Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8)

by Jo Nesbo

  Arnold Folkestad coughed quietly, and Krohn turned his attention to him with a friendly gaze while straightening his wristwatch in a studied casual manner. Arnold held out a yellow folder.

  ‘What’s this?’ Krohn asked, taking it with one raised eyebrow.

  ‘Our suggestion for an agreement,’ Folkestad said. ‘As you’ll see, we suggest Silje Gravseng terminates her course at PHS with immediate effect and does not apply under any circumstances for a job in, or in connection with, the police force.’

  ‘You are joking . . .’

  ‘And she does not try under any circumstances to contact Harry Hole again.’

  ‘This is preposterous.’

  ‘In return, we will – out of consideration for all parties – refrain from legally pursuing this false accusation and attempted blackmail of a PHS employee.’

  ‘In that case, see you in court,’ Krohn said, managing to avoid the cliché sounding like one. ‘And even if you suffer as a result I am looking forward to conducting the prosecution.’

  Folkestad shrugged. ‘Then I’m afraid you’re going to be a bit disappointed, Krohn.’

  ‘Let’s see who will be disappointed.’ Krohn had already risen to his feet and done up one button of his jacket, a sign he was on his way to the next meeting, when he caught Harry’s eye. He hesitated.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind taking the trouble,’ Folkestad said, ‘I would suggest you read the documents behind the proposed agreement.’

  Krohn opened the file again. Flicked through. Read.

  ‘As you can see,’ Folkestad continued, ‘your client has followed the lectures at PHS about rape, in which, among other things, there is a description of how rape victims tend to react psychologically.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean—’

  ‘May I ask you to wait with your objections until the end and now flick over to the next page, Krohn? There you will find a signed, and for the moment unofficial, witness statement from a male student who was standing outside the front entrance where he saw frøken Gravseng leaving PHS at the time in question. He states that she looked angry rather than frightened. He doesn’t mention anything about a torn dress. On the contrary, he says she appeared to be both dressed and unhurt. And he admits to studying her very closely.’ He turned to Silje Gravseng. ‘A compliment to you, I assume . . .’

  She sat as still as before, but her cheeks had coloured up and her eyes were blinking non-stop.

  ‘As you can see, Harry Hole went over to him a maximum of one minute, so sixty seconds, after frøken Gravseng had passed him. Hole stayed with the witness until I arrived and took Hole to Krimteknisk, which is –’ Folkestad motioned with his hand – ‘on the next page, there, yes.’

  Krohn read it, and slumped back in his chair.

  ‘The report says that Hole has none of the things you would expect a man who has just committed rape to have. No skin under the nails, no genital secretions or pubic hairs from other persons on his hands or his genitals. And this gives the lie to frøken Gravseng’s statement about scratching and penetration. Furthermore, there are no marks on Hole’s body to suggest she had been fighting him at all. The only suggestion of contact is two hairs on his clothes, but they are no more than one would expect after she had leaned across him, see page three.’

  Krohn flicked through without looking up. His eyes danced down the page, his lips forming a profanity after three seconds, and Harry knew the myth was true: no one in Norwegian justice circles could read an A4 document faster than Johan Krohn.

  ‘Finally,’ Folkestad said, ‘if you look at the volume of Hole’s ejaculate only half an hour after the alleged rape, it shows four millimetres. A second ejaculation within the same half an hour would produce less than ten per cent of that. In short, unless Harry Hole’s testicles are made of something very special he did not have an ejaculation at the time frøken Gravseng claims.’

  In the ensuing silence Harry could hear a car horn outside, shouting, then laughter and swearing. The traffic was at a standstill.

  ‘It’s not exactly complicated,’ Folkestad said, tentatively smiling into his beard. ‘So if you’ve done your calculations and—’

  The hydraulic snort of brakes being released. And then the bang as Silje Gravseng got up from her chair immediately followed by the bang of the door as she left the room.

  Krohn sat with his head lowered for some time. When he raised it again, his gaze was directed at Harry.

