Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8)

by Jo Nesbo

  They coughed. They had something to tell her. So what were they waiting for? She already knew. They had already told her with those idiotic, hammed-up tragic faces of theirs. She was furious. So furious that she could feel her face writhing, distorting into someone she didn’t want to be, who had also been forced into a role in this comic tragedy. They had said something. What was it? Was it Norwegian? The words made no sense.

  She had never wanted to have Mr Right. And she had never wanted his name.

  Until now.

  15

  THE BLACK VW Sharan slowly rose in circles towards the blue sky. Like a rocket in super slow motion, Katrine thought, watching the trail, which was not fire and smoke but water running from the doors and boot of the crushed car, dissolving into drops and glistening in the sun on its way down to the river.

  ‘We hauled the car up here last time,’ the local police officer said.

  They were standing by the disused sawmill with the peeling red paint and smashed panes in the small windows. The withered grass lay on the ground like a Hitler fringe, combed in the direction the rain had fallen the previous night. In the shadows lay grey flecks of slushy snow. Doomed, a prematurely returning migratory bird sang optimistically, and the river gurgled with contentment.

  ‘But this one was stuck between two rocks, so it was easier to raise it straight up.’

  Katrine’s gaze followed the river downstream. Above the sawmill, there was a dam, where the water trickled between the enormous grey rocks that had embraced the vehicle. She saw the sun glinting on the scattered fragments of glass. Then her eyes were drawn up the vertical rock face. Drammen granite. It was a concept apparently. She glimpsed the tail of the truck and the yellow crane protruding over the edge of the precipice high up. Hoped someone had worked out the weight versus jib ratio correctly.

  ‘But if you’re detectives, why aren’t you up there with the others?’ said the policeman who let them through the cordon after carefully examining their ID cards.

  Katrine shrugged. She couldn’t exactly say they were apple scrumping, four people with no real authorisation, on the kind of mission that meant they should keep their distance from the official investigation unit.

  ‘We can see what we need to see from here,’ Beate Lønn said. ‘Thanks for letting us look.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Katrine Bratt switched off her iPad, which was still logged into the Norwegian Prisons site, then hurried after Beate Lønn and Ståle Aune, who had already crossed the cordon and were on their way back to Bjørn Holm’s forty-year-old-plus Volvo Amazon. Its owner came sauntering down the steep gravel road from the top and caught them up at the old-timer with no air conditioning, airbag or central locking, but with two chequered speed stripes over the bonnet, roof and tail. Katrine concluded from Holm’s heaving chest that he would hardly satisfy the current PHS entrance requirements.

  ‘Well?’ Beate said.

  ‘The face is partly smashed, but they reckon the body’s probably one Anton Mittet,’ Holm said, removing his Rasta hat and using it to wipe the sweat from his round face.

  ‘Mittet,’ Beate said. ‘Of course.’

  The others turned to her.

  ‘A local officer. He took over from Simon in Maridalen. Do you remember, Bjørn?’

  ‘No,’ Holm said, without any visible shame. Katrine assumed he had got used to the idea that his boss was from Mars.

  ‘He used to be in the Drammen force. And he was tangentially involved in the investigation of the previous murder here.’

  Katrine shook her head in astonishment. It was one thing for Beate to react as soon as the message about a car in the river had appeared on the police log and she had ordered them all to Drammen because she remembered that it was the exact spot where René Kalsnes had been murdered several years ago. And quite another for her to remember the name of a Drammen man who had been tangentially involved in the investigation.

  ‘He was easy to remember because he made such a blunder,’ said Beate, obviously having noticed Katrine shaking her head. ‘He kept quiet about a baton he found because he was frightened it could implicate the police. Did they say anything about the probable cause of death?’

  ‘No,’ Holm said. ‘It’s pretty clear he would have been killed by the fall. The handbrake went through his mouth and out the back of his head. But he must have been beaten while he was alive because his face was bruised.’

  ‘Could he have driven off the cliff himself?’ Katrine asked.

