding 14.2 from nothing, line by line, with a coffee gone cold at his elbow. On the monitor beside him the build dashboard showed what it always showed: green ticks, grey crosses, the names of jobs. In its top corner a small green number was counting down.
00:29:40
Viktor’s eyes passed over it the way they pass over the clock on a church tower. Then he went to find Mona.