The Redbreast (Harry Hole)

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I heard someone talking outside,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  Oleg was in the sitting room, watching TV in his pyjamas.

  ‘Hi loser,’ Harry said. ‘Shouldn’t you be practising Tetris?’

  Oleg snorted without taking his eyes off the TV.

  ‘I always forget that children don’t understand irony,’ Harry said to Rakel.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Oleg asked.

  ‘Been?’ Harry was a little baffled by Oleg’s accusatory expression. ‘What do you mean?’

  Oleg rolled his shoulders.

  ‘Coffee?’ Rakel asked. Harry nodded. Oleg and Harry sat in silence watching the gnu’s incredible migration through the Kalahari Desert while Rakel clattered around in the kitchen. It took time, the coffee and the migration.

  ‘Fifty-six thousand,’ Oleg said finally.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Harry said.

  ‘I top the all-time-high list!’

  ‘Go and get it.’

  Oleg was on to his feet and out of the sitting room as Rakel brought in the coffee. She sat facing Harry. He found the remote control and turned down the sound of thundering hooves. It was Rakel who broke the silence in the end.

  ‘So what are you going to do on 17 May this year?’

  ‘Work. But if you’re suggesting an invitation to something, I’ll move heaven and earth . . .’

  She laughed and dismissed the idea with a wave.

  ‘Sorry, I was just making conversation. Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘You’ve been ill, haven’t you?’ Harry asked.

  ‘That’s a long story.’

  ‘You have a number of them.’

  ‘Why are you back from Sweden?’ she asked.

  ‘Brandhaug. With whom, strangely enough, I was sitting right here.’

  ‘Yes, life throws up bizarre coincidences,’ Rakel said.

  ‘So bizarre that you would never get away with it in fiction, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it, Harry.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She sighed and stirred her tea.

  ‘What is this?’ Harry asked. ‘Is the whole family communicating in coded messages this evening?’

  She attempted a laugh, but it ended up in a sniffle. Spring cold,Harry thought.

  ‘I . . . it . . .’

  She tried to start the sentence a couple more times, but nothing coherent emerged. The teaspoon in her cup went round in circles. Over her shoulder Harry glimpsed a gnu being slowly and pitilessly dragged into the river by a crocodile.

  ‘I’ve had a terrible time,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been pining for you.’

  She turned to Harry, and it was only now that he saw she was crying. The tears rolled down her cheeks and collected under her chin. She made no attempt to stop them.

  ‘Well . . .’ Harry began, and that was all he managed to say before they were in each other’s arms. They clung to each other as to a lifebuoy. Harry was shaking. Just this, Harry thought. Just this is enough. Just holding her like this.

  ‘Mummy!’ The shout came from the first floor. ‘Where’s the GameBoy?’

  ‘In one of the drawers in the dressing-table,’ Rakel shouted in a quivering voice. ‘Start at the top.’

  ‘Kiss me,’ she whispered to Harry. ‘But Oleg might —’

  ‘It’s not in the dressing-table.’

  When Oleg came downstairs with the GameBoy, which he finally found in the toy box, he didn’t notice the atmosphere in the sitting room at first and laughed at Harry, who was hm-hming with concern at seeing the new score. But as soon as Harry set off to beat the new record, he heard Oleg say, ‘What’s up with your faces?’

  Harry looked at Rakel, who was only just capable of keeping a straight face.

  ‘It’s because we like each other so much,’ Harry said, replacing three lines with one long line out on the right. ‘And your record is on the ropes now, loser.’

  Oleg laughed and slapped Harry on the shoulder.

  ‘No chance. You’re the loser.’

  83

  Harry’s Flat. 11 May 2000.

  HARRY DIDN’T FEEL LIKE A LOSER WHEN, SHORTLY BEFORE midnight, he unlocked the door to his flat and saw the red eye on the answerphone blinking. He had carried Oleg to bed and drunk tea, and Rakel had said that one day she would tell him a long story. When she wasn’t so exhausted. Harry had answered that she needed a holiday, and she agreed.

