by Jo Nesbo
‘Of c-course.’
‘Thank you very much indeed. I’ll send an officer to Holmenveien right away.’
Lene rang off. Felt the tears coming. Put her iPod earphones back in.
Caught Tracy Chapman singing about taking a fast car and keeping on driving. Then the song finished. She pressed repeat.
65
Kadok
NYDALEN EMBODIED THE DEINDUSTRIALISATION OF OSLO. The factory buildings that had not been demolished – and had not given way to gleaming, elegant designer office blocks in glass and steel – had been converted into TV studios, restaurants and large, open-plan redbrick affairs with exposed ventilation and plumbing.
The latter were often rented by advertising firms who wanted to flag up that they thought in untraditional ways, that creativity flourished just as well in cheap industrial rooms as in the expensive and centrally located head offices of their well-established competitors. But the premises in Nydalen now cost at least as much because all advertising agencies basically think in traditional patterns. That is: they follow the fashion and drive the prices upwards for whatever is the fashion.
The owners of the disused Kadok factory site had, however, not participated in this bonanza. When the factory had finally closed fourteen years ago, after several annual deficits and the dumping of PSG in China, the founder’s heirs went for each other’s throats. And while they were arguing about who should have what, the factory fell into decay, isolated behind the fences to the west of the River Akerselva. Shrubs and deciduous trees were allowed to grow wild and eventually masked the factory from its surroundings. Bearing all this in mind, Harry thought the large padlock on the gate seemed strangely new.
‘Cut it,’ Harry told the officer beside him.
The jaws of the enormous bolt cutter went through the metal as if it were butter, and the lock was snapped as quickly as it had taken Harry to get a blue chit. The solicitor at Kripos had sounded as if he had more important things to do than issue search warrants, and Harry had barely finished talking before he had the chit filled and signed in his hand. And he had thought to himself that they could do with a couple of stressed-out, negligent solicitors at Crime Squad as well.
The low afternoon sun flashed on the jagged glass of smashed windows high in the brick walls. The atmosphere was marked by the desolation you find only in disused factories where everything you see has been constructed for hectic, efficient activity, yet there is no one around. Where the echo of iron on iron, of workers shouting, cursing and laughing over the drone of the machines still reverberates silently between the walls, and the wind blows through the soot-darkened, broken windows, making the spiders’ webs and the dead shells of insects quiver.
There was no lock on the door into the factory hall. The five men walked through a rectangular area with church-like acoustics, which gave the impression of an evacuation rather than closure; work tools were still laid out, a pallet loaded with white buckets labelled PSG TYPE 3 stood ready to be driven away, a blue coat hung over the back of a chair.
They stopped when they reached the centre of the hall. In one corner there was a kind of kiosk, shaped like a lighthouse and raised a metre off the ground. Foreman’s office, Harry thought. Around the walls ran a gallery, which at one end led into a mezzanine floor with its own rooms. Harry guessed they were the lunch room and admin offices.
‘Where shall we begin?’ Harry asked.
‘The same place as always,’ Bjørn Holm said, casting round. ‘Top left-hand corner.’
‘What are we looking for?’
‘A table, a bench with blue PSG on it. The stains on the trousers were rubbed in slightly below the back pockets, so she must have been sitting on something – in other words, she wasn’t lying flat.’
‘If you begin down here, this officer and I will go upstairs with the bolt cutters,’ Harry said.
‘Oh?’
‘To open doors for you forensics boys. We promise not to spray semen anywhere.’
‘Very droll. Don’t—’
‘—touch anything.’
Harry and the officer, whom he called ‘officer’ for the simple reason that he had forgotten his name two seconds after hearing it, stomped up a winding staircase, making the iron steps sing. The doors they met were open, and inside, as Harry had envisaged, there were offices from which the furniture had been removed. A cloakroom with rows of iron lockers. A large communal shower. But no blue stains.
