The Redeemer

by Jo Nesbo

  The report by the Crime Scene Unit – though it was hardly a unit, numbering one detective and one technician – said the container had stood empty for a while. Unlocked. The site watchman had explained that they didn't bother much about locking empty containers as the area was fenced off and, furthermore, under surveillance. Nevertheless a drug addict had got in. Per Holmen, he supposed, had been one of the many who had hung out around Bjørvika, which was a mere stone's throw from the junkies' supermarket in Plata. Perhaps the watchman had turned a blind eye to them using the containers as accommodation? Perhaps he knew that in so doing they had saved the odd life or two?

  There was no lock on the container, but there was a big, fat padlock on the gate in the fence. Harry regretted that he hadn't rung from HQ to say he was coming. If there were any guards here, he couldn't see any.

  Harry checked his watch. Deliberated and surveyed the top of the fence. He was in good shape. Better than for a long time. He hadn't touched alcohol since the catastrophe last summer, and he had been training on a regular basis in the police gym. More than regular. Before the snow came, he had broken Tom Waaler's old steeplechase record in Økern. A few days later Halvorsen had cautiously asked if all the training had anything to do with Rakel. Because his impression was that they weren't seeing each other any more. Harry had explained to the young officer in a curt yet clear way that they might share an office but not a private life. Halvorsen had shrugged, asked who else Harry talked to and had his assumption confirmed when Harry got up and marched out of room 605.

  Three metres. No barbed wire. Easy. Harry caught hold of the fence as high as he could, put his feet against the fence post and straightened up. Right arm up, then left, hung with arms outstretched until his feet got a grip. Caterpillar movements. He swung himself over to the other side.

  He raised the bolt and pulled open the door of the container, took out his solid, black army torch, ducked under the police tape and went in.

  It was eerily quiet inside; sound seemed to have been frozen, too.

  Harry switched on the torch and shone it inside the container. In the cone of light he could see the chalk outline on the floor where they had found Holmen. Beate Lønn, head of Forensics in the new building in Brynsalléen, had shown him the pictures. Holmen had been sitting with his back to the wall with a hole in his right temple and the gun on his right. Very little blood. That was the advantage of shots to the head. The only one. The gun fired ammunition of a modest calibre, so the entry wound was small and there was no exit wound. Forensics would find the bullet in the skull where it would have bounced around like a pinball and pulped what Per Holmen had once thought with, made this decision with, and at the end ordered his forefinger to press the trigger with.

  'Incomprehensible,' his colleagues tended to say when they discovered young people who had chosen to take their lives. Harry assumed they said that to protect themselves, to reject the whole idea of it. If not, he didn't understand what they meant by it being incomprehensible.

  All the same, that was the word he himself had used this afternoon standing at the entrance and looking down the hallway at Holmen's father on his knees, his back bent, shaking with sobs. And since Harry had had no words of comfort to say about death, God, redemption, life afterwards or the sense of it all, he had just mumbled the same feeble: 'Incomprehensible . . .'

  Harry switched off the torch and put it in his coat pocket; the darkness closed in around him.

  He thought of his own father. Olav Hole, the retired teacher and widower living in a house in Oppsal. Of how his eyes lit up when Harry, or Sis, visited him once a month and how the light slowly faded as they drank coffee and talked about things of little import. Anything of meaning had pride of place in a photo on the piano she had once played. Olav Hole did almost nothing now. Read his books. About countries and empires he would never see, and in fact no longer had any desire to see, since she could not join him. 'The greatest loss of all,' he said on the few occasions they talked about her. And what Harry was thinking about now was what Olav Hole would call the day they went to tell him his son was dead.

  Harry left the container and walked towards the fence. Grabbed hold of it with his hands. Then there was one of those strange moments of sudden total silence when the wind catches its breath to listen or change its mind and all that is heard is the reassuring rumble of the town in the winter darkness. That, and the sound of wind-borne paper scraping against the tarmac. But the wind had dropped. It wasn't paper, it was steps. Quick, light steps. Lighter than footsteps.

  Paws.

  Harry's heart accelerated out of control and, facing the fence, he bent his knees lightning-quick. And straightened up. Only afterwards would it occur to him what had made him so frightened. It was the silence, and the fact that he heard nothing in this silence, no growling, no signs of aggression. As though whatever it was out there in the dark did not want to frighten him. Quite the contrary. It was hunting him. Had Harry known much about dogs, he might have been aware that there was one kind of dog that never growls, neither when it is frightened nor when it attacks: the male of the black Metzner species. Harry stretched his arms upwards and was bending his knees again when he heard the change in rhythm and then silence, and he knew it had launched itself. He pushed upwards.