  ‘Maybe. But his hands were attached to the wheel with cable ties. There were no brake marks, and the car hit the rocks close to the cliff, so it can’t have been going very fast. Must have just rolled over.’

  ‘Handbrake in his mouth?’ Beate said with a frown. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘His hands were tied and the car was rolling towards the edge,’ Katrine said. ‘He must have been trying to pull it with his mouth.’

  ‘Perhaps. Anyway, this is a policeman. He was killed at an old crime scene.’

  ‘On a murder that was never cleared up,’ Bjørn Holm added.

  ‘Yes, but there are some important differences between that murder and the murders of the girls in Maridalen and Tryvann,’ Beate said, waving the report they had printed at breakneck speed before leaving the basement office. ‘René Kalsnes was a man and there were no signs of sexual abuse.’

  ‘There’s an even more important difference,’ Katrine said.

  ‘Oh?’

  She patted the iPad under her arm. ‘I was just checking criminal records and the lists of prisoners as we were coming here. Valentin Gjertsen was serving a short sentence in Ila when René Kalsnes was killed.’

  ‘Shit!’ That was Holm.

  ‘Now now,’ Beate said. ‘That doesn’t rule out Valentin killing Anton Mittet. He might have broken the pattern here, but it’s still the same madman behind it. Isn’t it, Ståle?’

  The three of them turned to Ståle Aune, who had been unusually quiet. Katrine noticed that the plump man was also unusually pale. He was leaning on the door of the Amazon, and his chest was rising and falling.

  ‘Ståle?’ Beate repeated.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, making an unsuccessful attempt to smile. ‘The handbrake . . .’

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Beate said with an equally unsuccessful attempt to hide her impatience. ‘Is this our cop killer or not?’

  Ståle Aune straightened up. ‘Serial killers can break the pattern, if that’s what you’re asking me. But I don’t think this is a copycat continuing where the first . . . er, cop killer left off. As Harry was wont to say, a serial killer is a white whale. So, a serial killer of police officers is a white whale with pink dots. There aren’t two of them.’

  ‘So we agree this is the same murderer,’ Beate stated. ‘But the prison sentence pulls the carpet from under the theory that Valentin is visiting his old haunts and repeating the murders.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Bjørn said, ‘this is the only murder where the murder itself is also a copy. The blows to the face, the car in the river. That may have some significance.’

  ‘Ståle?’

  ‘It might mean that he feels he’s becoming more skilled, that he’s perfecting the murders by making them polished replicas.’

  ‘Come on,’ Katrine bridled. ‘You’re making him sound like an artist.’

  ‘Really?’ Ståle said, sending her a quizzical look.

  ‘Lønn!’

  They turned. From the top of the hill came a man with a flapping Hawaiian shirt, quivering belly and dancing curls. The relatively high speed appeared to be more a consequence of the steep gradient of the hill than any enthusiasm on the body’s part.

  ‘Let’s get going,’ Beate said.

  They had piled into the Amazon, and Bjørn was making a third stab at starting the car when a bony index finger tapped on the window at the front where Beate was sitting.

  She gave a low groan and wound down the window.

  �
�Roger Gjendem,’ she said. ‘Does Aftenposten have any questions I can answer with “no comment”?’

  ‘This is the third policeman to be murdered,’ the man in the Hawaiian shirt gasped, and Katrine was able to confirm that, fitness-wise, Bjørn Holm had met his inferior. ‘Have you got any leads?’

  Beate Lønn smiled.

  ‘N-O C-O-M . . .’ Roger Gjendem spelt out, while pretending to write in his notebook. ‘We’ve been keeping an ear open. Picking up little things. A garage owner says Mittet filled up at his place late last night. He thought Mittet was alone. Does that mean . . .?’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘. . . comment. I reckon your police chief will have to make you carry loaded guns from now on.’

