by Jo Nesbo
‘I beg your pardon if I’ve misunderstood you,’ she said, although her facial expression suggested she considered that highly improbable. ‘By the way, Martin Cooper did not ring his wife; he rang his rival, Joel Engel at Bell Laboratories. Do you think that was to teach him a thing or two, Skarre? Or to brag?’
Skarre watched her leave, watched her suit rubbing against her backside as she wiggled towards the canteen door. Shit, the woman was off her trolley! He felt like getting up and throwing something at her. But he knew he would miss. Besides, he didn’t want to move; he was afraid his erection was still visible.
Harry felt his lungs pressing against the inside of his ribs. His breathing was beginning to settle. But not his heart, which was running like a hare in his chest. His training clothes were heavy with sweat as he stood at the edge of the forest by Ekeberg restaurant. The functionalist restaurant built between the wars had once been Oslo’s pride and joy, towering above the town on the precipitous ridge face in the east. But customers had stopped taking the long trip up from the city centre to the forest, the place had become unprofitable, it had declined and become a peeling shack for superannuated dance fiends, middle-aged drinkers and lonely souls on the lookout for other lonely souls. In the end, they had closed the restaurant. Harry had always liked driving up here above the town’s layer of yellow exhaust fumes and running along the network of paths on the steep terrain that provided a challenge and caused the lactic acid to burn in his muscles. He had liked to stop by the crumbling beauty of a restaurant, sitting on the rain-wet, overgrown terrace overlooking the town that had once been his, but which was now emotionally bankrupt, all assets transferred, an ex-lover with transferred affections.
The town lay below in a hollow with ridges on all sides and a sole retreat via the fjord. Geologists said that Oslo was a dead volcanic crater. And on evenings like this Harry could imagine that the town’s lights were perforations in the earth’s surface with the glowing lava shining through. From Holmenkollen ski jump, which lay like an illuminated white comma on the ridge on the opposite side of the town, he tried to work out where Rakel’s house was.
He thought about the letter. And the telephone call he had just received from Skarre about the signals transmitted by Birte’s missing phone. His heart was beating slower now, pumping blood and transmitting calm, regular signals to the brain that there was still life. Like a mobile phone to a base station. Heart, Harry thought. Signal. The letter. It was a sick thought. So why hadn’t he already dismissed it? Why was he already calculating how long it would take him to run to the car, drive to Hoff and check which of them was sicker?
Rakel stood by the kitchen window looking across her property to the spruce trees blocking her view of the neighbours. At a local residents’ meeting she had suggested that some of the trees might be cut down to let in more light, but the unspoken absence of enthusiasm that greeted her was so obvious that she didn’t even ask for a vote. The spruce trees prevented people from looking in and that was how they liked it on Holmenkollen Ridge. The snow still lay on the ground high above the town where BMWs and Volvos gently threaded their way up through the bends on their way home to electric garage doors and dinners on tables, prepared by fitness-centre-slim housewives taking their career breaks with just a little help from nannies.
Even through the solid floors of the wooden house she had inherited from her father, Rakel could hear the music from Oleg’s room on the first floor. Led Zeppelin and the Who. When she had been eleven years old, it would have been unthinkable to listen to music from her parents’ generation. But Oleg had been given these CDs by Harry and he played them with genuine love.
She thought about how thin Harry had become, how he had shrunk. Just like her memory of him. It was almost frightening how someone you have been intimate with can fade and vanish. Or perhaps that was why; you had been so close to each other that afterwards, when you no longer were, it seemed unreal, like a dream you soon forget because it had happened only in your head. Perhaps that was why it had been a shock to see him again. To embrace him, to smell his aroma, to hear his voice, not on the telephone, but from a mouth with those strangely soft lips in that hard and ever more lined face of his. To look into those blue eyes with the gleam that varied in intensity as he talked. Just like before.
Yet she was glad it was over, that she had put it behind her. That this man had become a person with whom she would not share her future, a person who would not bring his grubby reality into their lives.
