Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8)

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Bjørn, is that you?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve got my number saved then?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I see. Right. I’m afraid there’s something I have to tell you.’

  Pause.

  Bjørn swallowed. ‘It’s about your daughter. She—’

  ‘Bjørn, before you go any further, I don’t know what this is about, but I can hear from your tone that it’s serious. And I can’t take any more phone calls about Fia. This is just like it was then. No one could look me in the eye. Everyone rang. Seemed to be easier. Please would you come here? Look me in the eye when you say whatever it is. Bjørn?’

  ‘Of course,’ Bjørn Holm said, taken aback. He had never heard Roar Midtstuen talk so openly and honestly about his frailty before. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘It’s exactly nine months today, so as it happens I’m on my way to the place where she was killed. To lay a few flowers, think—’

  ‘Just tell me exactly where it is and I’ll be there right away.’

  Katrine Bratt gave up looking for somewhere to park. It had been easier finding the telephone number and address online. But after ringing four times and getting neither an answer nor an answerphone, she had requisitioned a car and driven to Industrigata in Majorstuen, a one-way street with a greengrocer’s, a couple of galleries, at least one restaurant, a picture-framing workshop, but, well, no free parking spaces.

  Katrine made a decision, drove up onto the pavement, killed the engine, put a note on the windscreen saying she was a police officer, which she knew meant sod all to traffic wardens, who, according to Harry, were all that stood between civilisation and total chaos.

  She walked back the way she had come, towards Bogstadsveien’s stylish shopping hysteria. Stopped outside a block of flats in Josefines gate where once or twice during her studies at Police College she had ended up for a late-night coffee. So-called late-night coffee. Alleged late-night coffee. Not that she’d minded. Oslo Police District had owned the block and rented out rooms to students at the college. Katrine found the name she was searching for on the panel of doorbells, pressed and waited while contemplating the simple four-storey facade. Pressed again. Waited.

  ‘No one at home?’

  She turned. Automatic smile. Guessed the man was in his forties, perhaps a well-kept fifty-year-old. Tall, still with hair, flannel shirt, Levi’s 501s.

  ‘I’m the caretaker.’

  ‘And I’m Detective Katrine Bratt, Crime Squad. I’m looking for Silje Gravseng.’

  He studied the ID card she held out and shamelessly examined her from top to toe.

  ‘Silje Gravseng, yes,’ the caretaker said. ‘Apparently she’s left PHS, so she won’t be here for much longer.’

  ‘But she’s still here?’

  ‘Yes, she is. Room 412. Can I pass on a message?’

  ‘Please. Ask her to ring this number. I want to talk to her about Runar Gravseng, her brother.’

  ‘Has he done something wrong?’

  ‘Hardly. He’s sectioned and always sits in the middle of the room because he thinks the walls are people who want to beat him to death.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Katrine took out her notebook and wrote her name and number. ‘You can tell her it’s about the police murders.’

  ‘Yes, she seems to be obsessed by them.’

  Katrine stopped writing. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She uses them like wallpaper. Newspaper cuttings about dead policemen, I mean. Not that it’s any of my business. Students can put up what they like, but that’s a bit . . . creepy, isn’t it?’

  Katrine looked at him. ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Leif Rødbekk.’

  ‘Listen, Leif. Do you think I could have a peek at her room? I’d like to see the cuttings.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘No problem. Just show me the search warrant.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t—’

  ‘I was kidding,’ he grinned. ‘Come with me.’

  A minute later they were in the lift on their way to the third floor.

  ‘The rental agreement says I can go into the rooms as long as I’ve given advance warning. Right now we’re checking all the electric radiators for accumulated dust. One of them caught fire last week. And we tried to give her advance warning before we entered, but Silje didn’t answer the intercom. Sound all right to you, Detective Bratt?’ Another grin. Wolfish grin, Katrine thought. Not without charm. If he’d taken the liberty of using her Christian name at the end of the sentence, it would of course have been over, but he did have a certain lilt. Her gaze sought his ring finger. The smooth gold was matt. The lift doors opened and she followed him down the narrow corridor until he stopped in front of one of the blue doors.

