Tuesday 11 November, 07:05
The Fjordnett building sat at the dead end of a street of identical grey boxes in the office park at Kokstad, architecture designed to be forgotten on purpose. Behind it Løvstakken had pulled the cloud down over its shoulders. The drizzle from the harbour had thickened on the drive south, and by the time Viktor parked it had turned to pøsregn, rain that came down in ropes and bounced.
The car park held two police cars and an ambulance with its rear doors open and nothing urgent about anyone near it. A scatter of staff stood under the overhang of the bicycle shed in their good coats, phones in hand, because no one had told them they could go inside and no one had told them they could go home. One of them, a young man in a thin rain jacket, was talking fast into his phone and walking in small circles.
A woman detached herself from the doorway and came to meet him. Mid-forties, dark coat, the unhurried walk of a person who has been to a great many scenes and learned not to run at any of them.
“Brekke.” She said it like a diagnosis.
“Dahl.” He nearly smiled. “You look well.”
“I look wet. You look like a man who hasn’t slept.”
“I never do. You always did get the easy deductions first.”
Line Dahl did not smile back, quite, but something in her face let go by half a degree, which from her was close to an embrace.
They had worked three cases together in the old days, before Kripos and he had parted company. Then she had given evidence at the review. She had sat at a table under a strip light in Oslo and said, in her flat Bergen voice, what she had seen him do, and it had been enough.
She looked him up and down. “All those years with the østlendinger at Kripos. You’ve gone soft round the vowels.”
“So I’m told.”
She turned her back to the rain and dropped her voice. “Here is what I’ve got. A dead systems man behind a locked door. A ransom note on two hundred screens. A company that writes the software for every GP surgery and home-care service from Kirkenes to Lindesnes, and three kommuner, Askøy, Øygarden and Alver, with nurses driving round in the dark. The health directorate has already got hold of Politimester Rød, and Rød has called a press conference for twelve o’clock.” “If he finds out I’ve let a civilian with a review file into his crime scene, I’ll be directing traffic at Danmarksplass by Christmas. So I would dearly like to know whether I’m looking at a murder, a break-in, a heart attack, or the worst coincidence in the history of Western Norway.”
“Give me an hour,” Viktor said, “and I’ll tell you which of those it isn’t.”
Inside, the office was open-plan and ordinary. Desks, tired plants, a foosball table nobody had touched since the pandemic, a wall of framed thank-you letters from grateful municipalities. Only one of the staff had come in. A woman in her sixties stood behind the reception desk in a cardigan the colour of heather, filling the coffee machine with careful hands. Her eyes were red at the rims. On the desk beside her sat a Tupperware box with the lid off, and in it a dozen skillingsboller, glazed, still giving off a faint warm breath of cardamom into the cold air from the door.
“Someone has to make coffee,” she said to nobody in particular, and then, to Viktor, “Please. Take one. Nobody will eat them.”
He took one, because it seemed to matter to her. As he passed the windows he saw the young man in the rain jacket come in out of the rain, and the woman leave the desk and go to him and put a hand on his shoulder, briefly, as if steadying a ladder. “Mona,” he said, and let her. Then he shook it off and went on talking into his phone.
Someone had written on a whiteboard beside the operations room, in capitals, underlined twice: DO NOT TURN ANYTHING OFF. Viktor asked who had written it.
“I did.”
Kristin Aase was smaller than her voice on the telephone, and greyer, in a navy jacket buttoned to the top button. She shook his hand too hard and let go too soon. Her lipstick was on straight. A lanyard round her neck held two key cards, and one of them was a different colour from the other.
“Datatilsynet has to be notified within seventy-two hours. I’ve started the form. I didn’t know what to put under nature of the breach.” She said it in one breath, as if she had been saying it to herself in the car. “Two hundred customers. Three municipalities with no patient records. Eleven staff. Twelve. Eleven.”
He watched her correct herself and not blink. Her systems administrator had been found dead before six that morning, and here she stood in perfect order, the lipstick on straight. Maybe that was what twenty-one years of running a company did to a person. Maybe it was something else. He put it somewhere he would find it later.
“Tell me about last night,” he said. “A man died, and someone took your systems apart. Those can be one story, or two stories that happened to share an evening. Which they are is the whole case.”
Through the operations room, past the red screens nobody had touched, the glass wall of the server room was misted at the bottom with cold. Beyond it a police photographer moved round a shape on the floor in short, careful steps, and every time the flash went the racks lit up white and went dark again.
“What did Geir find, Kristin? A man like Geir doesn’t die in his own server room, on the night of an attack, by accident. Not unless accidents have changed since I left.”
She looked at the glass for a long time. When she spoke, the rehearsed voice had gone.
“He asked me last week who had keys to the server room,” she said. “I told him not to be paranoid.”