Anne Holt - 1222

‘I need coffee,’ I said. ‘Lots and lots of coffee. I have no intention of going to sleep again until we’ve been rescued. The next time I lie down, it will be in my own bed.’

‘This ought to do,’ said Berit, putting down a three-litre thermos. ‘Milk?’

‘Normally, yes, but since the intention is to keep me awake, I think I’ll take it black. I’m sure it’s just my imagination, but I think it works better the darker it is.’

The very thought that I wouldn’t sleep before tomorrow afternoon at the earliest was making my head feel unbelievably heavy. Geir had suggested I should have a little nap on my own in the small office behind reception. Nobody was going to be murdered at three o’clock in the afternoon when everybody was awake, he insisted with a wry smile. And he was right, of course. Anyway, I said I’d rather not, but I did agree to use the office. One hour in the land of dreams would make me even sleepier. From experience I knew that I could be on the go for another twenty-four hours as soon as I had passed over the borderline between deathly tired and overtired. A strong dose of caffeine would therefore be more useful than a one-hour nap.

‘Do you need anything else?’

Berit threw her arms wide as if she could offer me whatever I might wish for. I looked at a dead computer screen and tried to come up with something.

‘No. But thank you anyway. You’re a marvel, Berit. I’m so impressed by the way you’ve dealt with all this.’

‘It’s doing you good to be in the mountains,’ said Geir with a smile, clipping the back of my head before moving towards the door. ‘You should come here more often!’

It was half past two in the afternoon, and I couldn’t really see the humour in what I was planning to do.

Sometimes I imagine that I still have feeling in my legs. I have never wanted to bother anybody with complaints about an injury for which I have only myself to blame, so I never speak about that hint of pain that reminds me from time to time of what it’s like to stand on two legs.

Not that I usually have all that many people to share my thoughts with. It can be weeks between those occasions when I have to speak to anyone other than Nefis, Ida and old Mary, our housekeeper. This is the life I have chosen, and this is the way my life has turned out.

But now I was sitting alone, and feeling lonely.

It was very strange.

The wound in my thigh was hurting. I mean, really hurting. Of course I realize it was my imagination; I’ve seen the pictures of the severed nerves in the small of my back. Like porridge, the surgeon had said, peering in fascination at the pictures they had taken when they operated on me.

There is no possibility that the cells below my navel can send any kind of signal to my brain. Communication has broken down for ever, something that I accepted long ago. And yet it was as if I could still feel the searing pain in the wound left by the ski pole. Not like a phantom pain, but like a real injury that hurt.

It was strange to feel so alone.

Cato Hammer must have had many enemies. Perhaps enemies was the wrong word. He wasn’t dangerous enough for that. Too rotund and nice. His constant pronouncements were irritating rather than sharp, loud rather than offensive. And yet I was still certain that many people must have felt like me: the man was intolerably self-obsessed in his alleged concern for others.

But that kind of person doesn’t usually provoke murder.

The flip chart was still in the corner of the little office. The sheet on which I had written the names of the two victims was untouched. I moved slowly over to the chart and picked up the red marker pen. Beneath the two names I drew a line, dividing the sheet in two. Then I began to add more names.

Einar Holter, the train driver I had never met.

Elias Grav, I wrote.

Steinar Aass.

Sara.

I wished I knew her surname. The way it looked now on the sheet of paper, you might have thought I didn’t like the little girl. Not using her surname showed a lack of respect, as if she were worth less than the others. As if she were a dog. Or a cat, with no relatives, no sense of being part of a real family.

Rosenkvist , I wrote slowly in my best handwriting. Sara Rosenkvist. It suited her.

Four people were dead, and nobody could be blamed for their deaths apart from this bloody storm. Einar, Elias, Steinar and little Sara Rosenkvist. They had been torn from their lives as unexpectedly as the two who had been murdered. And just as pointlessly. And yet when the police got here, to this cold place, tonight, tomorrow or in two days at the worst, they would concentrate on the two names at the top of the list of the fallen at Finse during the storm of February 2007. They would put all their resources and manpower into the investigation, and within a day or two they would have driven the perpetrator into a corner, and would have made sure he was looking through prison bars for the next fifteen years or so.

What was actually the difference between these people?

Was the fact that Cato Hammer or Roar Hanson had lost their lives worse than the fact that Sara would never grow up? Was Cato Hammer’s death a greater loss for his family than the fact that Einar Holter’s three children would barely remember their father by the time they were grown up? Why should society put all its resources into punishing the person or persons responsible for two of the deaths, while the others would be forgotten by the public as soon as they were in their graves?

Concentrate, I thought, and had some more coffee.

I stared at Cato Hammer’s name and tried to picture him in my mind’s eye. However hard I tried to see him as he had been when he was alive, it was only his dead, surprised expression as he lay on the kitchen worktop that had stuck in my memory.

The information meeting.

The thought suddenly struck me, and I realized why. I closed my eyes so that I could think back to that first evening, when only the train driver was dead and everyone seemed relieved and excited following the accident rather than shocked. Before Berit Tverre began to speak, I had seen Cato Hammer disappear behind one of the pillars in the lobby, and had noticed that he seemed different. Earlier in the evening he had been positively bubbling with obtrusive happiness and irritating energy. He had even managed the harsh confrontation with Kari Thue with a self-confident smile on his lips. Therefore, it had struck me as strange that he seemed so serious later on. Depressed, somehow.

Afraid?

When I saw him disappear behind the pillar, I immediately thought it was Kari Thue who had frightened him. I had no reason to reflect further on his change of mood at the time. But now, when I thought back, I became more and more certain that he had seemed just as mild-mannered and smug after Kari Thue’s bizarre rant as he had been before he got mixed up in the quarrel between her and the Kurds.

I tore off the sheet of paper and wrote Cato Hammer’s name again. Underneath it I drew a timeline, writing in the approximate times of the heated discussion and the information meeting. I used a green pen to mark the first event, black for the second. In green I wrote happy, eager and patient. Then I drew an arrow pointing to the right; I couldn’t indicate when his good mood had started to deteriorate. With the black pen I wrote serious, possibly afraid. After a brief pause I added a question mark after the last word.

As far as I could work out and recall, there was a gap of one and a half hours between the two events. Kari Thue had been in the lobby the whole time. Cato Hammer had been in the hobby room where the prayer meeting had taken place, and the big bridge tournament was under way. I had fallen asleep, but that could hardly have been for more than a few seconds, perhaps a couple of minutes. I was as sure as I could be that Kari Thue and Cato Hammer had not spoken to each other during the period that was marked out on the sheet in front of me.