by Jo Nesbo
Kaja looked out at the heavy snowfall. Even had been like that, too; he was excited by the power of nature, regardless of whether it was working for or against him.
‘I hope my train will finally get through,’ she said.
‘Yes, of course,’ Krongli said, fingering his wine glass in a way that suggested to Kaja that wining and dining was not something he did that often. ‘We’ll make sure it does. And sort out the guest books from the other cabins.’
‘Thank you,’ Kaja said.
Krongli ran a hand through his unruly locks and put on a wry smile. Chris de Burgh with ‘Lady in Red’ oozed like syrup through the loudspeakers.
There were only two other guests in the restaurant, two men in their thirties, each sitting at a table with a white cloth, each with a beer in front of them, staring at the snow, waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen.
‘Doesn’t it get lonely here sometimes?’ Kaja asked.
‘Depends,’ the rural policeman said, following her glance. ‘If you don’t have a wife or family, it means you tend to gather at places like this.’
‘To be lonely together,’ Kaja said.
‘Yep,’ Krongli said, pouring more wine into their glasses. ‘But I suppose it’s the same in Oslo, too?’
‘Yes,’ Kaja said. ‘It is. Have you got any family?’
Krongli shrugged. ‘I did live with someone. But she found life too empty here, so she moved down to where you live. I can understand her. You have to have an interesting job in a place like this.’
‘And you do?’
‘I think so. I know everyone here, and they know me. We help each other. I need them and they … well …’ He twirled the glass.
‘They need you,’ Kaja said.
‘I believe so, yes.’
‘And that’s important.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Krongli said firmly, looking up at her. Even’s eyes. Which had the embers of laughter in them; something amusing or something to be happy about always seemed to have just happened. Even if it hadn’t. Especially when it hadn’t.
‘What about Odd Utmo?’ Kaja said.
‘What about him?’
‘He left as soon as he had dropped me off. What does he do on an evening like tonight?’
‘How do you know he isn’t sitting at home with his wife and children?’
‘If I’ve ever met a recluse, Officer—’
‘Call me Aslak,’ he said, laughing and tipping back his glass. ‘And I can see that you’re a real detective. But Utmo hasn’t always been like that.’
‘He hasn’t?’
‘Before his son went missing he was apparently pretty approachable. Yes, now and then he was nothing less than affable. But I suppose he’s always had a dangerous temper.’
‘I would have thought a man like Utmo would be single.’
‘His wife was good-looking, too. When you consider how ugly he is. Did you see his teeth?’
‘I saw he was wearing an orthodontic brace, yes.’
‘He says it’s so that his teeth don’t go crooked.’ Aslak Krongli shook his head, with laughter in his eyes, though not in his voice. ‘But it’s the only way to make sure they don’t fall out.’
‘Tell me, was that really dynamite he was carrying on his snowmobile?’
‘You saw it,’ Krongli said. ‘Not me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are lots of residents up here who can’t quite see the romanticism of sitting for hours with a fishing rod by the mountain lakes, but who would like to have the fish they regard as their own on the dinner table.’
‘They chuck dynamite in the lakes?’
‘As soon as the ice has gone.’
‘Isn’t that somewhat illegal?’
Krongli held up his hands in defence. ‘As I said, I didn’t see anything.’
‘No, that’s true, you only live here. Have you got dynamite, too, by any chance?’
‘Just for the garage. Which I’m planning to build.’
‘Right. What about Utmo’s gun? Looked modern with the telescopic sights and so on.’
‘Certainly is. Utmo was good at hunting bears. Until he went half blind.’
‘I saw his eye. What happened?’
‘Apparently his boy spilt a glass of acid on him.’
‘Apparently?’
Krongli rolled his shoulders. ‘Utmo is the only person left who knows what happened. His son went missing when he was fifteen. Soon afterwards his wife disappeared as well. But that was eighteen years ago, before I moved up here. Since then Utmo has lived alone in the mountains, no TV, no radio, doesn’t even read the papers.’
