The Redbreast

by Jo Nesbo

  Harry was on the raised intersection – known locally as the traffic machine – in front of the Post House when he suddenly had a thought and called Ellen back.

  ‘Ellen? It’s me again. There was one thing I forgot. Still with me? Hasn’t held a weapon for more than fifty years. Repeat. Hasn’t held a . . . Yes, I know it’s more than five words. Still nothing? Damn, now I’ve missed my turning! Catch you later, Ellen.’

  He put his phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on driving. He had just turned off the roundabout when his mobile bleeped.

  ‘Harry here. What? What on earth made you think of that? Right, right, now don’t get angry, Ellen. Now and then I forget that you don’t know what goes on in your own noodle. Brain. In your great big, beautiful, bouffant brain, Ellen. And yes, now you say it, it’s obvious. Thanks very much.’

  He put down the phone and at that moment remembered he owed her three night shifts. Now that he was no longer in Crime Squad, he would have to find something else. He considered what he could do, for approximately three seconds.

  36

  Irisveien. 1 March 2000

  THE DOOR OPENED AND HARRY PEERED INTO A PAIR OF piercing blue eyes in a lined face.

  ‘Harry Hole, police,’ he said. ‘I rang this morning.’

  ‘Right.’

  The old man’s grey-white hair was brushed smoothly across his high forehead, and he was wearing a tie under a knitted cardigan. It had said EVEN & SIGNE JUUL on the postbox outside the entrance to this red duplex house in the quietly affluent suburb in north Oslo.

  ‘Please, come in, Inspector Hole.’

  His voice was calm and firm, and there was something about his bearing that made Professor Even Juul look younger than, by rights, he had to be. Harry had done his research and knew that the history professor had been in the Resistance movement. Although Even Juul was retired, he was still considered to be Norway’s foremost expert on the history of the German Occupation and the Nasjonal Samling.

  Harry bent down to take off his shoes. On the wall directly in front of him hung old, slightly faded black and white photographs in small frames. One of them showed a young lady in nurse’s uniform. Another, a young man in a white coat.

  They went into the sitting room where a greying Airedale stopped barking and instead dutifully sniffed Harry’s crotch before walking over and lying down beside Juul’s armchair.

  ‘I’ve been reading some of your articles about Fascism and National Socialism in Dagsavisen,’ Harry said after they had sat down.

  ‘My goodness, so Dagsavisen readers do exist then?’ Juul smiled.

  ‘You seem keen to warn us against today’s neo-Nazism?’

  ‘Not to warn, I am merely pointing out some historical parallels. It’s an historian’s duty to uncover, not to judge.’ He lit his pipe. ‘Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.’

  A blue column of smoke rose into the air. ‘But this isn’t what you came here to ask, I imagine?’

  ‘We’re wondering if you can help us to find a man.’

  ‘You mentioned that on the telephone. Who is this man?’

  ‘We don’t know. But we have deduced that he has blue eyes, he’s Norwegian and is seventy years old. And he speaks German.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Juul laughed. ‘Well, there are a few to choose from then.’

  ‘Right. There are 158,000 men in this country over seventy, and I would guess around 100,000 of them have blue eyes and can speak German.’

  Juul raised an eyebrow. Harry gave a sheepish smile.

  ‘Office for National Statistics. I checked, for fun.’

  ‘So how do you think I can help?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. This person reportedly said that he hasn’t handled a weapon in over fifty years. I thought, that is, my colleague thought, that over fifty is more than fifty, but less than sixty.’

  ‘Logical.’

  ‘Yes, she’s very . . . er, logical. So, let’s assume it was fifty-five years ago. Then we’d be smack in the middle of the Second World War. He’s around twenty and uses a weapon. All Norwegians privately owning a gun had to hand them over to the Germans. So where is he?’

  Harry counted on three fingers: ‘Either he’s in the Resistance, or he’s fled to England, or he’s at the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans. He speaks better German than English. Accordingly . . .’

  ‘So this colleague of yours came to the conclusion that he must have been fighting at the front, did she?’ Juul asked.

  ‘She did.’

  Juul sucked on his pipe. ‘Many of the Resistance people had to learn German,’ he said, ‘in order to infiltrate, monitor and so on. And you’re forgetting the Norwegians in the Swedish police force.’

  ‘So the conclusion doesn’t stand up?’

  ‘Well, let me think aloud a bit,’ Juul said. ‘Roughly fifteen thousand Norwegians volunteered for service at the front, of whom seven thousand were called up and were thus allowed to use a weapon. That’s a lot more than those who escaped to England and joined up there. And even though there were more men in the Resistance at the end of the war, very few of them ever held a weapon.’

  Juul smiled.

  ‘For the time being, let’s assume you’re right. Now obviously these men fighting at the front are not listed in the telephone directory as ex-Waffen SS, but I imagine you have found out where to search?’

