Tuesday 11 November, 10:40
Viktor went outside to think, which meant he went outside to smoke, which he had given up four years ago and took up again roughly once a case.
The pøsregn had thinned to a fine, cold drizzle. Beyond the fence and a strip of wet birches, Løvstakken stood with its head in the cloud, as though it had decided not to watch. He lit the cigarette with his back to the wind and held the first lungful longer than a man should.
Dahl found him there. She stood a metre off with her hands in her coat pockets and said nothing for a while, which had always been one of the better things about Line Dahl.
“It’s the Oslo thing,” she said eventually. It was not a question.
“Everything’s the Oslo thing.”
He had been good once, in the uncomplicated way that gets a man promoted past the edge of his own judgement. In his last year at Kripos he had run an operation against a group bleeding money out of a chain of care homes, so certain he knew how they were getting in that he stopped checking the dull things. He had chased the clever door while they walked in and out through the stupid one.
A man had helped him. Henrik, forty-four, a clerk in the care-home company’s finance office, frightened and decent, who came to Viktor with what he knew because he could not think of a reason not to. Viktor promised him it would be handled carefully. Then Viktor was in a hurry, because in those days being in a hurry felt like being good at the job, and a file went to the wrong place, and a name that should never have left a locked room left it.
He did not say the rest. He never said the rest. What he saw instead was the hearing room. A long table. Water jugs nobody touched. People who had never met Henrik discussing the chain of events in voices like a shipping forecast. And in the second row, Henrik’s widow, in a buttoned raincoat, with a carrier bag of groceries on her lap. Milk. A loaf. The corner of a tin. She held that bag through four hours of testimony and never once put it down, as though the day might still end with her going home and making dinner for two.
“Do you remember the bag?” he said.
Dahl looked at the mountain. “I sat two rows behind her.”
“She never put it down.”
“No.” The drizzle beaded on her collar. “I said what I said in there because it was true, Brekke. I’m not going to stand by a fence and apologise for it.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“You were going to.” She let it go. “Geir was on that case. Wasn’t he. The technical side.”
“He was lent to us,” Viktor said.
Dahl nodded. “I remember him.”
“Geir was the one who found where the file had gone. Afterwards.” Viktor turned the cigarette in his fingers. “He came and stood in my doorway. He didn’t shout. Geir never shouted. He just said, you skipped the boring part, Viktor. Then he said, let’s just check, and he pulled a chair over, at midnight, and we went through every single thing I should have gone through in the first place. Until it got light. He wasn’t my friend. He thought I was arrogant, and he was right. But he sat there until morning.”
The cigarette had burned down to the filter. He did not drop it until the heat was in the skin of his fingers, and Dahl watched him not drop it, and said nothing about that either.
He ground it out on the wet tarmac.
“I left three months later. Geir went back to Bergen, to the little firm that had lent him out, to keep the lights on for two hundred customers. And now he’s on the floor of his own server room on patch night, of all the nights in the month, and everybody standing in that car park thinks he died fighting someone off.” He looked at her. “I need to know if that’s true before they carve it on his stone.”
Dahl took her hands out of her pockets.
“The door logs are back,” she said. “The pathologist is ringing me within the hour. Come inside before you set fire to something.” She had already turned towards the building. “You’re going to like it. And then you’re going to hate what it means.”