  The claim that you don't feel pain when terror has pumped the blood full of adrenalin is, at best, somewhat less than accurate. Harry let out a yell when the teeth of the large, lean dog gripped the flesh of his right leg and sank further and further in until finally they were pressing on the sensitive tissue membrane around the bone. The wire fence sang, gravity pulled at them both, but in sheer desperation Harry managed to hang on. By normal standards he would have been safe by now. Because any other dog weighing as much as a mature black Metzner would have let go. But a black Metzner has teeth and jaw muscles which can crush bone, hence its alleged reputation as a relative of the bone-devouring speckled hyena. So it hung there, bolted to Harry's leg by two canine teeth set backwards in the upper jaw and one in the lower jaw, which stabilised the bite. It had broken the second canine in the lower jaw on a steel prosthesis when it was just three months old.

  Harry managed to put his left elbow over the edge of the fence and tried to drag them both up, but the dog had one paw in the wire. With his right hand he groped for his coat pocket, found it and his hand grabbed the rubber shaft of the torch. He looked down and for the first time saw the animal. The black eyes in the equally black face had a dull sheen. Harry swung the torch. It hit the dog on the head right between its ears and so hard that he heard a crunch. He raised the torch and struck again. Hitting the sensitive snout. Struck out in desperation at the eyes which still had not blinked. He lost hold of the torch and it fell to the ground. The dog was still hanging from his leg. Soon Harry would not have the strength to hold on to the fence. He did not want to think about what might happen then, but was unable to stop himself.

  'Help!'

  Harry's feeble cry was carried away on the wind that had sprung up again. He changed grip and felt a sudden urge to laugh. Surely it couldn't all end like this? Being found in a container terminal with his throat savaged by a guard dog? Harry took a deep breath. The jagged points from the wire netting were digging into his armpit; his fingers were wilting fast. He was seconds away from letting go. If only he had a weapon. If only he had had a bottle instead of the hip flask, he could have smashed it and used it to stab with.

  The hip flask!

  Summoning his last strength, Harry reached inside his coat and pulled out the flask. He stuffed the spout into his mouth, sank his teeth in the metal top and twisted. The top loosened and he held it between his teeth as the whisky filled his mouth. A shock ran through his body. Christ. He pressed his face against the fence, forcing his eyes closed, and the distant lights of the Plaza and Opera hotels became white stripes in all the darkness. With his right hand he lowered the flask until it was above the dog's red jaws. Then he spat out the top and the whisky,
mumbled 'Skål' and emptied the flask. For two long seconds the black doggy eyes stared up at Harry in total perplexity as the brown liquid gurgled and trickled down Harry's leg into the open jaws. The animal relinquished its hold. Harry heard the smack of living flesh on bare tarmac. Followed by a kind of death rattle and low whimpering, then the scratching sound of paws, and the dog was swallowed up by the dark from which it had emerged.

  Harry swung his legs over the fence. He rolled up his trouser leg. Even without the torch he knew the evening was going to be spent in A&E and not watching All About Eve.

  Jon lay with his head in Thea's lap and his eyes closed, enjoying the regular drone of the TV. It was one of these series she liked so much. King of the Bronx. Or was it The King of Queens?

  'Have you asked your brother if he would do your shift in Egertorget?' Thea asked.

  She had placed a hand over his eyes. He could smell the sweet fragrance of her skin, which meant that she had just given herself a shot of insulin.

  'Which shift?' Jon asked.

  She snatched away her hand and stared at him in disbelief.

  Jon laughed. 'Relax. I spoke to Robert ages ago. He agreed.'

  She gave a groan of resignation. Jon grabbed her hand and put it back over his eyes.

  'I didn't say it was your birthday though,' he said. 'If I had, I'm not sure he would have agreed.'

  'Why not?'

  'Because he's crazy about you, and you know it.'

  'That's what you say.'

  'And you don't like him.'

  'That's not true!'

  'Why do you always go stiff whenever I mention his name then?'

  She laughed out loud. Must have been something in Bronx. Or Queens.

  'Did you get a table at the restaurant?' she asked.

  'Yes.'

  She smiled and squeezed his hand. Then she furrowed her brow. 'I've been thinking. Someone might see us there.'

  'From the Army? Out of the question.'

  'What if they do?'

  Jon didn't answer.

  'Perhaps it's time we went public,' she said.

  'I don't know,' he said. 'Isn't it best to wait until we're absolutely sure that—'

  'Aren't you sure, Jon?'

  Jon moved her hand and looked up at her in dismay: 'Thea, please. You know very well that I love you above all else. That's not the point.'

  'What is the point then?'

  Jon sighed and sat up beside her. 'You don't know Robert, Thea.'

