Phantom

by Jo Nesbo

  “That’s not true, Oleg. And you know it.” Harry heard his own voice, which was firm and sure now, telling him that he was as calm and secure as an aircraft carrier. But the lump in his stomach told him otherwise. He was used to being yelled at during interrogations, and it made no difference to him—at best it made him even calmer and more analytical. But with this kid, with Oleg … against this he had no defense.

  Oleg gave a bitter laugh. “Should we see if I can do it now?” He pressed his middle finger against his thumb. “Gone … there we are!”

  Harry held up his palms. “Oleg …”

  Oleg shook his head as he knocked on the door behind him, without taking his dark eyes off Harry. “Guard! Visit’s over. Lemme out!”

  Harry remained in the chair for a few seconds after Oleg had gone.

  Then he struggled to his feet and plodded out into a Botsparken bathed in sunshine.

  Harry stood looking up at Police HQ. Pondering. Then he walked up to the custody block. But he stopped halfway, leaned back against a tree and pinched his eyes so hard he could feel he was squeezing out water. Fucking light. Fucking jet lag.

  “I just want to see them. I won’t take anything,” Harry said.

  The duty officer behind the counter at the custody block eyed Harry and wavered.

  “Come on, Tore—you know me.”

  Nilsen cleared his throat. “Yeah, but are you working here again, Harry?”

  Harry shrugged.

  Nilsen tilted his head and lowered his eyelids until his pupils were only half visible. As though he were filtering the optical impression. Filtering out what was unimportant. And what was left evidently fell in Harry’s favor.

  Nilsen released a heavy sigh, disappeared and returned with a drawer. As Harry had assumed, the items found on Oleg when he was arrested were there. Only when it was decided prisoners would be in custody for longer than a couple of days were they moved down to Botsen, but personal effects weren’t always transferred.

  Harry studied the contents. Coins. A ring with two keys, a skull and a Slayer badge. A Swiss Army knife with one blade and the rest screwdrivers and Allen keys. A throwaway lighter. And one more object.

  It shook Harry, even though he already knew. The newspapers had called it “a drug showdown.”

  It was a disposable syringe, still in its plastic wrapper.

  “Is that all?” Harry asked, taking the key ring. He held it under the counter as he scrutinized the keys. Nilsen clearly did not like Harry holding anything out of his sight and leaned over.

  “No wallet?” Harry asked. “No bank card or ID?”

  “Doesn’t seem so.”

  “Could you check the contents list for me?”

  Nilsen picked up the folded list at the bottom of the drawer, fiddled around with his glasses and looked at the sheet. “There was a cell phone, but they took it. Probably wanted to see if he had called the victim.”

  “Mm,” Harry said. “Anything else?”

  “What else should there be?” Nilsen said, skimming the sheet. And concluded he had checked everything. “Nope.”

  “Thanks, that was all. Thanks for your help, Nilsen.”

  Nilsen nodded slowly. Still wearing his glasses. “Keys.”

  “Yes, right.” Harry put them back in the drawer. Watched Nilsen making sure there were still two.

  Harry left, crossed the parking lot and went onto Åkebergveien. Continued down to Tøyen and Urtegata. Little Karachi. Small greengrocers, hijabs and old men on plastic chairs outside their cafés. And to the Watchtower, the Salvation Army café for the town’s down-and-outs. Harry knew that on days like today it would be quiet, but as soon as winter and the cold came they would be flocking around the tables. Coffee and freshly made sandwiches. A set of clean clothes, the previous year’s fashion, blue sneakers from the army surplus store. In the sickroom on the first floor: attend to the latest wounds from the drug battlefields or—if the situation was dire—a vitamin B injection. Harry considered for a moment whether to drop in on Martine. Perhaps she was still working there. A poet had once written that after the great love there were minor ones. She had been one of the minor ones. But that was not the reason. Oslo was not big, and the heavy users gathered either here or at the Mission Café on Skippergata. It was not improbable that she had known Gusto Hanssen. And Oleg.

  However, Harry decided to take things in the right order, and started to walk again. Passed the Akerselva River. He looked down from the bridge. The brown water Harry remembered from his childhood was as pure as a mountain stream. It was said you could catch trout in it now. There they were, on the paths either side of the river: the dope dealers. Everything was new. Everything was the same.

