by Jo Nesbo
She scuttled towards the pedestrian crossing. To Hansen's bakery. If she got there, she would be safe. A cup of tea and a doughnut at the table behind the counter, at the far end of the long, thin cafe. Every day at precisely 10.30.
'Tea and a doughnut?' 'Yes, please.' 'That'll be 38 kroner.' 'Here you are.' 'Thank you.'
Most days that was the longest conversation she had with anyone.
For the last weeks an elderly man had been sitting at her table when she arrived, and even though there were several unoccupied tables, this was the only table she could sit at because . . . no, she didn't want to think about these things now. Nevertheless, she had been forced to arrive a quarter of an hour earlier to get to the table first. Today that was perfect because otherwise she would have been at home when he rang. And she would have had to open the door. She had promised Mother. Ever since the time she had refused to answer the telephone or the doorbell for two months, and in the end the police had come and her mother had threatened to have her readmitted.
She didn't lie to Mother.
To others, yes. She lied to them all the time. On the telephone to the publishers, in shops and on Internet chat sites. Especially there. She could pretend to be someone else, one of the characters in the books she translated, or Ramona, the decadent, promiscuous but fearless woman she had been in an earlier life. Astrid had discovered Ramona when she was small. She was a dancer, had long black hair and brown almond-shaped eyes. Astrid used to draw Ramona, especially her eyes, but she had to do it clandestinely because Mother tore the drawings to shreds and said she didn't want to see hussies like her in the house. Ramona had been gone for many years, but she had returned, and Astrid had noticed how Ramona had begun to take over, in particular when she wrote to the male writers she trans-lated. After the preamble about language and cultural references, she liked to write more informal e-mails, and after a couple of those, the French writers would beg to meet her. When they were in Oslo to launch the book. Besides, she alone was reason enough to make the trip. She would always refuse although that did not seem to deter the suitors, more the opposite. This was what constituted her writerly activities now, after waking up from the dream of publishing her own books several years ago. A publishing consultant had finally cracked on the telephone and hissed that he could no longer put up with her 'hysterical fussing'; no reader would ever pay to share her thoughts, but, for a fee, a psychologist might.
'Astrid Monsen!'
She felt her throat constrict and for a moment she panicked. She didn't want to have respiratory problems here on the street. She was about to cross when the lights changed to red. She could have made it, but she would never cross on red.
'Hello, I was on my way to see you.' Harry Hole caught up with her. He still had the same hunted expression, the same red eyes. 'Let me first say I read Inspector Waaler's report of the conversation he had with you. I understand you lied to me because you were frightened.'
She could feel she would start hyperventilating soon.
'It was extremely inept of me not to tell you about my role in the whole business straight away,' the police officer said.
She looked at him in surprise. He did sound genuinely sorry.
'And I've read in the paper that the guilty party has been apprehended,' she heard herself say.
They stood looking at each other.
'Is dead, I mean,' she added in a soft voice.
'Well,' he said with a tentative smile. 'Perhaps you wouldn't mind helping me with a couple of questions anyway?'
That was the first time she had not sat alone at her table in Hansen's bakery. The girl behind the counter had sent her a kind of knowing girlfriend's smile, as if the tall man with her were an escort. Since he looked as if he had just crawled out of bed, perhaps the girl even thought . . . no, she didn't want to entertain that idea now.
They had sat down and he had given her printouts of several e-mails he wanted her to read through. Could she, as a writer, decipher whether they had been written by a man or a woman? She had examined them. As a writer, he had said. Should she tell him the truth? She raised her teacup so that he couldn't see her smiling at the thought. Of course not. She would lie.
'Hard to say,' she said. 'Is it fiction?'
'Yes and no,' Harry said. 'We think the person who killed Anna Bethsen wrote them.' 'So it must be a man.'
Harry studied the table and she shot a quick glance at him. He wasn't good-looking, but he had something going for him. She had - as improbable as it sounded - noticed it as soon as she saw him lying on the landing outside her door. Perhaps because she had had one more Cointreau than usual, but she had thought he looked peaceful, almost handsome, as he lay there, like a sleeping prince someone had placed in front of her door. The contents of his pockets had been scattered over the staircase and she had picked them up one by one. She had even had a peep in his wallet and found his name and address.
Harry raised his eyes and hers quickly darted away. Could she have liked him? Certainly. The problem was he wouldn't have liked her. Hysterical fuss. Groundless fears. The sobbing. He wouldn't like that. He wanted women like Anna Bethsen. Like Ramona.
'Are you sure you don't recognise her?' he asked slowly.
She gave him a horrified look. It was only then she noticed he was holding up a photograph. He had shown her this photograph before. A woman and two children on the beach.
'On the night of the murder, for example.'
'Never seen her in my whole life,' Astrid Monsen said firmly.
Snow was beginning to fall again. Large, wet snowflakes, which were grey and dirty before they landed on the brown earth between Police HQ and Botsen. A message from Weber lay waiting in the office. It confirmed Harry's suspicions, the same suspicions which had made him see the e-mails in a new light. Nevertheless, Weber's concise message came as a shock. A kind of expected shock.
