Henning buys a baguette from Deli de Luca on his way home and eats it as he walks. The thought of what awaits him makes him speed up.
Heidi let him have the rest of the week off though she couldn’t refrain from sighing heavily when he refused to give her a reason. Instead she said, ‘Fine. You need it. You look dreadful.’
Henning said nothing.
Back in his flat he sits down on the sofa and takes out the mini cassettes with his initials on. He peels off the tape, scrunches it into a ball and throws it on the kitchen floor. None of the tapes are labelled with a date or year, and it’s impossible to see if some of them are more used than others.
Henning finds his old tape recorder in the driftwood cupboard, plugs in the power cable and inserts the first cassette. Soon he hears his own voice.
What did you think of Statoil’s handling of this matter?
The reply is provided by a female voice he can’t identify.
Statoil’s promises concerning my role and the company’s self-imposed obligations in respect of human rights were false and misleading. This individual case is symptomatic of a greater problem.
Henning fast-forwards. The woman’s voice follows him for twelve minutes and thirty-six seconds before another woman’s voice appears after a short break. Henning recognises the voice immediately.
The man was stabbed in the chest. He has been taken to Ulleval Hospital, but his condition is unknown. His attacker appears to be a woman and she is now in police custody.
The voice belongs to Assistant Commissioner Pia Nokleby and is professional and grave as it always is when he asks her for a quote or two on the record. Henning fast-forwards through a story about sexual abuse of schoolchildren before he works out that this tape must have been recorded at least one year before Jonas died. He finds a marker pen, puts a big black cross on that cassette and inserts the next.
It’s going to be a long night.