She was better now. Much better. She looked at her watch. He would be here soon. For, unlike Harry, he tended to be on time.
Mathias had suddenly stood there one day. At a garden party under the auspices of the Holmenkollen Residents’ Association. He didn’t even live in the neighbourhood, he had been invited by friends, and he and Rakel had sat talking all evening. Mostly about her in fact. And he had listened attentively, a bit like doctors do, she had thought. But then he had rung her two days later and asked her whether she would like to see an exhibition at the Henie-Onstad Art Centre in Høvikodden. Oleg was welcome to join them, because there was a children’s exhibition, too. The weather had been terrible, the art mediocre and Oleg fractious. But Mathias had managed to lift the mood with his good humour and acid comments about the artist’s talent. And afterwards he had driven them home, apologised for his idea and promised with a smile never to take them anywhere ever again. Unless they asked him, of course. After that Mathias had gone to Botswana for a week. And had rung her the evening he came home, to ask if he could meet her again.
She heard the sound of a car changing down to tackle the steep drive. He drove a Honda Accord of older vintage. She didn’t know why, but she liked the idea of that. He parked in front of the garage, never inside. And she liked that, too. She liked the fact that he brought a change of underwear and a toilet bag in a holdall he then took away with him the next morning. She liked him asking her when she wanted to see him again and taking nothing for granted. That might change now, of course, but she was ready for it.
He stepped out of the car. He was tall, almost as tall as Harry, and smiled to the kitchen window with his open, boyish face, even though he must have been dead on his feet after the inhumanly long shift. Yes, she was ready for it. For a man who was present, who loved her and prioritised their little trio above everything else. She heard a key being turned in the front door. The key she had given him the previous week. Mathias had looked like one big question mark at first, like a child who had just received a ticket to a chocolate factory.
The door opened, he was inside and she was in his arms. She thought even his woollen coat smelt good. The material was soft and autumn-cold against her cheek, but the secure warmth inside was already radiating out to her body.
‘What is it?’ he laughed in her hair.
‘I’ve been waiting for this for so long,’ she whispered.
She closed her eyes, and they stood like that for a while.
She released him and looked up into his smiling face. He was a good-looking man. Better looking than Harry.
He freed himself, unbuttoned his coat, hung it up and walked over to the slops sink where he washed his hands. He always did that when he came from the Anatomy Department where they handled real bodies during the lectures. As indeed Harry always had done when he came straight from murder cases. Mathias opened the cupboard under the sink, emptied potatoes from the bag into the kitchen sink and turned on the tap.
‘How was your day, darling?’
She thought that most men would have asked about the previous night; after all, he knew she had met Harry. And she liked him for that, too. She talked while looking out of the window. Her gaze ran across the spruce trees to the town beneath them where lights had started to twinkle. He was down there somewhere now. On a hopeless hunt for something he had never found and never would. She felt sorry for him. Sympathy was all that was left. In truth, there had been a moment last night when they were both silent and their eyes ha
d held each other, unable to free themselves straight away. It had felt like an electric shock, but it had been over in an instant. Completely over. No lasting magic. She had made her decision. She stood behind Mathias, put her arms around him and rested her head on his broad back.
She could feel muscles and sinews at work under his shirt as he peeled the potatoes and put them in the saucepan.
‘We could do with a couple more,’ he said.
She became aware of a movement by the kitchen door and turned.
Oleg was standing there looking at them.
‘Could you fetch some more potatoes from the cellar?’ she said and saw Oleg’s dark eyes darken.
Mathias turned. Oleg was still there.
‘I can go,’ Mathias said, taking the empty bucket from under the sink.
‘No,’ said Oleg, stepping forward two paces. ‘I’ll go.’
He took the bucket from Mathias, turned and went out of the door.
‘What was that about?’ Mathias asked.
‘He’s just a bit frightened of the dark,’ Rakel sighed.
‘I thought so, but why did he go anyway?’
