Alexandra passed him the cigarette they were sharing, and Harry inhaled and looked at the smoke curling up towards the ceiling while ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’ came from a little Geneva speaker on the bedside table.

‘Sounds like that’s about us,’ she said.

‘Mm. Lovers who break up?’

‘Yeah. And what Cohen says about not talking of love or chains.’

Harry didn’t respond. Held the cigarette and gazed at the smoke, but was aware of her still lying with her face turned to him.

‘It’s in the wrong order,’ he said.

‘Wrong because Rakel was already in your life when we met?’

‘I was just thinking of something a woman said to me. How we’re fooled when the writer changes the order of the sentences around.’ He took a fresh drag of the cigarette. ‘But, yeah, probably that about Rakel too.’

After a while he felt the warmth of her tears on his stomach. He wanted to cry himself.

The window creaked, as though what was out there wanted to get in to them.

37

Wednesday

Reflex

Toppåsveien didn’t quite live up to the name. The road wound its way between villas a fair way up to higher ground, but the top of Kolsås was still a good distance away when the road ended. Terry Våge parked by the side of the road. There was forest above him. In the darkness he could make out something lighter further up, which he knew were rock faces popular with climbers and other boneheads.

He fiddled with the sheath of the knife he had taken with him, looked over at the torch and the Nikon camera on the passenger seat. The seconds passed. The minutes passed. He peered down towards the lights in the darkness below. Rosenvilde High School was down there somewhere. He knew that because Genie had been a pupil there when he had discovered her. Because it was he, Terry Våge, who had done it, who had used his influence as a music critic to lift her and that talentless band of hers up from the underground into the light, into the mainstream, the marketplace. She had been eighteen, attending school there, and he had driven over a couple of times because he was curious to see her in a school setting. Was there something wrong with that? He had just hung around outside the schoolyard to catch a glimpse of the star he had created, hadn’t even taken any pictures, which he easily could have. The telephoto lens he had taken with him would have rendered razor-sharp pictures of a different Genie from the performer playing a role as a dangerous seductress. It would have shown the innocence, the little girl. But hanging around a schoolyard like that could easily have been misunderstood if he’d been discovered, so he had left it at those two times and sought her out at the concerts instead.

He was about to check the time when the phone rang.

‘Yes?’

‘You’re in position, I see.’

Våge looked around. His car was the only one parked on the road, and he would have seen anyone in the street light. Was the guy watching him from somewhere in the woods? Våge’s hand squeezed the handle of the knife.

‘Take your torch and camera, walk along the forest trail past the barrier, keep an eye on the left-hand side. After about one hundred metres you’ll see reflective paint on a tree trunk. Leave the trail and follow the reflective paint further. Got it?’

‘Got it,’ Våge said.

‘You’ll know when you’ve reached the spot. Once you do, you have two minutes to take pictures. Then you walk back, get into your car and drive straight home. If you haven’t left after those one hundred and twenty seconds, I will come for you. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it’s time to reap your reward, Våge. Hurry up.’

The connection was broken. Terry Våge drew a deep breath, and a thought struck him. He could still turn the key in the ignition and get the hell out of there. He could go and have a beer at Stopp Pressen! Tell anyone who would listen that he had spoken to the serial killer on the phone and they had arranged a rendezvous, but that Terry had chickened out at the last minute.

Våge heard his own barking laughter, grabbed the camera and the torch and stepped out of the car.

Perhaps this was the lee side of the hill, because strangely enough the wind wasn’t as strong up here as it had been lower down or in the city centre. He spotted the forest trail a few metres in from the road. He walked past the barrier, turning towards the street light one last time before switching on the torch and continuing on into the darkness. The wind soughed in the treetops and the gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he counted the steps and alternated between shining the torch on the ground and at the tree trunks on the left side. He had made it to one hundred and five when he caught sight of the first patch of reflective paint shining in the beam. He saw the second patch further into the forest.