‘What do you think that is?’ Harry asked, standing in the lunch room. He pointed to a narrow padlocked door at the back.
‘Pantry,’ the officer said, already on his way out.
‘Wait!’
Harry went to the door. Scratched a nail on the apparently rusty lock. It was genuine rust. He turned it round, looked at the cylinder. No rust.
‘Cut it,’ Harry said.
The officer did as he was bidden. Then Harry opened the door.
The officer smacked his lips.
‘Just a secret door,’ Harry said.
Behind it was neither a pantry nor a room, but another door. Fitted with what looked like a solid lock.
The officer dropped the bolt cutter.
Harry scanned the area and found what he was looking for. A large red fire extinguisher, fairly conspicuous, hanging from the middle of the wall in the lunch room. Hadn’t Øystein mentioned something about that once? The materials they made where his father worked were so inflammable that they were instructed to smoke by the river. In to which the cigarette ends were to be thrown afterwards.
He lifted the extinguisher off the wall and carried it to the door. Took a run-up of two strides, aimed and smashed the metal cylinder into the door like a battering ram.
The door split around the lock, but still clung to the frame.
Harry repeated the attack. Splinters flew all around.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he heard Bjørn call from the factory floor.
At the third attempt the door gave with a despairing scream and swung open. They stared into a pitch-black void.
‘Can I borrow your torch?’ Harry asked the officer, putting down the fire extinguisher and wiping off the sweat. ‘Thanks. Wait here.’
Harry stepped into the room. There was a smell of ammonia. He shone the torch along the walls. The room – which he estimated was three metres square – had no windows. The beam swept across a black folding chair, a desk with a lamp and a Dell computer screen. The keyboard was relatively unworn. The desk was tidy and made of bare wood, no blue stains. In the litter bin there were strips of paper, as though someone had been cutting out pictures. And, sure enough, a Dagbladet with the front page cut up. Harry read the headline over the missing picture and knew they had come to the right place. They had arrived. This was it.
– DIED IN AVALANCHE –
Harry instinctively shone the torch upwards, on the wall above the desk, past some blue stains. And there they were.
All of them.
Marit Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka. And Tony Leike.
Harry concentrated on breathing from his diaphragm. On absorbing the information piecemeal. The pictures had been cut out of newspapers or were printouts, probably from news pages on the Internet. Apart from the picture of Adele. His heart felt like a bass drum, dull thuds as it tried to send more blood to his brain. The picture was on photographic paper and so grainy that Harry assumed it must have been taken with a telephoto lens and then blown up. It showed a car window, Adele’s profile in the front seat from which the plastic cover did not seem to have been removed, and there was something protruding from her neck. A large knife with a shiny, yellow handle. Harry forced his eyes to look further. Underneath the pictures hung a line of letters, also printed off a computer. Harry skimmed the introduction to one of them.
IT IS SO SIMPLE. I KNOW WHO YOU KILLED.
YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I
WANT.
MONEY. IF YOU DON’T PAY
UP, THE COPS WILL BE ROUND.
SIMPLE, EH?
The text continued, but his eye was caught by the end of the letter. No name, no sign off. The police officer was standing in the doorway. Harry heard his hand fumbling along the wall as he muttered: ‘Must be a light switch here somewhere.’
Harry shone the torch at the blue ceiling, on four large neon tubes.
‘There must be,’ Harry said, illuminating the wall above several blue stains, before the cone of light found a sheet pinned to the right of the pictures. A tiny alarm bell had begun to go off in his brain. The sheet was torn at the side and covered in hand-drawn lines and columns. But there were different handwriting styles.
‘Here it is,’ the officer said.
For some reason, Harry suddenly thought about the work lamp. And the blue ceiling. And the smell of ammonia. And realised at that instant that the alarm in his head had nothing to do with the paper.
‘Don’t …’ Harry started.
But too late.
