Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

Fredrikstad to Halden. 9 May 2000.

The train was barely half full and Harry had found a seat by the window.

The girl in the seat directly behind him had taken out the earplugs from her Walkman and he could make out the vocalist but none of the instruments. The monitoring expert they had used in Sydney had explained to Harry that at low volumes the human ear amplifies the frequencies human voices use.

Harry thought there was something comforting about the fact that the last thing you heard before everything went quiet was the human voice.

Streaks of quivering raindrops fought their way across the carriage windows. Harry peered out at the flat, wet fields and the electric cables rising and falling between the posts alongside the track.

On the platform in Fredrikstad a Janizary band had been playing. The conductor on the train had explained to him that they were practising for Independence Day on 17 May.

'Every Tuesday, every year at this time,' he said. 'The band leader thinks that rehearsals are more realistic when they are surrounded by people.'

Harry had thrown a few clothes in a bag. The apartment in Klippan was supposed to be simple, but very well furnished. A television, a stereo, even some books.

'Mein Kampf and that sort of thing,' Meirik had said with a grin.

He had not called Rakel. Even though he could have done with hearing her voice. A last human voice.

'The next station is Halden,' came the nasal crackle from the loudspeaker, interrupted by the strident, off-key tone of the train's brakes.

Harry ran a finger across the window as he juggled the sentence in his head. A strident, off-key tone. An off-key strident tone. A tone which is strident…

A tone can't be off-key, he thought. A tone isn't off-key until it is set alongside other tones. Even Ellen, the most musical person he had known, needed a few moments, a few tones, to hear the music. Even she was unable to pinpoint a single moment and say with total certainty that it was off-key. It was wrong, it was a lie.

And yet this tone sang in his ear, high-pitched and gratingly off-key. He was going to Klippan to stake out a potential sender of a fax which as yet had provoked no more than a couple of newspaper headlines. He had combed the day's newspapers and it was obvious that they had already forgotten the story about the threatening letters of which they had made so much a mere four days ago. Instead, Dagbladet wrote about the skier Lasse Kjus, who hated Norway, and Bernt Brandhaug, the Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, who, if quoted correctly, had said that traitors should be given the death sentence.

There was another tone that was off-key. But perhaps because he wanted it to be. Rakel's departure from the restaurant, the expression in her eyes, almost a declaration of love before she cut it short, leaving him in free fall and with a bill of eight hundred kroner that she had boasted she would pay. It didn't make sense. Or did it? Rakel had been in Harry's flat, seen him drinking, heard him talking tearfully about a dead colleague he had known for barely two years as if she was the only person he had ever had a close relationship with. Pathetic. Humans should be spared the sight of each other stripped bare. So why hadn't she called it a day then and there? Why hadn't she said to herself that this man was more trouble than she could handle?

As usual, he had escaped into his work when his private life became too much of a burden. It was typical of a certain type of man, he had read. That was probably why he had spent the weekend brewing conspiracy theories and scenarios which placed all the various elements-the Marklin rifle, Ellen's murder, the murder of Hallgrim Dale-in one pot so that he could stir it up into one foul-smelling broth. That was pathetic too.

He ran an eye over the paper spread out over the collapsible table in front of him, focused on the photograph of the FO head. There was something familiar about that face.

He rubbed his chin with his hand. From experience he knew that the brain tended to make its own associations when an investigation was in a rut. And the investigation into the rifle was a closed chapter. Meirik had made that clear-he had called it a non-case. Meirik had wanted him to write reports about neo-Nazis and do undercover work among rootless youths in Sweden. Well, fuck him!

'… the platform is on the right hand side.'

What if he simply got off the train? What was the worst that could happen? As long as the Foreign Office and POT were frightened that the shooting incident at the toll barrier last year would leak out, Meirik couldn't give him the boot. And as far as Rakel was concerned… as far as Rakel was concerned, he didn't know.

The train came to a halt with a final groan and the carriage fell quiet. Outside in the corridor, doors slammed. Harry remained in his seat. He could hear the song from the Walkman more clearly. It was one he had heard many times before; he just couldn't remember where.

Nordberg and the Continental Hotel.

9 May 2000.

The old man was caught completely unprepared; the sudden stabbing pains took his breath away. He curled up on the ground where he lay and forced his fist into his mouth to stop himself screaming. He lay like that, trying to retain consciousness as waves of light and dark surged through him. Opening and closing his eyes. The sky rolled in over him. It was as if time were accelerating: the clouds sped across the sky, the stars shone through the blue. Day turned into night, into day, night, day, and back to night again. Then it was over and he could smell the aroma of wet earth beneath him and he knew he was alive.

He remained in the same position until he had got his breath back. The sweat had stuck his shirt to his body. Then he rolled over on to his stomach and looked down towards the house again.

It was a large black timber house. He had been lying there since the morning and he knew the wife was the only one home. Nevertheless, all the windows were lit on the ground and the first floor. He had seen her walking round to switch all the lights on as soon as there was a suspicion of dusk, from which he assumed that she was frightened of the dark.

He was frightened himself-not of the dark though, he had never been afraid of that. He was frightened of time accelerating. And the pain. It was a new experience and he hadn't learned to control it yet. Nor did he know if he could. And the time? He did his best not to think about cells dividing and dividing and dividing.

A pale moon appeared in the sky. He checked his watch: 7.30. Soon it would be too dark and he would have to wait until the morning. In that case he would have to spend the whole of the night in the bivouac. He looked at the construction he had made. It consisted of two Y-shaped branches he had pushed into the earth leaving half a metre above the ground. Between these, in the fork of the branches, was a stripped branch from a pine tree. Then he had cut three long branches which he placed on the ground and rested against the pine branch. He had covered them with a thick layer of spruce twigs. Thus he had a kind of roof which would protect him from the rain, retain some warmth and camouflage his presence from walkers, should they unexpectedly stray from the path. It had taken him barely half an hour to make the windbreak.

He calculated the risk of being seen from the road or by anyone in the nearby houses as negligible. It would have to be an unusually sharp-eyed person to make out the bivouac between the tree trunks in the dense spruce forest from a distance of almost three hundred metres. For safety's sake he had covered nearly the whole of the opening with spruce twigs too and tied rags around the barrel of the rifle so that the low afternoon sun would not catch the steel.