The Blind Goddess Read Online Free PDF Page A

limited to having yelled after a bicycle thief who was making off down Markveien with her new
fifteen-gear bike. But—she had seen this on TV. Defence Counsel Matlock had said: “I don’t want to know the truth, I want to know what you’re going to say in court.”
Somehow it didn’t sound quite as convincing coming from her own lips. More hesitant, perhaps. But it might be a way of eliciting something.
    Several minutes passed. The suspect had stopped rocking the chair, but was scraping it on the linoleum instead. The noise was getting on her nerves.
    “It was me that killed the man you found.”
    Karen was more relieved than surprised. She’d known it was him. He’s telling the truth, she thought, and offered him a throat pastille. He’d acquired the habit of smoking with
a pastille in his mouth, just as she had. She’d started many years ago in the vague belief that it prevented the smell of smoke on the breath. By the time she’d realised it
didn’t, she’d already become hooked.
    “I was the one who killed the guy.”
    It was as if he wanted to convince someone. It wasn’t necessary.
    “I don’t know who he is. Was, I mean. That is, I know his name, and what he looks like. Looked like. But I didn’t know him. Do you know any defence lawyers?”
    “Yes, of course,” she said, with a smile of relief. He didn’t smile back. “Well, it depends what you mean by know. I’m not a personal friend of any, if that’s
what you mean, but it’ll be easy to find a good defence counsel for you. I’m glad you realise what you need.”
    “I’m not asking you to get me another lawyer. I’m just asking you whether you know any. Personally.”
    “No. Well, a few of my fellow students went on to specialise in that field, but none of them is in the top league. Yet.”
    “Do you often see them?”
    “No, only when I meet them by chance.”
    That was true. And a sore point. Karen Borg didn’t have many friends now. They had slipped out of her life one after another, or she out of theirs, on paths that had become overgrown, only
crossing now and again as polite exchanges over a beer in a pavement café in the spring, or emerging from a cinema late on an autumn evening.
    “Good. Then I want to have you. They can charge me with the murder, and I’ll be remanded in custody. But you must get the police to guarantee me one thing: to let me stay here in
police headquarters. Anything to keep away from that bloody prison.”
    The man was certainly full of surprises.
    The disgraceful conditions in the cells at police headquarters had hit the headlines from time to time in the newspapers, and with reason. The cells were intended for twenty-four-hour remand.
They were scarcely even adequate for that. Yet they were where this prisoner wanted to stay. For weeks.
    “Why?”
    The young man bent forward confidentially. She could smell his breath, now rancid after several days without a toothbrush, and leant back in her own chair.
    “I can’t trust anyone. I have to think. We can talk again when I’ve worked some things out. You will come back?”
    He was intense, verging on desperation, and for the first time she almost felt sorry for him.
    She rang the number Håkon had written on a piece of paper.
    “We’ve finished. You can come and fetch us.”
    Karen Borg didn’t have to go to court, to her great relief. She had only once attended a court hearing. It was while she was still a student, and convinced she would use
her law degree to help the needy. She had sat herself on the public benches in Room 17, behind a barrier which seemed to be there to protect innocent observers from the brutal reality in the room.
People were being imprisoned at half-hourly intervals, and only one out of eleven had been able to persuade the judge that he couldn’t possibly be guilty. On that occasion she had found it
difficult to see who was defending and who was prosecuting counsel, so matey were they, laughing and handing one