Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

voice said. ‘It’s your body; it’s secreting a scent. Can you smell it? Adrenalin. It smells of medicine and urine. It’s the same odour you smell in old people’s homes and slaughterhouses. The smell of mortal fear.’
    Anton gasped for air; there didn’t seem to be enough for both of them.
    ‘As for me, I’m not at all afraid of dying,’ the voice said. ‘Isn’t it strange? That you can lose something so fundamentally human as the fear of dying. Of course, it’s partly to do with the desire to live, but only partly. Many people spend their whole lives somewhere they don’t want to be out of fear that the alternative is worse. Isn’t that sad?’
    Anton had a sense he was being suffocated. He had never had asthma himself, but he had seen Laura when she had an attack, seen the desperate, imploring expression on her face, felt the despair at not being able to help, at being no more than a spectator of her panic-stricken struggle to breathe. But a part of him had also been curious, wanting to know, to feel what it was like to be there, to feel you were on the verge of dying, to feel there was nothing you could do, it was something that was being done to you.
    Now he knew.
    ‘I believe death is a better place,’ the voice intoned. ‘But I can’t join you now, Anton. You see, I have a job to do.’
    Anton could hear the crunching of gravel again, like a hoarse voice slowly introducing a sentence with this sound that would soon go faster. And it was no longer possible to press the pedal any further, it was on the floor.
    ‘Goodbye.’
    He felt the cold air from the passenger’s side as the door was opened.
    ‘The patient,’ Anton groaned.
    He stared ahead at the edge, where everything disappeared, but felt the person in the passenger seat turn towards him.
    ‘Which patient?’
    Anton stuck out his tongue, ran it along his top lip, sensing something moist that tasted sweet and metallic. Licked the inside of his mouth. Found his voice. ‘The patient at the Rikshospital. I was drugged before he was killed. Was that you?’
    There was a couple of seconds’ silence as he listened to the rain. The rain out there in the darkness, was there a more beautiful sound? If he could have chosen he would have sat there listening to the sound day after day. Year after year. Listening and listening, enjoying every second he was given.
    Then the body beside him moved, he felt the car rise as it was relieved of the man’s weight. The door closed softly. He was alone. The car was moving. The sound of tyres rolling slowly on gravel was like a husky whisper. The handbrake. It was fifty centimetres away from his right hand. Anton tried to pull his hands away. Didn’t even feel the pain as the skin burst. The husky whisper was louder and quicker now. He knew he was too tall and too stiff to get a foot under the handbrake, so he leaned down. Opened his mouth. Held the tip of the handbrake, felt it pressing against the inside of his upper teeth, pulled, but it slipped out. Tried again, knowing it was too late, but he preferred to die like this, fighting, desperate, alive. He twisted, held the brake lever in his mouth again.
    Now it was totally still. The voice had gone quiet and the rain had come to a sudden stop. No, it hadn’t stopped. It was him. He was falling. Weightless, as he swirled round in a slow waltz, like the one he had danced that time with Laura while everyone they knew stood around watching. Rotated on his own axis, slowly, swaying, step-two-three, only now he was all alone. Falling in this strange silence. Falling with the rain.

14
    LAURA MITTET LOOKED at them. She had come down to the front of the block in Elveparken when they rang, and now she was standing with her arms crossed, freezing in her dressing gown. The first rays of sun glittering on the River Drammen. Something had flickered in her mind; for a couple of seconds she wasn’t there, she didn’t hear them, didn’t see anything, except for the river behind them. For a few seconds she was alone thinking that Anton had never been the right one. She had never met Mr Right, or at least had never got him. And the one she had got, Anton, had cheated on her the same year they got married. He had never found out that she knew. She’d had too much to lose for that. And he’d probably been having another affair now. He’d had the same expression on his face of exaggerated normality when he delivered the same rotten excuses. Overtime shifts