by Jo Nesbo
‘Have you heard anything from Adele?’ the man asked, looking from Kaja to Harry.
‘No,’ Harry said. ‘Have you?’
The man shook his head and peered over his shoulder, at the counter, to make sure there weren’t any customers waiting. They perched on high bar stools in front of the window facing one of Drammen’s many squares, that is, an open area that was used as a car park. People amp; Coffee sold coffee and cakes at airport prices and tried to give the impression they belonged to an American chain, and indeed perhaps they did. The man Adele Vetlesen lived with, Geir Bruun, appeared to be around thirty, was unusually white with a shiny, perspiring crown and constantly wandering blue eyes. He worked at the place as a ‘barista’, a title that had attracted awe-inspiring respect in the nineties when coffee bars had first invaded Oslo. And it also involved making coffee, an art form which – the way Harry saw it – was primarily about avoiding obvious pitfalls. As a policeman, Harry used people’s intonation, diction, vocabulary and grammatical solecisms to place them. Geir Bruun neither dressed, nor combed his hair, nor behaved like a homosexual, but as soon as he opened his mouth, it was impossible to think of anything else. There was something about the rounding of the vowels, the tiny redundant lexical embellishments, the lisping that almost seemed feigned. Harry knew that the guy could be a die-hard hetero, but he had already decided that Katrine had jumped to a premature conclusion when she described Adele Vetlesen and Geir Bruun as living togther. They were just two people who had shared a city-centre flat in Drammen for economic reasons.
‘Yes, I have,’ Geir Bruun said in answer to Harry’s question. ‘I remember she went to some kind of mountain cabin in the autumn.’ He uttered this as though it were a concept he found fairly alien. ‘But that wasn’t where she disappeared.’
‘We know that,’ Kaja said. ‘Did she go there with anyone, and if so, do you know who?’
‘No idea. We didn’t talk about that sort of thing – it was enough to share a bathroom, if you know what I mean. She had her private life, I had mine. But I doubt she would have gone into the wilds on her own, if I may put it like that.’
‘Oh?’
‘Adele did very little on her own. I don’t see her in a cabin without a guy. But impossible to say who. She was – if I may be frank – a bit promiscuous. She had no female friends, though she compensated with male friends. Whom she kept apart. Adele didn’t live a double life so much as a quadruple life. Or thereabouts.’
‘So she was dishonest?’
‘Not necessarily. I remember she gave me advice on honest ways to finish with someone. She said that once while she was being shagged from behind she took a photo over her shoulder with her mobile, wrote the name of the guy, sent the photo and deleted the addressee. All in one swift operation.’ Geir Bruun’s face was expressionless.
‘Impressive,’ Harry said. ‘We know she paid for two people in the mountains. Could you give us the name of a male friend, so we could start our enquiries there?’
‘’Fraid I can’t,’ Geir Bruun said, ‘but when I reported her missing, you lot checked who she’d been talking to on the phone over the last few weeks.’
‘Which officers precisely?’
‘I don’t remember any names. Local police.’
‘Fine, we have a meeting at the police station now,’ Harry said, looking at his watch and getting up.
‘Why’, asked Kaja, who hadn’t moved, ‘did the police stop investigating the case? I don’t even recall reading about it in the newspapers.’
‘Don’t you know?’ the man said, signalling to two women with a pram that he would attend to them immediately. ‘She sent a postcard.’
‘Postcard?’ Harry said.
‘Yes. From Rwanda. Down in Africa.’
‘What did she write?’
‘It was very brief. She’d met her dream guy, and I would have to pay the rent on my own until she was back in March. The bitch.’
It was walking distance to the police station. An inspector with a squat pumpkin head and a name Harry forgot as soon as he heard it received them in a smoke-infested office, served them coffee in plastic cups that burned their fingers, and cast long looks at Kaja every time he considered himself unobserved.
He began by delivering a lecture about there being somewhere between five hundred and a thousand missing Norwegians at any one time. Sooner or later they would all turn up. If the police were to investigate every missing person case whenever there was suspicion of a criminal act or an accident, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. Harry stifled a yawn.