  Harry nodded.

  ‘The Traitors’ Archives. Filed according to name, along with all the data from the court cases. I’ve been through it in the course of the last few days. I was hoping that enough of them would be dead to make it a manageable total, but I was wrong.’

  ‘Yes, they’re tough old birds,’ Juul laughed.

  ‘And so I come to why we called you. You know the background of these soldiers better than anyone. I would like you to help me to understand how men like that think, to understand what makes them tick.’

  ‘Thank you for your confidence, Inspector, but I’m a historian and know no more than anyone else about individual motivation. As you perhaps know, I was in the Resistance, in Milorg, and that doesn’t exactly qualify me to get into the head of someone who volunteers for the Eastern Front.’

  ‘I think you know a great deal, anyway, herr Juul.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘I think you know what I mean. My research has been very thorough.’

  Juul sucked on his pipe and looked at Harry. In the silence that followed Harry became aware that someone was standing in the sitting-room doorway. He turned and saw an elderly woman. Her gentle, calm eyes were looking at Harry.

  ‘We’re just having a chat, Signe,’ Even Juul said.

  She gave Harry a cheery nod, opened her mouth as if to say something, but stopped when her eyes met Even Juul’s. She nodded again, quietly closed the door and was gone.

  ‘So you know?’ Juul asked.

  ‘Yes. She was a nurse on the Eastern Front, wasn’t she?’

  ‘By Leningrad. From 1942 to the retreat in March of 1944.’ He put down his pipe. ‘Why are you hunting this man?’

  ‘To be honest, we don’t know that, either. But there might be an assassination brewing.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘So what should we look for? An oddball? A man who’s still a committed Nazi? A criminal?’

  Juul shook his head.

  ‘Most of the men at the front served their sentence and then slipped back into society. Many of them made out surprisingly well, even after being branded traitors. Not so surprising maybe. It often turns out that the gifted ones are those who make decisions in critical situations like
war.’

  ‘So the person we’re looking for may well be one of those who did alright for himself.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘A pillar of society?’

  ‘The door to positions of national importance in finance and politics would probably have been closed to him.’

  ‘But he could have been an independent businessman, an entrepreneur. Definitely someone who has earned enough money to buy a weapon for half a million. Who could he possibly be after?’

  ‘Does this necessarily have anything to do with his having fought at the front?’

  ‘I have a sneaking feeling it might.’

  ‘A motive for revenge then?’

  ‘Is that so unreasonable?’

  ‘No, not at all. Many men from the front see themselves as the real patriots in the war. They think that, given the way the world looked in 1940, they acted in the best interests of the nation. They consider the fact that we sentenced them as traitors to be a total travesty of justice.’

  ‘So?’

  Juul scratched behind his ear.

  ‘Well. The judges involved in bringing them to justice are by and large dead now. And the same is true of the politicians who laid the basis for the trials. The revenge theory seems thin.’

  Harry sighed. ‘You’re right. I’m only trying to form a picture with the few pieces of the puzzle I have.’

  Juul glanced quickly at his watch. ‘I promise I’ll give it some thought, but I really don’t know if I can help you.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ Harry said, getting up. Then he remembered something and pulled out a pile of folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

  ‘By the way, I took a copy of my report of the interview with a witness in Johannesburg. If you could have a look to see whether there’s anything of significance in it?’

  Juul said yes, but shook his head as if meaning no.

  As Harry was putting on his shoes in the hall, he pointed to the photograph of the man in the white coat.

  ‘Is that you?’

  ‘In the first half of the previous century, yes,’ Juul laughed. ‘It was taken in Germany before the war. I was supposed to follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and study medicine there. When the war broke out I made my way home and in fact got my hands on my first history books on the boat. After that it was too late: I was hooked.’

  ‘So you gave up medicine?’

  ‘Depends on how you look at it. I wanted to try to find an explanation of how one man and one ideology could bewitch so many people. And perhaps find an antidote, too.’ He laughed. ‘I was very, very young.’

  37

  First Floor, Continental Hotel. 1 March 2000.

  ‘NICE THAT WE COULD MEET LIKE THIS,’ BERNT BRANDHAUG said, raising his wineglass.

  They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

  ‘And not only on official business,’ he said, holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug studied her. She wasn’t exactly attractive, her features were a little too coarse for that and she was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty way about her and she was young plump.

  She had rung him from the staff office this morning saying they needed his advice on an unusual case, but before she could say any more he had asked her up to his office. And when she was there he had immediately decided he didn’t have the time and they could discuss it over a meal after work.

  ‘We civil servants should also have a few perks,’ he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.

  So far everything had gone well. The head waiter had given them Brandhaug’s regular table and, to the best of his knowledge, there was no one he knew in the room.