  He went up Hausmanns Gate. Passed Jakobs kirke. Followed the house numbers. A sign for the Theatre of Cruelty. A graffiti-covered door with a smiley face. A burned-down house, open, cleared. And there it was. A typical Oslo tenement building, built in the 1800s, pale, sober, four stories. Harry pushed the front door, which opened. Not locked. It led straight to the stairway. Which smelled of piss and garbage.

  Harry noted the coded tagging on the way up the floors. Loose banisters. Doors bearing the scars of smashed locks with newer, stronger and additional ones in place. On the third floor he stopped and knew he had found the crime scene. Orange-and-white tape crisscrossing the door.

  He put his hand into his pocket and took out the two keys he had removed from Oleg’s key ring while Nilsen was reading the checklist. Harry wasn’t sure which of his own keys he had used to replace them, but Hong Kong was not, after all, the hardest place to have new ones made.

  One key was an Abus, which Harry knew was a padlock, since he had once bought one himself. But the other was a Ving. He inserted it in the lock. It went half in, then stopped. He pushed harder. Tried twisting.

  “Shit.”

  He took out his cell phone. Her number was listed in his contacts as B. Since there were only eight names stored, one letter was enough.

  “Lønn.”

  What Harry liked best about Beate Lønn, apart from the fact that she was one of the two best forensics officers he had worked with, was that she always reduced information to the basics, and that—like Harry—she never weighed a case down with superfluous words.

  “Hi, Beate. I’m on Hausmanns Gate.”

  “The crime scene? What are you doing—”

  “I can’t get in. Do you have the key?”

  “Do I have the key?”

  “You’re in charge of the whole shebang up there, aren’t you?”

  “ ’Course I’ve got the key. But I’ve no intention of giving it to you.”

  “ ’Course not. But there are a couple of things you’ve got to double-check at the crime scene, aren’t there? I remember something about a guru saying that in murder cases a forensics officer can never be thorough enough.”

  “So you remember that, do you.”

  “It was the first thing she said to all her trainees. I suppose I can join you and see how you work.”

  “Harry …”

  “I won’t touch anything.”

  Silence. Harry knew he was exploiting her. She was more than a colleague; she was a friend, but most important of all, she was herself a mother.

  She sighed. “Give me twenty.”

  Saying “minutes” for her was superfluous.

  Saying “Thank you” for him was superfluous. So Harry hung up.

  OFFICER TRULS BERNTSEN walked slowly through the corridors of Orgkrim. It was his experience that the slower his steps, the faster time went. And if there was anything he had enough of it was time. Awaiting him in the office was a worn chair and a small desk with a pile of reports that were there mostly for appearances’ sake. A computer he used mostly for surfing, but even that had become boring after there had been a crackdown on which websites they could visit. And since he worked with narcotics and not sexual offenses he could soon find himself having to give an explanation. Officer Berntsen carried t
he brimming cup of coffee through the door to the desk. Was careful not to spill it on the brochure for the new Audi Q5, with 218 horsepower. An SUV, but not a Paki car. Bandit car. Left the Volvo V70 patrol car in the dust. A car that showed you were someone. Showed her, she of the new house in Høyenhall, that you were someone. Not a nobody.

  Keeping the status quo. That was the focus now. We’ve achieved definite gains, Mikael had said at the general meeting on Monday. Which meant: Make sure no one new gets his oar in. “We can always wish there were even fewer drugs on the streets. But having achieved so much in such a short time there is always the danger of a relapse. Remember Hitler and Moscow. We shouldn’t bite off more than we can chew.”

  Officer Berntsen knew in rough terms what that meant. Long days with your feet on the desk.

  Sometimes he longed to be back at Kripos. Murder was not like narcotics—it wasn’t politics, just solving a case, period. But Mikael Bellman himself had insisted that Truls accompany him from Bryn to Police HQ, said he needed allies down there in enemy territory, someone he could trust, someone who could cover his flank if he was attacked. Said it without saying it: the way Mikael had covered Truls’s flank. As in the recent case of the boy with whom Truls had been a bit heavy-handed during questioning and who—so terribly unfortunate—had received an injury to the face. Mikael had given Truls a chewing out, of course, said he hated police violence, didn’t want to see it in his department, said that now, alas, it was his responsibility as boss to report Truls to the prosecutor, then she would assess whether it should go further to Internal Affairs. But the boy’s eyesight had returned to almost normal, Mikael had dealt with the boy’s lawyer, the drug-possession charge had been dropped, and nothing happened after that.

