The Redeemer hh-6

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry's eyes found what they were looking for, and he headed for the table where a tall, thin man towered over one empty and one almost empty beer glass.

  'Boss.'

  The man's head bobbed up at the sound of Harry's voice. His eyes followed after a slight delay. Behind the mist of intoxication his pupils were contracting.

  'Harry.' To his surprise, the voice was clear and distinct.

  Harry pulled over a free chair from a neighbouring table.

  'Travelling through?' asked Bjarne Moller.

  'Yes.'

  'How did you find me?'

  Harry didn't answer. He had been prepared, but still he could hardly believe what he was seeing.

  'So they're gossiping at the station, are they? Well, well.' Moller took another deep draught from the glass. 'Strange change of roles, isn't it. It used to be me who found you like this. Beer?'

  Harry leaned over the table. 'What's happened, boss?'

  'What's usually happened when a grown man drinks during working hours, Harry?'

  'He's either been given the sack or his wife's left him.'

  'I haven't been given the boot yet. As far as I know.' Moller laughed. His shoulders shook, but no sound came out.

  'Has Kari…?' Harry stopped, not knowing quite how to formulate the words.

  'She and the kids didn't come with me. That's OK. That was decided in advance.'

  'What?'

  'I miss the boys, of course I do. I'm managing though. This is just… what do they call it?… a passing phase… but there's a more elegant word… trans… no.' Bjarne Moller's head had sunk down over his glass.

  'Let's go for a walk,' Harry said, waving his hand for the bill.

  Twenty-five minutes later Harry and Bjarne Moller were standing in the same rain cloud by a railing on Floien mountain, looking down on what might have been Bergen. A cable car sliced diagonally like a piece of cake and pulled by thick steel wires had transported them up from the town centre.

  'Was that why you came here?' Harry asked. 'Because you and Kari were going to split up.'

  'It rains here as much as they say,' Moller said.

  Harry sighed. 'Drinking doesn't help, boss. Things get worse.'

  'That's my line, Harry. How are you getting on with Gunnar Hagen?'

  'OK. Good lecturer.'

  'Don't make the mistake of underestimating him, Harry. He's more than a lecturer. Gunnar Hagen was in FSK for seven years.'

  'Special Forces?' Harry asked in surprise.

  'Indeed. I was told that by the Chief Superintendent. Hagen was redeployed in FSK in 1981 when the force was set up to protect our oil rigs in the North Sea. As it's secret service, it's never been on any CV.'

  'FSK,' Harry said, conscious that the ice-cold rain was seeping through his jacket onto his shoulders. 'I've heard the loyalty there is uncommonly fierce.'

  'It's like a brotherhood,' Moller said. 'Impenetrable.'

  'Do you know anyone else who's been in it?'

  Moller shook his head. He already looked sober. 'Anything new in the investigation? I've been given some insider information.'

  'We don't even have a motive.'

  'The motive's money,' Moller said, clearing his throat. 'Greed, the illusion that things will change if you have money. That you can change.'

  'Money.' Harry looked at Moller. 'Maybe,' he demurred.

  Moller spat with disgust into the grey soup in front of them. 'Find the money. Find the money and follow it. It will always lead you to the answer.'

  Harry had never heard him talk like that before, not with this bitter certainty, as though he had an insight he would have preferred not to possess.

  Harry breathed in and took the plunge. 'Boss, you know I don't like to beat about the bush, so here it is. You and I are the types of people who don't have many friends. And even though you may not regard me as a friend I am at any rate something of the kind.'

  Harry watched Moller, but there was no response.

  'I came here to find out whether there was anything I could do. Anything you wanted to talk about or…'

  Still no response.

  'Well, I'm buggered if I know why I came, boss. But I'm here now anyway.'

  Moller leaned his head back to face the sky. 'Did you know that Bergensians call what's behind us mountains? And in fact they are. Real mountains. Six minutes on the cable car from the centre of the second biggest town in Norway there are people who get lost and die. Funny, isn't it.'

