Police hh-10

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘There aren’t any lectures about serial killings, Silje. I was wondering if you saw anyone coming or going while you sat there, someone or something that didn’t tally with the routines, that made you sit up, in brief anything that-’

  ‘-shouldn’t have been there?’ She smiled. Young, white teeth. Two of them crooked. ‘That’s from your lecture.’ Back arched more than necessary.

  ‘Well?’ Harry said.

  ‘You think the patient was killed and that Mittet was in on it, don’t you?’ She had angled her head, boosted her cleavage, and Harry wondered if she was acting, or she was really so sure of herself. Or if she was just a deeply disturbed person trying to imitate what she considered normal behaviour, but kept getting it slightly wrong. ‘Yes, you do,’ she said. ‘And so you think Mittet was killed afterwards because he knew too much. And that the murderer disguised it as one of the police murders?’

  ‘No,’ Harry said. ‘If he’d been killed by people like that his body would have been dumped in the sea with weights in the pockets. Please think carefully, Silje. Concentrate.’

  She took a deep breath, and Harry avoided looking at her heaving chest. She tried to catch his eye, but he lowered his head and scratched his neck. Waiting.

  ‘No, there was no one,’ she said at length. ‘Same routine all the time. A new anaesthetic nurse came, but he stopped after one or two visits.’

  ‘OK,’ Harry said, putting his hand in his jacket pocket. ‘What about him on the left?’

  He placed a printout on the table in front of her. He had found the picture online, Google Images. It showed a young Truls Berntsen on the left of Mikael Bellman by Stovner Police Station.

  Silje studied the picture. ‘No, I never saw him at the hospital, but the one on the right-’

  ‘You saw him there?’ Harry interrupted.

  ‘No, no, I was just wondering if it was-’

  ‘Yes, it is, it’s the Chief of Police,’ Harry said, wanting to take the picture back, but Silje placed her hand on his.

  ‘Harry?’

  He could feel the heat from her soft palm on his hand. Waiting.

  ‘I’ve seen them before. Together. What’s the other man’s name?’

  ‘Truls Berntsen. Where?’

  ‘They were together on the firing range in Økern not so long ago.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Harry said, pulling his hand away with the picture. ‘Then I don’t want to take up any more of your time.’

  ‘As far as time goes, you’ve made sure I’ve got more than enough, Harry.’

  He didn’t answer.

  She sniggered. Leaned forward. ‘You didn’t ask me to come here just for that, did you?’ The light from the little table lamp danced in her eyes. ‘Do you know what wild idea struck me, Harry? You had me kicked out of the college so that you could be with me without getting into any trouble with management. So why don’t you tell me what you really want?’

  ‘What I really want, Silje-’

  ‘Shame your colleague turned up last time we met, right when we-’

  ‘-is to ask you about the hospital-’

  ‘I live in Josefines gate, but you’ve probably already googled that-’

  ‘-The last time was very wrong of me, I messed up, I-’

  ‘It takes eleven minutes and twenty-three seconds to walk. Exactly. I timed myself on the way here.’

  ‘-can’t. I don’t want to. I-’

  ‘Let’s-’ She made as if to get up.

  ‘-I’m getting married this summer.’

  She slumped back down on the chair. Staring at him. ‘You’re. . getting married?’ Her voice was barely audible in the noisy room.

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said.

  Her pupils contracted. Like a starfish someone had poked with a stick, Harry thought.

  ‘To her?’ she whispered. ‘To Rakel Fauke?’

  ‘That’s her name, yes. But married or not, student or not, something happening between us is out of the question. So I apologise for. . the situation that arose.’

  ‘Getting married. .’ She repeated it in a somnambulistic voice, staring right through him.

  Harry nodded. And felt something vibrate against his chest. For an instant he thought it was his heart, then realised it was the phone in his jacket pocket.

  He took it out. ‘Harry.’

