robbery were available on the Net.'
Ivarsson shook his head. 'I'm afraid your average bank robber
these days is not so sophisticated, Hole. Would someone else like to
explain to Crime Squad what the typical hallmark of an inveterate
robber is? No? Well, he always - with painful precision - repeats
what he did on the previously successful occasion. It is only when he
fails - if he doesn't get the money or he is arrested - that he changes
the pattern.'
'That substantiates your theory, but it doesn't exclude mine,'
Harry said.
Ivarsson cast a desperate look around the table, as if begging for
help. 'Fine, Hole. You will have the chance to test your theories. In
fact, I've just decided to experiment with a new approach. The gist is
that a small party will work independently of, but in parallel with, the
investigation team. The idea originates with the FBI and the aim is to
avoid getting into a rut, having only one view of the case, which does
often happen with large groups of officers when, consciously or
unconsciously, a consensus is formed about the principal features of
an investigation. The small party can bring a new and fresh focus
because they are working separately and are not influenced by the
other group. This method has proved to be effective in tricky cases.
Most of us here, I am sure, will agree that Harry Hole has the natural
qualifications to be a member of such a party.'
Scattered chuckles. Ivarsson came to a halt behind Beate's chair.
'Beate, you will join Harry.'
Beate blushed. Ivarsson placed a paternal hand on her shoulder: 'If
it doesn't work, all you have to do is say.'
'I will,' Harry said.
Harry was about to unlock the front door to his apartment building when he changed his mind and walked back ten metres to the little grocery shop, where Ali was carrying in boxes of fruit and vegetables from the pavement.
'Hi, Harry! Are you better now?' Ali had a broad grin on his face and Harry closed his eyes for a second. It was as he feared.
'Did you help me, Ali?'
'Just up the stairs. When we opened your door, you said you could manage.'
'How did I get home? On foot or . . . ?'
'Taxi. You owe me a hundred and twenty.'
Harry groaned and followed Ali into the shop. 'I apologise, Ali. Really. Can you give me an abridged version, without too many embarrassing details?'
'You and the driver were arguing in the street. And our bedrooms face that way.' He added with a winning smile: 'Bloody awful to have the window there.'
'And when was that?'
'In the middle of the night.'
'You get up at five o'clock, Ali. I don't know what people like you mean by the middle of the night.'
'Half past eleven. At least.'
Harry promised it would never happen again. Ali kept nodding in the way that people do when listening to stories they know off by heart. Harry asked how he could thank Ali, who answered that Harry could rent him his unused cellar storage space. Harry said he would give the matter more thought and paid Ali the money for the taxi, a bottle of Coke, a bag of pasta and meatballs.
'We're quits then,' Harry said.
Ali shook his head. 'Quarterly rates,' said the chairman, treasurer and Mr Fix-it of the housing co-op committee.
'Oh shit, I'd forgotten.'
'Eriksen.' Ali smiled.
'Who's that?'
'Someone I got a letter from last summer. He asked me to send the account number so that he could pay his rates for May and June 1972. He reckoned that was why he hadn't been able to sleep for the last thirty years. I wrote back saying no one in the block remembered him, so he didn't need to pay.' Ali pointed a finger at Harry. 'But I'm not going to do that with you.'
Harry raised both arms in surrender: 'I'll transfer the money tomorrow.'
The first thing Harry did when he was in his flat was to call Anna's number again. The same ex-presenter as the previous time. But he had barely emptied the bag of pasta and meatballs into the frying pan when he heard the telephone ringing above the sizzling noises. He ran into the hall and snatched at the phone.
'Hello!' he yelled.
'Hello,' said the familiar woman's voice at the other end, somewhat taken aback.
'Oh, it's you.'
'Yes, who did you think it was?'
Harry squeezed his eyes shut. 'Work. There's been another robbery.' The words tasted like bile and chilli. The numb ache behind his eyes was back.
