Anne Holt - 1222

Cato Hammer’s disappearance made things even worse. At first I didn’t think people would be particularly concerned. I mean, obviously they would react if they got to know the brutal truth about how he died. But so far no one knew, apart from the staff, Dr Streng, Geir Rugholmen, Adrian and me. The general unease over the fact that one person hadn’t turned up for breakfast was therefore striking. After all, Finse 1222 is a real old haunted house of a building, with lots of hidden nooks and crannies and narrow, forgotten corridors. Bearing in mind Cato Hammer’s theological flexibility, something he had constantly stressed in public, he could just as well still be lying in a warm, comfortable bed, which according to the Bible he shouldn’t be doing.

But then there was this woman. She was hysterical, to put it mildly. It was driving us all mad. Most people were already in a somewhat unstable frame of mind by the time the two lads hurtled down the stairs and into the lobby, both bawling at the same time.

‘He’s shooting! They’re shooting up there! On the top floor! They’ve got guns!’

Six or seven people were standing at the foot of the stairs; two of them were girls from the handball team. They started shrieking as if a boy had surprised them in the shower. From my position diagonally across the room with the long table between me and the stairs, I saw an elderly man give such a violent start that he threw a full cup of coffee up in the air. It rotated slowly on its way down to the floor. In his confusion the old man lost his balance. The bouncy dog got red hot coffee on its nose, and barked, howled and whimpered in turn as it zigzagged among all the people, searching for its owner. When the old man fell to the floor, the girls put their hands to their faces and took a deep breath before letting out an ear-splitting, atonal scream. Someone shouted for a doctor. The dog owner yelled imaginative curses at the lot of us before he finally managed to grab the dog; he clutched it to his chest and rushed into the men’s toilets. Roar Hanson, who for some reason was standing right in the corner behind the counter in the Millibar, where strictly speaking nobody was allowed except the staff, threw himself on the floor and disappeared from my view. I noticed that Veronica, Adrian’s black-clad friend, was standing on the same side of the bar. She started to laugh, a surprisingly hoarse, deep laugh that in no way matched the rest of her spindly figure. The Kurd also hurled himself down, but unlike the priest he was thinking of others, not himself. He lay down on top of his wife, covering her with his body. The movement was so quick that it must have been something he had been trained to do. A woman who had been sitting on her own knitting throughout the previous evening started sobbing loudly. The pink baby, whom I hadn’t seen since the accident, woke up and started yelling in her mother’s arms. The noise level in reception threatened to drown out the storm. Shouts about guns and shooting were still coming from the stairs. One of the businessmen – I thought I might have seen his photo in Dagens Næringlsiv but I couldn’t think of his name – quickly closed his laptop, wriggled out of the window seat and started to run towards St Paal’s Bar with the computer under his arm.

‘They’re going to shoot us!’ somebody bawled. ‘They’re on their way!’

The man increased his speed. Several people followed him. A four- or five-year-old boy with his mouth full of food and a roll in each hand was knocked over by a tall woman as she ran. I tried to move so that I could help the child, but I barely had time to release the brakes before Geir Rugholmen came racing out of the kitchen. He picked up the child and placed him on my knee in one smooth movement before climbing up onto the table, raising his arms in the air and bellowing:

‘Stop! Stop! Shut up, the lot of you!’

It was like flicking the switch on a circuit breaker.

Not only did everyone stop talking, but all the people who were running, pushing and waving their arms around froze like the players in a game of statues when the music stops.

Afterwards, I thought of that moment as a turning point. The atmosphere had shifted long ago. And yet it was only now that I really began to feel afraid. Not of the storm. Not of the murderer at liberty in our midst.

‘Right, listen to me!’

Geir was no longer bellowing. There was no need.

‘He’s dying!’ a feeble voice shouted from the stairs, at the far side of the lobby. ‘Elias is dying! Somebody help me!’

Geir gazed out across the room, at all the faces turned towards him. Before he found what he was looking for, Dr Streng and the female gynaecologist were hurrying across the floor in a slalom race between the motionless figures. The female doctor was the first to reach the man on the floor. She bent down, and I could no longer see her or her vertically challenged colleague.

The boy on my knee was weeping quietly.

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ hissed Geir Rugholmen. ‘Nobody is shooting. Do you hear me? Not one single shot has been fired, and not one single shot is going to be fired. Is everything OK over there?’

Nobody answered him. I could hear rhythmic counting from the other end of the reception area, and assumed that Elias’s tired heart had been unable to cope with so many exhausting experiences in less than twenty-four hours.

I heard cautious steps behind me, and half-turned around. It was the woman who had knocked over the little boy without stopping. She stood on the short staircase between St Paal’s Bar and reception, next to the businessman who had also come back, crestfallen and red-cheeked. Some of the others who had tried to flee from the imagined shooting drama were slowly moving closer. The woman was staring at me with eyes that reminded me of why I had begun to feel so afraid.

A sense of unease was spreading through the room. The counting stopped. I looked up at Geir, who could presumably see what was going on from his elevated position. He rubbed a hand over his eyes.

‘I’m very sorry,’ said the female doctor, far away.

The only sounds that could now be heard above the storm were the sobs of the little boy I was holding, and the weeping of the woman who had just become a widow.

The Finse disaster had just claimed its third victim.

The woman behind me came up to my chair, held out a thin, uncertain hand and said, ‘I’m sorry. You must forgive me!’

I didn’t look at her. Instead I met Geir Rugholmen’s gaze. He was still standing on the table, his legs wide apart; he was strong, but there was an air of resignation about him. We were both thinking the same thing.

The people who were snowed in at Finse 1222 had begun to let go of their dignity. And only eighteen hours had passed since the accident.

After Elias Grav’s ill-timed heart attack, people did at least seem to be trying to pull themselves together. The two young men who had started the whole thing by yelling about guns being fired seemed quite upset. Geir had not given up until they had loudly and clearly admitted that maybe there hadn’t been any shooting. But they had definitely seen guns! There was a man, or maybe even two, standing in the corridor outside the top floor apartments with an automatic weapon in his hands. They stuck to that, the boys, even if that business about the shooting might possibly have been cracking and banging caused by the storm. They might have misheard. They really didn’t mean to scare anyone, they said in their defence, but when the rumours started about the guards on the top floor, they felt they had the right to investigate the matter. Geir repeated his clear instruction: everyone was to respect the cordon he had set up in front of the door leading to the narrow corridor; Berit Tverre then took over and informed the assembled company that unfortunately Cato Hammer had passed away during the night. He had been carrying out a small errand down in the lobby at about three o’clock, and had fallen over. The cause of death was presumed to be a massive brain haemorrhage. Magnus Streng confirmed this, weighed down with seriousness, his hands joined together as if to show respect for the dead man’s profession.