  ‘Yes, there’s this strange case we had yesterday,’ she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over her lap. ‘We had a visit from an elderly man who maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said, referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.’

  She rolled her eyes. She shouldn’t wear so much make-up, Brandhaug thought.

  ‘So what did we owe him money for?’

  ‘He said he was a merchant seaman during the war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They had withheld his pay.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What else did he say?’

  ‘That he couldn’t wait any longer. That we had cheated him and all the other merchant seamen. God would punish us for our sins. I don’t know if he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked under the weather. He brought a letter with him, signed by the Norwegian Consul General in Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk bonus for four years’ service as an officer in the Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho of course, and we wouldn’t have bothered you with this trivial matter.’

  ‘You can come to me any time you wish, Aud Hilde,’ he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her name was Aud Hilde, wasn’t it?

  ‘Poor man,’ Brandhaug said, gesturing to the waiter to bring more wine. ‘The sad thing about this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was established to administer the boats in the merchant fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It was an organisation with partly political and partly commercial interests. The British, for example, paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of being used to pay the crews, went straight into the ship-owners’ pockets and the state’s coffers. We’re talking about several hundred million kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their money back through legal proceedings, but they lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that merchant seamen had a right to this money.’

  ‘This man doesn’t seem to have received anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans, he said.’

  ‘Did he say what his name was?’

  ‘Konrad Åsnes. Wait a moment and I’ll show you the letter. He had worked out how much was owed with compound interest.’

  She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms quivered. She should do a bit more exercise, Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde would simply be well-rounded instead of . . . fat.

  ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see it. Nortraship comes under the Ministry of Commerce.’

  She looked up at him.

  ‘He insisted we were the ones who owed him the money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.’

  Brandhaug laughed.

  ‘Did he? And what’s the rush now, after sixty years?’

  ‘He didn’t say. He only said that we would have to take the consequences if we didn’t pay.’

  ‘My goodness.’ Brandhaug waited until the waiter had poured out more wine for them before leaning forward. ‘I hate taking the consequences, don’t you?’ She flashed him a hesitant smile.

  Brandhaug raised his glass.

  ‘I was wondering what we should do about this case?’ she said.

  ‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘But I was also wondering one thing, Aud Hilde.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If you’ve seen the hotel room we have at our disposal here.’

  Aud Hilde smiled again and said she hadn’t.

  38

  Focus Fitness Centre, Ila. 2 March 2000.

  HARRY WAS PEDALLING AND SWEATING. THE CARDIO-vascular room was equipped with eighteen hyper-modern ergometric exercise bikes, all occupied by ‘urban’, generally speaking, attractive people staring at the mute TV monitor hanging from the ceiling. Harry was watching Elisa in The Robinson Expedition mouthing that she couldn’t stand Poppe. Harry knew. It was a repeat.

  That don’t impress me much! rang out from the loudspeakers.

  No, well, there’s a surprise, Harry thought, who liked neither the loud music nor the rasping sounds that could be heard coming from somewhere i
n his lungs. He could have worked out for nothing in the gym at Police HQ, but Ellen had persuaded him to join the Focus centre. He had gone along with that, but drew the line when she tried to get him to join an aerobics class. Moving in time to canned music with a troupe of people who all liked canned music while an instructor with a rictus smile encouraged greater exertion with such verbal wit as ‘no pain, no gain’ was for Harry an incomprehensible form of voluntary self-abasement. The way he saw it, the biggest advantage of Focus was that he could work out and watch The Robinson Expedition without having to be in the same room as Tom Waaler, who appeared to spend most of his free time in the police gym. Harry cast a quick glance around and confirmed that tonight, as usual, he was the oldest person there. Most people in the room were girls, with Walkmans plugged into their ears, sneaking a look in his direction at regular intervals. Not because they were looking at him, but because Norway’s most popular stand-up comic sat next to him in a grey hoodie without a drop of sweat beneath his jaunty forelock. A message flashed up on Harry’s speedometer console: You’re training well.

  But dressing badly, Harry thought, looking down at his limp, faded jogging bottoms, which he had to keep hitching up because of the mobile phone hanging on the waistband. And his tired Adidas trainers were neither new enough to be modern or old enough to be trendy again. The Joy Division T-shirt which had once held some kind of street cred just sent out the signal that he hadn’t been following what was happening on the music scene for a number of years. But Harry didn’t feel completely – completely – in the cold until his phone began to bleep and he noticed that seventeen reproachful pairs of eyes, including the stand-up comic’s, were directed at him. He unhooked the tiny black devil’s machine from his waistband.

  ‘Hole.’

  That don’t impress me much! again.

  ‘It’s Juul. Am I disturbing?’

  ‘No, it’s just music.’

  ‘You’re wheezing like a walrus. Ring me back when it’s more convenient.’

  ‘It’s convenient now. I’m at the gym.’