‘Harry, I’d like to help, but right now I have some private matters I need to prioritise, and the truth isn’t going to disappear in the space of twelve hours. My lecturer at Police College maintained he was quoting you when he said that the investigation of a serial killer wasn’t a sprint but a marathon. That you need to pace yourself. But now my twenty seconds are up, Harry. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow.’
‘Mm.’
Sung-min wanted to take the phone from his ear, but again his hand refused to obey.
‘Katrine is together with this Arne guy at the moment,’ Harry said.
Chris had counted the seconds. It annoyed him that over thirty of them had passed when Sung-min sat down across from him again. And it annoyed him even more that his boyfriend did not look him in the eye. At least not until he had taken a mouthful of the red wine Chris had already forgotten the name of. He could sense Sung-min’s restlessness, which always made him feel like — at best — number two.
‘You’re going to work, aren’t you?’
‘No, no, relax. Tonight, you and I are going to enjoy ourselves, Chris. Why don’t you take that glass of wine to the sofa and I’ll put on that recording of Brahms’s third symphony I brought with me?’
Chris looked at Sung-min suspiciously, but they went into the living room. It was Sung-min who had persuaded him to buy a vinyl turntable and while Sung-min put the record on he sat back on the sofa.
‘Close your eyes!’ Sung-min ordered.
Chris did as he was told and a moment later the music streamed out into the room. He waited to feel the sofa yield to the weight of Sung-min where he had left space but it didn’t happen. He opened his eyes.
‘Hey! Sung! Where are you?’
The reply came from the kitchen. ‘Just making a few quick calls. Listen in particular to the cellos.’
The ring
Frognerseteren restaurant was situated high above Oslo, between the villas of its more bourgeois inhabitants and the hiking terrain of those same inhabitants. The people on their way to the restaurant were wearing suits and dresses; those going to the cafe adjacent were dressed in trekking attire. It was a six-minute walk from the terminus of the metro, and when Katrine arrived, she had no trouble spotting Arne, he was sitting alone outside at one of the large, solid wooden tables. He had stood up and spread his arms wide, smiling with those nice, sad eyes from under his flat cap, and she had stepped slightly reluctantly into his imperious embrace.
‘Won’t it get a little cold?’ she asked when they had sat down. ‘They haven’t put out any patio heaters. It looks like they have tables inside.’
‘Yes, but if we’re in there we won’t get to see the blood moon.’
‘I see,’ she said, shivering. It was unseasonably warm in the city below, but up here the temperature was considerably lower. She looked up at the white moon. It was full but looked normal otherwise. ‘When’s the blood coming out?’
‘It’s not blood,’ he said with a chuckle.
For a while she had found it irritating that he took everything she said so literally, as if he thought she were a child. But tonight she found it perhaps a little extra irritating when so many stressful thoughts were swirling in her head, and she had a nagging feeling that she should be at work, because
‘The eclipse occurs because the earth is between the sun and the moon. So for a short time the moon is in the earth’s shadow,’ he said. ‘Ergo the moon should be black. But the direction of light changes when it strikes something with a different density. Don’t you remember this from your school physics, Katrine?’
‘I took languages.’
‘Oh, well, when the sunlight strikes the earth, the atmosphere bends the red portion of the light inwards, around the earth, and it hits the surface of the moon.’
‘Aha!’ Katrine said with ironic exaggeration. ‘So it’s light and not blood.’
Arne smiled and nodded. ‘Man has been staring at the sky in wonder since time immemorial. But we continue to do so even now when we have so many answers. And I think it’s because there’s a comfort of sorts in the vastness of space. It makes us and our short lives seem so small and insignificant. Ergo our problems also seem small. We’re here one moment and gone the next, so why spend what little time we have worrying? We need to use it as best we can. That’s why I’m now going to ask you to switch off your mind, switch off your phone, switch off this world. Because just for tonight you and I are only going to relate to the two greatest things. The universe...’ He placed his hand on hers. ‘And love.’
The words touched Katrine’s heart. Of course they did, she was a simple soul. At the same time, she knew they would have probably touched her more deeply if someone else had said them. She also didn’t know if she was comfortable about turning off her phone; she had a babysitter at home and responsibility for a murder investigation that might not turn out to be as cut and dried as they had believed only hours before.
