Tuesday 11 November, 06:20
Viktor Brekke was awake, because Viktor Brekke was always awake at that hour.
Three in the morning until about six was the stretch he had stopped fighting. He had tried the breathing and the cold water and the warm milk, and he had tried the pills, and the pills had worked, which was the trouble with them. Now there was a truce. The night was his. He used it for the things daylight was too loud for.
The Dorthea moved under him, old timber talking to the fenders in a slow, wet grumble. She was a wooden houseboat built for a calmer century, moored at the end of a floating jetty below the old houses of Sandviken, and in a southwesterly she complained like an aunt. Tonight there was no wind to speak of. The drizzle did not fall so much as hang in the air and wait for something to walk into it. Out across Byfjorden the lights of Askøy lay low and broken, and to the south, past Skuteviken, Bryggen’s gables stood dark. Above the city the lights on Fløyen burned inside the cloud like lamps behind wet paper.
At half past three he had gone down to the galley for water and opened the drawer by the sink. Spoons. A tin of matches. A blister strip of zopiclone, the foil pushed out in a neat line from one end. He did not take it out. He counted through the plastic with his thumb, the way other men count the days they have been sober.
Fourteen.
He closed the drawer and went up on deck with a blanket and a coffee, and he had been there since.
A cormorant stood on the next jetty with its wings half spread, doing its strange black heraldry. The old man two boats down, who came out at first light to check his lines and never said good morning, called them skarv and called them thieves. This one fished the same patch of water every dawn. Viktor had stopped thinking of it as a different bird each day.
At twenty past six the phone rang. A Bergen number he did not know.
“Brekke.”
“My name is Kristin Aase. I run a company called Fjordnett. I’m sorry to call so early.” A pause, and in it the sound of someone holding herself together by main force. “One of my people is dead. All our systems are down, across half the country, and the police are in my office. I was given your name a long time ago, and I kept it, and I don’t know who else to call.”
“Given my name by whom?”
Another pause.
“By Geir,” she said. “Geir Solheim. He’s the one who’s dead.”
The cormorant dropped from the jetty. It hit the water without a splash and was gone.
He had not heard the name in nine years, but he could see the man at once: big, slow, terrible glasses, a fleece zipped to the chin in a server room in Oslo where the air conditioning ran like a winter. Six months in 2016 when Fjordnett had lent him to Kripos because a care-home chain ran their software and nobody at Kripos could read it. A habit of saying let’s just check, mildly, at the very moment Viktor least wanted to hear it.
“Where are you?” He was on his feet. The blanket slid to the deck.
“Kokstad. Did you— did you know him?”
“I knew him,” Viktor said. “Don’t let anyone turn anything off. Not one machine. Not even the one he died next to. I’m coming.”
He left the coffee on the rail and the deck light burning.
The gangway was slick with weed and his left knee told him about it on every slat. Up the steep smau between the old houses to where the car stood under a dripping rowan. He drove south through a city that had not yet heard. Buses with their insides lit like aquariums. A man in a fluorescent vest hosing down the fish market. On the radio a woman from NRK was saying the word Askøy in the careful voice they used for things they did not yet understand, and he switched it off, because he wanted to see it before anyone told him what it was.
Out on the water, the cormorant came up somewhere else entirely.