  Listened to the voice. Then he held the phone in front of him, looking at it as if there was something wrong with it.

  ‘Repeat,’ he said, putting the phone to his ear.

  ‘I said I’ve found the gun,’ Bjørn Holm said. ‘And, yes, it’s his.’

  ‘How many people know?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘See how long you can keep it quiet.’

  Harry broke the connection and dialled another number. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said to Silje and shoved a banknote under her glass. Saw her painted mouth open, but stood up and left before she could say anything.

  By the time he was at the door Katrine was on the phone. He repeated what Bjørn had told him.

  ‘You’re joking,’ she said.

  ‘So why aren’t you laughing?’

  ‘But. . but this is just unbelievable.’

  ‘Probably why we don’t believe it,’ Harry said. ‘Find it. Find the mistake.’

  And over the phone he could hear the ten-legged insect already scrabbling across the keyboard.

  Aurora trudged to the bus stop with Emilie. It was getting dark, and it was the kind of weather where you think it’s going to rain the whole time and then it doesn’t after all. And it kind of puts you in a bad mood, she thought.

  She said so to Emilie. Who said ‘Mm’, but Aurora noticed that she didn’t understand.

  ‘If it would only start then it’d be finished, wouldn’t it?’ Aurora said. ‘It’s actually better if it rains because then you don’t dread it.’

  ‘I like rain,’ Emilie said.

  ‘Me too. At least, a little. But. .’ She gave up.

  ‘What happened at training?’

  ‘What do you mean what happened?’

  ‘Arne shouted at you because you didn’t cover the wing.’

  ‘I was a bit late, that’s all.’

  ‘No. You stood stock-still staring up at the stand. Arne says defence is the key in handball. And cover is the key in defence. And that means cover is the key in handball.’

  Arne says a load of rubbish, Aurora thought. Though she didn’t say it aloud. Knowing Emilie wouldn’t understand that either.

  Aurora had lost her concentration because she was sure she had seen him in the stand. He wasn’t so difficult to spot, because the only other people there were the boys’ team, who were waiting impatiently for the hall to be cleared after the girls. But it had been him, she was almost certain. The man who had been in their garden. Who had asked for Dad. Who had wanted her to listen to a band whose name she had already forgotten. Who wanted a glass of water.

  Then she must have stood still, the others had scored and their coach, Arne, had stopped the game and shouted at her. And as usual she was sorry. She had tried to fight it; she hated it when she got upset about such stupid things, but it was no use. Her eyes just filled with tears, which she wiped away with the sweatband around her wrist, wiped her forehead at the same time so that it would seem as if she was only drying sweat. And when Arne had finished, and she had looked up again at the stand, he was gone. Exactly like before. Except that this time it had happened so quickly she wondered if she had really seen him or it was just something she had imagined.

  ‘Oh no,’ Emilie said, reading the bus timetable. ‘The 149 won’t be here for at least another twenty minutes. Mum’s made pizza for us this evening. It’ll be freezing cold now.’

  ‘What a shame,’ Aurora said, reading down further. She didn’t particularly like pizza or sleepovers. But it was what everyone did now. Everyone had sleepovers with everyone; it was like a circle dance you had to join. That or you were off the map. And Aurora didn’t want to be off th
e map. Not entirely at any rate.

  ‘Emilie,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘it says here the 131 will be along in a minute, and I’ve remembered I’ve left my toothbrush at home. The 131 goes past our house, so if I catch that one I can cycle over afterwards.’

  She could see Emilie didn’t like the idea. Didn’t like the idea of standing here in the darkness, in the almost-rain that would never be rain, to catch the bus home alone. And she probably already suspected that Aurora would find some excuse for not sleeping over after all.

  ‘Hm,’ Emilie grunted, fiddling with her sports bag. ‘We won’t wait for you with the pizza though.’

  Aurora saw the bus coming round the bend at the bottom of the hill. The 131.