  Beate raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The gun in Mittet’s glove compartment.’ Gjendem bent down and cast a suspicious look at the others, to see if they really hadn’t got this basic information. ‘Empty, even though there was a box of ammo there. If he’d had his gun loaded it might have saved his life.’

  ‘Do you know what, Gjendem?’ Beate said. ‘You can just add ditto marks after the first answer you got. Actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention this little meeting to anyone.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  The engine growled into life.

  ‘Have a nice day, Gjendem.’ Beate began to wind up the window. But not quickly enough to avoid the next question.

  ‘Are you missing you-know-who?’

  Holm let go of the clutch.

  Katrine watched Roger Gjendem shrinking in the mirror.

  But waited until they had passed Liertoppen before she said what everyone was thinking.

  ‘Gjendem’s right.’

  ‘Yes,’ Beate sighed. ‘But he’s no longer available, Katrine.’

  ‘I know, but we have to try!’

  ‘Try what?’ Bjørn Holm asked. ‘Digging up a man declared dead and buried?’

  Katrine stared out at the monotonous trees as they glided along the motorway. Thinking how once she had flown in a police helicopter above here, the most densely populated part of Norway, and how it had struck her that even here there was just so much forest and wilderness. Places people didn’t go. Places to hide. That even here houses were tiny dots in the night, the motorway a thin stripe through the impenetrable darkness. That it was impossible to see everything. That you had to be able to smell. To listen. To know.

  They had almost arrived in Asker, but they had travelled in a silence so impenetrable that when Katrine did answer no one had forgotten the question.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  16

  KATRINE BRATT CROSSED the open square in front of Chateau Neuf, the headquarters of the Norwegian Student Society. Great parties, cool gigs, heated debates. That was how she remembered the place. And in between they had passed their exams.

  The dress code had changed surprisingly little since she was here: average T-shirts, sagging trousers, nerdy glasses, retro Puffa jackets and retro army jackets, security of style trying to camouflage insecurity, the avarege social climber signalling ‘smart slacker’, the fear of failing socially and professionally. At any rate, though, they were glad not to be the poor buggers on the other side of the square, which was where Katrine was heading.

  Some of them were coming towards her now from the prison-like gate in front of the college grounds: students in black police uniforms that always looked a bit too big however well they fitted. From afar she could pick out the first years; they looked as if they were standing in the middle of the uniform, and the peak of the cap came too far down their foreheads. Either to conceal their insecurity or to avoid meeting the slightly contemptuous or even sympathetic looks from students across the square, the proper students, the free, independent, socially critical, thinking intellectuals. Who were grinning behind long, greasy hair, lying on the steps in the sun, exalted in their supine states, inhaling what they knew the police trainee knew might be a reefer.

  For they were the real youth, the cream of society with a right to make mistakes, those who still had life choices ahead of them, not behind.

  Perhaps it was only Katrine who had felt like this when she was here, who felt the desire to shout that they didn’t know who she was, why she had chosen to become a police officer, what she had decided to do with the rest of her life.

  The old duty officer, Karsten Kaspersen, still stood in the office inside the door, but if he did remember Katrine Bratt, his face didn’t show it as he examined her ID card and gave a quick nod. She walked down the corridor to a lecture room. Passing the door of the crime-scene room which was furnished like a flat with partition walls and had a gallery from where they could watch one another practising searches, finding clues and interpreting the course of events. Then the door to the fitness room, with training mats and the smell of sweat, where they drilled the fine art of wrestling people to the ground and applying handcuffs. At the end of the corridor she slipped into auditorium 2. The lecture was in full flow, so she crept along to a free seat in the back row. She sat down so quietly she wasn’t noticed by the two girls excitedly whispering in front of her.

  ‘She’s weird, I’m telling you. She’s got a picture of him on her bedsit wall.’

  ‘Has she?’

  ‘I’ve seen it myself.’

  ‘My God, he’s so old. And ugly.’

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Are you blind?’ She nodded to the board where the lecturer was writing with his back to the class.

