The slug’s feelers moved. It had caught the smell of its favourite dish, the thawed moss Prim had also smuggled from the foot of Mount Kaputar. Now the slug was moving, almost imperceptibly, its smooth, pink surface glistening. Advancing millimetre by millimetre towards its dinner, while laying a trail of slime behind it on the black soil. Closing in on its target, as slowly and surely as Prim was closing in on his. There were cannibal snails in Australia, blind predators that used the slime trail of the Mount Kaputar slug to hunt for it. They were only marginally faster, but slowly, ever so slowly, they closed in on their prey. They would eat the beautiful pink slug alive, scraping it up with a plate of tiny teeth and sucking it in, layer by layer. Was the pink slug aware of them coming? Did it experience fear in the long wait until it was caught? Did it have any solution, any means of escape? Did it, for instance, ever consider crossing the slime trail of another Mount Kaputar slug in the hope the pursuers changed course? That, at least, was his own plan when they came for him.
Prim went back to the kitchen and put the ziplock bag back. Stood for a moment looking at the large freezer bag. At the human brain inside. Shuddered. It made him nauseous. He was dreading it.
After brushing his teeth and going to bed, he switched on the police radio and listened to the messages going back and forth. Sometimes it seemed reassuring and was sleep-inducing to listen to these calm voices expressing, in such sober brevity, what was going wrong out there in the city. Because so little occurred and what did was rarely dramatic enough to keep Prim from falling asleep after a short while. But not tonight. They had ended the search in Grefsenkollen for the missing woman and were now using the police radio to arrange times and rendezvous points for the different search parties early tomorrow morning. Prim opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out the cocaine holder. It was partially made of gold, he thought. Five centimetres long and shaped like a bullet. A snuff bullet. If you twisted the grooved area slightly, the bullet ‘loaded’ with an appropriate dose you could then sniff through the hole at the tip. Truly elegant. It had belonged to the woman the police were now looking for, it even had her initials on the side, B.B. A gift no doubt. Prim ran his fingers across the grooves, rolled the bullet against his cheek. Then he placed it back in the drawer, switched off the radio and stared at the ceiling for a while. There was so much to think about. He tried to masturbate but gave up. Then he began to cry.
It was almost two in the morning when he finally fell asleep.
Truls looked at his watch. Ten past nine. Markus Røed should have arrived ten minutes ago.
Truls and Harry had pushed the bed against the wall in order to move the desk into the middle of Harry’s hotel room and were now sitting on chairs on one side of the desk looking at the empty chair awaiting the third person. Truls scratched under his arm.
‘Arrogant prick,’ he said.
‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘Just think about what he’s paying you per hour and that you’re on the clock. That feel better?’
Truls straightened out a forefinger and tapped aimlessly on the laptop in front of him. Thought about it. ‘A bit,’ he grunted.
They had gone carefully through the procedure.
The division of responsibilities was simple. Harry would ask the questions, and Truls would keep his mouth shut and concentrate on the screen without giving away what he saw. That suited Truls just fine, it was after all pretty much what he had been doing at Police HQ for the last three years. Playing patience, online poker, watching old episodes of
‘Planning on using the good cop/bad cop tactic?’ Truls asked, nodding at the kitchen roll Harry had placed on the table. The routine was that after making the interviewee cry, the bad cop would march out angrily, whereupon the good cop would immediately proffer the paper towels, say a few compassionate words and then just wait for the interviewee to confide in him. Or in her. People thought women were kinder, they were stupid like that. But Truls knew better. Knew better now.
‘Maybe,’ Harry said.
