Tuesday 11 November, 08:10
Jonas Lie had not stopped moving since the police let him back into the building. He paced the length of the little kitchen with his phone in one hand, and when Viktor came in he was in the middle of a sentence, “no, tell them we’ll have a statement by—” He saw the stranger and hung up without finishing it.
“I didn’t do anything,” Jonas said.
“I didn’t ask.” Viktor fetched two coffees from the machine, put one in Jonas’s hand, and sat down at the little table, which obliged Jonas to sit too. “Every first sentence anyone has said to me this morning has been a defence against something I hadn’t accused them of. It’s very educational.”
Jonas laughed, one short unhappy bark, and some of the wire went out of him. He was twenty-seven and looked younger, with a two-day beard that hadn’t decided what it wanted to be and a conference T-shirt with the logo washed half off. His left knee kept going under the table.
“You’re the guy. The one Kristin called. Geir used to talk about a guy.”
“Did he.”
“Said there was someone in Oslo who could read a system the way other people read a face. Said he was a disaster, personally.” Jonas glanced up, suddenly aware of whom he was talking to. “Sorry.”
“He wasn’t wrong,” Viktor said. “Tell me about yesterday.”
Jonas had been the last person to see Geir alive, and he knew it. He talked to the coffee rather than to Viktor.
“We had a release going out. 14.2. The big quarterly one, goes to every customer we’ve got.” He turned the cup a quarter turn on the table. “We ship on Patch Tuesday. Always have. Second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft push their security patches, and every IT guy at every surgery in the country is up at night rebooting stuff anyway, so we go out with it. One evening of pain instead of two. Release goes out nine o’clock tonight.” He stopped. “Was supposed to.”
“And Monday?”
“Monday’s patch night. Geir’s thing. He stayed late the night before every release with a thermos and a printed checklist, like, actual paper, and he went through all of it. Every line. Twice.” Jonas’s mouth went crooked. “We used to call it the liturgy.”
Viktor thought of the checklist on the desk he had walked past, half the boxes ticked in blue biro. Geir in Oslo had kept the same kind of list, in a ring binder with a coffee ring on the cover, and had read from it aloud at two in the morning while Viktor sat beside him pretending not to listen.
“You argued.”
“Same argument we always have. Had.” The knee stopped. “About six. My part was done. Merged, tested, green across the board. He wanted another evening of checks on stuff that has never once broken. I told him it was theatre.” He said the word as if it had a hook in it. “That’s what I said. Theatre. And he looked at me over those glasses and said, the theatre is the only reason you still have a job to be arrogant in. And then I went home. I was pissed off. And he stayed to finish, because he always stayed, and now he’s—”
He did not finish that one either.
Viktor let the silence work. Outside the kitchen window the rain had eased to something you could see through.
“Was there anything else bothering him? Last week. Last month.”
Jonas shrugged. “He was in a mood. He spent ages at the front desk one day last week, talking low. Came back and sat with his headphones on and didn’t say a word to anyone till lunch.” He rubbed his face. “I figured it was the budget. It’s always the budget.”
“Who had a key to that room?”
“Everyone’s got a card. It’s not really a key, the door just reads the badge. But the server room’s on its own reader. Geir. Kristin. Me. That’s the whole list.”
“Three cards.”
“Three cards.” Jonas looked up, and Viktor watched him arrive, in real time, at what three cards meant. The colour went out of his face from the top down. The knee started again.
“Oh,” he said. “That’s why she’s put me in a room with you.”