In Adele Vetlesen’s case they had even received a sign of life; they had it somewhere. The inspector got up and stuck his pumpkin head into a drawer of hanging files and reappeared with a postcard, which he laid before them. There was a photo of a conical mountain with a cloud around the peak, but no text to explain what the mountain was called or where in the world it was. The handwriting was scratchy, dreadful. Harry could just decipher the signature. Adele. There was a stamp bearing the name Rwanda and the envelope was postmarked Kigali, which Harry seemed to recall was the capital.
‘Her mother confirmed it was her daughter’s handwriting,’ the inspector said and explained that at the mother’s insistence they had checked and found Adele Vetlesen’s name on the passenger list of a Brussels Airlines flight to Kigali via Entebbe in Uganda on the 25th of November. Furthermore, they had carried out a hotel search through Interpol, and a hotel in Kigali – the inspector read out his notes: the Gorilla Hotel! – had indeed had an Adele Vetlesen down as a guest the same night she arrived by plane. The only reason Adele Vetlesen was still on the missing persons list was that they didn’t know precisely where she was now, and that a postcard from abroad did not technically change her status as missing.
‘Besides, we’re not exactly talking about the civilised part of the world here,’ the inspector said, throwing up his arms. ‘Huti, Tutsu, or whatever they’re called. Machetes. Two million dead. Get me?’
Harry saw Kaja close her eyes as the inspector with the schoolmaster’s voice and a string of interpolated dependent clauses explained how little life was worth in Africa, where human trafficking was hardly an unknown phenomenon, and how in theory Adele could have been abducted and forced to write a postcard, since blacks would pay a year’s salary to sink their teeth into a blonde Norwegian girl, wouldn’t they.
Harry examined the postcard and tried to block out the pumpkin man’s voice. A conical mountain with a cloud around the peak. He glanced up when the inspector with the forgettable name cleared his throat.
‘Yes, now and then you can understand them, can’t you?’ he said with a conspiratorial smile directed at Harry.
Harry got up and said work was waiting in Oslo. Would Drammen be so kind as to scan the postcard and email it on for them?
‘To a handwriting expert?’ the inspector asked, clearly displeased, and studied the address Kaja had noted down for him.
‘Volcano expert,’ Harry said. ‘I’d like you to send him the picture and ask if he can identify the mountain.’
‘Identify the mountain?’
‘He’s a specialist. He travels around examining them.’
The inspector shrugged, but nodded. Then he accompanied them to the main door. Harry asked if they had checked whether there had been any calls on Adele’s mobile phone since she left.
‘We know our job, Hole,’ the inspector said. ‘No outgoing calls. But you can imagine the mobile network in a country like Rwanda…’
‘Actually I can’t,’ Harry said. ‘But then I’ve never been there.’
‘A postcard!’ Kaja groaned when they were standing on the square by the unmarked police car they had requisitioned from Police HQ. ‘Plane ticket and hotel record in Rwanda! Why couldn’t your computer freak in Bergen have found that, so we wouldn’t have had to waste half a day in fucking Drammen?’
‘Thought that would put you in a great mood,’ Harry said, unlocking the door. ‘G
ot yourself a new friend, and perhaps Adele isn’t dead after all.’
‘Are you in a great mood?’ Kaja asked.
Harry looked at the car keys. ‘Feel like driving?’
‘Yes!’
Strangely enough, none of the speed boxes flashed, and they were back in Oslo in twenty minutes flat.
They agreed they would take the light things, the office equipment and the desk drawers, to Police HQ first, and wait with the heavy things until the day after. They put them on the same trolley Harry had used when they were fitting out their office.
‘Have you been given an office yet?’ Kaja asked when they were halfway down the culvert. Her voice cast long echoes.
Harry shook his head. ‘We’ll put the things in yours.’
‘Have you applied for an office?’ she asked, and stopped.
Harry kept going.
‘Harry!’
He stopped.