‘Because Harry said he should.’
‘Should do what?’
Rakel shook her head. ‘The things he’s frightened of. And doesn’t want to be frightened of. When Harry was here, he used to send Oleg down to the cellar all the time.’
Mathias frowned.
Rakel put on a sad smile. ‘Harry’s not exactly a child psychiatrist. And Oleg wouldn’t listen to me if Harry had given his opinion first. On the other hand, there are no monsters down there.’
Mathias turned a knob on the stove and said in a low voice, ‘How can you be so sure of that?’
‘Mathias?’ Rakel laughed. ‘Were you afraid of the dark?’
‘Who’s talking about was?’ Mathias grinned mischievously.
Yes, she liked him. This was better. A better life. She liked him, yes she did, she did like him.
Harry pulled up in front of the Beckers’ house. He sat in the car staring at the yellow light from the windows spilling onto the garden. The snowman had shrunk to a dwarf. But its shadow still extended to the trees and right over to the picket fence.
Harry got out of the car. The lament of the iron gate made him wince. He knew he ought to have rung first; a garden was as much private property as a house was. But he had neither the patience nor the inclination to discuss anything with Professor Becker.
The wet ground was springy. He crouched down. The light reflected off the snowman as if it were matt glass. The thaw during the day had made the tiny snow crystals hook together into larger crystals, but now the temperature had fallen again, the water vapour had condensed and frozen onto other crystals. The result was that the snow which had been so fine, white and light this morning was now coarse, greyish-white and packed.
Harry raised his right hand. Clenched his fist. And punched.
The snowman’s crushed head rolled off its shoulders and down onto the brown grass.
Harry punched again, this time from above and down through the neck. His fingers formed a claw and bored their way through the snow and found what they were searching for.
He pulled out his hand and held it up triumphantly in front of the snowman, the way Bruce Lee did, to show his adversary the heart he had just torn out of his chest.
It was a red-and-silver Nokia mobile phone. It was still switched on.
But the feeling of triumph had faded. For he already knew that this was not a breakthrough in the investigation, just a minor scene in a puppet show with someone else pulling invisible strings. It had been too simple. They had been meant to find it.
Harry walked to the front door and rang the bell. Filip Becker opened up. His hair was dishevelled and his tie askew. He blinked hard several times as though he had been sleeping.
‘Yes,’ he answered to Harry’s question. ‘That’s the kind of phone she’s got.’
‘Could I ask you to ring her number?’
Filip Becker disappeared into the house and Harry waited. Suddenly Jonas poked his face out of the porch doorway. Harry was about to say ‘Hi’, but at that moment the red phone began to play a children’s tune: ‘Blåmann, blåmann, bukken min.’ And Harry remembered the next line from his school songbook: Tenk på vesle gutten din. Think about your little boy.
And he saw Jonas’s face light up. Saw the inexorable process of reasoning in the boy’s brain, the immediate bewilderment and then the joy of hearing his mother’s ringtone fade into intense, naked fear. Harry swallowed. It was a fear he knew all too well.
As Harry let himself into his flat he could smell the plaster and the sawdust. The plasterboard forming the corridor walls had been taken down and lay piled up on the floor. There were some light stains on the brick wall behind. Harry ran a finger over the white coating that had drifted onto the parquet floor. He put a fingertip into his mouth.
It tasted of salt. Did mould taste like that? Or was it just salt bloom, the structure sweating? Harry flicked a lighter and leaned over to the wall. Nothing to smell, nothing to see.
When he had gone to bed and was lying staring into the room’s hermetically sealed blackness, he thought about Jonas. And his own mother. About the smell of illness and her face slowly fading into the pillow’s whiteness. For days and weeks he had played with Sis, and Dad had gone quiet and everyone had tried to act as if nothing was happening. He thought he could hear a faint rustle outside in the hall. As if the invisible puppet strings were multiplying, lengthening and sneaking around as they consumed the darkness and formed a faint shimmering light which quivered and shook.