'I tried to catch you on your mobile,' Rakel said.
'I've lost it.'
'Lost it?'
'Left it somewhere, or it's been stolen. I don't know, Rakel.'
'Is something wrong, Harry?'
'Wrong?'
'You sound so . . . stressed.'
'I . . .'
'Mm?'
Harry breathed in. 'How's the court case going?'
Harry was listening, but was unable to order the words into sentences which made sense. He picked up 'financial status', 'the best for the child' and 'arbitration' and gathered that there wasn't much news. The next meeting with the lawyers had been postponed until Friday; Oleg was fine, but was sick of living in a hotel.
'Tell him I'm looking forward to having you back,' he said.
When they had rung off, Harry stood wondering if he should ring back. But what for? To tell her he had been invited to dinner by an old flame and he had no idea what had taken place? Harry rested his hand on the telephone, but then the smoke alarm in the kitchen went off. And when he had taken the frying pan off the hob and opened the window, the telephone rang again. Later Harry was to reflect that a lot would have been different, if Bjarne Moller had not chosen to ring him that evening.
'I know you've just gone off duty,' Moller said, 'but we're a bit shortstaffed and a woman has been found dead in her flat. Appears she shot herself. Could you take a look?'
'Of course, boss. I owe you one for today. By the way, Ivarsson presented the parallel-investigation approach as his idea.'
'What would you have done, if you were boss and had received such an order from above?'
'The idea of me as a boss is mind-boggling, boss. How do I get to this flat?'
'Stay where you are. You'll be picked up.'
Twenty minutes later there was a harsh buzzing sound that Harry heard so seldom it made him jump. The voice, metallic and distorted by the intercom, said the taxi had arrived, but Harry could feel the hairs on his neck rising. When he got downstairs and saw the lowslung, red sports car, a Toyota MR2, his suspicions were confirmed.
'Good evening, Hole.' The voice came from the open car window, but it was so close to the tarmac that Harry couldn't see who was speaking. Harry opened the car door and was welcomed by a funky bass, an organ as synthetic as a blue boiled sweet and a familiar falsetto: 'You sexy motherfucka!'
With difficulty, Harry heaped himself into a narrow bucket seat.
'It's us two tonight then,' Inspector Tom Waaler said, opening a Teutonic jaw and revealing an impressive row of impeccable teeth in the centre of his suntanned face. But the arctic-blue eyes remained cold. There were many at Police HQ who disliked Harry, but as far as he knew there was only one person who actually nourished a hatred of him. In Waaler's eyes, Harry knew he was an unworthy representative of the police force and therefore a personal affront. On several occasions, Harry had made it clear he didn't share Waaler's and some other colleagues' crypto-fascist views on homos, commies, dole cheats, Pakis, chinks, niggers, gyppos and dagos, while Waaler, for his part, had called Harry a 'pissed-up rock journo'. However, Harry suspected that the real reason for his hatred was that Harry drank. Tom Waaler could not tolerate weakness. Harry assumed that was why he spent so many hours in the fi
tness studio practising high kicks and punches against sacks of sand and a stream of new sparring partners. In the canteen, Harry had overheard one of the younger officers, with admiration in his voice, describing how Waaler had broken both arms of a karate kid in a Vietnamese gang by Oslo Central station. Given Waaler's view on skin colour, it was a paradox for Harry that his colleague spent so much time in the solarium, but perhaps it was true what one wag had said: Waaler wasn't actually a racist. He was just as happy beating up neo-Nazis as blacks.
Over and above what was common knowledge, there were some matters no one knew as such, but a few had a gut feeling about nevertheless. It was more than a year ago now since Sverre Olsen - the only person who could have told them why Ellen Gjelten was murdered - was found lying on his bed with a warm gun in his hand and a bullet from Waaler's Smith & Wesson between his eyes.
'Be careful, Waaler.'
'I beg your pardon?'
Harry reached out and turned down the love-making groans. 'It's icy tonight.'
