Anne Holt - 1222

‘He shares a room with Sebastian Robeck.’

‘Seb- What are you talking about?’

I sank back against the cushions. Sleep just didn’t want to let go of me now it had finally got a firm grip.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ hissed Geir. ‘He’s just one of the blokes from the church commission. They were sharing a room. But when Sebastian Robeck got up for a pee half an hour ago, he discovered that Hanson’s bed was empty. It hasn’t been touched. He never went to bed.’

‘A different room,’ I mumbled. ‘He’s probably gone to bed on his own somewhere. Since the carriage fell there are a few empty rooms.’

‘That’s what I thought. But this bloke, this Sebastian, he said something about…’

I waved my hands to get him to move back a bit. My tongue tasted dry and stale, and I grabbed my jacket to look for some chewing gum.

‘What did he say?’ I asked quietly, rubbing my eyes with both hands. ‘Is Adrian asleep, by the way?’

Geir glanced over at the window and nodded.

‘Roar Hanson had said something,’ he whispered. ‘Tonight, just before everybody went to bed. He told his roommate he had a little errand to do, but it would only take quarter of an hour. He…’

He suddenly looked up.

‘Here he comes,’ he whispered, pointing.

Berit Tverre was moving silently across the room. I threw off the covers and managed to get into my wheelchair before she and her companion reached me.

Fortunately I had gone to bed fully dressed. A sharp smell from my own unwashed body made me roll the chair back as the man held out his hand. He lowered it again, shrugged his shoulders and introduced himself anyway. I mumbled my own name.

‘What’s all this about?’ I said, shaking my head violently; it didn’t help much. ‘Why the drama? It’s the middle of the night, and as there are plenty of empty rooms…’

‘He asked me to wait,’ Sebastian said so loudly that I had to shush him. When he continued, his voice was considerably more subdued. ‘He said he was going to sort something out or meet someone, or maybe he said he had an errand to do. I can’t remember properly. But the strange thing is, he asked me to wait. It was only going to take quarter of an hour or so. I asked him why, but he just repeated that I had to wait.’

‘But were you intending to go somewhere? Why would he ask you to wait – surely you were going to bed anyway?’

‘Of course.’

The man scratched his armpit and a furrow of discontent appeared at the top of his nose.

‘He asked me not to go to sleep. To stay awake until he came back.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘Yes. But he just asked me even more insistently to wait.’

‘And what happened?’

The man squirmed.

‘I fell asleep. I was just so worn out.’

His voice had a complaining, almost guilty undertone.

‘I can’t see that you’ve committed any sort of crime, exactly.’

I tried to stifle a yawn. Tears sprang to my eyes. I picked up a bottle of Farris mineral water from the coffee table and had a drink. At the same time I swallowed my chewing gum.

‘What shall we do?’ asked Geir. ‘Start searching?’

Silence.

‘Let’s wait,’ said Berit eventually. ‘The last thing we need is to wake everybody up long before they’ve had enough sleep. Hanson has probably gone to bed in one of the other rooms. He might have come back, seen that Sebastian was asleep, felt like reading for a while, and decided to go to a different room so that he wouldn’t disturb him.’

‘Are the empty rooms open?’ I asked. ‘I mean, don’t you have to collect the keys from reception?’

Berit gave a resigned smile. ‘We gave up on that early yesterday. Everything’s open. We’ve put out piles of clean sheets. People have to make their own beds if they want to change rooms. Easier for us, of course, but it also means we have less control. But what could we do, we…’

‘It sounds eminently sensible. And I agree with you. Since it seems probable that there is a perfectly natural explanation for Roar Hanson’s disappearance…’

I stopped. The others were looking at me. All three of them knew I was lying. We were all thinking the same thing: the fact that another member of the church commission had disappeared during the night under slightly mysterious circumstances, almost exactly twenty-four hours after his colleague had been shot dead, was suspicious to say the least. I also assumed that I wasn’t the only one who had noticed Roar Hanson’s unstable state of mind. As far as both Sebastian Robeck and I knew, the priest could have smashed a window and jumped out into the bitter cold of his own free will.

Or something along those lines.

‘… we’ll wait before raising the alarm. If we wake people up now, I’m afraid it could cause an even bigger catastrophe than…’

It was impossible to finish the sentence. And nobody tried to help me out.

‘Could we meet here at…’

It was now ten past three.

‘… six. No, half past six should be fine. Most people will still be asleep then. And we can take it from there. OK?’

Nobody protested. They padded away, each to his or her own space, and I lay down again. Adrian was lying in exactly the same position as when he had settled down three hours earlier. Before I had time to fear insomnia, I was in a deep, dreamless sleep.

It’s strange, what people can cope with.

The clock insisted that it was morning; 06.20, explained the luminous numbers on my mobile. My body protested with some tenacity. I was just as far gone when the monotonous mechanical noise tried to drag me from my sleep as when Geir had woken me a few hours earlier.

My back was aching. A fire was running downwards from the small of my back, disappearing into a pain I could no longer feel. For a moment I wondered if I had regained my mobility. If so, it would be a miracle of biblical proportions. A heavy-calibre projectile had severed the spinal cord between the tenth and eleventh vertebrae, and it was beyond all hope of healing.

I tried to sit up. Although the sofa had seemed like a good idea, I couldn’t lie there all night. At home we had a 120,000 kroner bed from Auping, ordered especially to take into account Nefis’s and my weight and height. Even that can sometimes give me problems. Right now I doubted briefly whether I would be able to pull myself up into a sitting position.

I just about managed it.

‘We’ll start with those rooms we know are empty,’ said Berit quietly, frowning as she noticed that Adrian was gone.

‘The boy went off a while ago,’ I mumbled. ‘I’ve no idea where.’

‘Geir’s already started searching,’ she said. ‘And Sebastian Robeck insists on helping. We’ll see if luck is on our side. Hopefully he’ll turn up in one of the beds.’

‘How many rooms do you actually have?’

Her smile was resigned, and didn’t reach her eyes.

‘More than I’d like at this particular moment. First of all we’ll take the storerooms, the cubby holes in the cellar, the workshop and the technical rooms. And the attic. With a bit of luck, people will sleep late today. After everything that happened yesterday, I mean. If they’re all as tired as I am, they’ll sleep until twelve! I just hope we can find Roar Hanson before we have to start waking the guests.’

I was thinking precisely the opposite. If we found the priest in a room that wasn’t a bedroom, I had a bad feeling about the state he would be in. Since I very much doubted that he’d embarked on some amorous adventure, given the circumstances, for the time being I was clinging to the hope that he had found a bedroom all to himself. In which case it would be more difficult to find him without starting to wake other people.