  ‘I apologise,’ he said. ‘As a defence counsel we have to accept that our clients lie to save their skins. But this . . . I should have read the situation better.’

  Harry shrugged. ‘You don’t know her, do you?’

  ‘No,’ Krohn said. ‘But I know you. Should know you after so many years, Hole. I’ll get her to sign your agreement.’

  ‘And if she won’t?’

  ‘I’ll explain to her the consequences of making a false accusation. And an official expulsion from PHS. She’s not stupid, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Harry said, getting up with a sigh. ‘I know.’

  Outside, the traffic had started again.

  Harry and Arnold Folkestad walked up Karl Johans gate.

  ‘Thank you,’ Harry said. ‘But I’m still wondering how you grasped everything so quickly.’

  ‘I have some experience of OCD,’ Arnold smiled.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Obsessive compulsive disorder. When a person with that predisposition has made a decision, she stops at nothing. Action is in itself more important than the consequences.’

  ‘I know what OCD is. I have a psychologist pal who has accused me of being halfway there myself. What I meant was, how did you twig so fast that we needed a witness and that we had to get ourselves to Krimteknisk?’

  Arnold Folkestad chuckled. ‘I don’t know if I can tell you that, Harry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What I can tell you is that I was involved in a case where two policemen were about to be reported by someone they’d beaten senseless. But by doing something similar to what we’ve just done they got one over on him. One of them burnt the evidence that counted against them. And what was left wasn’t enough, so the man’s lawyer advised him to drop the charge because they wouldn’t get anywhere. I reckoned the same would happen here.’

  ‘Now you’re making it sound as if I really did rape her, Arnold.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Arnold laughed. ‘I had been half expecting that something like this would happen. The girl’s a ticking time bomb. Our psychological tests should have disqualified her before she was offered a place on the course.’

  They walked across Egertorget. Images flickered through Harry’s brain. A smile from a laughing girlfriend one May when he was young. The body of a Salvation Army soldier in front of the Christmas kettle. A town full of memories.

  ‘So who were the two policemen?’

  ‘One pretty high up.’

  ‘Is that why you won’t tell me? And you were part of it? Guilty conscience?’

  Arnold Folkestad shrugged. ‘Anyone who doesn’t dare to stand up for justice should have a guilty conscience.’

  ‘Mm. A policeman with a history of violence and a predilection for burning evidence. There aren’t many of them. We wouldn’t by any chance be talking about an officer by the name of Truls Berntsen, would we?’

  Arnold Folkestad said nothing, but the wince that recoiled through his short, round body was more than enough to tell Harry what he wanted to know.

  ‘Mikael Bellman’s shadow. That’s what you mean by pretty high up, isn’t it?’ Harry spat on the tarmac.

  ‘Shall we talk about something else, Harry?’

  ‘Yes, let’s do that. Lunch at Schrøder’s?’

  ‘Schrøder’s? Do they really have . . . er, lunch?’

  ‘They have burgers on bread. And room.’

  ‘That looks familiar, Rita,’ Harry said to the waitress who had just placed two burnt burgers covered wit
h pale fried onions in front of them.

  ‘Nothing changes here, you know.’ She smiled and left them.

  ‘Truls Berntsen, yes,’ Harry said, looking over his shoulder. He and Arnold were almost alone in the single, square room which despite years of anti-smoking legislation still felt smoky. ‘I think he’s been operating as a burner inside the police for many years.’

  ‘Oh?’ Folkestad studied the animal cadaver in front of them with scepticism. ‘And what about Bellman?’

  ‘He was responsible for narcotics during that time. I know he had some deal with one Rudolf Asayev, who was selling a heroin-like substance called violin,’ Harry said. ‘Bellman granted Asayev the monopoly in Oslo in return for an assurance that visible signs of drug trafficking, junkies in the streets and of course ODs went down. That made Bellman look good.’

  ‘So good that he got his hands on the Police Chief job?’

  Harry chewed tentatively on the first bite of burger and shrugged his shoulders to suggest a ‘maybe’.