‘You asked about my father,’ he said.
‘I didn’t mean to…’
‘No, of course not. But he hasn’t got much time left. OK? After that I’ll be off again. I just wanted to…’
‘Wanted to what?’
‘Have you heard of the Dead Policemen’s Society?’
‘What is it?’
‘People who worked at Crime Squad. People I cared about. I don’t know if I owe them something, but that’s the tribe.’
‘What?’
‘It’s not much, but it’s all I have, Kaja. They’re the only ones I have any reason to feel loyalty towards.’
‘A police unit?’
Harry started walking. ‘I know, and it’ll probably pass. The world will go on. It’s just restructuring, isn’t it? The stories are in the walls, and now the walls are coming down. You and yours will have to make new stories, Kaja.’
‘Are you drunk?’
Harry laughed. ‘I’m just beaten. Finished. And it’s fine. Absolutely fine.’
His phone rang. It was Bjorn.
‘I left my Hank biography on my desk,’ he said.
‘I’ve got it here,’ Harry said.
‘What a sound. Are you in a church?’
‘The culvert.’
‘Jeez, you’ve got coverage there?’
‘Seems we’ve got a better phone network than Rwanda. I’ll leave the book in reception.’
‘That’s the second time I’ve heard Rwanda and mobile phones mentioned in the same breath today. Tell them I’ll pick it up tomorrow, OK?’
‘What did you hear about Rwanda?’
‘It was something Beate said. About coltan – you know the bits of metal we found on the teeth of the two with the stab wounds in their mouths.’
‘The Terminator.’
‘Eh?’
‘Nothing. What’s that got to do with Rwanda?’
‘Coltan’s used in mobile phones. It’s a rare metal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo has almost the entire world supply. Snag is that the deposits are in the war zone where no one keeps an eye on it, so smart operators are pinching it in all the chaos and shipping it over to Rwanda.’
‘Mm.’
‘See you.’
Harry was about to pocket his phone when he noticed he had an unread text message. He opened it. Mt Nyiragongo. Last eruption 2002. One of few volcanoes with lava lake in crater. In DR Congo by Goma. Felix.
Goma. Harry stood watching the drips from a pipe in the ceiling. That was where Kluit’s instruments of torture originated.
‘What’s up?’ Kaja asked.
‘Ustaoset,’ Harry said. ‘And the Congo.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harry said. ‘But I’m a non-believer as far as coincidences are concerned.’ He grabbed the trolley and swung it round.
‘What are you doing?’ Kaja asked.
‘U-turn,’ Harry said. ‘We’ve still got more than twenty-four hours left.’
29
Kluit
It was an unusually mild evening in Hong Kong. The skyscrapers cast long shadows over The Peak, some almost as far as the house where Herman Kluit was sitting on the terrace with a blood-red Singapore sling in one hand and the telephone in the other. He was listening while watching the lights in the queues of traffic twisting and turning like fireworms way below.
He liked Harry Hole, had liked him from the first moment he had clapped eyes on the tall, athletic, but obviously alcoholic Norwegian stepping into Happy Valley to put his last money on the wrong horse. There was something about the aggressive expression, the arrogant bearing, the alert body language that reminded him of himself as a young mercenary soldier in Africa. Herman Kluit had fought everywhere, on all sides, serving the paymasters. In Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Liberia. All countries with dark pasts and even darker futures. But nowhere darker than the country about which Harry had asked. The Congo. That was where they had eventually found the vein of gold. In the form of diamonds. And cobalt. And coltan. The village chief belonged to the Mai Mai, who thought water made them invulnerable. But otherwise he was a sensible man. There was nothing you couldn’t fix in Africa with a bundle of notes or – at a pinch – a supply of Kalashnikovs. In the course of one year Herman Kluit became a rich man. In the course of three he was wealthy beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Once a month they had travelled to the closest town, Goma, and slept in beds instead of on the jungle floor where a carpet of mysterious bloodsucking flies emerged from holes every night and you woke up like a half-eaten corpse. Goma. Black lava, black money, black beauties, black sins. Half of the men in the jungle had contracted malaria, the rest sicknesses with which no white doctor was conversant and which were subsumed under the generic term ‘jungle fever’. That was the affliction Herman Kluit suffered from, and even though it left him in peace for long periods, he was never completely free. The only remedy Herman Kluit knew of was Singapore sling. He had been introduced to the drink in Goma by a Belgian who owned a fantastic house that had reportedly been built by King Leopold in the period when the country was known as the Congo Free State and was the monarch’s private playpen and treasure chest. The house was situated down by the banks of Lake Kivu with women and sunsets so beautiful that for a while you could forget the jungle, Mai Mai and earth flies.