‘How did they disappear?’
‘You tell me. There are lots of sheer drops around Utmo’s farm where you might fall. And the snow. The son’s shoe was found after an avalanche, but there was no sign of him after the snow melted that year, and it was strange to lose a shoe like that up in the snow. Some thought it was a bear. Though, as far as I know, there weren’t any bears up here eighteen years ago. And then there were those who reckoned it was Utmo.’
‘Oh? Why’s that?’
‘We-ell,’ Aslak said, dragging it out, ‘the boy had a bad scar on his chest. Folk reckoned he’d got that from his father. It was something to do with the mother, Karen.’
‘How so?’
‘They were competing for her.’
Aslak shook his head at the question in Kaja’s eyes. ‘This was before my time. And Roy Stille, who has been an officer here since the dawn of time, went to the house, but only Odd and Karen were there. And they both said the same. The boy had gone out hunting and hadn’t returned. But this was in April.’
‘Not hunting season?’
Aslak shook his head. ‘And since then no one has seen him. The following year, Karen went missing. Folk here believe it was the grief that broke her and she took a one-way ticket off a cliff.’
Kaja thought she detected a little quiver in the officer’s voice, but concluded it must have been the wine.
‘What do you believe?’ she asked.
‘I believe it’s true. The boy was caught by an avalanche. He suffocated under the snow. The snow melted and he was carried into a lake and that’s where he is. With his mother, let’s hope.’
‘Sounds nicer than the bear story, anyway.’
‘Well, it isn’t.’
Kaja looked up at Aslak. There was no laughter in his eyes now.
‘Buried alive in an avalanche,’ he said, and his gaze wandered out of the window, to the drifting snow. ‘The darkness. The loneliness. You can’t move, it holds you in its iron grip, laughs at your attempts to free yourself. The certainty that you’re going to die. The panic, the mortal fear when you can’t breathe. There’s no worse way to go.’
Kaja took a gulp of wine. She put down the glass. ‘How long were you lying there?’ she asked.
‘I thought it was three, maybe four hours,’ Aslak said. ‘When they dug me out, they said I had been trapped for fifteen minutes. Another five and I would have been dead.’
The waiter came and asked if they wanted anything else; he would call last orders in ten minutes. Kaja said no, and the waiter responded by putting the bill in front of Aslak.
‘Why does Utmo carry a gun?’ Kaja asked. ‘As far as I’m aware, it isn’t the hunting season now.’
‘He says it’s because of beasts of prey. Self-defence.’
‘Are there any here? Wolves?’
‘He never tells me exactly what kind of animal he means. By the way, there’s a rumour going round that at night the boy’s ghost walks the plains. And that if you see him, you have to be careful, because it means there’s a sheer drop or an avalanche nearby.’
Kaja finished her drink.
‘I can have drinking hours extended for a bit if you like.’
‘Thanks, Aslak, but I have to be up early tomorrow.’
‘Ooh,’ he said, laughing with his eyes and scratching his locks, ‘now that sounds
like I …’ He paused.
‘What?’ Kaja said.
‘Nothing. I suppose you have a husband or boyfriend down south.’
Kaja smiled, though didn’t answer.
Aslak stared at the table, and said quietly, ‘Well, there you go: provincial policeman couldn’t take his drink and started wittering.’
‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a boyfriend. And I like you. You remind me of my brother.’
‘But?’
‘But what?’
‘Don’t forget I’m a real detective, too. I can see you’re no hermit. There is someone, isn’t there?’
Kaja laughed. Normally she would have left it at that. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was because she liked Aslak Krongli. Maybe it was because she didn’t have anyone to talk to about that sort of thing, not since Even died, and Aslak was a stranger, a long way from Oslo, someone who didn’t talk to her circle of acquaintances.