7
DAY 3.
Hidden Statistics.
THE FRAIL MORNING LIGHT SEEPED THROUGH THE BLINDS in the POB’S office, coating the two men’s faces in grey. POB Hagen was listening to Harry with a pensive furrow over bushy black eyebrows that met in the middle. On the huge desk stood a small plinth bearing a white knuckle bone which, according to the inscription, had belonged to the Japanese battalion commander, Yoshito Yasuda. In his years at the military academy, Hagen had lectured about this little finger that Yasuda had cut off in desperation in front of his men during the retreat from Burma in 1944. It was just a year since Hagen had been brought back to his old employer, the police, to head Crime Squad, and, as a lot of water had passed under the bridge in the meantime, he listened with relative patience to his veteran inspector holding forth on the theme of ‘missing persons’.
‘In Oslo alone, over six hundred people are reported missing every year. After a couple of hours only a handful of these are not found. As good as none remain missing for more than a couple of days.’
Hagen stroked a finger over the hairs on the bridge of his nose binding his eyebrows together. He had to prepare for the budget meeting in the Chief Constable’s office. The theme was cutbacks.
‘Most missing persons are escapees from mental institutions or elderly people suffering from dementia,’ Harry continued. ‘But even the relatively compos mentis who have run off to Copenhagen or committed suicide are found. Their names appear on passenger lists, they withdraw cash from an ATM or wash up on a beach.’
‘What’s your point?’ Gunnar Hagen said, looking at his watch.
‘This,’ Harry said, tossing a yellow file that landed on the POB’s desk with a smack.
Hagen leaned forward and flicked through the stapled documents. ‘My goodness, Harry. You’re not normally the report-writing type.’
‘This is Skarre’s work,’ Harry said, wasting no words. ‘But the conclusion is mine, and I’ll give it to you now, orally.’
‘Make it brief, please.’
Harry stared down at his hands, which he had placed in his lap. His long legs were stretched out in front of the chair. He took a deep breath. He knew that when he had said this out loud, there was no going back.
‘Too many people have disappeared,’ Harry said.
The right half of Hagen’s eyebrow
shot into the air. ‘Explain.’
‘You’ll find it on page 6. A list of missing women aged between twenty-five and fifty from 1994 until today. Women who in the last ten years have never been found. I’ve been talking to the Missing Persons Unit, and they agree. It’s simply too many.’
‘Too many in relation to what?’
‘In relation to before. In relation to Denmark and Sweden. And in relation to other demographic groups. Married and cohabiting women are hugely over-represented.’
‘Women are more independent than they used to be,’ Hagen said. ‘Some go their own way, break with the family, go abroad with a man maybe. That has some bearing on statistics. So?’
‘They’ve become more independent in Denmark and Sweden, too. But they find them again there.’
Hagen sighed. ‘If the figures are so divergent from the norm, as you claim, why has no one discovered this before?’
‘Because Skarre’s figures are valid for the whole country and usually the police only look at those missing in their own district. There is a national missing persons register at Kripos, however, detailing 1,800 names, but it’s for the last fifty years and includes shipwrecks and dis asters like the Alexander Kielland oil rig. The point is that no one has looked at countrywide patterns. Not until now.’
‘Fine, but our responsibility is not for the country, Harry. It’s for Oslo Police District.’ Hagen smacked both palms down to indicate that the audience was over.
‘The problem,’ Harry said, rubbing his chin, ‘is that it’s come to Oslo.’
‘What it?’
‘Last night I found Birte Becker’s mobile phone in a snowman. I don’t know quite what it is, boss. But I think we need to find out. Quick.’
‘These statistics are interesting,’ Hagen said, absent-mindedly taking Battalion Commander Yasuda’s little finger and pressing his thumb into it. ‘And I also appreciate that this latest disappearance is grounds for concern. But it’s not enough. So tell me: what was it that actually made you ask Skarre to write this report?’