by Jo Nesbo
Harry knew that the air pressure itself wouldn’t have much more effect than deafening those in the room. But the explosion combined with the blinding flash and the men’s assault would paralyse even well-trained targets for the first three seconds. And those three seconds were all the Delta troops needed.
Harry waited. Then a subdued voice came through his earpiece. Just what he expected.
‘Room 406 taken. No one here.’
It was what came after that made Harry swear out loud.
‘Looks like he’s been here to pick up his stuff.’
Harry was standing, arms crossed, in the corridor outside room 406 as Katrine and Bjørn arrived.
‘Good shot. Hit the post?’ Katrine asked.
‘Missed an open goal,’ Harry said, shaking his head.
They followed him into the room.
‘He came straight here, grabbed all his stuff and was gone.’
‘All?’ Bjørn queried.
‘All except for two used Q-tips and two tram tickets we found in the waste-paper basket. Plus the stub of this ticket to a football match I have a feeling we won.’
‘We?’ Bjørn asked, looking around the bog-standard hotel room. ‘Do you mean Vålerenga?’
‘Norway. Versus Slovenia, it says.’
‘We won,’ Bjørn said. ‘Riise scored in extra time.’
‘Sick. How can you men remember things like that?’ Katrine said, shaking her head. ‘I can’t even remember if Brann won the league or were demoted last year.’
‘I’m not like that,’ Bjørn objected. ‘I only remember it because it was heading for a draw and then I was called out, and Riise—’
‘You remembered it anyway, Rain Man. You—’
‘Hey.’ They turned to Harry, who was staring at the ticket. ‘Can you remember what it was for, Bjørn?’
‘Eh?’
‘The call-out?’
Bjørn Holm scratched one sideburn. ‘Let’s see, it was early in the evening . . .’
‘Never mind,’ Harry said. ‘It was the murder of Erlend Vennesla in Maridalen.’
‘Was it?’
‘The same evening that Norway was playing at Ullevål Stadium. The date’s here on the ticket. Seven o’clock.’
‘Aha,’ Katrine said.
Bjørn Holm’s face showed a pained expression. ‘Don’t say that, Harry. Please don’t say Valentin Gjertsen was at the match. If he was there—’
‘—he can’t be the murderer,’ Katrine finished. ‘And we would very much like him to be, Harry. So please say something encouraging now.’
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘Why wasn’t this ticket in the basket with the Q-tips and the tram tickets? Why did he put it on the desk when he tidied everything else up? Placed it exactly where he knew we’d find it?’
‘He’s left his alibi,’ Katrine said.
‘He left it for us so that we would stand here like we’re doing now,’ Harry said. ‘Suddenly having doubts, unsure what to do. But this is only a stub. It doesn’t prove he was there. On the contrary, it’s pretty striking that not only was he at a football match, in a stadium where fans don’t tend to remember each other, but also that, inexplicably, he has saved the ticket.’
‘The ticket’s got a seat number,’ Katrine said. ‘Perhaps the people sitting next to him and behind him can remember who was there. Or if the seat was unoccupied. I can search for the seat number. Perhaps I’ll find—’
‘Do that,’ Harry said. ‘But we’ve been through this before with alleged alibis in the theatre or the cinema. Three or four days pass and people don’t remember a thing about their neighbours.’
‘You’re right,’ Katrine said, resigned.
‘Internationals,’ Bjørn said.
‘What about them?’ Harry asked, heading for the bathroom, his flies already half undone.
‘International matches are subject to FIFA rules and regulations,’ Bjørn said. ‘Hooliganism.’
‘Of course,’ Harry shouted from behind the bathroom door. ‘Well done, Bjørn!’ Then the door slammed.
‘What?’ Katrine shouted. ‘What are you on about?’
‘CCTV,’ Bjørn said. ‘FIFA requires match organisers to film the spectators in case there are any disturbances. The ruling came in during the wave of hooliganism in the 1990s to help the police find the troublemakers and charge them. They film the stands throughout the match with high-definition cameras so that they can zoom in and identify every single face. And we’ve got the seating area, row and seat number of where Valentin sat.’