‘I’m in love,’ she heard herself say. ‘With a police officer.’ She put the glass of water to her mouth to hide a flurry of confusion. The strange thing was that it hadn’t struck her as true until she heard the words said aloud.
Aslak raised his glass to hers. ‘Skål to the lucky guy. And the lucky girl, I hope.’
Kaja shook her head. ‘There’s nothing to skål about. Not yet. Maybe ever. My God, listen to me …’
‘We don’t have anything else to do, do we? Tell me more.’
‘It’s complicated. He’s complicated. And I don’t know if he wants me. In fact, that bit is fairly straightforward.’
‘Let me guess. He’s got someone, and he can’t let go.’
Kaja sighed. ‘Perhaps. I honestly don’t know. Aslak, thank you for all your help, but I—’
‘—have to go to bed now.’ The police officer rose. ‘I hope it all goes sour with your friend, you want to escape from your broken heart and the city and that you could envisage giving this a chance.’ He passed her an A4 piece of paper with a Hol Police Station letterhead.
Kaja read it and laughed out loud. ‘A post in the sticks?’
‘Roy Stille is retiring in the autumn and good officers are hard to find,’ Aslak said. ‘It’s our advertisement for the post. We put it out last week. Our office is in Geilo city centre. Time off every alternate weekend and free dentistry.’
As Kaja went to bed she could hear the distant rumbles. Thunder and snow rarely came as a joint package.
She rang Harry and got his voicemail. Left a little ghost story about the local guide Odd Utmo with the rotten teeth and brace, and about his son who had to be even uglier since he had been haunting the district for eighteen years. She laughed. Realised she was drunk. Said goodnight.
She dreamed about avalanches.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. Harry and Joe had left Goma at seven, crossed the border to Rwanda without any problems and Harry was standing in an office on the first floor of the terminal building at Kigali Airport. Two uniformed officers were giving him the once-over. Not in an unfriendly way, but to check that he really was who he claimed to be: a Norwegian policeman. Harry put his ID card back in his jacket pocket and felt the smooth paper of the coffee-brown envelope he had there. The problem was that there were two of them. How do you bribe two public servants at once? Ask them to share the contents of the envelope and politely request them not to snitch on one another?
One officer, the same one who had inspected Harry’s passport two days before, pulled his beret back on his head. ‘So you want a copy of whose landing card? Could you repeat the date and the name?’
‘Adele Vetlesen. We know she arrived at this airport on the 25th of November. And I’ll pay a finder’s fee.’
The two officers exchanged glances, and one left the room on the other’s cue. The remaining officer walked over to the window and surveyed the runway, the little DH8 that had landed and which in fifty-five minutes would be transporting Harry on the first phase of his journey home.
‘Finder’s fee,’ the officer repeated quietly. ‘I assume you know it is illegal to try to bribe a public servant, Mr Hole. But you probably thought: Shiit, this is Africa.’
It struck Harry that the man’s skin was so black it seemed like gloss paint.
He felt his shirt sticking to his back. The same shirt. Perhaps they sold shirts at Nairobi airport. If he got that far.
‘That’s right,’ Harry said.
The officer laughed and turned. ‘Tough guy, eh! Are you a hard man, Hole? I saw you were a policeman when you arrived.’
‘Oh?’
‘You examined me with the same circumspection that I examined you.’
Harry shrugged.
The door opened. The other officer was back accompanied by a woman dressed like a secretary with clickety-clack heels and glasses on the tip of her nose.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in impeccable English, clocking Harry. ‘I’ve checked the date. There was no Adele Vetlesen on that flight.’
‘Mm. Could there be a mistake?’
‘Unlikely. Landing cards are filed by date. The flight you’re talking about is a thirty-seven-seater DH8 from Entebbe. It didn’t take long to check.’
‘Mm. If that’s the case, may I ask you to check something else for me?’
‘You may ask of course. What is it?’
‘Could you see if any other foreign women arrived on that flight?’
‘And why should I do that?’