  Harry shrugged.

  Moller sighed. 'The rain's not going to stop. Let's take the tin can back down.'

  At the bottom they walked to the taxi rank.

  'It'll take twenty minutes to Flesland Airport now, before the rush hour,' Moller said.

  Harry nodded and waited before he got in. His jacket was drenched.

  'Follow the money,' Moller said, putting a hand on Harry's shoulder. 'Do whatever you have to do.'

  'You too, boss.'

  Moller raised a hand in the air and began to walk, but turned when Harry got into the taxi and shouted something that was drowned by the traffic. Harry switched on his mobile phone as they roared across Danmarks plass. A text message was waiting from Halvorsen telling him to ring back. Harry dialled the number.

  'We've got Stankic's credit card,' Halvorsen said. 'The cash machine in Youngstorget ate it last night around twelve.'

  'So that's where he was coming from when we raided the Hostel', Harry said.

  'Yes'

  'Youngstorget is a good distance from there,' Harry said. 'He must have gone there because he was frightened we would trace the card to somewhere near the Hostel. And it suggests he's in desperate need of money.'

  'But it gets better,' Halvorsen said. 'The cash machine's under a surveillance camera of course.'

  'Yeah?'

  Halvorsen paused for effect.

  'Come on,' Harry said. 'He doesn't hide his face, is that it?'

  'He smiled straight into the camera like a film star,' Halvorsen said.

  'Has Beate got the recording?'

  'She's sitting in the House of Pain going through it now.'

  Ragnhild Gilstrup thought about Johannes. About how different everything could have been. If only she had followed her heart, which had always been wiser than her head. It was strange that she had never been that unhappy and yet she had never wanted to live as much as right now.

  To live a bit longer.

  Because she knew everything now.

  She stared into a black muzzle and she knew what she saw.

  And what would happen.

  Her scream was drowned by the roar of a very simple motor of a Siemens VS08G2040. A chair fell to the floor. The muzzle with the powerful suction approached her eye. She tried to squeeze her eyelids shut, but they were held open by strong fingers that wanted her to see. And she saw. And knew, knew what was going to happen.

  17 Thursday, 18 December. The Face.

  THE WALL CLOCK OVER THE COUNTER IN THE BIG CHEMIST'S shop showed half past nine. People sat around the room coughing, closed sleepy eyes or alternated glances between the red digital figure on the wall and their queue number as though it were their lottery ticket for life and every ping a new draw.

  He had not taken a number from the machine; he wanted to sit by the heaters in the shop, but he had a feeling the blue jacket was attracting unwanted attention because the staff were beginning to send him looks. He gazed out of the window. Behind the mist he could make out the contours of a feeble, impotent sun. A police car passed by. They had security cameras in here. He had to move on, but where to? Without any money he would be thrown out of cafes and bars. Now he didn't even have the credit card any more. Last night he had decided he would withdraw money even though he knew there was a risk the card would be traced. He had searched on his evening walk from the Hostel, and in the end found an ATM some distance away. But the machine had just eaten his card without giving him anything, except for confirmation of what he already knew: they were
encircling him; he was under siege again.