  ‘And we can share a toothbrush,’ Emilie said. ‘After all, we’re friends.’

  We are not friends, Aurora thought. You are Emilie, friends with all the girls in the class, Emilie who always wears the right clothes, Emilie, Norway’s most popular name, who never falls out with anyone because you’re so great and never criticise anyone, at least not when they’re within earshot. Whereas I’m Aurora, who does what she has to do — but nothing more — to be with you all because she doesn’t have the courage to be alone. Who all of you consider strange, but smart enough and confident enough for you not to pick on her.

  ‘I’ll be at your place before you,’ Aurora said. ‘I promise.’

  Harry was sitting in the modest stand, head supported on his hands, looking at the track.

  There was rain in the air, it could pour down at any moment and there was no roof on Valle Hovin.

  He had the whole ugly little stadium to himself. Knew he would have, concerts here were few and far between now, and it was even longer to the ice-skating season when anyone who wanted could come and train. This was where he had sat watching Oleg taking his first tentative steps and slowly but surely developing into a promising skater in his age category. He hoped he would soon see Oleg here again. So that he could time his circuits without him realising. Note his progress and plateaus. Encourage him when things were sluggish, lie about the conditions and the state of his skates, and maintain a neutral tone when things were going well, not letting his internal jubilation come across. Be a kind of compressor to even out the peaks and troughs. Oleg needed that, otherwise his emotions would have free rein. Harry didn’t know much about skates, but he did know a lot about this. Affective control, Ståle called it. How to console yourself. It was one of the most important features of a child’s development, but not everyone developed it to the same degree. Ståle thought, for example, that Harry needed more affective control. He lacked the average person’s ability to flee from what hurt, to forget, to focus his mind on nicer, lighter topics. He had used alcohol to cope with his job. Oleg’s father was also an alcoholic, who drank his family fortune and life away in Moscow, Rakel had told him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Harry felt such tenderness for the boy. They shared this lack of affective control.

  Harry heard footsteps on the concrete. Someone was coming through the darkness from the other side of the track. Harry took a full drag of the cigarette so that the glow would show him where he was sitting.

  The man swung a leg over the fence and walked with light, agile strides up the stand’s concrete steps.

  ‘Harry Hole,’ the man said, stopping two steps below.

  ‘Mikael Bellman,’ Harry said. In the night the white patches on Bellman’s face seemed to light up.

  ‘Two things, Harry. This had better be important. My wife and I had planned a cosy evening together.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘Stub that out. Cigarette smoke damages your health.’

  ‘Thank you for your concern.’

  ‘I was thinking about me, not you. Please put it out.’

  Harry rubbed the end on the concrete and dropped it back into the packet while Bellman took a seat beside him.

  ‘Unusual place to meet, Hole.’

  ‘Only hangout I have, besides Schrøder’s. And less populated.’

  ‘Too unpopulated, in my opinion. I wondered for a moment if you were the cop killer trying to lure me here. We still believe it’s a policeman, do we?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Harry said, already craving the cigarette. ‘We’ve matched the gun.’

  ‘Already? That was damn quick. I didn’t even know you’d started calling in all-’

  ‘We don’t need to. The first gun matched.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your gun, Bellman. It was fired and the result matched the bullet in the Kalsnes case.’

  Bellman burst out laughing. The echo carried between the stands. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Harry?’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me, Mikael.’

  ‘To you I’m the Chief of Police or herr Bellman, Harry. And I don’t have to tell you anything. What’s going on?’

  ‘That’s what you’ll have to — sorry — is should better?. . you should tell me, Police Chief Bellman. Otherwise we’ll have to — and I do mean have to here — summon you to an official interview. And I’m sure everyone would prefer to avoid that. Are we agreed?’

  ‘Get to the point, Harry. How could this have happened?’

  ‘I can see two possible explanations,’ Harry said. ‘The first and more obvious one is that you shot René Kalsnes, Police Chief Bellman.’

