Killing Moon

But Harry carried on walking towards him. Became aware he was still holding the credit card in his right hand. Was this how it ended? In a dusty parking lot in a foreign country, bathed in sunlight, broke and half drunk, while trying to do what he hadn’t been able to do for his mother, hadn’t been able to do for any of those he had ever cared about?

He almost closed his eyes and squeezed his fingers around the credit card, so his hand formed a chisel.

The title of the Leonard Cohen song swirled through his mind: ‘Hey, that’s no way to say goodbye.’

Fuck that, the hell it wasn’t.

1 Friday

Eight o’clock. Half an hour since the September sun had gone down over Oslo, and past bedtime for three-year-olds.

Katrine Bratt sighed and whispered into the phone: ‘Can’t you sleep, darling?’

‘Gwanny is singing wong,’ the child’s voice answered, sniffling. ‘Whe ah you?’

‘I had to go to work, darling, but I’ll be home soon. Would you like Mummy to sing a little?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, then you have to close your eyes.’

‘Yeah.’

‘“Blueman”?’

‘Yeah.’

Katrine began singing the melancholy song in a low, deep voice. Blueman, Blueman, my buck, think of your small boy.

She had no idea why children had, for over a century, felt happy to be lulled to sleep by the story of an angst-ridden boy who wonders why Blueman, his favourite goat, hasn’t returned home from grazing, and who fears it’s been taken by a bear and now lies mutilated and dead somewhere in the mountains.

Still, after just one verse she could hear Gert’s breathing become more regular and deep, and after the next verse she heard her mother-in-law’s whispered voice on the phone.

‘He’s asleep now.’

‘Thanks,’ said Katrine, who had been squatting on her haunches so long she had to put her hand on the ground. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

‘Take all the time you need, dear. And I’m the one who should be thanking you for wanting us here. You know, he looks so much like Bjørn when he’s asleep.’

Katrine swallowed. Unable, as usual, to respond when she said that. Not because she didn’t miss Bjørn, not because she wasn’t happy that Bjørn’s parents saw him in Gert. But because it simply wasn’t true.

She concentrated on what lay in front of her.

‘Intense lullaby,’ said Sung-min Larsen, who had come and crouched down next to her. ‘“Maybe now you lay dead”?’

‘I know, but it’s the only one he wants to hear,’ Katrine said.

‘Well, then that’s what he gets.’ Her colleague smiled.

Katrine nodded. ‘Have you ever thought about how as children we expect unconditional love from our parents, without giving anything in return? That we are actually parasites? But then we grow up and things change completely. When exactly do you think we stop believing that we can be loved unconditionally just for being who we are?’

‘When did she stop, you mean?’

‘Yeah.’

They looked down at the body of the young woman lying on the forest floor. Her trousers and knickers were pulled down to her ankles, but the zip on the thin down jacket was pulled up. Her face — which was turned to the starry skies above — appeared chalk-white in the glare of the Crime Scene Unit’s floodlights, which were positioned among the trees. Her make-up was streaked, and looked like it had run and dried out several times. Her hair — bombed blonde by chemicals — was sticking to one side of her face. Her lips were stuffed with silicon, and false eyelashes protruded like the eaves of a roof over one eye, which was sunken down in its socket, staring glassily up and past them, and also over the other eye, which was not there, only an empty socket. Perhaps all the barely degradable synthetic materials were the reason the body had remained in as good condition as it had.

‘I’m guessing this is Susanne Andersen?’ Sung-min said.

‘I’m guessing the same,’ Katrine replied.

The detectives were from two different departments, she was with Crime Squad at the Oslo Police and he was with Kripos. Susanne Andersen, twenty-six years old, had been missing for seventeen days and was last spotted on a security camera at Skullerud metro station around a twenty-minute walk from where they were now. The only lead on the other missing woman, Bertine Bertilsen, twenty-seven years old, was her car, which was found abandoned in a car park in Grefsenkollen, a hiking area in another part of the city. The hair colour of the woman in front of them tallied with the security camera footage of Susanne, while Bertine was, according to family and friends, currently a brunette. Besides, the body had no tattoos on the naked lower body, while Bertine was supposed to have one — a Louis Vuitton logo — on her ankle.