  ‘We could go together, all three of us,’ he had said, ‘when this business is over.’

  She had stroked his hair.

  ‘This is not the sort of thing to be flippant about, Harry Hole.’

  ‘Who’s being flippant?’

  ‘I can’t talk about this now. Go on home, Harry Hole.’

  They had kissed a little more in the hallway, and Harry still had the taste of her on his lips.

  Without turning on the light, he crept into the sitting room in stockinged feet and pressed the play button of the answerphone. Sindre Fauke’s voice filled the darkness:

  ‘Fauke here. I’ve been thinking. If Daniel Gudeson is more than a ghost, there’s only one person on this earth who can solve this riddle. And that’s the man who was on watch that New Year’s Eve when Daniel Gudeson was apparently shot dead: Gudbrand Johansen. You have to find Gudbrand Johansen, Inspector Hole.’

  Then there was the sound of the receiver being replaced, a bleep, and where Harry expected the click, a new message instead.

  ‘Halvorsen here. It’s 11.30. I’ve just received a call from one of the officers outside Mosken’s flat. They’ve been waiting and waiting, but he hasn’t returned home. So they tried to ring the number in Drammen, just to see if he would answer the phone. But he didn’t answer. One of the men drove to Bjerken, but everything was locked up and the lights were off. I asked them to stick it out for a while yet and put out a call for Mosken’s car on police radio. Just so you know. See you tomorrow.’

  New bleep. New message. New record on Harry’s answerphone.

  ‘Halvorsen again. I’m going senile. I completely forgot to mention the other thing. Looks as if we’ve finally had a bit of luck. The SS archive in Cologne didn’t have any personal details about Gudeson or Johansen. They told me to ring the central Wehrmacht archive in Berlin. There I talked to a nice old grump who said that very few Norwegians had been in the regular German army. But when I explained the matter to him, he said he would check anyway. After a while he rang back and said that, as expected, he hadn’t found anything about Daniel Gudeson. However, he had found copies of some papers concerning one Gudbrand Johansen, also a Norwegian. It appeared from the papers that he had been transferred from the Waffen SS to the Wehrmacht in 1944. A note was made on the copies that the original papers were sent to Oslo in the summer of 1944, which, according to our man in Berlin, could only mean that Johansen had been sent there. He also found some correspondence with a doctor who had signed Johansen’s medical certificates. In Vienna.’

  Harry sat down on the only chair in the room.

  ‘The doctor’s name was Christopher Brockhard, at the Rudolf II Hospital. I checked with the Viennese police and it turns out the hospital is still fully functional. They even gave me the name and telephone number of twenty-odd people who worked there during the war and are still alive.’

  The Teutons know how to archive, Harry thought.

  ‘So I began ringing round. I’m really crap at speaking German!’

  Halvorsen’s laughter crackled in the loudspeaker.

  ‘I rang eight of them before I found a nurse who could remember Gudbrand Johansen. She was an old lady of seventy-five. Remembered him very well, she said. You’ll have the number and her address tomorrow morning. By the way, her name is Mayer. Helena Mayer.’

  A crackly silence was followed by a bleep and the click of the tape recorder stopping.

  Harry dreamed about Rakel, about her face burrowing into his neck, about her strong hands, and Tetris blocks falling
and falling. But it was Sindre Fauke’s voice that woke him in the middle of the night and made him stare at the contours of a figure in the dark.

  ‘You have to find Gudbrand Johansen.’

  84

  Akershus Fortress. 12 May 2000.

  IT WAS 2.30 IN THE MORNING AND THE OLD MAN HAD PARKED his car beside a low warehouse in a street called Akershusstranda. Years ago the street had been a main thoroughfare in Oslo, but after the Fjellinje tunnel had been opened Akershusstranda had been closed off at one end and was only used during the day by those working in the docks. And prostitutes’ clients who wanted a relatively undisturbed place for the ‘walk’. Between the road and the water there were several warehouses and on the other side was the western side of Akershus Fortress. Naturally, if anyone had taken up a position in Aker Brygge with a quality riflescope they would certainly have been able to see the same as the old man did: the back of a grey coat which jerked every time the man inside it thrust his hips forward, and the face of a very made-up and very drunken woman who was being banged against the west wall of the fortress, right under the cannons. On each side of the mating couple was a floodlight projector lighting up the rock face and the wall above them.