‘Didn’t sit!’ Katrine shouted. ‘He’s not allowed to be on any bloody footage, all right? Or we’ll be back to square one.’
‘They may of course have deleted the images,’ Bjørn said. ‘There wasn’t any trouble during the match, and I’m sure the data-archiving directive states how long they’re allowed to keep—’
‘The data-archiving directive . . .’
‘If the images are stored electronically then all they have to do is press Delete for the files to disappear.’
‘Trying to remove files permanently is like trying to remove dog shit from your trainers. Difficult. How do you think we find child porn on computers pervs have handed in voluntarily, thinking they’ve got rid of the lot? Believe me, I’ll find Valentin Gjertsen if he was at the stadium that evening. What was the assumed time of death for Erlend Vennesla?’
They heard the toilet flush.
‘Between seven and half eight,’ Bjørn said. ‘In other words, right at the start of the game, after Henriksen equalised. Vennesla must have heard the cheering up in Maridalen. It’s not far from Ullevål, is it?’
The bathroom door opened. ‘Which means he could have made it to the match after the murder in Maridalen,’ Harry said, doing up the last button. ‘Once he was in the stadium he could have done something that people around him would remember. Alibi.’
‘Valentin was not at the match,’ Katrine said. ‘But if he was I’ll watch the sodding video from start to finish and time him if he so much as lifts his bum off the seat. Alibi, my arse.’
There was a silence hanging over the large detached houses.
The silence before the storm of Volvos and Audis returning home after working for Norway Ltd, Truls Berntsen thought.
He rang the bell and looked around.
Nicely established garden. Well looked after. You probably had time to do that if you were a retired Chief of Police.
The door opened. He looked older. The same sharp blue eyes, but the skin around his neck was a little looser, his back not quite as straight. He was simply not as impressive as Truls remembered him. Perhaps it was just the faded casual clothes; perhaps that’s how it is when your job doesn’t keep you on your toes any more.
‘Berentzen, Orgkrim.’ Truls held up his ID in the certain knowledge that if the old boy really read Berntsen he would think that was what he heard as well. Lies with backup. But the Chief nodded without looking. ‘I think I’ve seen you before. How can I help you, Berentzen?’
He gave no indication that he was going to invite Truls in. Which was fine by Truls. No one could see them and there was minimal background noise.
‘It’s about your son, Sondre.’
‘What about him?’
‘We’re running an operation to catch Albanian pimps, and for that purpose we’ve been keeping an eye on movements in Kvadraturen and taking pictures. We’ve identified a number of cars seen picking up prostitutes and we’re intending to bring the owners in for questioning. We’ll offer them reduced sentences if we can act on information they give us about the pimps. And one of the cars we’ve photographed belongs to your son.’
The Chief of Police raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘What’s that? Sondre? Impossible.’
‘I thought so too. But I wanted to confer with you. If you think this must be some misunderstanding, that the woman he picks up is not even a prostitute, we’ll shred the photo.’
‘Sondre is happily married. I brought h
im up. He knows the difference between right and wrong, believe me.’
‘Of course, I just wanted to be sure that this is how you see the matter as well.’
‘My God, why would he buy . . .’ The man in front of Truls was grimacing as if he had been chewing a rotten grape. ‘. . . sex in the street? The danger of infection. The children. No, no, no.’
‘Sounds like we agree there’s no point following this up. Even though we have reason to suspect that the woman is a prostitute, your son may have lent his car to someone else. We don’t have a photo of the driver.’
‘So you don’t even have any proof. No, you’d better just forget this one.’
‘Thank you. We’ll do as you say.’
The Chief of Police nodded slowly while carefully studying Truls. ‘Berentzen at Orgkrim, did you say?’
‘Correct.’
‘Thank you, Berentzen. You officers are doing a good job.’
Truls beamed. ‘We do the best we can. Have a good day.’
‘What was that you said again?’ Katrine said, staring at the black screen in front of her. In the world outside the Boiler Room, where the air was thick with evaporating human being, it was afternoon.