  ‘And why haven’t you passed on what you know?’ Arnold Folkestad cut carefully into what he hoped was meat. Gave up and looked at Harry, who returned a blank stare as he chewed and chewed. ‘A blow for justice?’

  Harry swallowed. Wiped his mouth with a paper serviette. ‘I had no proof. Besides, I was no longer a policeman. It wasn’t my business. It isn’t my business now either, Arnold.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’ Folkestad speared a chunk on his fork and raised it for inspection. ‘But if this isn’t your business, and you’re no longer a policeman, why has the pathologist sent you a post-mortem report on this Rudolf Asayev?’

  ‘Mm. So you saw it?’

  ‘Only because I usually collect your post as well when I’m by the pigeonholes. And because I’m a nosy parker, of course.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘I haven’t tried it yet.’

  ‘Go for it. It won’t bite.’

  ‘Same to you, Harry.’

  Harry smiled. ‘They searched behind the eyeball. And found what we’d been searching for. A little pinprick in the large blood vessel. Someone could have pushed Asayev’s eyeball to the side while he was in the coma and injected air bubbles into the corner of the eye. The result would have been instant blindness followed by a blood clot in the brain which couldn’t be traced.’

  ‘Now I really feel like eating this,’ Folkestad grimaced and put down his fork. ‘Are you saying you’ve proved that Asayev was murdered?’

  ‘Nope. The cause of death is still impossible to determine. But the mark proves what might have happened. The conundrum is of course how anyone got into the hospital room. The duty officer insisted he didn’t see anyone pass during the period when the injection must have been made. Neither a doctor nor anyone else.’

  ‘The mystery of the locked room.’

  ‘Or something simpler. Like the officer leaving his post or falling asleep and, quite understandably, not admitting it. Or he was in on the murder, directly or indirectly.’

  ‘If he went AWOL or fell asleep the murder would have depended on serendipity, and surely we don’t believe in that?’

  ‘No, Arnold, we don’t. But he could have been lured away from his post. Or doped.’

  ‘Or bribed. You’ll have to get the officer in for questioning!’

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘First of all, I’m not a policeman any more. Secondly, the officer’s dead. He was the one killed in the car outside Drammen.’ Harry nodded as if to himself, raised his coffee cup and took a sip.

  ‘Damn!’ Arnold had leaned forward. ‘And thirdly?’

  Harry signalled to Rita for the bill. ‘Did I say there was a thirdly?’

  ‘You said “secondly”, not “and secondly”. As though you were in the middle of reeling off a list.’

  ‘Right. I’ll have to sharpen up my Norwegian.’

  Arnold tilted his head. And Harry saw the question in his colleague’s eyes. If this is a case you’re not going to follow up, why are you telling me about it?

  ‘Come on, eat up,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve got a lecture.’

  The sun slipped across a pale sky, made a gentle landing on the horizon and coloured the clouds orange.

  Truls Berntsen sat in his car half listening to the police radio while waiting for darkness to fall. Waiting for the lights in the house above him to be switched on. Waiting to see her. A fleeting glimpse would be enough.

  Something was brewing. He could hear it in the style of communication, something was happening alongside the usual, subdued, routine normality. Short, intense reports came sporadically, as though they had been told not to use the radio more than necessary. And it wasn’t what was said, more what wasn’t said. The way it wasn’t said. The staccato sentences on the surface about surveillance and transport, but without addresses, times or individual names being mentioned. People used to say the police frequency was the fourth most popular local radio in Oslo, but that was before it had been encrypted. Nevertheless, they were talking this evening as though they were terrified of revealing something.

  There they were again. Truls turned up the volume.

  ‘Zero one. Delta two zero. All quiet.’

  Delta, the elite force. An armed operation.

  Truls picked up his binoculars. Focused on the living-room window. It was harder to see her in the new house; the terrace in front of the living room was in the way. With the old house, he had been able to stand in the trees and see straight into the room. See her sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked up underneath her. Barefoot. Stroking the blonde curls away from her face. As though she knew she was being watched. So beautiful he could cry.

