Friday 14 November, 05:05
Dahl did not run. She turned her back on the room and on the screen with the word Sandviken on it, and rang the politiadvokat in the voice she used for weather reports and next of kin.
Ola spoke without looking up. “Windows laptop. Norwegian keyboard.” He turned the screen a few degrees towards them. “Local user.”
Tobias
“There are a lot of Tobiases,” Dahl said, a hand over the phone.
“One at that address.”
The provider’s email lay open on Dahl’s phone where Ola had put it down. Below the street name, a subscriber name, a date of birth, a second-floor flat. Tobias Riise. 34.
Viktor took the notebook out of his inside pocket and found Wednesday’s page. Riise, contractor 2016. Sued over invoices. Forum posts. “Harmless. Moved to Oslo.” Under it, in the worse handwriting of Thursday’s small hours: Reg. Oslo 2019. He had let a registry address talk him out of it, and then Mona had walked in with a box of buns.
“Haugland’s contractor,” he said.
Dahl came round the table and read it over his arm. “Registered in Oslo,” she said. “Living four hundred metres from you.” Then, more quietly: “I said I’d have someone look at him in the morning. In the morning I had Mona.” She went back to her phone.
The rest came in pieces, from tired people at other desks. A civil case over unpaid invoices, 2017, lost. A year of posts on a developers’ forum after it, long and bitter and well spelled. A man who had been angry in a small room for a long time and had never once raised his voice in public.
At 05:12 the politiadvokat gave the ransakingsbeslutning orally and said the paper would follow. Dahl wrote the time on the back of her hand in biro. Four officers from the response unit, two cars, staged by Sandviken church at half past five. In at six.
“Six,” she said, looking at Viktor. “Not five fifty-nine because somebody can’t stand still.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were breathing like it.”
Behind them Mona sat in the corner under a grey blanket someone had found in the duty room, her coffee gone cold, the 7-Eleven bag folded into a small neat square in her lap.
Dahl let Viktor ride in the back of her car. “You stay in the car,” she said. “If you get out of the car, you stand where I can see you. You do not cross the road.”
The sludd had come in off Byfjorden while they were inside, wet and heavy, not quite snow. Øvregaten was empty. Down to the left, between the old houses, Viktor caught the harbour in pieces: black water, the lights of a fish farm boat, the jetties, and somewhere among them his own roof, dark. He had not slept there since Tuesday.
They parked below the church at 05:29. The response unit sat in the other car with the engine running, four big shapes in the steam of their own breathing.
At 05:34 Ola came on the radio. “He’s stopped.”
“Stopped what?” said Dahl.
“Taking. Nothing for six minutes.”
Dahl looked at her watch. The wipers went. Viktor thought of the canary, the file that, once opened, seemed to do nothing at all, and of a man who had spent four months making sure everything he touched did something.
At 05:40 the radio clicked again.
“Mona’s phone,” Ola said. He read it out with no expression whatever, which was worse.
Tell your friend on the boat his coffee is getting cold.
Viktor turned his head and looked down through the side window at the harbour. Black water. The jetty. The Dorthea, low and dark among the other boats.
“Go,” Dahl said into the radio. “Go now.”
It took twelve minutes, and every one of them was too long. The cars went up Sandviksveien without sirens and turned into Ladegårdsgaten with their lights off. The street door of the old house was locked and took the ram on the second blow. The stair inside was steep and crooked and narrow, built two hundred years ago for people carrying fish, not for four men in vests, and Viktor, standing across the street in the sludd where he had been told to stand, counted the seconds between the first shout of Politi! and the next sound. A chair going over. A man’s voice, high and quick. Then nothing.
The time on his phone said 05:52.
He stood there with the sludd collecting on his shoulders. A light came on behind a curtain on the floor below; an old woman’s face appeared, looked at the police car, looked at him, and withdrew. Somewhere down the hill a delivery van reversed, beeping. Nothing else in Sandviken knew anything had happened.
At 06:14 they brought him out.
He was thinner than Viktor had pictured, and younger-looking, with the soft indoor face of a man who had not been properly outside, or properly asleep, in a long time. Grey hooded top, the hood down, hair flattened on one side as if he’d been leaning on a hand for hours. His wrists were cuffed in front of him, and as they came down the steps Viktor saw his thumbs. The cuticles were bitten back to raw red, one of them bleeding a little into the crease of the knuckle.
He did not look like a cormorant. He looked like a man who had been sending messages to himself in an empty room.
At the car he stopped, and the officer let him, and he looked across the street at Viktor. Not searching. He knew where to look.
“It wasn’t supposed to hurt anyone,” he said. The words came out worn smooth, as if he’d been saying them to himself since 05:40. “The home-care thing. That was never the point. I just needed them looking the wrong way for one day.”
“A man sat in his kitchen waiting for his insulin,” Viktor said. “In the dark. Because you needed one day.” He held Tobias Riise’s eyes until they went somewhere else. “That was the point. You just weren’t the one who had to sit in the kitchen.”
Tobias opened his mouth, closed it, and let himself be folded into the back of the car.
Dahl came down at twenty to seven.
“He was wiping,” she said. “Two drives. The tech pulled the plug at thirty-one per cent.”
“Thirty-one per cent of what?”
“I’m told that’s good news.” She looked at him for a moment, then up at the window. “Come up. To the doorway. Hands in your pockets.”
The stair was as bad as it had sounded. The flat was two rooms under a sloping ceiling, a kitchen corner with an electric kettle and a ring of coffee stains on the worktop, a mattress, and a desk with three monitors, two of them dark and one showing a frozen progress bar. Above the desk a sheet of paper was pinned to the panelling with a single rusted drawing pin, yellowed at the edges. An invoice. Vestdata AS, 2016. A sum that would not have bought Arvid Hellesøy’s van.
Viktor stayed in the doorway with his hands in his pockets.
The window was small and square, set low in the slope of the roof. Between the two roofs opposite there was a slot of sea, grey under the sludd, no wider than a hand held at arm’s length.
On the sill, on a folded tea towel, stood a pair of binoculars.
Viktor did not touch them. He bent at the knees until his eye was level with their line and looked where they were pointing: down the hill, through the gap between the roofs, across the jetties, to a low wooden houseboat with its deck light off and a coffee cup still standing on the rail where he had left it.