Harry was on the telephone for the rest of the day, between running to and from the fax machine. In the breaks, he brooded, placed one brick on top of another and tried not to think about what he was looking for. But it was all too clear. This roller coaster could climb, fall, twist and turn as much as it liked, but it was the same as all other roller coasters - it would end up where it started.
When Harry's brooding was over and most of the picture was clear, he leaned back in the office chair. He didn't feel any triumph, just a void.
Rakel didn't ask any questions when he rang to say she shouldn't wait for him. Afterwards he went up the stairs to the canteen and onto the terrace roof where some smokers were standing and shivering. The city lights twinkled beneath them in the early-afternoon gloom. Harry lit a cigarette, ran his hand along the wall and made a snowball. Rolled it up. Tighter and tighter, hit it with his palms, squeezed it until the melted ice ran between his fingers. Then he threw it down towards the city. He followed the shiny snowball with his eyes as it fell, faster and faster, until it disappeared into the grey-white background.
'There was a boy in my class called Ludwig Alexander,' Harry said out loud.
The smokers stamped their feet and looked at the inspector.
'He was linguistically inclined and was called Kebab. Because once in the English lesson he had been stupid enough to tell the teacher he liked the word "barbecue" spelt as "BBQ" because that would be kebab backwards. When the snows came, there was a snowball fight between the classes in every break. Kebab didn't want to join in, but we forced him to. It was the only thing we let him join in. As cannon fodder. He was so bad at throwing that all he managed was a few weak lobs. The other class had Roar, a fat kid who played handball for Oppsal. He used to head Kebab's snowballs away for fun and then pepper him black and blue with his underarm swings. One day Kebab put a big stone in a snowball and threw it as high as he could. Roar jumped up with a smile and headed it. The sound was like a stone hitting a stone in shallow water, hard and soft at the same time. That was the only time I saw an ambulance in the school yard.'
Harry sucked hard
on his cigarette.
'In the staff room they argued for days about whether Kebab should be punished. After all, he hadn't thrown the snowball at anyone, so the question was: Should a person be punished for showing no consideration towards an idiot behaving like an idiot?' Harry stubbed out his cigarette and went inside.
It was after half past four. The cold wind had picked up speed in the open stretch between the Akerselva and the metro station in Gronlands torv. Schoolchildren and pensioners were giving way to women and men with closed faces and ties hurrying home from their offices. Harry bumped into one of them as he ran down the stairs into the underground and a swear word echoed between the walls and followed him. He stopped in front of the window between the toilets. It was the same elderly lady who had sat there last time.
'I have to talk to Simon right now.'
Her calm, brown eyes took him in.
'He's not in Toyen,' Harry said. 'Everyone has left.'
The woman shrugged her shoulders, bewildered.
'Say it's Harry.'
She shook her head and waved him away. Harry leaned over to the glass separating them. 'Say it's the spiuni gjerman?
Simon drove down Enebakkveien instead of taking the long Ekeberg tunnel.
'I don't like tunnels, you know,' he explained as they crept up the side of the mountain at snail's pace in the afternoon rush hour.
'So the two brothers who had run away to Norway and grown up together in a caravan fell out because they were in love with the same girl?' Harry said.
'Maria came from a very respectable Lovarra family. They lived in Sweden where her daddy was the bulibas. She married Stefan and moved to Oslo when she was just thirteen and he was eighteen. Stefan was so in love with her he would have died for her. At that time
Raskol was in hiding in Russia, you know. Not from the police, but from some Kosovo-Albanians in Germany who thought he had cheated them in some business.' 'Business?'
'They found an empty trailer by the autobahn near Hamburg.' Simon smiled.
'But Raskol returned?'
'One sunny May day he returned to Toyen. That was when Maria and he saw each other for the first time.' Simon laughed. 'My God, how they stared at each other. I had to inspect the heavens to see if thunder was on its way, the air was so tense.'
'So they fell for each other?'
'In seconds. While everyone was watching. Some of the women were embarrassed.'
'But if it was so obvious, the relatives must have reacted, didn't they?'
'They didn't think it was so dangerous. You mustn't forget we marry earlier than you do, you know. We cannot stop the young ones. They fall in love. Thirteen, you can imagine . . .'
'I can.' Harry rubbed the back of his neck.
'But this was a serious business, you see. She was married to Stefan and loved Raskol from the first day she saw him. And even though she and Stefan lived in their own caravan, she met Raskol, who was there the whole time. So things took the course they had to take. When Anna was born, only Stefan and Raskol were not aware Raskol was the father.'
'Poor girl.'
'And poor Raskol. The only person who was happy was Stefan. He walked three metres tall, you know. He said Anna was as good-looking as her daddy.' Stefan smiled with sad eyes. 'Perhaps it could have gone on like that. If Stefan and Raskol hadn't decided to rob a bank.'