  He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, turning the key in the lock.

  ‘You’ve been very helpful, Rødbekk.’

  ‘Leif. And it’s a pleasure to be able to help. It’s not every day I run into such a . . .’ He opened the door for her but stood in such a way that if she wanted to go in she would have to squeeze past him. She sent him an admonitory glance. ‘. . . serious case,’ he said with laughter dancing in his eyes and stepped to the side.

  Katrine went in. The rooms hadn’t changed a lot. There was still a kitchenette and the bathroom door at one end and a curtain at the other, behind which Katrine remembered there was a bed. But the first thing that struck her was that she had entered a girl’s room and it couldn’t be a very mature girl living here. Silje Gravseng must long for something in the past. The sofa in the corner was covered with a motley collection of teddy bears, dolls and various cuddly toys. Her clothes, strewn across the table and chairs, were brightly coloured, predominantly pink. On the walls there were pictures, a human menagerie of fashion victims; Katrine guessed they were from boy bands or the Disney Channel.

  The second thing to strike her was the black-and-white newspaper cuttings between the lurid glamour shots. She walked round the room, but was drawn to the wall above the iMac on the desk.

  Katrine went closer although she had already recognised most of the cuttings. They had the same ones on the wall of the Boiler Room.

  The cuttings were fastened with drawing pins and bore no other notes than the date written in biro.

  She rejected her first thought and instead tested a second: that it was not so strange for a PHS student to be fascinated by such a high-profile ongoing murder case.

  Beside the keyboard lay the newspapers the cuttings had been taken from. And between the papers a postcard with a picture of a north Norwegian mountain peak she recognised: Svolværgeita in Lofoten. She picked up the card and turned it over, but there wasn’t a stamp, or an address or signature. She had already put the card down when her brain told her what her eyes had registered where they had automatically searched for a signature. A word in block capitals where the writing had finished. POLITI. She picked up the card again, holding it by the edges this time and read it from the start.

  They think the officers have been killed because someone hates them. They still haven’t understood that it’s the other way round, that they were killed by someone who loves the police and the police’s sacred duty: catching and punishing anarchists, nihilists, atheists, the faithless and the creedless, all the destructive forces. They don’t know that what they’re hunting is an apostle of righteousness, someone who has to punish not only vandals but also those who betray their responsibilities, those who out of laziness and indifference do not live up to the standard, those who do not deserve to be called POLITI.

  ‘Do you know what, Leif?’ Katrine said, without moving her eyes from the microscopic, neat, almost childish letters written in blue ink. ‘I really wish I had a search warrant.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ll get one, but you know how it is with these things. They can take time. And by then what I’m curio
us about may have disappeared.’

  Katrine looked up at him. Leif Rødbekk returned her gaze. Not flir-tatiously, but as if to find confirmation. That this was important.

  ‘And do you know what, Bratt?’ he said. ‘I’ve just remembered that I have to nip down to the basement. The electricians are changing cupboards there. Can you manage on your own for a while?’

  She smiled at him. And when he returned her smile too, she wasn’t sure what kind of smile it was.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.

  Katrine pressed the space bar on the iMac the second she heard the door close behind Rødbekk. The screen lit up. She put the cursor on Finder and typed in Mittet. No hits. She tried a couple of other names from the investigation, crime scenes and ‘police murders’, but no hits.

  So Silje Gravseng hadn’t used the computer. Smart girl.

  Katrine pulled at the desk drawers. Locked. Strange. What girl of twenty-something would lock the drawers in her own room?

  She got up, went over to the curtain and drew it aside.

  It was as she remembered, an alcove.

  With two large photographs on the wall above the narrow bed.