The engine purred like a sewing machine, but the sound was deceptive; as the car accelerated Harry experienced for himself how hard the back of the seat was. They raced up the hill by Stenspark along Suhms gate.
'Where are we going?' Harry asked.
'Here,' Waaler said, swinging abruptly to the left in front of an oncoming car. The window was still open and Harry could hear the sound of wet leaves sucking at the tyres.
'Welcome back to Crime Squad,' Harry said. 'Didn't they want you in POT?'
'Restructuring,' Waaler said. 'Besides, the Chief Super and Moller wanted me back. I achieved some pretty useful results in Crime Squad, if you remember.'
'How could I forget.'
'Well, one hears so much about the long-term effects of drinking.'
Harry had just managed to put his arm against the dashboard before the sudden braking sent him into the windscreen. The glove compartment sprang open and something heavy hit Harry on the knee on its way to the floor.
'What the fuck was that?' he groaned.
'A Jericho 941, Israeli police issue,' Waaler said, switching off the engine. 'Not loaded. Leave it where it is. We've arrived.'
'Here?' Harry asked in amazement and bent down to look up at the yellow block of flats in front of him.
'Why not?' Waaler said, already halfway out of the car.
Harry felt his heart beginning to pound. As he searched for the door handle, out of all the thoughts racing through his mind one took hold: he should have made the call to Rakel.
The fog was back. It seeped in through the streets, from the cracks around the closed windows behind the trees in the avenue, out of the blue door which opened after they had heard Weber's abrupt bark over the intercom, and out through the keyholes in the doors they passed on the way upstairs. It lay like a duvet of cotton wool around Harry, and as they entered the flat, Harry had the sensation of walking on clouds. Everything around him - the people, the voices, the crackle of the walkie-talkies, the light from the camera flashes - had taken on a dreamlike sheen, a coating of detachment because this was not, could not be, real. But, standing in front of the bed where the deceased lay with a pistol in her right hand and a black hole in her temple, he found himself unable to look at the blood on the pillow or meet her vacant, accusatory gaze. Instead he focused on the bedhead, on the horse with the bitten-off head, hoping the fog would soon lift and he would wake up.
10
Sorgenfrigata
Voices came and went around him.
'I'm Inspector Waaler. Can anyone give me a quick recap?' 'We got here three quarters of an hour ago. The electrician here
found her.'
'When?'
'At five. He immediately rang the police. His name is . . . let me see
. . . Rene Jensen. I've got his National Insurance number here and his address too.'
'Good. Ring in and check his record.'
'OK.'
'Rene Jensen?'
'That's me.'
'Can you come over here? My name's Waaler. How did you get in?'
'As I said to the other officer, with this spare key. She popped it down to my shop on Tuesday because she wasn't going to be at home when I came.'
'Because she was working?'
'No idea. Don't think she had a job. Well, not the normal kind. She said she was putting on an exhibition of some stuff.'
'She was an artist then. Anyone here heard of her?'
Silence.
'What were you doing in the bedroom, Jensen?'
'Looking for the bathroom.'
Another voice: 'The bathroom's behind that door.'
'OK. Anything suspicious strike you when you came into the flat, Jensen?'
'Er . . . how do you mean suspicious?'
'Was the door locked? Any windows left open? A particular smell or sound? Anything.'
'The door was locked. Didn't see windows open, but I wasn't looking. The only smell was that solvent . . .'
'Turpentine?'
Another voice: 'There are some painting materials in one of the bigger rooms.'
'Thanks. Anything else you noticed, Jensen?'
'What was the last one again?'
'Sound.'
'Sound, yeah! No, not a lot of sound, quiet as the grave it was. That is . . . ha ha . . . I didn't mean . . .'
'That's fine, Jensen. Had you met the deceased before?'
'Never seen her before she came to the shop. Seemed pretty perky then.'
'What did she want you to do?'
