Anne Holt - 1222

‘Veronica,’ I interrupted her. ‘I’m serious; don’t say any more right now.’

‘Wilhelmsen is right,’ said Langerud. ‘As soon as we’re done here, we’ll take you to Bergen, and you will of course have access to a solicitor there.’

‘Mum was just a simple secretary,’ she carried on, as if she hadn’t heard either of us. ‘A deeply religious secretary with access to a lot of money, and the authority to make payments. Money she never touched! A simple secretary with weak nerves, a great deal of anguish, and a blind faith in God. Both He and Cato Hammer betrayed her worse than… worse than…’

The tears came. But her voice remained steady.

‘I couldn’t get my head around the idea that she’d done it,’ she said. ‘Stealing money. What would she have used it for? It was a straight confession. Nobody made a big deal out of the fact that all the police managed to trace was 800,000 in a recently opened account. Cato must have given her the money in sheer desperation when it was clear that the whole thing was going to come to light. She said she’d frittered away the rest. I didn’t believe that. We never had much money. Then she got… She got sick, and she was put in hospital. I was only fifteen years old. Fifteen!’

She gasped for breath with a short panting sound.

‘For almost ten years she was locked up in a hospital. And she never told anyone she’d taken the blame for Cato Hammer. My childhood home was sold to cover the debt to the foundation. When she finally died in January this year, I found a letter among her papers, a letter she wrote in 1998. My name was on it. When I had read it I decided to-’

‘Shut up, Veronica!’ I said. ‘Langerud – do something!’

The big man squatted down in front of her.

‘My mother has atoned for both of us,’ she said expressionlessly. ‘And I have already paid too much. I couldn’t let Roar Hanson destroy… He said he was going to… He…’

‘Veronica,’ said Langerud. ‘That’s enough. OK?’

She looked past him. He gently took hold of her chin and forced her to make eye contact.

‘ Be quiet! ’

Suddenly he gave her a feather-light clip around the ear. It happened so fast I would have missed it if I’d blinked.

‘Do you understand? Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ said Veronica Koht Larsen. ‘I understand everything. I wish I’d understood it long ago. If only I’d understood everything when I was fifteen, then…’

She didn’t finish the sentence. She had already talked herself deep into two premeditated murders, despite the fact that I would never pass the information on to anyone. Per Langerud couldn’t think that way, and too much had already been said. True, Veronica would not say another word, not for several months, but none of us knew that as she stiffly got up from the sofa.

She no longer reminded me of a cat. The woman who obediently followed Per Langerud through the big rooms in the side wing at Finse 1222 was not moving with stealth and suppleness. Her steps were short and stiff, with sudden moves to the side in order to maintain her balance. Her head was bowed. Even the black, loose clothes around her bony figure seemed greyer now, and made her look like a pencil mark that someone had tried hard to erase.

It suddenly occurred to me that that person was me.

‘The boy will be coming with me,’ I said.

Berit was making lists of those who were to be evacuated together, and in which order. A decision had been made to start moving people out of the hotel tonight. Nobody would be able to sleep anyway, and the wind had dropped. There was no longer any reason to keep people here. Quite the reverse, in fact. The sooner the hotel was emptied, the sooner work on the repairs could begin. Johan had had help to clear the snow from the station platform. The tractors were dug out in record time. Many of the guests had joined in with shovels and unassailable enthusiasm. As far as I could gather from people coming in with red faces and frozen hands, the platform looked like a giant pool, a deep ice hockey rink with an edging of powdery snow. The electric lines along the track were still buried, and were no longer live.

The helicopters could land.

The first one was expected at any moment.

‘The boy will be coming with me,’ I repeated. ‘And I’d like to be the last to leave.’

‘In that case it won’t be until tomorrow some time,’ said Berit.

‘That’s fine,’ I said, rolling my chair through the lobby, which was more or less empty.

Some people were outside, some had gone to their rooms – if not to sleep, then perhaps to collect their thoughts after everything that had happened. The bar had been closed since the police arrived, and most people realized this was going to take time. Nobody minded. The evacuation would soon be under way, and that was the only thing that mattered now.

Adrian was sitting alone by the kitchen door. Nobody was taking any notice of him. He had been sitting there ever since Berit led him up from the wing. He wasn’t doing anything or saying anything. He was just sitting there with his forehead resting on his knees and his arms around his legs, almost imperceptibly rocking from side to side.

The Kurd who was not a Kurd suddenly came over to me.

‘Thomas Chrysler,’ he said with a smile, holding out his hand. ‘That was an impressive performance you gave downstairs.’

‘Thomas Chrysler,’ I repeated softly, thinking that someone should have come up with something better when they were giving the man a false identity. ‘From the police security service, I presume?’

He glanced around quickly. No one could hear us. But he still didn’t answer. His teeth were even below the bristly moustache.

‘I just want to ask you,’ he said instead, ‘how you could be sure Clara and I would step in and tackle Veronica Larsen? I mean, you put them there, right next to us. You asked them to sit there, Veronica and the boy.’

‘I saw you when the railway carriage fell; I saw you draw your guns.’

His eyes narrowed. He studied me for a few seconds before breaking into a broad grin. His teeth really were strikingly white and even.

‘But surely you couldn’t have known that we -’

‘Just a minute,’ I said, raising a hand defensively. ‘I had my reasons for believing that you were the good guys, OK? A little bird had… well, not exactly chirruped in my ear, but at least given me a look that suggested you were to be trusted. Let’s leave it at that. It was nice to meet you, but I have to go and help the boy over there. Just one thing first.’

Now I was the one glancing quickly over my shoulder.

‘I presume you were supposed to keep an eye on the train passengers,’ I said, suppressing a yawn. ‘You were working undercover in case someone was after your terrorist’s life, weren’t you?’

His eyes grew even narrower. His eyelashes were so long they curled up over his heavy eyelids.

‘Terrorist?’

The grin cracked into a hearty laugh.

‘We didn’t have a real terrorist with us,’ he said without raising his voice. ‘This was an exercise! Did you think… No, no. This was an exercise. A very realistic exercise under extremely demanding conditions.’

He was lying.

What he was saying just had to be a lie.

It couldn’t be true that this whole nightmare, everything that had happened to do with the mysterious carriage, all the rumours and the unpleasantness, the rebellion in the wing – it couldn’t be true that the whole thing was based on a bluff. I couldn’t have wasted so much energy on nothing, on an exercise, on a little training jaunt for the security service boys, when I should have been concentrating on one thing from the very first night: who killed Cato Hammer?