The explosion was not technically an explosion but – as it would appear in the report the fire chief would sign the following day – an explosion-like fire triggered by an electric spark from cables connected to a canister of ammonia gas that in its turn ignited the PSG painted over the whole ceiling and splattered on the walls.
Harry gasped as the oxygen in the room was drawn into the flames and he felt an immense heat bear down on his head. He automatically fell to his knees and ran his hands through his hair to see if it was alight. When he looked up again, flames were coming off the walls. He wanted to breathe in, but managed to stop the reflex. Got to his feet. The door was only two metres away, but he had to have … he stretched for the sheet of paper. For the missing page from the Håvass guest book.
‘Move away!’ The officer appeared in the doorway with the fire extinguisher under his arm and the hose in his hand. As though in slow motion, Harry saw it squirt out. Saw the golden-brown jet released from the hose splash against the wall. Brown that should have been white; liquid that should have been powder. And already, before he looked into the jaws of the flames that rose on two legs and roared at him from where the liquid landed, before he smelt the sweet sting of petrol in his nostrils, before he saw the flames follow the jet of petrol towards the officer standing in the doorway, with the handle still depressed, in shock, Harry knew why the extinguisher had been hanging from the middle of the lunch-room wall, on display, impossible to miss, red and new, screaming out to be used.
Harry’s shoulder hit the policeman at waist height, folding him over the rampaging inspector and knocking him backwards into the room with Harry on top.
They sent a couple of chairs flying as they skidded under the table. The officer, gasping for air, gesticulated and pointed while opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Harry turned. Wrapped in flames, the red extinguisher rumbled and rolled towards them. The hose was spitting melted rubber. Harry shot up, dragging the officer after him, pulled him to the door as a stopwatch ticked timelessly in his head. He shoved the swaying officer out of the room, onto the gallery, thrust him down to the floor alongside him as it came, what the fire chief in his report would describe as an explosion, and which blew out all the windows and set fire to the entire lunch room.
The cutting room is burning. It’s on the news. You have to serve and protect, Harry Hole, not demolish and destroy. You will have to pay compensation. If not, I will take something from you that you hold dear. In a matter of seconds. You have no idea how easy it will be.
66
After the Fire
THE EVENING DARKNESS HAD DESCENDED OVER NYDALEN. Harry stood with a blanket over his shoulders and a large paper cup in his hand as he and Bjørn Holm watched the smoke divers running in and out with the last PSG buckets that would ever leave the Kadok factory.
‘So he’d pinned up the pictures of the murder victims, had he?’ Bjørn Holm said.
‘Yep,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the prostitute in Leipzig, Juliana Verni.’
‘What about the page? Are you sure it was from the Håvass guest book?’
‘Yes. I saw the guest book when I was in the cabin and the pages were identical.’
‘And so you were standing half a metre from the name of the eighth guest, but you didn’t see it?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Perhaps I need reading glasses. Things happened bloody quickly in there, Bjørn. And my interest in the page waned rather when the officer started spraying petrol.’
‘Course, I didn’t mean—’
‘There were some letters on the wall. From what I could see they were blackmail letters. Maybe someone had already rumbled him.’
A fireman came towards them. His clothes creaked and groaned as he walked.
‘Kripos, aren’t you?’ The man’s voice resonated in a way that matched the helmet and boots. And he had body language that said boss.
Harry hesitated, but confirmed with a nod; no reason to complicate matters.
‘What actually happened in there?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping you boys will eventually be able to tell us,’ Harry said. ‘But in general terms I think we can say that whoever found himself a rent-free office in there had a clear plan for dealing with uninvited guests.’
‘Oh?’
‘I should have known as soon as I saw the neon tubes on the ceiling. If they’d been working, the tenant wouldn’t have needed a desk lamp. The switch was connected to something else, some kind of ignition device.’
‘You think so, do you? Well, right, we’ll get some experts in tomorrow morning.’
‘What does it look like inside?’ Holm asked. ‘The room where it started.’
