Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

people as ugly as he was and how serious could concussion be for someone who didn’t have a brain?
    It was meant to be a joke, and Truls had tried with his grunted laughter to show he appreciated it, but the broken jawbone and the smashed nose had hurt too much.
    He was still taking strong painkillers, he still wore big bandages around his head, and of course he was not allowed to drive, but what could he do? He couldn’t sit at home waiting for the dizziness to go and the wounds to heal. Even Megan Fox had begun to bore him and he didn’t actually have the doctor’s permission to watch TV either. So he might just as well sit here. In a car outside a church to . . . well, to do what? To show his respect for a man he had never had any respect for? An empty gesture for a sodding idiot who didn’t know what was good for him, who saved the life of the one man whose death he had everything to gain by? Truls Berntsen couldn’t bloody fathom it. He only knew he wanted to be back working as soon as he was well enough. And the town to be his again.
    Rakel breathed in and out. Her fingers round the bouquet felt clammy. Stared at the door. Thought about the people sitting inside. Friends, family, acquaintances. The priest. Not that there were so many, but they were waiting. Couldn’t start without her.
    ‘You promise you won’t cry?’ Oleg said.
    ‘No,’ she said, smiled fleetingly and stroked his cheek. He had grown so tall. He was so good-looking. Towered above her. She’d had to buy a dark suit for him, and it was only when they were standing in the shop and measuring up that she realised her son was close to Harry’s one metre ninety-two. She sighed.
    ‘We’d better go in,’ she said, threading her arm through his.
    Oleg opened the door, was given a nod by the verger inside and they began to walk up the aisle. And when Rakel saw all the faces turned to her, she felt her nervousness vanish. This had not been her idea, she had been against it, but in the end Oleg had persuaded her. He thought it was only right that it should all finish like this. That was precisely the word he had used: finish. But wasn’t it above all else a beginning? The start of a new chapter in their lives? At least that was how it felt. And suddenly this did feel right. Being here, now.
    And a smile spread across her face. She smiled at all the other smiling faces. For a moment she thought that if their smiles or her own got any broader there could be a serious accident. And the notion of this, the sound of tearing faces, which ought to have made her shudder, caused bubbles of laughter in her stomach. Don’t laugh, she told herself. Not now. She noticed that Oleg, who so far had been concentrating on walking in time with the organ, sensed her mood, and she glanced at him. Met his surprised, admonitory expression. But then he had to look away; he had seen. That his mother was having a fit of the giggles. Here, now. And he found that so inappropriate that he started laughing as well.
    To focus her mind on something else, on what was about to happen, on the solemnity, she fixed her gaze on the man who was waiting by the altar. Harry. In black.
    He stood facing them with an idiotic grin plastered across his handsome, pug-ugly face. As tall and proud as a peacock. When he and Oleg had stood back-to-back at Gunnar Øye’s, the outfitter’s, the assistant with the tape measure had announced that only three centimetres separated them, in Harry’s favour. And the two overgrown schoolboys had high-fived as though both were satisfied with the outcome of some competition.
    But now, at this moment, Harry looked very adult. The rays from the June sun falling through the stained-glass windows enveloped him in a kind of celestial light and he seemed taller than ever. And as relaxed as he had been throughout. At first she didn’t understand how he could be so relaxed after all that had happened. But gradually it had rubbed off, this calm, this unshakeable belief that everything had sorted itself out. She hadn’t been able to sleep for the first few weeks after Arnold Folkestad had come to their home, even though Harry had snuggled up close and whispered in her ear that it was over. That it had gone well. That they were out of danger. He had repeated the same words night after night like a soporific mantra, which still hadn’t been enough. But then, gradually, she had begun to believe it. And after a few more weeks to know it. Everything had