  The sky above Oslo Fjord changed from orange to red and then violet.

  It had been all black the night he had parked by the mosque in Åkebergveien. He had walked down to Police HQ, clipped on his ID card in case the duty officers saw him, unlocked the door to the atrium and sauntered downstairs to the Evidence Room. Unlocked the door with the copy he’d had for three years now. Put on his night-vision goggles. He’d started doing that after the time he’d switched on the lights and aroused the suspicions of a security guard during one of Asayev’s burner jobs. He had been quick, found the box by date, opened the bag containing the 9mm bullet taken from Kalsnes’s head and replaced it with the one he had in his jacket pocket.

  The only oddity had been that he hadn’t felt alone.

  He watched Ulla. Did she feel that too? Was that why she kept looking up from her book towards the window? As though there was something outside. Something waiting for her.

  They were talking on the radio again.

  He knew what they were talking about.

  Understood what they were planning.

  25

  D-DAY WAS drawing to an end.

  The walkie-talkie crackled quietly.

  Katrine Bratt twisted on the thin ground sheet. Raised her binoculars again and focused on the house in Bergslia. Dark and silent. As it had been for almost twenty-four hours.

  Something had to happen soon. In three hours it would be another date. The wrong date.

  She shivered. But it could have been worse. About nine degrees during the day and no rain. But after the sun went down the temperature had plummeted and she had begun to feel cold, even with the full complement of winter underwear and the padded jacket which, according to the salesman, was ‘eight hundred on the American scale, not the European one, that is’. It had something to do with insulation. Or was it feathers? Right now she wished she had something warmer than eight hundred. Like a man she could snuggle up to . . .

  There was no one posted in the house itself; they hadn’t wanted to risk being seen going in or out. Even for the recce they had parked a long way away, then sneaked around at some distance from the house, never more than two people at once and always out of uniform.

  The spot she had been allocated was a little hill in Berg Forest, set b
ack from where the Delta troops were deployed. She knew their positions, but even when she scanned them with the binoculars she couldn’t see anything. She knew there were four marksmen, though, covering every side of the house, as well as eleven men ready to storm the place in under eight seconds.

  She looked at her watch again. Two hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.

  To the best of their knowledge the original murder had taken place at the end of the day, but it was hard to determine the moment death occurred when the body was cut into bits of no more than two kilos. Anyway, the timings of the copycat murders had so far matched the originals, so the fact that nothing had happened as yet was in a sense expected.

  Clouds were moving in from the west. Dry weather had been forecast, but it would get darker and visibility would worsen. On the other hand, perhaps it might become milder. She should have brought a sleeping bag with her. Katrine’s mobile vibrated. She answered it.

  ‘What’s happening?’ It was Beate.

  ‘Nothing to report here,’ Katrine said, scratching her neck. ‘Except that global warming is a fact. There are midges here. In March.’

  ‘Don’t you mean mosquitoes?’

  ‘No, midges. They . . . well, we have a lot of them in Bergen. Any interesting phone calls?’

  ‘No. Just Cheez Doodles, Pepsi Max and Gabriel Byrne. Tell me, is he hot or just a tad too old?’

  ‘Hot. Are you watching In Treatment?’

  ‘First season. Disc three.’

  ‘Didn’t know you’d succumbed to calories and DVDs. Trackie bottoms?’

  ‘With very loose elastic. Have to go for some hedonism when the little one’s not here.’

  ‘Shall we swap?’

  ‘Nope. I’d better call off in case the prince rings. Keep me posted.’

  Katrine put the phone next to the walkie-talkie. Lifted the binoculars and studied the road in front of the house. In principle he could come from any direction. It was unlikely he would cross the fences on either side of the tracks where the metro had just clattered past, of course, but if he came from Damplassen he could come through the forest on any one of the many paths. He could walk through the neighbouring gardens alongside Bergslia, especially now that it was clouding over and getting darker. But if he felt confident there was no reason why he wouldn’t come on the road. Someone on an old bike was pedalling uphill, staggering from side to side, perhaps he wasn’t quite sober.