  The same as nothing happened here.

  Long days with feet on the desk.

  And that was where Truls was about to put them—as he did at least ten times a day—when he looked out onto Botsparken and the old linden tree in the middle of the avenue leading up to the prison.

  It had been put up.

  The red poster.

  He felt his skin tingle, his pulse rise. And his mood.

  In a flash he was up, his jacket was on and his coffee was abandoned.

  GAMLEBYEN CHURCH WAS a brisk eight-minute walk from Police HQ. Truls Berntsen walked down Oslo Gate to Minneparken, then left over Dyvekes Bridge, and he was in the heart of Oslo, where the town had originated. The church was unadorned to the point of appearing poor, without any of the trite ornaments on the new Romantic church by Police HQ. But Gamlebyen Church had a more exciting history. At least if half of what his grandmother had told him during his childhood in Manglerud was true. The Berntsen family had moved from a dilapidated downtown block to the satellite town of Manglerud when it was constructed at the end of the 1950s. But, strangely enough, it was they—the genuine Oslo family with Berntsen workers spanning three generations—who felt like immigrants. For most people in the satellite towns were farmers or people who came to town from far away to create a new life. And when Truls’s father got drunk in the seventies and the eighties and sat in their flat shouting at everyone and everything, Truls fled to his best—and only—friend, Mikael. Or down to his grandmother in Gamlebyen. She had told him that Gamlebyen Church had been built on top of a thirteenth-century monastery, inside of which the monks had locked themselves away from the Black Death to pray, though people said it was to escape their Christian duty to tend the contagion carriers. When, after eight months without a sign of life, the chancellor broke down the doors of the monastery, rats were feasting on the monks’ rotting bodies.

  His grandmother’s favorite bedtime story was about when a lunatic asylum—known locally as “The Madhouse”—was built on the same site, and some of the inmates complained that hooded men were walking the corridors at night. And that when one of the hoods was ripped off, a pale face was seen, with rat bites and empty eye sockets. But the story Truls liked best was the one about Askild Øregod, Askild Good Ears. He lived and died more than a hundred years ago, at the time Kristiania, as Oslo was known then, became a proper town, and a church had long existed on the site. It was said that his ghost walked the cemetery, adjacent streets, the harbor district and Kvadraturen. But never farther, because he had only one leg and needed to get back to his grave before light, his grandmother said. Askild Øregod had lost his leg under the wheel of a fire wagon when he was three, but Truls’s grandmother said the fact that they gave him a nickname based on his large ears instead was an example of east Oslo humor. They were hard times, and for a child with one leg the choice of occupation was fairly obvious. So Askild Øregod begged and became a familiar sight hobbling through the burgeoning town, always friendly and always ready for a chat, particularly with the unemployed who sat in pubs during the day. Yet sometimes they suddenly had money in their hands. Then the odd coin often came Askild’s way as well. But occasionally Askild needed a bit more, and then he would tell the police which of them had been extra-generous of late. And who, well into the fourth glass, and—unsuspecting of the harmless beggar on the periphery—told others that they had been offered the chance to rob the goldsmith on Karl Johans Gate, or a timber merchant in Drammen. Rumors began to spread that Askild’s ears were indeed good, and after a gang of robbers in Kampen were arrested, Askild disappeared. He was never seen again, but one winter’s morning, on the steps of Gamlebyen Church, a crutch and two severed ears appeared. Askild had been buried somewhere in the graveyard, but since no priest had pronounced his blessing, his spirit still walked abroad. And after the onset of night, in Kvadraturen or around the church, you could bump into a hobbling man, with his cap pulled well over his head, begging for two øre. And then it was bad luck not to give the beggar a coin.

  That was what his grandmother had told him. Nevertheless, Truls Berntsen ignored the lean beggar with the foreign coat and tanned skin sitting by the cemetery gate, strode down the gravel between the gravestones, counting, turned left when he got to seven, to the right when he got to three and stopped by the fourth gravestone.