  Akershus, the WWII Wehrmacht prison. The internal section of the fortress area was closed for the night, and even though he could probably find his way in, the risk of being discovered in the actual place of execution was too great. No one really knew how many were shot there during the war, but there was a memorial plaque for fallen Norwegian Resistance men. The old man knew that at least one of them was a common criminal who had deserved his punishment whichever way you looked at it. And it was there they had shot Vidkun Quisling and the others who had been tried for war crimes and sentenced to death. Quisling had been imprisoned in the Powder Tower. The old man had often wondered if the Powder Tower had inspired Jens Bjørneboe’s book, in which he described, in great detail, various methods of execution over the centuries. Was his description of execution by firing squad actually a portrait of the execution of Vidkun Quisling that October day in 1945 when they led the traitor out to the square to drill his body with bullets? Had they, as the author wrote, placed a hood over his head and fastened a white square of cloth over his heart as a marker? Had they given the command to shoot four times before the shots rang out? And had the trained marksmen shot so badly that the doctor with the stethoscope had been forced to say that the condemned man would have to be executed again – until they had done it four or five times and death occurred through loss of blood from the many surface wounds?

  The old man had cut out the description from the book.

  The grey coat had finished his business and was on his way down the slope to his car. The woman still stood by the wall; she had pulled her skirt back into place and lit a cigarette which glowed in the dark when she inhaled. The old man waited. Then she crushed the cigarette under her heel and began to walk down the muddy path round the fortress and back to her ‘office’ in the streets around Norges Bank.

  The old man turned towards the back seat where the gagged woman stared at him with the same petrified eyes he had seen when she became conscious after being given diethyl ether. He could see her mouth moving behind the gag.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, Signe,’ he said, leaning over and fastening something on to her coat. She tried to bend her head to see what it was, but he forced her head up.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘As we used to.’

  He got out of the car, opened the rear door, pulled her out and shoved her in front of him. She stumbled and fell on the gravel in the grass beside the path, but he caught hold of the rope which bound her hands behind her back and pulled her to her feet. He positioned her directly in front of one of the floodlight projectors, with the light in her eyes.

  ‘Stand still. I forgot the wine,’ he said. ‘Red Ribeiros. You can remember it, can’t you? Quite still, otherwise I . . .’

  She was blinded by the light and he had to put the knife right in front of her face for her to see it. Despite the piercing light, the pupils were so large that her eyes seemed almost completely black. He went down to the car and scouted around. No one in sight. He listened and all he heard was the usual drone of the town. Then he opened the boot. He shoved the black rubbish bag to the side and could feel that the body of the dog inside had already begun to go stiff. The steel of the Märklin rifle twinkled darkly. He took it out and sat in the front seat. He rolled the window half-down and rested the gun on it. When he looked up he could see her gigantic shadow dancing on the yellowish brown sixteenth-century wall. The shadow had to be visible all the way across the bay from Nesodden. Beautiful.

  He started up the car with his right hand and revved the engine. He took a last look around before peering through the sights. The distance was barely fifty metres and her coat filled the whole of the circle in the sight lens. He shifted his aim marginally to the right and the black cross-hair found what he was searching for – the white piece of paper. He released the air from his lungs and crooked his finger around the trigger.

  ‘Welcome back,’ he whispered.

  Part Eight

  THE REVELATION

  85

  Vienna. 14 May 2000.

  HARRY TREATED HIMSELF TO THREE SECONDS OF RELISHING the sensation of cool leather against the back of his neck and forearms on the seats of Tyrolean Air. Then he went back to his reflections.