It was the Belgian who had shown Herman Kluit the king’s little treasury in the cellar. There he had collected everything, from the world’s most advanced clocks, rare weapons and imaginative instruments of torture to gold nuggets, unpolished diamonds and preserved human heads. That was where Herman Kluit had first come face to face with what they called a Leopold’s apple. By all accounts it had been developed by one of the king’s Belgian engineers to use on recalcitrant tribal chiefs who would not say where they found their diamonds. The earlier method had been to use buffaloes. They covered the chief in honey, tied him to a tree and brought along a captured forest buffalo, which began to lick off the honey. The point of this was that the buffalo’s tongue was so coarse that it licked off skin and flesh with it. But it took time to catch a buffalo, and they could be hard to stop once they had started. Hence Leopold’s apple. Not that it was particularly effective from a torturer’s angle – after all, the apple prevented the prisoner from speaking. But the effect on the natives who witnessed what happened when the interrogator pulled the string for the second time was exemplary. The next man asked to open wide couldn’t speak fast enough.
Herman Kluit nodded to his Filipina housemaid for her to take away the empty glass.
‘You remember rightly, Harry,’ Herman Kluit said. ‘It’s still on my mantelpiece. Fortunately I do not know if it has ever been used. A souvenir. It reminds me of what there is in the heart of darkness. That’s always useful, Harry. No, I’ve neither seen it nor heard of it being used anywhere else. It’s a complicated piece of technology, you know, with all these springs and needles. Requires a special alloy. Coltan is correct. Yes indeed. Very rare. The person from whom I purchased my apple, Eddie Van Boors
t, claimed only twenty-four had been made, and that he had twenty-two of them, one of which was twenty-four-carat gold. That’s right, there are twenty-four needles as well. How did you know? Apparently the number twenty-four had something to do with the engineer’s sister, I don’t recall what. But that may also have been something Van Boorst said to push up the price. He’s Belgian, isn’t he.’
Kluit’s laughter transmuted into coughing. Damned fever.
‘However, he ought to have some idea of where the apples are. He lived in a splendid house in Goma, in north Kivu, by the border to Rwanda. The address?’ Kluit coughed again. ‘Goma gets a new street every day, and now and then half the town is buried under lava, so addresses don’t exist, Harry. But the post office has a list of all the whites. No, I have no idea if he still lives in Goma. Or whether he is still alive, for that matter. Life expectancy in the Congo is thirty-something, Harry. For whites also. Besides, the town is as good as under siege. Exactly. No, of course you haven’t heard of the war. No one has.’
Dumbfounded, Gunnar Hagen stared at Harry and leaned across his desk.
‘You want to go to Rwanda?’ he said.
‘Just a flying visit,’ Harry said. ‘Two days including the flights.’
‘To investigate what?’
‘What I said. A missing persons case. Adele Vetlesen. Kaja will go to Ustaoset to see if she can find out who Adele was travelling with before she disappeared.’
‘Why can’t you just ring up and ask them to check the guest book?’
‘Because the cabin in Havass is self-service,’ said Kaja, who had settled in the chair next to Harry’s. ‘But anyone who stays in a Tourist Association cabin has to sign the guest book and state their destination. It’s compulsory because if anyone’s reported missing in the mountains, the search party will know where to concentrate their efforts. I’m hoping Adele and her companion gave a full name and address.’