  The name carved into the gravestone meant nothing to him. A. C. RUD. He had died as Norway gained its independence in 1905, only twenty-nine years old, but apart from the name and the dates there was no text, no imperative to rest in peace, nor any other winged words. Perhaps because the coarse gravestone was so small. But the blank, rough surface of the stone meant it was perfect for chalking messages, which must have been why they chose it.

  LTZHUSCRDTO RNBU

  Truls deciphered the text, using the simple code they had developed so that casual passersby wouldn’t understand. He began at the end, and read the letters in pairs, moving backward along the line until he reached the final three letters.

  BURN TORD SCHULTZ

  Truls Berntsen didn’t write it down. Didn’t need to. He had a good memory for names that brought him closer to the leather seats in an Audi Q5 2.0 six-speed manual. He used his jacket sleeve to erase the letters.

  The beggar looked up as Truls passed on his way out. Brown doggy eyes. There was probably a band of beggars and a big fat car waiting somewhere. Mercedes—wasn’t that what they liked? The church bell rang. According to the price list, a Q5 cost 666,000 kroner. If there was a hidden message in those figures, it went way over Truls Berntsen’s head.

  “YOU LOOK GOOD,” Beate said as she inserted the key into the lock. “Got a new finger, as well.”

  “Made in Hong Kong,” Harry said, rubbing the short titanium stump.

  He observed the small, pale woman as she unlocked the door. The short, thin blond hair held in a band. Her skin so fragile and transparent that he could see the fine network of veins in her temple. She reminded him of the hairless mice they used in experiments for cancer research.

  “Since you wrote that Oleg was living at the crime scene I thought his keys would give me access.”

  “That lock was probably destroyed ages ago,” Beate said, pushing the door open. “You just walked str
aight in. We had this lock put in so that none of the addicts would come back and contaminate the scene.”

  Harry nodded. It was typical of crack dens. No point having a lock; they were destroyed immediately. First of all, junkies broke into places where they knew the occupants might have drugs. Second, even those who lived there stole from one another.

  Beate pulled the tape to the side, and Harry squeezed in. Clothes and plastic bags hung from hooks in the hall. Harry peered into one of the bags. Paper towel rolls, empty beer cans, a wet bloodstained T-shirt, bits of aluminum foil, a cigarette packet. Against one wall was a stack of Grandiosa boxes, a leaning tower of pizza that rose halfway to the ceiling. Four identical white coat racks. Harry was puzzled until he realized they were probably stolen goods they had been unable to convert into cash. He remembered that in junkie flats they were forever coming across things they thought they could sell at some point. In one place they had found sixty hopelessly out-of-date cell phones in a bag, in another a partly dismantled moped parked in the kitchen.

  Harry stepped into the sitting room. It smelled of a mixture of sweat, beer-soaked wood, wet ash and something sweet that Harry was unable to identify. The room had no furniture in any conventional sense. Four mattresses lay on the floor as if around a campfire. From one protruded a piece of wire bent at ninety degrees, shaped into a Y at the end. The square of wood floor between the mattresses was black with scorch marks around an empty ashtray. Harry assumed the SOC unit had emptied it.

  “Gusto was by the kitchen wall, here,” Beate said. She had stopped in the doorway between the sitting room and kitchen, and was pointing.

  Instead of going into the kitchen Harry stayed by the door and looked around. This was a habit. Not the habit of forensics officers, who worked the scene from the outside, started the fine-combing on the periphery and then made their way bit by bit toward the body. Nor was it the habit of a uniformed officer or a patrol car cop, the first police on the scene, who were aware they might contaminate the evidence with their own prints or, worse, destroy the ones there were. Beate’s people had done what had to be done ages ago. This was the habit of the investigating detective, who knows he has only one chance to let his sensory impressions, the almost imperceptible details, do their own talking, leave their prints before the cement sets. It had to happen now, before the analytical part of the brain resumed its functioning, the part that demanded fully formulated facts. Harry used to define intuition as simple, logical conclusions drawn from normal impressions that the brain was unable, or too slow, to convert into something comprehensible.