  ‘Motive!’ The lecturer had turned to them and repeated the word he had written on the board. ‘The psychological cost of killing is so high for rationally thinking people with normal feelings that there has to be an extremely good motive. Extremely good motives are as a rule easier and quicker to find than murder weapons, witnesses or forensic evidence. And they point you straight to a potential perp. That is why every detective should start with the question “why”.’

  He paused to scan the audience, a bit like a sheepdog circling and keeping the flock together, Katrine thought.

  He raised his forefinger. ‘A rough simplification: find the motive and you’ve got the murderer.’

  Katrine Bratt didn’t think he was ugly. Not attractive though, of course, not in the conventional meaning of the word. More what the British call an acquired taste. And the voice was the same deep, warm voice with the slightly worn, hoarse edge that appealed not only to young student fans.

  ‘Yes?’ The lecturer had hesitated for a moment before giving the floor to a female student waving her arm.

  ‘Why do we send out large, costly forensics units if a brilliant detective like you can crack the case with a few questions and a bit of deduction?’

  There was no audible irony in the girl’s intonation, only an almost childlike sincerity plus a lilt that revealed she must have lived in the north.

  Katrine saw the emotions flicker across the lecturer’s face – embarrassment, resignation, annoyance – before he collected himself and gave an answer: ‘Because it’s never enough to know who the lawbreaker is, Silje. During the bank robbery wave in Oslo ten years ago the Robberies Unit had a female officer who could recognise masked robbers by the shape of their faces.’

  ‘Beate Lønn,’ said the girl he had called Silje. ‘The boss of Krimteknisk.’

  ‘Exactly. And so in eight out of ten cases the Robberies Unit knew who the masked men on the CCTV videos were. But they didn’t have any proof. Fingerprints are proof. A used gun is proof. A convinced detective is not proof, however brilliant he or she may be. I’ve used a number of simplifications today, but here is the last: the answer to the question “why” is worthless unless we find out how and vice versa. But now that we’ve got a bit further in the process Folkestad is going to talk about forensic investigation.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll talk more in depth about motives next time, but here’s something to get your brains working. Why do people kill one another?’

  He s
canned the audience again with an encouraging expression. Katrine saw that in addition to the scar that ran like a channel from the corner of his mouth to his ear he had two new scars. One looked like a slash with a knife to the neck; the other could have been made by a bullet at the side of his head, level with his eyebrows. But otherwise he looked better than she had ever seen him. The 1.92-metre figure looked tall and supple; the blond, cropped brush of hair still didn’t have any flecks of grey. And she could see he was toned beneath his T-shirt. There was meat back on his bones. And, most important of all, life in his eyes. The alert, energetic, bordering on manic, look was back. Laughter lines and expansive body language she had never seen before. You could almost suspect him of leading a good life. Which, if this was the case, would be a first.

  ‘Because they have something to gain by it,’ a boy’s voice answered.

  The lecturer nodded good-naturedly. ‘You would think so, wouldn’t you? But murder as a crime for profit is not that usual, Vetle.’

  A barking Sunnmøre voice: ‘Because they hate someone?’

  ‘Elling is suggesting crimes of passion,’ he said. ‘Jealousy. Rejection. Revenge. Yes, definitely. Anything else?’

  ‘Because they are deranged.’ The suggestion came from a tall, stooped boy.

  ‘Deranged’s not the word, Robert.’ It was the girl again. Katrine could only see a blonde ponytail over the back of the seat in the front row. ‘It’s called—’

  ‘It’s fine. We know what he means, Silje.’ The lecturer had sat down at the front of the desk, stretched out his long legs and crossed his arms over the Glasvegas logo on his T-shirt. ‘And personally I think deranged is an excellent word. But not in fact a particularly usual reason for murder. There are of course those who are of the opinion that murder in itself is proof of insanity, but most murders are rational. Just as it’s rational to seek material gain, it’s rational to seek emotional relief. The murderer may have some idea that murder will dull the pain that comes with hatred, fear, jealousy, humiliation.’