  She had seen Silje Gravseng only twice, the first time at PHS when Katrine had visited Harry. But the family likeness between the blonde Silje and the person in the photo was so striking she was sure.

  There was no doubt about the man in the other photo.

  Silje must have found a high-res photo online and enlarged it. Every scar, every line, every pore in the skin of the ravaged face stood out. But it was as though they were invisible, as though they faded in the gleam of the blue eyes and the furious expression as he spotted the photographer and told him there would be no cameras on his crime scene. Harry Hole. This was the photo the girls in the row in front of her in the auditorium had been talking about.

  Katrine divided the room into squares and started with the top left, then scanned the floor, looked up again to start the next row, the way she had been taught by Harry. And recalled his thesis: ‘Don’t search for something, just search. If you search for something the other things won’t speak to you. Make sure everything speaks to you.’

  After going through the room, she sat down at the iMac again, his voice still buzzing in her head: ‘And when you’ve finished and think you haven’t found anything, think inversely, a mirror image, and let the other things speak to you. The things that weren’t there, but should have been. The bread knife. The car keys. The jacket from a suit.’

  It was the last item that had helped her to conclude what Silje Gravseng was doing now. She had flicked through all the clothes in the wardrobe, in the linen basket in the little bathroom and on the hooks beside the door, but she hadn’t found the tracksuit Silje had been wearing the last time Katrine had seen her, with Harry in the basement flat where Valentin had lived. Dressed in black from top to toe. Katrine remembered she had reminded her of a marine on night manoeuvres.

  Silje was out running. Training. As she had done to pass the entry requirements for PHS. To get in and do whatever she could do. Harry had said the motive for the murders was love, not hatred. Love for a brother, for instance.

  It was the name that had brought a reaction. Runar Gravseng. And after further investigation a lot had come to light. Among other things, the names of Bellman and Berntsen. Runar Gravseng had in conversation with the head of the detox clinic claimed that he had been beaten up by a masked man while working at Stovner Police Station. That had been the reason for the doctor’s certificate, his resignation and his increased drug consumption. Gravseng maintained the perp was one Truls Berntsen and the motive for the violence was a slightly too cosy dance with Mikael Bellman’s wife at the police station’s Christmas dinner. The Chief of Police had refused to take the wild accusations of an out-and-out drug addict any further, and the head of the detox clinic had supported this. He had only wanted to pass on information, he’d said.

  Katrine heard the lift go in the corridor as her gaze fell on something protruding from under the desk, which she’d missed. She bent down. A black baton.

  The door opened.

  ‘Electricians doing their job?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leif Rødbekk. ‘You look as if you intend to use that.’

  Katrine smacked the baton against her palm. ‘Interesting object to have lying around in your room, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. I said the same when I was changing the washer on the bathroom tap last week. She said it was for training, for an exam. And in case the cop killer turned up.’ Leif Rødbekk closed the door behind him. ‘Find anything?’

  ‘This. Ever seen her take it out?’

  ‘A couple of times, yes.’

  ‘Really?’ Katrine pushed herself backwards on the chair. ‘What time of day?’

  ‘At night of course. Dolled up, high heels, blow-dried hair and the baton.’ He chuckled.

  ‘Why on—?’

  ‘She said it was protection against rapists.’

  ‘She’d lug a baton into town for that?’ Katrine weighed the baton in her hand. (It reminded her of the top of an IKEA hat stand.) ‘It would have been easier to avoid the parks.’

  ‘Not her. She went straight to the parks.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She went to Vaterlandsparken. She wanted to practise hand-to-hand combat.’

  ‘She wanted perverts to try it on and then . . .’

  ‘And then beat them black and blue, yes.’ Leif Rødbekk put on his wolfish grin again, sending Katrine such a direct look that she wasn’t sure who he meant when he said: ‘Quite a girl.’

  ‘Yes,’ Katrine said, getting up. ‘And now I have to find her.’

  ‘Busy?’

