Anne Holt - 1222

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the bloody Yanks had a man on the train,’ he said angrily. ‘Or several, in fact. If your crazy theory is correct, then I understand why the terrorist insisted on travelling by train. An attack on the railways is much more difficult to cover up than a carefully arranged plane crash. One strike against a plane, and everybody dies. To kill all the passengers on a train, you’d have to… Bloody hell!’

The front of his trousers was soaking wet.

‘I haven’t got any clothes down here,’ he groaned. ‘And I don’t feel like going out and shovelling snow. Shit.’

The noise outside had grown louder. The humming had turned into a throbbing, even roar.

‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘Can you hear that?’

He stood there with his legs apart looking as if he had wet himself. His expression sharpened, with narrowed eyes and his mouth slightly open.

‘A helicopter,’ he said, fascinated. ‘They’re here already?’

He had forgotten his wet trousers.

I put aside all thoughts of terrorists and American attacks on foreign soil. It struck me briefly that the story of the secret prisoner was a sign of how small the world has become. Even in Finse, the Norwegian mountain village where the train struggles up through valleys so Norwegian that you imagine you can see nineteenth-century paintings flickering by outside the windows; even now, in a snowstorm, in ultra-Norwegian isolation in an old National Romantic wooden building, even here the outside world has made its presence felt. The presence of the terrorist was life’s reminder that the world was no longer so alien or so far away; it was here with us, always, and we were a part of it whether we liked it or not.

But I didn’t want to think about the terrorist.

Instead I thought about Cato Hammer and Roar Hanson.

‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

The lobby was in joyous uproar. People were clapping and laughing as if they were sitting on a charter flight that had just touched down on the runway. A few were raising their glasses in a toast, while others were starting to gather their belongings as if they thought they might be going home in ten minutes. The fourteen-year-olds had already started putting on their outdoor clothes; none of them wanted to miss the spectacle of a heavy helicopter landing on deep snow.

‘They can’t land,’ said Johan. ‘There’s no way they can land on this powdery snow. The thing will tip over!’

He was standing at the window by the long table, watching the lights as they approached over Finsevann. The helicopter was low in the sky and moving slowly. The searchlights swept from side to side across the vast expanse of snow. The ice crystals glittered so beautifully in the dazzling, blue-white light that some of the older ladies gasped out loud. As the machine came in above the roof and we lost sight of it, there couldn’t have been more than twenty metres between the ridge of the roof and the helicopter. The whole building was shaking, but this time the racket was not a sign of a threatening danger. This noise was a welcome consolation, a greeting from the lives we really lived, far away from both Finse and a storm that we didn’t yet know had been given the name Olga.

All those who had seen the helicopter coming ran to the front door. Even Adrian seemed excited. He left Veronica sitting alone by the kitchen door with those stupid cards spread out on the floor. He was chatting enthusiastically to one of the girls from the handball team, as if he’d completely forgotten how cool he actually was.

‘They can’t land,’ Johan said again.

A metallic voice sliced through every other sound and most people stopped dead before they even reached the door.

‘This is the police. I repeat: this is the police. We are going to winch down three men. Stay away from the station platform. I repeat: everyone must stay away from the platform.’

Johan sighed with relief, then ran towards the door.

‘Move away!’ he shouted. ‘Inside, everybody! Stay away from the door! Inside, all of you!’

The teenagers protested defiantly. A couple of men started arguing outside the kiosk, and Mikkel had to intervene. The lady with the knitting started crying again, loudly and piercingly. Berit came running from the kitchen.

‘Calm down!’

Over the past couple of days Berit had become a new person. She had acquired a strength that surpassed Johan’s, despite the mountain man’s indisputable physical superiority. From being an ordinary hotel landlady with a pleasant nature, Berit had taken control at Finse 1222.

‘OK, we’re going to remain completely calm,’ she bellowed, paradoxically with a smile. ‘Go and sit down either in Blåstuen or St Paal’s Bar – and I mean everybody. Come along!’

People calmed down. They shrugged their shoulders and glanced at one another. Nobody said anything much, but they moved back into the hotel as one man, removing hats and outdoor clothes. A few shuffled along slowly and sullenly, others strutted along arrogantly, heads held high, as if they had been proved right in some way, although I had no idea what this could possibly be.

‘This is the police,’ the metallic voice intoned again. ‘We are asking everyone to remain indoors during the operation. I repeat: everyone must remain indoors.’

Kari Thue was not in the lobby. When I thought about it, I hadn’t seen her since dinner. Perhaps that wasn’t so strange; I had spent most of the time in the office, and hadn’t seen anybody except Geir Rugholmen.

But I didn’t like it.

Severin had sent for the police. In the letter Geir had smuggled to him, I had not only asked who had embezzled funds from the Public Information Service Foundation at some point towards the end of the nineties, I had also asked him to inform the authorities that there had been not only one murder at Finse 1222, as they had been told before communication with the outside world broke down, but two.

People moved towards the side wing as the helicopter’s rotor blades sent deep vibrations through the battered hotel. The disappointment over the fact that the helicopter had not come for them, that the journey home was postponed, the embarrassment at having got excited and happy for no reason meant that everybody had a long face as they passed by without looking in my direction.

I just stayed where I was in the middle of the floor, waiting.

Although one of the police officers gave me an almost imperceptible nod as he walked past on the way down to Blåstuen, none of them seemed to recognize me from the old days. When I saw them, two men in their thirties from the Bergen police authority and an older man from the National CID, I felt a pang. They reminded me of the fact that I had once been part of something different, something bigger than life on Krusesgate with Nefis, Ida and Mary. For a long time I had felt as if that cold, dramatic December night in 2002 was not just the end of an epoch; my break with the police service was just as much the beginning of something new. Something I had wished for. The injury made it possible to create an existence for which I had the strength, a life where I was seldom afraid and never worn out.

When I saw the three officers talking quietly together, using an abbreviated language they were trained to interpret, and with glances only they could decipher, I wondered if I had been fooling myself. These years of silence, these days that were longer than I ever imagined days could be, the nights of loneliness in front of the TV, all these months that followed each other smoothly and without friction, when the only reminders that the year was passing were Christmas celebrations and Ida’s wonderful birthdays: was this what I really wanted?