He felt something cold against his fingertips.
An iron bar.
Got two fingers round the bar. Three. Then the other hand. Let his aching legs swing free, dangled and hurriedly found a boothold to relieve the pressure on his arms. At last he could see into the bedroom. And he saw. His brain struggled to absorb the sight while it knew immediately what it was looking at: the finished work of art, the prototype of which he had already seen.
Rakel’s eyes were wide open and black. She was wearing a dress. Crimson. Like Campari. She was ‘cochineal’. Her head strained towards the ceiling as though she were standing by a fence trying to see over, and from this position she stared down and out at him. Her shoulders were pulled back and her arms hidden. Harry assumed her hands were tied behind her back. Her cheeks bulged as though she had a sock or a cloth in her mouth. She sat astride the shoulders of an enormous snowman. Her bare legs were crossed in front of the snowman’s chest, and he could see her tensed leg muscles quivering. She mustn’t fall. She couldn’t. For around her neck there was not a grey, lifeless wire, as with Eli Kvale, but a white glowing circle, like an absurd imitation of an old toothpaste advertisement promising a ring of confidence, good fortune in love and a long and happy life. A wire ran from the black handle of the cutting loop to a hook in the ceiling above Rakel’s head. The wire continued to the other end of the room, to the door. To the door handle. The wire was not thick, but long enough to have provided noticeably more resistance when Harry had begun to press the handle. If he had opened the door, indeed if he had even pressed the handle right down, the white glowing metal would have cut into her throat, right under her chin.
Rakel was staring back at Harry without blinking. The muscles in her face were twitching, alternating between fury and naked fear. The loop was too narrow for her to remove her head unscathed; instead she held her head down so that it did not touch the death-bringing glow that hung almost vertically around her neck.
She looked at Harry, down at the floor and back to Harry. And Harry understood.
Grey clumps of snow were already lying in the water covering the floor. The snowman was melting. Fast.
Harry got a good foothold and shook the bars as hard as he could. They didn’t budge, didn’t even offer a hopeful creak. The iron was thin but firmly attached to the timber.
The figure inside was swaying.
‘Hold on!’ Harry shouted. ‘I’ll be there soon!’
Lies. He wouldn’t even be able to bend the bars with an iron lever. And he didn’t have time to start sawing them off. Fuck her father, the mad bastard! His arms were aching. He heard the ear-piercing siren of the first car turning into the drive. He looked round. It was one of Delta’s special vehicles, a large, armoured beast of a Land Rover. A man dressed in a green flak jacket jumped out of the passenger seat, took cover behind the vehicle and held up a walkie-talkie. Harry’s handset crackled.
‘Hello!’ Harry shouted.
The man, taken aback, looked left and right.
‘Up here, boss.’
Gunnar Hagen straightened up behind the vehicle as a patrol car swung up in front of the house with the blue light swirling.
‘Should we storm the house?’ Hagen shouted.
‘No!’ screamed Harry. ‘He’s got her strung up. Just . . .’
‘Just?’
Harry raised his eyes, stared. Not down to the city, but up to the illuminated Holmenkollen ski jump further up the ridge.
‘Just what, Harry?’
‘Just wait.’
‘Wait?’
‘I have to think.’
Harry rested his forehead against the cold bars. His arms were aching and he bent his knees to put most of his body weight on his legs. The cutting loop must have an off switch. On the plastic handle, probably. They could smash the window and poke a long pole in with a mirror attached so that they could perhaps . . . But how the hell would they be able to press the off switch without everything moving and . . . and . . . ? Harry tried not to think about the ludicrously thin layer of skin and soft tissue that protected the carotid artery. Tried to think constructively and ignore the panic that was roaring in his ears telling him to get in and take control.
They could enter through the door. Without opening it. Just saw away the panel. They needed a chainsaw. But who would have one? Only the whole of bloody Holmenkollen. After all, they’ve each got a spruce forest in their garden.
‘Get hold of a chainsaw from the neighbour’s house,’ Harry yelled.