‘I said there was a good chance the images of the crowds had been deleted because of the data-archiving directive,’ Bjørn said. ‘And as you can see, I was right.’
‘And what did I say?’
‘You said that files are like dog shit on trainers,’ Harry said. ‘Impossible to remove.’
‘I didn’t say impossible,’ Katrine said.
The four members of the team sat around Katrine’s computer. When Harry had rung Ståle and asked him to join them, Ståle had sounded relieved more than anything else.
‘I said it was difficult,’ Katrine said. ‘But as a rule there’s a mirror image of them somewhere. Which a clever computer man will be able to find.’
‘Or woman?’ Ståle suggested.
‘Nope,’ Katrine said. ‘Women can’t park, they don’t remember football results and they can’t be bothered to learn the fiddly bits on computers. For that you need weird men with band T-shirts and minimal sex lives, and it’s been like this ever since the Stone Age.’
‘So you can’t—’
‘I keep trying to explain that I’m not a computer specialist, Ståle. My search engines searched the files of the Norwegian Football Association, but all the recordings had been deleted. And I’m afraid that from here on in I’m no use.’
‘We could have saved ourselves a bit of time if you’d listened to me,’ Bjørn said. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘I don’t mean I’m no use for anything,’ Katrine said, still addressing Ståle. ‘You see, I’m equipped with a few relative virtues. Such as feminine charm, unfeminine get-up-and-go and no shame. Which can give you an edge in nerd land. The guy who showed me these search engines also got me in with an Indian IT man, known as Side Cut. And an hour ago I rang Hyderabad and put him on the case.’
‘And . . .?’
‘And here’s the footage,’ Katrine said, pressing the return button.
The screen lit up.
They stared.
‘That’s him,’ Ståle said. ‘He looks lonely.’
Valentin Gjertsen, alias Paul Stavnes, was sitting in front of them with his arms crossed. He was watching the match without any visible interest.
‘Goddamn!’ Bjørn cursed under his breath.
Harry asked Katrine to fast-forward.
She pressed a button and the crowd around Valentin Gjertsen began to move jerkily as the clock and the counter in the bottom right-hand corner raced forward. Only Valentin Gjersten sat still, like a lifeless statue amid a swarm of life.
‘Faster,’ Harry said.
Katrine clicked again and the same people became even more active, leaning forward and back, getting up, throwing their arms in the air, leaving, returning with a hot dog or a coffee. Then lots of empty blue seats shone back at them.
‘One–one and half-time,’ Bjørn said.
The stadium filled up again. Even more movement in the crowd. The clock in the corner was running. Heads shaking and obvious frustration. All of a sudden: arms in the air. For a couple of seconds the image seemed to be frozen. Then people jumped up from their seats at once, cheering, bouncing up and down, embracing each other. All except for one.
‘Riise penalty in extra time,’ Bjørn said.
It was over.
People vacated their seats. Valentin sat, unmoving, until everyone had left. Then he got up and was gone.
‘Suppose he doesn’t like queueing,’ Bjørn said.
The screen was black once more.
‘So,’ Harry said. ‘What have we seen?’
‘We’ve seen my patient watching a football match,’ Ståle said. ‘I imagine I have to say my ex-patient, providing he doesn’t turn up for the next therapy session. Nevertheless, it was apparently an entertaining match for everyone apart from him. As I know his body language, I may say with some certainty that this did not interest him. Which of course prompts the question: why go to a football match then?’
‘And he didn’t eat, go to the toilet or get up from his seat during the whole game,’ Katrine said. ‘Just sat there like a bloody pillar of salt. How spooky’s that? As though he knew we would check this recording and didn’t want us to miss ten seconds of his damn alibi.’
‘If only he’d made a call on his mobile,’ Bjørn said. ‘Then we could have blown up the picture and perhaps seen the number he dialled. Or clocked the split second he rang and checked it against outgoing calls at the base stations covering Ullevål Stadium and—’
‘He didn’t ring,’ Harry said.