  ‘I. . I. .’

  Harry watched Mikael Bellman’s mouth moving as the light seemed to pulsate in the white patches, as though he were some kind of exotic deep-sea creature.

  ‘You’ve got an alibi,’ Harry completed for him.

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘When we got the result I put Katrine Bratt on the case. You were in Paris the night René Kalsnes was shot.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Your name was on the Air France passenger list from Oslo to Paris and in the guest book at the Golden Oriole Hotel the same night. Anyone you met who can confirm you were there?’

  Mikael Bellman blinked hard as if to see better. The northern lights in his skin went out. He nodded slowly. ‘The Kalsnes case, yes. That was the day I went for a job interview with Interpol. I could definitely find a few witnesses from that trip. We even went out to a restaurant in the evening.’

  ‘So there’s just the question of where your gun was on that date.’

  ‘At home,’ Mikael Bellman said with total certainty. ‘Locked up. The key was on the key ring I had with me.’

  ‘Can you prove that?’

  ‘Doubt it. You said there were two possible explanations here. Let me guess. The second is that the ballistics boys-’

  ‘Most of them are girls now.’

  ‘-have made a mistake, have mixed up the fatal bullet with one of mine, or something like that.’

  ‘No. The lead bullet in the box in the Evidence Room comes from your gun, Bellman.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘By what?’

  ‘By saying “the bullet in the box in the Evidence Room” and not “the bullet found in Kalsnes’s skull”.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Now we’re getting warm, Bellman.’

  ‘Getting warm how?’

  ‘The other possibility, the way I see it, is that someone swapped the bullet in the Evidence Room with one from your gun. There is one thing about the bullet that doesn’t add up. It’s crushed in a way that suggests it hit something much harder than flesh and bone.’

  ‘Right. What do you think it hit then?’

  ‘The steel sheet behind the paper target on the firing range in Økern.’

  ‘What on earth would make you believe that?’

  ‘It’s not so much what I believe as what I know, Bellman. I got the ballistics girls to go up there and run a test with your gun. And guess what? The test bullet looked identical to the one in the evidence box.’

  ‘And what made you think of the firing range precisely?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? That’s where police officers fire most of the sho
ts that are not meant to hit people.’

  Mikael Bellman slowly shook his head. ‘There’s more. What is it?’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said, taking out his packet of Camel, holding it out to Bellman, who shook his head, ‘I thought about how many burners I know in the police. And do you know what? I could only think of one.’ Harry took the half-smoked cigarette, lit it and took a long, rasping drag. ‘Truls Berntsen. And as chance would have it I’ve spoken to a witness who recently saw you practising together on the range. The bullets drop into a container after they’ve hit the steel plate. It would be simple for someone to take a used bullet after you’d gone.’

  ‘Do you suspect that our mutual colleague Truls Berntsen planted false evidence to incriminate me, Harry?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Bellman looked as if he was about to say something, but changed his mind. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what Berntsen’s up to, Hole. And, to be honest, I don’t think you do, either.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know how honest you are, but I do know the odd fact about Berntsen. And Berntsen knows the odd fact about you too. Isn’t that true?’

  ‘I have an inkling you’re insinuating something, but I have no idea what, Hole.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do. But not much that can be proved, I would assume, so let’s give it a miss. What I’d like to know is what Berntsen is after.’

  ‘Your job, Hole, is to investigate the police murders, not to take advantage of the situation to conduct a personal witch-hunt against me or Truls Berntsen.’

  ‘Is that what I’m doing?’

  ‘It’s no secret that you and I have had our differences, Harry. I suppose you see this as a chance to get your own back.’

  ‘What about you and Berntsen? Any differences there? You’re the one who suspended him on suspicion of corruption.’

  ‘No, that was the Appointments Board. And that misunderstanding is about to be rectified.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘In fact, it was my mistake. The money that went into his account came from me.’