  If Katrine felt any unease at this question, it didn’t reach her consciousness until she was past him and out of the door. But on the stairs, going down, she thought, no, she wasn’t that desperate. Even if the slowcoach she was waiting for never pulled his finger out.

  Harry drove through Svartdalstunnel. The lights shone across the bonnet and windscreen. He didn’t go any faster than was necessary, no need to arrive any sooner than he had to. The gun was on the seat next to him. It was loaded and had twelve Makarov 9x18mm bullets in the magazine. More than enough to do what he was going to do. It was just a question of having the stomach for it.

  He had the heart for it.

  He had never shot anyone in cold blood before. But this was a job that had to be done. Simple as that.

  He shifted his grip on the steering wheel. Changed down as he came out of the tunnel, into the fading light, into the hills towards the Ryen intersection. Felt his mobile ring and pulled it out with one hand. Glanced at the display. It was Rakel. It was an unusual time for her to ring. They had an unspoken agreement that their phone time was after ten in the evening. He couldn’t talk to her now. He was too nervous. She would notice and ask. And he didn’t want to lie. Didn’t want to lie any more.

  He let the phone finish ringing, then he switched it off and put it beside the gun. For there was nothing to think about any more, the thinking was over, letting his doubts surface would mean starting again, only to take the same long route and end up exactly where he was already. The decision was taken, that he wanted to back out was understandable, but it was out of the question. Shit! He smacked his hand against the wheel. Thought about Oleg. About Rakel. It helped.

  He went round the roundabout and took the turning to Manglerud. To the block of flats where Truls Berntsen lived. Felt the calm descending. At last. It always did when he knew he had crossed the threshold, where it was too late, where he was in the wonderful free fall, where conscious thought stopped and everything was automatic, targeted action and well-oiled routine. But it had been so long ago, and he felt that now. He had been unsure whether he still had it in him. Well. He had it in him.

  He drove slowly down the streets. Leaned forward and looked up at the blue-grey clouds streaming in, like an unannounced armada with unknown objectives.
Sat back in the seat. Saw the high-rise buildings above the lower rooftops.

  Didn’t need to look down at the gun to know it was there.

  Didn’t need to think through the order of events to be sure he would remember.

  Didn’t need to count his heartbeats to know his pulse was at rest.

  And for a moment he closed his eyes and visualised what would happen. And then it came, the feeling he’d had a couple of times earlier in his life as a policeman. The fear. The same fear he could sometimes sense in those he was chasing. The murderer’s fear of his own reflection.

  42

  TRULS BERNTSEN RAISED his hips and forced his head back against the pillow. He closed his eyes, emitted low grunts, and came. Felt the spasms shake his body. Afterwards he lay still, drifting in and out of dreamland. In the distance – he assumed it must have been from the big car park – an alarm had started to wail. Otherwise a resounding silence reigned outside. Odd, really, that in a peaceful place where so many mammals lived above one another it was quieter than in even the most dangerous forests where the slightest sound could mean you had become the prey. He raised his head and met Megan Fox’s eyes.

  ‘Was it good for you too?’ he whispered.

  She didn’t answer. But her eyes didn’t flinch, her smile didn’t wither, the invitation of her body language was the same. Megan Fox, the only person in his life who was constant, loyal and reliable.

  He leaned over to the bedside table and grabbed the toilet roll. Cleaned himself up and found the remote control for the DVD player. Pointed it at Megan, who quivered in the freeze-frame on the fifty-inch flat-screen TV, a Pioneer in the series they had to stop making because it was too expensive, too good for the price they commanded. Truls had got the last one, bought with money he had earned by burning evidence against a pilot who had been smuggling heroin for Asayev. Taking the rest of the money to the bank and putting it straight into his account had been idiocy of course. Asayev had been dangerous for Truls. And when Truls had heard Asayev was dead his first thought was that now he was free. The slate had been wiped clean, no one could get him.