‘But if—’
‘He didn’t ring, Bjørn. And whatever Valentin Gjertsen’s motive for watching the match at Ullevål, it’s a fact that he was sitting there when Erlend Vennesla was murdered in Maridalen. And the other fact is . . .’ Harry gazed above their heads, at the bare white-brick wall. ‘. . . we’re back to square one.’
34
AURORA SAT ON the swing looking at the sun filtering through the leaves of the pear trees. At least, Dad stubbornly maintained they were pear trees, but no one had ever seen any pears on them. Aurora was twelve years old and a bit too big for a swing and a bit too big to believe everything her dad told her.
She had come home from school, done her homework and gone into the garden while Mum went to the shop. Dad wouldn’t be home for dinner; he’d started working long days again. Even though he’d promised her and Mum that now he would come home like other dads, he wouldn’t do police work in the evenings, just do his psychotherapy in his consulting room and then come home. But now he was working for the police after all. Neither Mum nor Dad had wanted to tell her exactly what it was he was doing.
She found the song she was looking for on her iPod, Rihanna singing that if he wanted her he should come and take a walk with her. Aurora stretched out her long legs to get more speed. The legs that had become so long she had to fold them underneath her or hold them up high so they wouldn’t drag along the ground under the swing. She would soon be as tall as her mother. She leaned her head back, felt the weight of her long, thick hair hanging from her scalp. So nice. Closed her eyes to the sun above the trees and the swing ropes, heard Rihanna singing, heard the low creak of the branch whenever the swing was at the lowest point. Heard another sound as well, the gate opening and footsteps on the gravel path.
‘Mummy,’ she called, not wanting to open her eyes, not wanting to move her face away from the sun which was so wonderfully hot. But she didn’t receive an answer and remembered she hadn’t heard a car pull up, hadn’t heard the hectic growl of her mother’s little blue dog kennel.
She dragged her heels along the ground, slowing the swing down until it was stationary, her eyes still closed, not wanting to abandon the wonderful bubble of music, sun and daydreams.
She felt a shadow fall across her and at once it was cold, like when a
cloud passes in front of the sun on a chilly day. She opened her eyes and saw a figure standing over her, no more than a silhouette against the sky, with a halo round the head where the sun had been. And for a moment she blinked, confused by the thought that had struck her.
That Jesus was back. That he was standing here, now. And it meant that Mum and Dad were wrong. God really did exist, and there was forgiveness for all our sins.
‘Hello, little girl,’ the voice said. ‘What’s your name?’
Jesus could speak Norwegian if push came to shove.
‘Aurora,’ she said, squeezing one eye shut to see his face better. No beard or long hair, anyway.
‘Is your father at home?’
‘He’s at work.’
‘I see. So you’re on your own, are you, Aurora?’
Aurora was about to answer. But something stopped her; quite what, she didn’t know.
‘Who are you?’ she said instead.
‘Someone who needs to talk to your father. But you and I can talk. Since we’re alone, I mean. Can’t we?’
Aurora didn’t answer.
‘What kind of music are you listening to?’ the man asked, pointing to her iPod.
‘Rihanna,’ Aurora said, pushing the swing back. Not just to get out of the man’s shadow but to see him better.
‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘I’ve got lots of her CDs at home. Would you like to borrow some?’
‘I listen to the songs I haven’t got on Spotify,’ Aurora said, establishing that the man looked quite normal, at least there wasn’t anything particularly Jesus-like about him.
‘Oh yes, Spotify,’ the man said, crouching down, not just to be at her height but lower. It felt better. ‘You can listen to all the music you like then.’
‘Almost,’ Aurora said. ‘But I’ve got the free Spotify, and there are lots of ads between the songs.’
‘And you don’t like that?’
‘I don’t like the talking. It messes up the atmosphere.’
‘Did you know there are records where they talk and they’re the best songs?’
‘No,’ Aurora said, tilting her head, wondering why the man spoke so softly, it didn’t sound like it was his usual voice. It was the same voice that Emilie, her friend, used when she was asking Aurora for a favour, such as to borrow her favourite clothes, but Aurora didn’t like lending them because it was such a messy arrangement. You never knew where your clothes were.