Down below he heard the sound of running. And a splash inside the bedroom. Harry’s heart stopped and he stared in. The whole of the snowman’s left side was gone. It had sheered off and landed in the water. The snowman was collapsing. He saw Rakel’s whole body tremble as she fought to maintain her balance to keep away from the white, tear-shaped gallows noose. They would never get back with the chainsaw in time, let alone cut through the door.
‘Hagen!’ Harry heard the shrill hysteria in his own voice. ‘The patrol cars have got a tow rope. Sling it up here and reverse the Land Rover to the wall.’
Harry heard a buzz of voices, the Land Rover’s engine revving in reverse and a car boot being opened.
‘Catch!’
Harry let go of the bar with one hand and turned to see the coiled rope coming towards him. He lunged in the dark, caught it and held on as the rest unfurled and fell back down to the ground with a thud.
‘Tie the end to the tow bar.’
There was a carbine hook attached to his end of the rope. As quick as lightning he smacked the hook against the junction of the bars in the middle of the window and the lock snapped shut. Speed-cuffing.
Another splash from inside the bedroom. Harry didn’t look. There was no point.
‘Go!’ he yelled.
Then he grabbed the edge of the gutter with both hands, using the bars as a ladder, and heard the Land Rover’s revs increase as he swung himself onto the roof. With his chest on the roof tiles and his eyes closed he could hear the motor engage, the rev count fall and the iron bars groan. More groaning. And more. Come on! Harry was aware that time was passing more slowly than he thought. And yet not slowly enough. Then – as he was waiting for the auspicious crack – the rev count suddenly rose to a ferocious whine. Shit! Harry realised the tyres of the Land Rover were spinning round helplessly.
A thought fluttered through his brain: he could say a prayer. But he knew that God had made up His mind, that destiny was sold out, that this ticket would have to be bought on the black market. But his soul wouldn’t be worth much without her anyway. The thought was gone that very same second, interrupted by the sound of rubber on tarmac, a sinking rev count and an increasing groan.
The big heavy tyres had spun their way down to the tarmac.
Then came the crack. The rev count roared and died. A second of total silence followed. And then a hollow crash as the bars hit the car roof below.
Harry pushed himself up. He stood with his back to the yard on the edge of the gutter and felt it give way. Then he bent down, grabbed the gutter with both hands and kicked off. Swung like a pendulum from gutter to window. Jack-knifed. The moment the old, thin windowpane gave with a tinkle under his boots Harry let go. And for a few tenths of a second he had no idea where he would land: down in the yard, on the jagged glass teeth of the window or in the bedroom.
There was a bang, a fuse must have gone, and everything went black.
Harry sailed through a room of nothing, felt nothing, remembered nothing, was nothing.
And when the light came back on his only thought was that he wanted to return to that space. Pain radiated from all over his body. He was lying on his back in icy-cold water. But he must have been dead because he was looking up at an angel dressed in blood red, seeing her shining halo glow in the dark. Slowly sound returned. The scratching. The breathing. Then he saw the distorted face, the panic, the gaping mouth stuffed with the yellow ball, the feet scrambling up the snow. He just wanted to close his eyes. A noise, like low moaning. Wet snow crumbling.
In retrospect, Harry couldn’t really account for what happened; he could only remember the nauseating smell as the cutting loop burned through flesh.
At the very moment the snowman collapsed he stood up. Rakel fell forward. Harry raised his right hand as he fastened his left arm around her thighs to hold her up. He knew it was too late. Flesh sizzled, his nostrils were filled with a sweet, greasy smell and blood ran down his face. He looked up. His right hand was situated between the white glow of the loop and her neck. The weight of her neck forced his hand down against the white-hot wire which ate through the flesh of his fingers like an egg slicer through a hard-boiled egg. And when it was right through it would cut open her throat. The pain came, delayed and dull, like an initially reluctant then insistent steel hammer on an alarm clock. He fought to stay upright. Had to have his left hand free. Blinded by blood, he hauled her up onto his shoulders and stretched his free hand over his head. Felt her skin against his fingertips, her thick hair, felt the loop burn into his skin before his hand found the hard plastic, the handle. His fingers found a flip switch. Moved it to the right. But stopped as soon as the noose started tightening. His fingers found another switch and pressed. The sounds disappeared, the light flickered and he knew he was on the point of losing consciousnessness again. Breathe, he thought, the important thing was to get oxygen to the brain. But his knees were giving way nevertheless. The white glow above him changed to red. And then gradually to black.