‘Because Adele Vetlesen was booked onto that flight. So either she used a false passport here—’
‘I doubt that very much,’ the passport officer said. ‘We check all the passport photos very carefully before they are scanned by a machine that matches the passport number against the international ICAO register.’
‘—or someone else was travelling in Adele Vetlesen’s name and then used their own, genuine passport to pass through here. Which is more than possible, as passport numbers are not checked before passengers board the aircraft.’
‘True,’ the chief passport official said, pulling at his beret. ‘Airline staff only make sure the name and photo match more or less. For that purpose you can have a false passport made for fifty dollars anywhere in the world. It’s only when you get off the plane at your final destination and have to go through checks that your passport number is matched and false passports are revealed. But the question is the same: why should we help you, Mr Hole? Are you on an official mission here and have you got the papers to support that?’
‘My official mission was in the Congo,’ Harry lied. ‘But I found nothing there. Adele Vetlesen is missing, and we fear she may have been murdered by a serial killer who has already murdered at least three other women, among them a government MP. Her name is Marit Olsen – you can verify that on the Net. I’m conscious that the procedure now is for me to return home and go through formal channels, as a result of which we will lose several days and give the killer a further head start. And time to kill again.’
Harry saw that his words had made some impression on them. The woman and the chief official conferred, and the woman marched off again.
They waited in silence.
Harry looked at his watch. He hadn’t checked in on the flight yet.
Six minutes had passed when they heard the click-clack heels coming closer.
‘Eva Rosenberg, Juliana Verni, Veronica Raul Gueno and Claire Hobbes.’ She spat out the names, straightened her glasses and put four landing cards on the table in front of Harry before the door slammed behind her. ‘Not many European women come here,’ she said.
Harry’s eyes ran down the cards. All of them had given Kigali hotels as their address, but not the Gorilla Hotel. He looked at their home addresses. Eva Rosenberg had given an address in Stockholm.
‘Thank you,’ Harry said, noting down the names, addresses and passport numbers on the back of a taxi receipt he found in his jacket pocket.
‘I regret that we can’t be of any more assistance,’ the woman said, p
ushing her glasses up again.
‘Not at all,’ Harry said. ‘You’ve been a great help. Really.’
‘And now, Mr Policeman,’ said the tall, thin officer, with a smile that lit up his black-as-night face.
‘Yes?’ Harry said in anticipation, ready to take out the coffee-brown envelope.
‘Now it’s time we got you checked in on the flight to Nairobi.’
‘Mm,’ Harry said, looking at his watch. ‘I may have to catch the next one.’
‘Next one?’
‘I have to go back to the Gorilla Hotel.’
Kaja was sitting in the Norwegian railway’s so-called ‘comfort coach’ which – apart from free newspapers, two cups of free coffee and a socket for your laptop – meant that you sat like sardines in a can instead of in the almost empty economy areas. So when her phone rang and she saw it was Harry, that was where she hurried.
‘Where are you?’ Harry asked.
‘On the train. Passing Kongsberg right this minute. And you?’
‘Gorilla Hotel in Kigali. I’ve had a look at Adele Vetlesen’s hotel registration card. I won’t get away now before the afternoon flight, but I’ll be home early tomorrow. Could you ring your friend, pumpkin head, at Drammen police station, and see if we can borrow the postcard Adele wrote? You can ask him to come to the station with it. The train stops at Drammen, doesn’t it?’
‘You’re pushing your luck. I’ll try anyway. What are we going to do with it?’
‘Compare the handwriting. There’s a handwriting expert called Jean Hue who worked at Kripos before he retired. Get him to the office for seven tomorrow.’
‘So early? D’you think he’ll—’
‘You’re right. I’ll scan Adele’s registration card and email it to you so you can go to Jean’s place with both this evening.’
‘This evening?’
‘He’ll be happy to see you. If you had any other plans, they are hereby cancelled.’
‘Great. By the way, sorry about the late call last night.’
‘No worries. Entertaining story.’