  ***

  The semi-deserted Biscuit restaurant was immersed in pan-pipe music. It was the quiet period after lunch and before evening meals, so Tore Bjorgen had positioned himself by the window and was staring dreamily out at Karl Johans gate. Not because the view was so appealing, but because the radiators were under the windows and he couldn't seem to get warm. He was in a bad mood. He had to pick up the plane ticket to Cape Town within the next two days and he had just concluded what he had known for a long time: he didn't have enough money. Even though he had worked hard, it wasn't there. There was the rococo mirror he had bought for the flat in the autumn, of course, but there had been too much champagne, cocaine and other expensive jollities. Not that he had lost his grip on things, but to be honest it was time he escaped from the vicious circle of coke for parties, pills to sleep and coke to give him the energy to do enough overtime to finance his bad habits. And right now he didn't have a bean in his account. For the last five years he had celebrated Christmas and New Year in Cape Town instead of going home to the village of Vegardshei, to religious narrow-mindedness, his parents' silent accusations and his uncles' and his nephews' thinly disguised revulsion. He exchanged three weeks of unbearable freezing temperatures, dismal darkness and tedium for sun, beautiful people and pulsating nightlife. And games. Dangerous games. In December and January Cape Town was invaded by European advertising agencies, film crews and models, female and male. And this was where he found like-minded individuals. The game he liked best was blind date. In a place like Cape Town there was always a certain risk involved, but to meet a man amid the shacks in Cape Flats you were risking your life. And yet that was what he did. He didn't always know why he did these idiotic things; all he knew was that he needed danger to feel he was alive. The game had to have a potential penalty to be interesting.

  Tore Bjorgen sniffed. His daydreams had been disturbed by a smell he hoped did not come from the kitchen. He turned.

  'Hello again,' the man standing behind him said.

  If Bjorgen had been a less professional waiter his face would have assumed a disapproving expression. The man in front of him was not only wearing the unbecoming blue jacket that was in fashion among the drug addicts on Karl Johans gate, he was also unshaven, red-eyed and stank like a urinal.

  'Remember me?' the man said. 'In the men's room?'

  At first Bjorgen thought he was referring to the nightclub of the same name before realising that the guy meant the toilet. It was only then that he recognised him. That is, he recognised the voice, while thinking that it was incredible what less than twenty-four hours without civilised necessities like a razor, a shower and a full night's sleep could do to a man's appearance.

  It might have been the interrupted intense daydream that accounted for Bjorgen's two distinctly different reactions coming in the order they did: first of all the sweet sting of desire. The man's reason for coming back was obvious after the flirtation and the fleeting but intimate physical contact they had had. Then the shock as the image of the man with the soapy gun appeared on his retina. Plus the fact that the policeman who had been here had connected it with the murder of the poor Salvation Army soldier.

  'I need somewhere to live,' said the man.

  Bjorgen blinked hard twice. He could not believe his ears. Here he was, standing opposite a man who might be a murderer, a man under suspicion of killing someone in cold blood. So why hadn't he already dropped everything and run out screaming for the police? The policeman had even said there was a reward for information leading to the man's arrest. Bjorgen glanced towards the end of the room where the head waiter was standing leafing through the reservations book. Why was it that instead he felt this strange tingle of pleasure in his solar plexus which spread through his body and made him shudder and shiver as he searched for something sensible to say?

  'It's just for one night,' the man said.

  'I'm working today.'

  'I can wait.'

  Bjorgen eyed the man. It's insane, he thought, while his brain slowly and inexorably connected his love of risk with a potential solution to a problem. He swallowed and shifted weight from one foot to the other.

  Harry jogged from the airport express in Oslo Central Station across Gronland to Police HQ, took the lift up to the Robberies Unit and loped down the corridors to the House of Pain, the video room.

  It was dark, warm and stuffy in the cramped windowless room. He heard quick fingers scurrying across the computer keyboard.

  'What can you see?' he asked the silhouette outlined against the flickering pictures on the wall screen.

  'Something very interesting,' Beate Lonn said without turning, but Harry knew her eyes were red-rimmed. He had seen Beate working before. Seen her staring at the screen for hours while she wound forward, stopped, focused, magnified, saved. Without knowing what she was looking for. Or what she could see. This was her territory.

  'And maybe an explanation,' she added.

  'I'm all ears.' Harry groped his way forward in the dark, hit his leg and sat down cursing.

  'Ready?'

  'Shoot.'

  'OK. Meet Christo Stankic.'

  On the screen a man stepped forward to an ATM.

  'Are you sure?' Harry asked.

  'Don't you recognise him?'