The fireman scrutinised Holm. ‘PSG on the walls and ceiling, son. What do you think it looks like?’
Harry was tired. Tired of being on the receiving end, tired of being afraid, tired of always being too late. But right now most tired of grown men who never tire of playing cock of the walk. Harry spoke in a low voice, so low that the fireman had to lean in to hear.
‘Unless you’re seriously interested in what my forensics officer thinks about the room you’ve just sent umpteen smoke divers into, I suggest you spit out what you know in concise but exhaustive terms. You know there was a guy sitting there planning six or seven murders. Which he carried out. And we’re very interested to know if we can expect to find clues which might help us to stop this very, very bad man. Can you be concise like that?’
The fireman straightened. Coughed. ‘PSG is extremely—’
‘Listen. We’re asking you for the consequences, not the cause.’
The fireman’s face had gone a colour that was not solely due to the heat from the burning PSG. ‘Burned out. Totally burned out. Papers, furniture, computer, the lot.’
‘Thank you, boss,’ Harry said.
The two policemen watched the fireman’s back as he left.
‘My forensics officer?’ Holm repeated, pulling a face as if he had swallowed something nasty.
‘Had to sound like a bit of a boss, too.’
‘Good to outsmart someone when you’ve just been outsmarted yourself, isn’t it?’
Harry nodded and pulled the blanket around him more tightly. ‘He said burned out, didn’t he?’
‘Burned out. How does that feel?’
Harry stared miserably at the smoke still seeping out of the factory windows into the fire service’s searchlights.
‘Like being knobbed in Nydalen,’ he answered, draining the rest of the cold coffee.
Harry drove away from Nydalen, but got no further than the red lights in Uelandsgate before Bjørn Holm rang again.
‘Forensics have done tests on the semen on Adele’s ski pants, and we’ve got a DNA profile.’
‘Already?’ Harry exclaimed.
‘Partial profile. But enough for them to state with 93 per cent certainty that we have a match.’
Harry sat up straight in the seat.
Match. What a wonderful word. Perhaps th
e day wasn’t a waste after all.
‘Out with it then!’ Harry said.
‘You’ve got to learn to savour dramatic pauses,’ Holm said.
Harry groaned.
‘OK, OK. They found the matching DNA profile with hair from Tony Leike’s hairbrush.’
Harry stared into the distance.
Tony Leike had raped Adele Vetlesen at the cabin.
Harry hadn’t seen it coming. Tony Leike? He couldn’t make it tally. Violent criminal, yes, but to rape a woman who’s come to a cabin with another man? Elias Skog said he’d seen him holding her mouth and pulling her into the toilet. Perhaps it wasn’t a rape when it came to the crunch?
And then – all of a sudden – it did come to the crunch.
Harry saw it, crystal clear.
It wasn’t a rape. And there it was: the motive.
The cars behind hooted. The lights had turned green.
67
Prince Charming
IT WAS A QUARTER TO EIGHT, AND THE DAY HADN’T YET adjusted colour and contrast. The grey morning light showed the countryside in a grainy black-and-white version as Harry parked beside the only other car by Lake Vøyentangen and ambled down to the jetty. County Officer Skai was standing at the edge with a fishing rod in his hand and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Wisps of mist hung in the air like cotton wool around the reeds poking up from the black, oil-smooth water.
‘Hole,’ said Skai without turning. ‘Up early.’
‘Your wife said you were here.’
‘Every morning from seven to eight. Only chance I have to think before the hustle and bustle starts.’
‘What have you caught?’
‘Nothing. But there are pike in the reeds.’
‘Sounds familiar. ‘Fraid the hustle and bustle starts a bit earlier today. I’ve come about Tony Leike.’
‘Tony, yes. His grandad’s farm was in Rustad, east of Lake Lyseren.’
‘So you remember him well?’
‘This is a small place, Hole. My father and old Leike were friends, and Tony was here every summer.’