  Beneath them the countryside lay like an unbroken patchwork of green and yellow, with the Danube glittering in the sun like a weeping brown wound. The air stewardess had just informed them that they were about to land in Schwechat, and Harry prepared himself.

  He had never been ecstatic about flying, but in recent years he had begun to be downright frightened. Ellen had once asked him what he was frightened of. ‘Crashing and dying, what the fuck else?’ he had answered. She had told him that the odds of dying in a plane on the occasional trip were thirty million to one against. He had thanked her for the information and said he wasn’t frightened any longer.

  Harry breathed in deep and then out as he listened to the changing sounds of the engine. Why did the fear of death get worse as you got older? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Signe Juul was seventy-nine years old. Presumably she had been scared out of her wits. One of the guards at Akershus Fortress had found her. They had received a telephone call during their watch from a sleepless millionaire celebrity at Aker Brygge, informing them that one of the projectors on the southern wall had gone out, and the duty officer had sent one of the young guards out. Harry had questioned him two hours later, and he had told Harry that as he approached the projector he had seen a lifeless woman slumped across it, obstructing the light. At first he had thought she was a junkie, but as he moved closer and saw the grey hair and old-fashioned clothes, he realised she was an elderly woman. His next thought was that she had been taken ill, but then he discovered her hands were tied behind her back. It was only when he was right up close that he saw the gaping hole in her coat.

  ‘I could see that her spine had been smashed,’ he had told Harry. ‘Shit, I could see her spine.’

  Then he had told him how he had propped himself against the rock-face as he threw up, and it was only later when the police had come to take away the body and the light shone on the wall again that he realised what the sticky stuff on his hand was. He had shown Harry his hand, as if it were important.

  The Crime Scene Unit had arrived and Weber had walked across to Harry while studying Signe Juul through sleepy eyes. He said God wasn’t the bloody judge, it was the bloke down below.

  The only witness was a night-watchman who kept an eye on the warehouses. He had met a car going down Akershusstranda on its way east at 2.45, but because the driver’s lights had been on full beam he had been dazzled and hadn’t been able to see the make of the car or the colour.

  It felt as if the pilot was accelerating. Harry imagined they were trying to gain height because the captain had
suddenly seen the Alps right in front of the cockpit. Then it felt as if the air beneath the wings of the Tyrolean Air plane had vanished and Harry felt his stomach shoot up under his ears. He groaned out loud when the next moment they bounced up again like a rubber ball. The captain came on to the intercom and said something in German and English about turbulence.

  Aune had pointed out that if someone didn’t have the capacity to feel fear, they would not survive a single day. Harry squeezed the arm of the chair and tried to find comfort in that thought.

  In fact it had been Aune who had supplied the impetus for Harry taking the first available plane to Vienna. Once he’d had the facts laid on the table, he had immediately said that time was of the utmost importance.

  ‘If we’re dealing with a serial killer, he’s on the point of losing control,’ Aune had said. ‘Not like the classical serial killer who looks for sexual release, but is then disappointed every time and increases the frequency of the killings out of sheer frustration. This murderer clearly isn’t sexually motivated. He has some sick plan or other which has to be completed, and up until now he has been cautious and has behaved rationally. The fact that the murders are close to each other and that he has gone to great lengths to emphasise the symbolism of his actions – as with this execution at Akershus Fortress – suggests that he either feels invincible or he’s losing his grip, maybe developing a psychosis.’

  ‘Or perhaps he’s still totally in control,’ Halvorsen had said. ‘He hasn’t slipped up yet. We still don’t have any clues.’

  And he was absolutely bloody right, Halvorsen was. There were no clues.

  Mosken had been able to account for his movements. He had picked up the telephone in Drammen when Halvorsen rang in the morning to check, since the surveillance boys hadn’t caught a sniff of him in Oslo. Of course they couldn’t know if what he said was true: that he had driven to Drammen after Bjerke Stadium closed at half past ten and had arrived at half past eleven. Or if he had arrived at half past two in the morning and had thus been in a position to shoot Signe Juul.