Killing Moon

‘Don’t you remember? A friend of one of Røed’s neighbours asked me. She said the party was taking place on the best rooftop terrace in Oslobukta. Told me it would be crawling with the well-heeled, with celebrities and party people. Said they’d prefer women came in skirts. Short skirts.’

‘Ugh,’ Helge said. ‘Don’t blame you for not going.’

‘Fuck that, course I would’ve gone! If I hadn’t had so much work on here that day. And you would have come with.’

‘Would I?’ Helge smiled.

‘Of course.’ Alexandra laughed. ‘I’m your fag hag. Can’t you picture it, you, me and the beautiful people?’

‘Yes.’

‘You see, you are gay.’

‘What? Because?’

‘Tell me truthfully, Helge. Have you ever slept with a man?’

‘Let me see...’ Helge wheeled the table with the corpse towards one of the cold lockers. ‘Yes.’

‘More than once?’

‘Doesn’t mean I’m gay,’ he said, opening the large metal drawer.

‘No, that’s only circumstantial evidence. The proof, Watson, is that you tie your sweater over one shoulder and under the other arm.’

Helge chuckled, grabbed one of the white cloths on the instrument table and flicked it at her. Alexandra smiled as she ducked down behind the top end of the table. She remained like that, stooped over, her eyes fixed on the body.

‘Helge,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Yeah.’

‘I think we’ve missed something.’

‘What?’

Alexandra reached out towards Susanne Andersen’s head, lifted the hair and pulled it to the side.

‘What is it?’ Helge asked.

‘Stitches,’ Alexandra replied. ‘Fresh stitches.’

He came round the other side of the trolley. ‘Hm. Guess she must have hurt herself then?’

Alexandra lifted away more hair, followed the stitches. ‘These weren’t carried out by a trained doctor, Helge, no one uses thread this thick or stitches this loosely. This was just done in a hurry. And look, the stitches continue all the way round the head.’

‘As though she’s...’

‘As though she’s been scalped,’ Alexandra said, feeling a cold shudder go through her. ‘And then the scalp has been sewn back on.’

She looked up at Helge, saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall. ‘Will we...’ he began. ‘Will we check what’s... underneath?’

‘No,’ Alexandra said firmly, straightening up. She had taken home enough nightmares from this job, and the pathologists earned two hundred thousand kroner a year more than her, they could earn it.

‘This is outside our field of competence,’ she said. ‘So it’s the kind of thing Dieners like you and me leave to the grown-ups.’

‘OK. And OK to partying tonight too, by the way.’

‘Good,’ Alexandra said. ‘But we need to finish the report and send it along with the photos to Bratt at Crime Squad. Oh fuck!’

‘What is it?’

‘I just realised that Bratt is bound to ask me to run an express DNA analysis when she reads about that saliva or whatever it is. In which case I won’t make it out on the town tonight.’

‘Come on, you can say no, everyone needs time off, even you.’

Alexandra put her hands on her hips, tilted her head to one side and looked sternly at Helge.

‘Right.’ He sighed. ‘Where would we be if everyone just took time off?’

4 Saturday

Rabbit hole

Harry Hole woke up. The bungalow lay in semi-darkness, but a white strip of sunlight, coming from under the bamboo blind, stretched across the coarse wooden floor, via the stone slab serving as a coffee table, and over to the kitchen worktop.

A cat was sitting there. One of Lucille’s cats; she had so many of them up in the main house that Harry couldn’t tell one from the other. The cat looked like it was smiling. Its tail was waving slowly as it calmly observed a mouse scuttling along the wall, stopping now and then to stick its snout in the air to sniff, before continuing. Towards the cat. Was the mouse blind? Did it lack a sense of smell? Had it eaten some of Harry’s marijuana? Or did it believe, like so many others seeking happiness in this city, that it was different, special? Or that this cat was different, that it meant well and wouldn’t just eat him?

Harry reached for the joint on the nightstand while keeping his eyes on the mouse, who was headed straight towards the cat. The cat struck, sinking its teeth into the mouse and lifting it up. It writhed a few moments in the predator’s jaws before going limp. The cat laid its prey on the floor, then viewed it with its head cocked slightly to one side, as though undecided on whether to eat the mouse or not.