'Fix the thermostat for the underfloor heating in the bathroom.'
'Could you do us a favour and check if there's really a problem with the cables? See if she had any heater cables even.'
'What for? Oh, I see, she might have set the whole thing up and we were kind of supposed to find her?'
'Something like that.'
'Yeah, well, the thermostat was fried.'
'Fried?'
'Not functional.'
'How do you know?'
Pause.
'You must have been told not to touch anything, Jensen, weren't you?'
'Ye-es, but you took such a bloody long time to come, and I got a bit twitchy, so I had to find something to do.'
'So, now, the deceased has a fully functional thermostat?'
'Er . . . ha ha . . . yes.'
Harry tried to move off the bed, but his feet wouldn't obey. The doctor had closed Anna's eyes and now she seemed to be sleeping. Tom Waaler had sent the electrician home and told him to make himself available for the next few days. He had also dismissed the uniformed patrolmen who had responded to the call. Harry would never have believed he would feel this way, but in fact he was pleased that Waaler had been there. Without his experienced colleague's presence, not one single intelligent question would have been asked, and even fewer intelligent decisions taken.
Waaler asked the doctor if he could give them some provisional conclusions.
'The bullet has obviously passed through the skull, destroyed the brain and thus arrested all vital bodily functions. On the assumption that the room temperature has been constant, body temperature suggests that she has been dead for at least sixteen hours. No signs of violence. No injection marks or external indications of medicinal use. However . . .' The doctor paused for effect. 'The scars on the wrists suggest that she has tried this before. A purely speculative but educated guess is that she was manic depressive, or simply depressive, and suicidal. I wouldn't mind betting we will find a psychologist's case file on her.'
Harry tried to say something, but his tongue wouldn't obey, either.
'I'll know more when I've undertaken a closer examination.'
'Thank you, Doctor. Anything to tell us, Weber?'
'The weapon is a Beretta M92F, a highly unusual gun. We can only find one set of fingerprints on the gunstock, and they are obviously hers. The bullet was lodged in one of the bed boards and the ammo matches the weapon, so the ballistics report will show it was fired by this pi
stol. You'll get a full report tomorrow.'
'Good, Weber. One more thing. The door was locked when the electrician arrived. I noticed the door was fitted with a standard lock and not a latch, so no one can have been here and then left the flat, unless they took the deceased's key and locked the door after them, of course. In other words, if we find her key, we can wrap this one up.'
Weber nodded and lifted a yellow pencil, dangling from which was a ring and a key. 'It was on the chest of drawers in the hall. It's the kind of system key that opens the main door to the block and all the rooms for common use. I checked and it fits the lock on the flat door.'
'Excellent. All we're missing then is basically a signed suicide letter. Any objections to calling this one an open and shut case?'
Waaler looked at Weber, the doctor and Harry. 'OK. Family can be given the sad news and come to identify her.'
He went into the hall while Harry stood by the bed. Soon after, Waaler stuck his head in again.
'Isn't it great when all the cards just fall into place, Hole?'
Harry's brain sent a message to the head to nod, but he had no idea if it obeyed.
11
The Illusion
I'm watching the first video. When I take it frame by frame I can see the spurt of flame. Particles of powder which as yet have not been converted into pure energy, like a glowing swarm of asteroids following the large comet into the atmosphere to burn up while the comet continues serenely on its course. And there is nothing anyone can do because this is the course that was predestined millions of years ago, before mankind, before emotions, before hatred and mercy were born. The bullet enters the head, truncates mental activity and revokes dreams. In the core of the cranium the last thought, a neural impulse from the pain centre, is shattered. It is a last contradictory SOS to itself before everything is silenced. I click onto the second video title. I stare out of the window while the computer grinds away scouring the Internet night. There are stars in the sky and I think that each of them is proof of the ineluctability of fate. They make no sense; they are elevated above the human need for logic and context. And that is why, I think, they are so beautiful.