'And it went wrong?'
The queue of cars moved towards Ryen crossroads.
'There were three of them. Stefan was the oldest, so he was the first in and the last out. While the other two ran out with the money to fetch the getaway car, Stefan stayed inside the bank with his pistol raised so they would not set off the alarm. They were amateurs, they didn't even know that the bank had a silent alarm. When they drove up to collect Stefan, he was stretched out over the bonnet of a police car. One officer had put handcuffs on him. Raskol was driving. He was only seventeen and didn't even have a licence. He rolled down the window. With three thousand on the back seat, he slowly drove up to the police car where his brother was struggling on the bonnet. Then Raskol and the officer had eye contact. My God, the air was as thick as when he and Maria met. Their mutual staring went on for ever. I was frightened Raskol would yell, but he didn't say a word. He just drove on. That was the first time they saw each other.'
'Raskol and Jorgen Lonn?'
Simon nodded. They came off the roundabout and went into the bend in Ryen. Simon signalled then braked by a petrol station. They pulled up in front of a twelve-storey building. The DnB logo flashed from a blue neon sign over the entrance nearby.
'Stefan got four years because he had fired his gun in the air,' Simon said. 'But after the trial, you know, something odd happens. Raskol visits Stefan in Botsen and the day after one of the guards says he thinks the new prisoner has changed appearance. His superior says it's normal for first-time prisoners. He tells him about wives who haven't recognised their own husbands on their first visit. The guard is reassured, but a few days later a woman phones the prison. She says they have the wrong prisoner. Stefan Baxhet's little brother has taken his place and they have to let the prisoner
go.'
'Is that really true?' Harry asks, pulling out his lighter and putting it to the end of his cigarette. 'Yes, it is,' Simon says. 'It's quite normal among gypsies in southern Europe for the younger sibling, or the son, to serve the convicted person's sentence, if he has a family to feed. As Stefan did. For us, it is a matter of honour, you know.'
'But the authorities would soon discover the mistake, wouldn't they?'
'Hah!' Simon threw out his arms. 'For you a gypsy is a gypsy. If he's in prison for something he didn't do, he's sure to have been guilty of something else.'
'Who rang in?'
'They never found out, but Maria vanished the same night. They never saw her again. The police drove Raskol to Toyen in the middle of the night and Stefan was dragged kicking and swearing out of the caravan. Anna was two years old and lay in bed screaming for her mummy and there was no one, no man and no woman, who could stop her howling. Until Raskol went in and lifted her up.'
They stared at the entrance to the bank. Harry glanced at his watch. Only a couple of minutes until it closed. 'What happened then?'
'When Stefan had served his sentence, he immediately left the country. I talked to him on the phone now and then. He travelled a lot.'
'And Anna?'
'She grew up in the caravan, you know. Raskol sent her to school. She had gadjo friends. Gadjo habits. She didn't want to live like us; she wanted to do what her friends did - make her own decisions, earn her own money and have her own place to live. Since she inherited her grandmother's flat and moved into Sorgenfrigata, we haven't had anything to do with her. She . . . well, she chose to move. The only person she had any contact with was Raskol.'
'Do you think she knew he was her father?'
Simon shrugged. 'As far as I know, no one said anything, but I'm sure she knew.'
They sat in silence.
'This is where it happened,' Simon said. 'Just before closing time,' Harry said. 'Like now.' 'He wouldn't have shot Lonn if he hadn't been forced to,' Simon said. 'But he does what he has to do. He's a warrior, you know.'
'No giggling concubines.' 'What?'
'Nothing. Where is Stefan, Simon?' 'I don't know.'
Harry waited. They watched a bank employee lock the door from the inside. Harry continued to wait.
'The last time I talked to him, he was ringing from a town in Sweden,' Simon said. 'Gothenburg. That's all I can help you with.'
'It's not me you're helping.'
'I know,' Simon sighed. 'I know.'
Harry found the yellow house in Vetlandsveien. The lights on both floors were lit. He parked, got out and stood looking at the metro station. That was where they had met on the first dark autumn evenings to go apple scrumping. Sigge, Tore, Kristian, Torkild, 0ystein and Harry. That was the fixed team line-up. They had cycled to Nordstrand because the apples were bigger the
re and the chances of anyone knowing your father smaller. Sigge had climbed over the fence first and 0ystein had kept lookout. Harry had been the tallest and could reach the biggest apples. One evening, however, they hadn't felt like cycling so far and they had gone scrumping in their local neighbourhood.
Harry looked across at the garden on the other side of the road.
They had already filled their pockets when he had discovered the face staring down at them from the illuminated window on the first floor. Without saying a word. It was Kebab.
Harry opened the gate and went up to the door. j0rgen and kristin l0nn was painted on the porcelain sign over the two bells. Harry rang the top one.
Beate didn't answer until he had pressed twice.
She asked if he wanted tea, but he shook his head and she went into the kitchen while he kicked off his boots in the hallway.
