Jo Nesbo - The Redeemer

'Jon texted me,' she said, staring without focus at the toilet walls. 'His father's ill, he said. He's flying to Bangkok tonight. Imagine. This evening of all evenings.'

'Bangkok? Did you tell Stankic?'

'We were supposed to meet the Prime Minister this evening,' Thea said as a tear rolled down her cheek. 'And he didn't even answer me when I rang, the… the-'

'Thea! Did you tell him Jon was catching a plane this evening?' She nodded, like a somnambulist, as though none of this had anything to do with her.

Harry rose to his feet and strode into the foyer where Martine and Rikard were standing and talking to a man Harry recognised as one of the Prime Minister's bodyguards.

'Call off the alarm,' Harry shouted. 'Stankic is no longer in the building.'

The three of them turned towards him.

'Rikard, your sister is sitting in there. Could you look after her? And, Martine, could you come with me?'

Without waiting for an answer, Harry took her arm and she had to jog to keep up with him down the steps towards the exit.

'Where are we going?' she asked.

'Gardemoen Airport.'

'And what are you going to do with me there?'

'You will be my eyes, dear Martine. You will see the invisible man for me.'

He studied his facial features in the reflection from the train window. The forehead, the nose, the cheeks, the mouth, the chin, the eyes. Tried to see what it was, where the secret lay. But he couldn't see anything special above the red neckerchief, just an expressionless face with eyes and hair which, against the walls of the tunnel between Oslo Central and Lillestrom, were as black as the night outside.

Monday, 22 December. The Shortest Day.

It took Harry and Martine exactly two minutes and thirty-eight seconds to run from the concert hall to the platform of the National Theatre station where, two minutes later, they boarded an Inter City train stopping at Oslo Central and Gardemoen Airport on its way to Lillehammer. True, this was a slower train but it was still faster than waiting for the next airport express. They dropped into the two free seats left in a carriage full of soldiers on their way home for Christmas leave and gangs of students with boxes of wine and Santa hats.

'What's going on?' Martine asked.

'Jon's making his getaway,' Harry said.

'Does he know Stankic is alive?'

'He's not fleeing from Stankic, but from us. He knows his cover is blown.'

Martine's eyes widened. 'What do you mean?'

'I hardly know where to begin.'

The train drew into Oslo Central. Harry scrutinised the passengers on the platform, but did not see Jon Karlsen.

'It all started when Ragnhild Gilstrup offered Jon two million kroner to help Gilstrup Invest buy some of the Salvation Army's properties,' Harry said. 'He turned her down because he wasn't convinced she was scrupulous enough to keep a secret. Instead he went behind her back and spoke to Mads and Albert Gilstrup. He demanded five million and they were instructed not to tell Ragnhild about the deal. They agreed.'

Martine's mouth fell. 'How do you know this?'

'After Ragnhild's death Mads Gilstrup more or less broke down. He decided to come clean about the whole business. So he rang the police. A telephone number on Halvorsen's business card. Halvorsen didn't answer, but he left the confession as a voicemail. A few hours ago I played the message. Among many other things he said Jon demanded a written agreement.'

'Jon likes things to be neat and tidy,' Martine muttered. The train pulled out of the station, past the stationmaster's Villa Valle and into east Oslo's grey landscape of backyards with wrecked bikes, bare clothes lines and soot-black windows.

'But what has this got to do with Stankic?' she asked. 'Who took out the contract? Mads Gilstrup?'

'No.'

They were sucked into the tunnel's black void, and in the dark her voice was barely audible above the rattle of the train on the rails. 'Was it Rikard? Say it wasn't Rikard…'

'Why do you think it's Rikard?'

'The night Jon raped me Rikard found me in the toilet. I said I had tripped in the dark, but I could see he didn't believe me. He helped me get to bed without waking any of the others. Even though he has never said anything I've always had the feeling that he saw Jon and knows what happened.'

'Mm,' Harry said. 'So that's why he's so protective. Rikard seems to like you, and it's genuine.'

She nodded. 'I suppose that's why I…' she began, then paused.

'Yes?'

'Why I don't want it to be him.'

'In that case your wish is granted.' Harry checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until they arrived.

Martine, with a look of alarm: 'You… you don't think?'

'What?'

'You don't think that my father knew about the rape, do you? That he…'

'No, your father has nothing to do with any of this. The person who took out the contract on Jon Karlsen…'

They were out of the tunnel; a black, starry sky hung over white, phosphorescent fields.

'… is Jon Karlsen.'

Jon entered the vast departures hall. He had been here before, but had never seen as many people as there were now. The noise of voices, feet and announcements rose to the steeple-high vaulted ceiling. An excited cacophony, a hotchpotch of languages and fragments of opinions he didn't understand. Home for Christmas. Going away for Christmas. Stationary queues at the check-in counters coiled round like overfed boa constrictors between the barriers.

Take a deep breath, he told himself. Plenty of time. They don't know anything. Not yet. Maybe they never will. He stood behind an elderly lady and bent down to help her move her suitcase as the queue shuffled forward twenty centimetres. When she turned to him with a smile of gratitude he could see that her skin was only a thin, deathly pale fabric stretched over a bony skull.

He returned the smile, and at length she looked away again. But through the noise of living people he could always hear her scream. The unbearable, unending scream struggling to drown out the roar of an electric motor.

After being taken to hospital and finding out that the police were searching his flat, he had realised they might stumble on the contract with Gilstrup Invest in his bureau. The one that stated that Jon would receive five million kroner if the Salvation Army board of management supported the offer, signed by Albert and Mads Gilstrup. After the police had driven him to Robert's flat he had gone to Goteborggata to collect the contract. But when he arrived someone was already there. Ragnhild. She hadn't heard him because of the vacuum cleaner. She was sitting down reading the contract. She had seen. Seen his sins as his mother had seen the semen stains on the bedding. And, like his mother, Ragnhild would humiliate him, destroy him, tell everyone. Tell his father. She mustn't see. I took her eyes, he thought. But she is still screaming.

'Beggars don't say no to charity,' Harry said. 'It's in the very nature of things. That was what struck me in Zagreb. Quite literally. A Norwegian twenty-kroner coin that was hurled at me. And as I watched it spinning on the floor I remembered the Crime Scene Unit had found a Croatian coin trodden into the snow outside the shop on the corner of Goteborggata. They automatically connected it with Stankic who had been escaping that way while Halvorsen lay bleeding further up the street. I am by inclination a doubter, but when I saw this coin in Zagreb it was as though a higher authority wanted to make me aware of something. The first time I met Jon a beggar threw a coin at him. I remember because I was surprised that a beggar would reject charity. Yesterday I tracked down the beggar to the Deichmanske library and showed him the coin the Crime Scene Unit had found. He confirmed he had hurled a foreign coin at Jon and that it could well have been the one I showed him. Yes, it could indeed have been that one, he said.'