Blix studied the footage of Dahlmann planting the phone belonging to the Danish footballer at the press conference. Krohn had pieced together a sequence in which the double murderer was caught by the cameras outside the police station.
He played the sequence several times. With each repetition, he grew increasingly uncertain about whether it was Dahlmann he had spotted on his way to Pastor Hansteen’s house. There and then he had felt confident. He had stopped the subway trains, closed off 313streets and sent a helicopter into the air to search for a man in a suit that was slightly too small for him. Because there had been something familiar about the man. His build had tallied, but not his stiff gait.
His phone rang. It was an internal number, from the operations centre. The female caller introduced herself as head of operations.
‘We have a standing order here that you should be notified of all messages that have any kind of connection to the number ten,’ she began. ‘At the moment we have a patrol car en route to Drivhusveien number ten in Bryn.’
‘What’s happening there?’ Blix asked.
‘A woman who was tied to a chair has managed to use her head to break a window,’ the caller explained. ‘She’s bleeding pretty badly. It was the man in the house next door who called it in.’
‘Someone held prisoner?’ Blix queried.
‘It seems so,’ the woman replied.
‘Who lives there?’
‘We have a Martha Elisabeth Eckhoff listed at that address,’ she told him. ‘Sixty-seven years of age.’
Blix stood up.
‘Repeat that name,’ he said.
‘Martha Elisabeth Eckhoff. I think she’s an old actress or something.’
A distressing thought flashed through Blix’s mind.
‘Hold the line!’ he bellowed as he logged into the Worthy Winner page.
‘What is it?’ Kovic asked.
Blix didn’t answer, but clicked through the website to locate the recordings of the tests the contestants had been subjected to.
‘Hidden camera,’ he said, pointing at the film showing the contestants’ reactions when they found their 500-kroner notes.
On screen, the farmer parked his red Nissan. Even Eckhoff entered the picture, dropped a 500-kroner bill and walked off.
‘He’s limping,’ Blix said, to himself just as much as to Kovic. He 314still had the head of operations on the phone. ‘Check whether she has a son called Even,’ he told her, looking at the time. ‘Pronto!’
He heard the sound of a keyboard tapping at the other end. Blix pulled on his jacket while he waited. Kovic stared at him in anticipation.
‘Looks like it, yes,’ the head of operations answered. ‘Even Eckhoff, born thirty-first of January nineteen eighty-seven; mother – Martha Elisabeth Eckhoff; father – Erling Sebastian.’
It all added up. The studios in Nydalen and Emma’s bike left there after the broadcast. Now Blix remembered who Eckhoff had reminded him of.
‘The estate agent guy,’ he said. ‘He walked the same way. He had a limp too.’
Blix didn’t take time to explain, but asked the head of operations to keep them posted about what they found at Drivhusveien ten. Then he tilted the computer screen showing the Worthy Winner web page so that Kovic could see it.
At the top of the page, a clock was ticking.
WILL THEY AGREE? was written underneath, on a sign bearing a picture of Iselin and Toralf – staring at each other as if engaged in a duel that was a matter of life or death. The clock continued to tick. It was one hour and fourteen minutes until the countdown would be over.
‘In a countdown,’ Blix said, looking at Kovic while struggling to hide how afraid he now felt, ‘do you end with one, or do you end with zero?’
‘Zero,’ Kovic said. ‘Zero is also a number.’
Spot on, Blix thought.
The clock always ticked right down to zero.