At his back he heard the sound of glass being crushed under several pairs of boot heels.
‘We’ve got her,’ a voice said behind him.
Harry sank to his knees in the blood-tinged water, with clumps of snow and unused plastic ties floating around him. His brain engaged and disengaged as if the power supply to it were failing.
Someone said something behind him. He caught fragments of it, inhaled air and groaned, ‘What?’
‘She’s alive,’ the voice repeated.
His hearing stabilised. And sight. He turned. The two men clad in black had laid Rakel on the bed and cut the plastic ties. The contents of Harry’s stomach came up without warning. Two heaves and it was all out. He stared down at the vomit floating in the water and felt a hysterical urge to laugh out loud. Because the finger seemed to have been spewed up with everything else. He lifted his right hand and looked at the bleeding stump as confirmation. It was his finger floating in the water.
‘Oleg . . .’ It was Rakel’s voice.
Harry picked up a plastic tie, wrapped it round the stump of his middle finger and tightened it as hard as he could. Did the same with his index finger which had been sliced through to the bone but was still firmly attached.
Then he went to the bed, spread the duvet over Rakel and sat beside her. The eyes staring up at him were large and black with shock, and blood ran from the wounds where the loop had come into contact with the skin on both sides of her neck. He took her hand with his uninjured left.
‘Oleg,’ she repeated.
‘He’s OK,’ Harry said and responded to her hand pressure. ‘He’s with the neighbours. It’s over now.’
He saw her trying to focus her eyes.
‘Promise me?’ she whispered, barely audible.
‘I promise you.’
‘Thank God.’
She sobbed once, buried her face in her hands and began to cry.
Harry looked down at his injured hand. Either the ties had stopped the bleeding or he was empty.
‘Where’s Mathias?’ he said quietly.
Her head bobbed up, and she gawped at him. ‘You just promised me that –’
‘Where did he go, Rakel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did he say anything?’
Her hand squeezed his. ‘Don’t go now, Harry. I’m sure someone else can –’
‘What did he say?’
He could tell by the way her body recoiled that he had raised his voice.
‘He said that it was finished now and he would bring it to a conclusion,’ she said as tears welled in her dark eyes again. ‘And that the end would be a homage to life.’
‘A homage to life? Those were the words he used?’
She nodded. Harry loosened his hand from hers, stood up and went to the window. Scoured the night sky. It had stopped snowing. He looked up at the illuminated monument that could be seen from almost everywhere in Oslo. The ski jump. Like a white comma against the black ridge. Or a full stop.
Harry went back to her bedside, bent down and kissed her on the forehead.
‘Where are you going?’ she whispered.
Harry raised the bloodstained hand and smiled. ‘To see a doctor.’
He left the room. Stumbled down the stairs. Came out into the cold, white darkness of the yard, but the nausea and giddiness would not release their grip.
Hagen stood beside the Land Rover talking on a mobile phone.
He broke off the conversation and nodded when Harry asked if they could drive him.
Harry sat in the back. He was thinking about how Rakel had thanked God. She couldn’t know, of course, that someone else deserved her thanks. Or that the buyer had accepted the offer. And that payback time had already started.
‘Down to the city centre?’ the driver asked.
Harry shook his head and pointed upwards. The right index finger looked strangely alone between the thumb and the ring finger.
36
DAY 21.
The Tower.
I
T TOOK THREE MINUTES TO DRIVE FROM
R
AKEL’S HOUSE TO
Holmenkollen ski jump. They drove through the tunnel and parked on the viewing promontory among the souvenir shops. The slope looked like a frozen white waterfall that plunged down between the stands and broadened into a flat out-run a hundred metres below.
‘How do you know he’s here?’ Hagen asked.