  'I recognise the blue jacket, but…' Harry said, hearing the confusion in his own voice.

  'Wait,' Beate said.

  The man put a card in the machine and stood waiting. Then he turned his face to the camera and grimaced. A pretend smile, the kind that meant the opposite.

  'He's found out he can't withdraw any money,' Beate said.

  The man on camera kept pressing buttons and in the end he smacked the keypad with his hand.

  'And now he's found out he won't get his card back,' Harry said.

  The man stood staring at the display on the machine for a long time.

  Then he pulled back his sleeve, checked his wristwatch, turned and was gone.

  'What make was the watch?' Harry asked.

  'The glass was reflecting,' Beate said. 'But I magnified the negative. It says Seiko SQ50 on the dial.'

  'Clever girl. But I didn't see an explanation.'

  'This is the explanation.'

  Beate typed and two pictures of the man they had just seen appeared on the screen. One while he was taking out his card; the other while he was looking at his watch.

  'I've chosen these two pictures because his face is in roughly the same position and this way it's easy to see. They've been taken with an interval of a little over a hundred seconds. Can you see that?'

  'No,' Harry said truthfully. 'I can tell I'm no good at this. I can't even see if it's the same person in the two pictures. Or if he's the man I saw in Toyen Park.'

  'Good. Then you've seen it.'

  'Seen what?'

  'Here's the picture of him off the credit card,' Beate said and clicked. A picture of a man with short hair and a tie appeared.

  'And here are the ones Dagbladet took of him in Egertorget.'

  Two further pictures.

  'Can you tell if this is the same person?' Beate asked.

  'Well, no.'

  'Nor can I.'

  'You can't? If you can't it means it's not the same person.'

  'No,' Beate said. 'It means here we have a case of what is known as hyperelasticity. Called visage du pantomime by professionals.'

  'What on earth are you talking about?'

  'A person who can change their appearance without any need for make-up, disguise or plastic surgery.'

  Harry was waiting for all the investigative team to sit down in the red zone's meeting room before he spoke. 'We know now that we're after one man and only one man. For the time being let's call him Christo Stankic. Beate?'

  Beate switched on the projector and an image of a face with closed eyes and a mask of something like red spaghetti appeared on the screen.

  'What you see here is an illustration of
our facial musculature,' she began. 'Muscles we use to form expressions and thereby change our appearance. The most important are located in the forehead, around the eyes and around the mouth. For example, this is the musculus frontalis, which, along with the musculus corrugator supercilii, is used to raise and furrow the eyebrows. The orbicularis oculi is used to close the eyelids or create folds in the part of the face around the eyes. And so on.'

  Beate pressed the remote control. The image was replaced by one of a clown with large inflated cheeks.

  'We have hundreds of muscles like these in our faces and even those whose job it is to pull faces use just a tiny percentage of the options available. Actors and entertainers train facial muscles to achieve maximum movement which we others lose as a rule at a young age. However, even actors and mime artists tend to use the face for imitative movements to express certain emotions. And, important as they are, they are quite universal and few in number. Anger, happiness, being in love, surprise, a chuckle, a roar of laughter and so on. Nature, though, has given us this mask of muscles to make several million, indeed, an almost unlimited number of facial expressions. Concert pianists have trained the link between brain and finger musculature to such an extent that they can perform ten different simultaneous operations, independently of each other. And we don't even have many muscles in our fingers. So what is the face not capable of?'

  Beate moved on to the clip of Christo Stankic outside the ATM.

  'Well, we are capable of this for example.'

  The film advanced in slow motion.

  'The changes are almost imperceptible. Tiny muscles are being tensed and slackened. The result of the small muscle movements is a changed expression. Does the face change that much? No, but the part of the brain that recognises faces – the fusiform gyrus – is very, very sensitive to even minor changes, since its function is to distinguish between thousands of physiologically similar faces. Via the facial muscles' gradual adjustments we end up with what seems to be a different person. Viz., this.'