  She gave a wry smile. 'I've known him since we were tiny, Jon.'

  Jon squirmed. 'Yes, but there are things you don't know. You don't know how angry he can get. He takes after Dad. He can be dangerous, Thea.'

  She leaned back against the wall and stared into the air.

  'I suggest we defer it for a while.' Jon wrung his hands. 'Out of consideration for your brother, too.'

  'Rikard?' she said, surprised.

  'Yes. What would he say if you, his own sister, announced your engagement to me right now?'

  'Ah, I see what you mean. As you're both competing for the head of admin job?'

  'You know very well that the High Council sets great store by high-ranking officers having a respectable officer as their spouse. It's obvious that the right thing to do from a tactical point of view would be to announce my marriage to Thea Nilsen, the daughter of Frank Nilsen, the commander's right hand. But would it be morally right?'

  Thea chewed her bottom lip. 'Why is this job so important to you and Rikard?'

  Jon shrugged. 'The Army has paid our way through Officer Training School and four years for an economics degree at a school of management. I suppose Rikard thinks the way I do. You have a duty to apply for Salvation Army jobs seeking your qualifications.'

  'Maybe neither of you will get it. Dad says no one under thirty-five has ever been appointed head of admin.'

  'I know.' Jon sighed. 'Don't tell anyone but actually I would be relieved if Rikard gets the job.'

  'Relieved?' Thea said. 'You? You've had the responsibility for all the rental property in Oslo for over a year now.'

  'That's right, but the head of admin has all of Norway, Iceland and the Faeroes. Did you know that the Army's property company owns over 250 plots, with three hundred buildings in Norway alone?' Jon patted himself on the stomach and stared at the ceiling with a familiar concerned expression. 'I saw my reflection in a shop window today and it struck me how small I am.'

  Thea did not seem to have heard. 'Someone told Rikard that whoever gets the job will be the next Territorial Commander.'

  Jon laughed out loud. 'I definitely do not want that.'

  'Don't mess about, Jon.'

  'I'm not messing about, Thea. You and I are much more important. I'm saying I'm not interested in the admin job, so let's announce our engagement. I can do other important work. Lots of the corps need economists, too.'

  'No, Jon,' Thea said, horrified. 'You're the best we've got. You have to be employed where we need you most. Rikard is my brother, but he doesn't have . . . your intelligence. We can wait until the decision has been made to tell them about the engagement.'

  Jon shrugged.

  Thea looked at the clock. 'You'll have to leave before twelve today. In the lift yesterday Emma said she had been worried about me because she had heard my door open and close in the middle of the night.'

  Jon swung his legs onto the floor. 'I don't understand why we bother living here.'

  She sent Jon a reproving glance. 'At least we can take care of each other here.'

  'Right,' he sighed. 'We take care of each other. Goodnight then.'

  She wriggled over to him and slipped her hand up his shirt and, to his surprise, he could feel her hand was sweaty, as if she had been clenching it or squeezing something. She pressed herself against him and her breathing began to quicken.

  'Thea,' he said. 'We mustn't . . .'

  She went rigid. Then she sighed and took her hand away.

  Jon was amazed. So far Thea had not exactly come on to him, more the opposite, she had seemed anxious about physical contact. And he valued that modesty. She had seemed reassured after their first date when he had quoted the statutes and said, 'The Salvation Army considers abstinence before marriage a Christian ideal.' Even though many thought there was a difference between 'ideal' and the word 'command', which the statutes used when referring to tobacco and alcohol, he saw no reason to break a promise to God because of nuances.

  He gave her a hug, stood up and went to the toilet. Locked the door behind him and turned on the tap. Let the water run over his hands as he regarded the smooth surface of molten sand reflecting the face of a person who to all outward appearances ought to be happy. He had to ring Ragnhild. Get it over with. Jon took a deep breath. He was happy. It was just that some days were harder than others.

  He dried his face and went back to her.

  The waiting room of Oslo's emergency services in Storgata 40 was bathed in harsh, white light. There was the usual human menagerie at this time of day. A trembling drug addict stood up and left twenty minutes after Harry arrived. As a rule they couldn't sit still for longer than ten. Harry could understand that. He still had the taste of whisky in his mouth; it had stirred up his old friends who heaved and tugged at the chains below. His leg hurt like hell. And the trip to the harbour had yielded – like 90 per cent of all police work – nothing. He promised himself he would keep the appointment with Bette Davis next time.

  'Harry Hole?'

  Harry looked up at the man in the white coat in front of him.

  'Yes?'

  'Could you come with me?'

  'Thank you, but I think it's her turn,' Harry said, nodding towards a girl with her head in her hands in the row of chairs opposite.