by Jo Nesbo
The light shone on the grey surface of ice. Through her reading glasses she glimpsed something at the other end of the hall, so she removed them. Slowly things came into focus. A person? She wanted to walk across the ice, but hesitated. Asta Johannsen was not at all the jittery type but she feared that one day she would break her thigh on the ice and have to stay there until the fox-hunters found her. She gripped one of the brooms leaning against the walls, used it as a walking stick and, taking tiny steps, teetered across the ice.
The lifeless man lay at the end of the sheet with his head in the centre of the rings. The blue-white gleam from the neon tubes fell on the face stiffened in a grimace. There was something familiar about his face. Was he a celebrity? The glazed eyes seemed to be looking for something behind her, beyond what was here. The cramped right hand held an empty plastic syringe containing a residue of red contents.
Asta Johannsen calmly concluded that there was nothing she could do for him and concentrated on making her way back over the ice to the nearest telephone.
After she had called the police and they had come, she went home and drank her morning coffee.
It was only when she picked up the Aftenposten newspaper that she realised who it was she had found.
Harry was sitting in a crouch examining Idar Vetlesen’s boots.
‘What does our pathologist say about the time of death?’ he asked Bjørn Holm, who was standing beside him in a denim jacket lined with white teddy-bear fur. His snakeskin boots made almost no noise as he stamped them on the ice. Barely an hour had passed since Asta Johannsen had made her call, but the reporters were already assembled outside the red police cordon by the curling club.
‘He says it’s difficult to tell,’ Holm said. ‘He can only guess how fast the temperature of a body lying on ice in a much warmer room might fall.’
‘But he has made a guess?’
‘Somewhere between five and seven yesterday evening.’
‘Mm. Before the TV news announcement about him. You saw the lock, did you?’
Holm nodded. ‘Standard Yale. It was locked when the cleaning lady arrived. I saw you looking at the boots. I’ve checked the prints. I’m pretty sure they’re identical to the prints we’ve got from Sollihøgda.’
Harry studied the pattern on the sole. ‘So you think this is our man, do you?’
‘I would reckon so, yes.’
Harry nodded, deep in thought. ‘Do you know if Vetlesen was left-handed?’
‘Would doubt it. As you can see, he’s holding the syringe in his right hand.’
Harry nodded. ‘So he is. Check anyway.’
Harry had never really managed to experience a sense of pleasure when, one day, cases he was working on reached a conclusion, were solved, were over. For as long as the case was under investigation this was his aim, but once it was achieved, he only knew that he hadn’t arrived at his journey’s end. Or that this was not the end he had imagined. Or that it had shifted, he had changed or Christ knows what. The thing was, he felt empty, success did not taste as promised, catching the guilty party always came loaded with the question: So what?
It was seven in the evening, witnesses had been questioned, forensic evidence collected, a press conference held and in the Crime Squad corridors there was a burgeoning party atmosphere. Hagen had ordered cakes and beer and summoned Lepsvik’s and Harry’s teams to some self-congratulation in K1.
Harry sat in a chair eyeing a huge piece of cake someone had placed in his lap. He listened to Hagen speaking, the laughter and the applause. Someone nudged him in the back as they passed, but most left him in peace. There a buzz of conversation around him.
‘The bastard was a bad loser. Chickened out when he knew we had him.’
‘Cheated us.’
‘Us? Do you mean that you Lepsvik lot—?’
‘If we’d caught him alive, the court would have declared him insane and –’
‘We should be happy. After all, we didn’t have any conclusive evidence, just circumstantial.’
Espen Lepsvik’s voice boomed from the other side of the room. ‘OK, folks, shut up! A motion has been put forward, and passed, that we meet at Fenris Bar at eight to get seriously drunk. And that’s an order. OK?’
Loud cheering.
Harry put the cake down and was standing up when he felt a light hand on his shoulder. It was Holm.
‘I checked. It’s as I said – Vetlesen was right-handed.’
Carbon dioxide fizzed from a beer being opened, and an already tipsy Skarre put his arm around Holm’s shoulder.
‘They say that life expectancy is higher for right-handed people than for left-handed. Didn’t apply to Vetlesen, though, did it? Ha ha ha!’
Skarre left to share his nugget of wisdom with others, and Holm asked Harry: ‘Are you off?’
‘Going for a walk. Might see you at Fenris.’
Harry had almost reached the door when Hagen grabbed his arm.
‘Nice if no one left quite yet,’ he said quietly. ‘The Chief Constable said he would come down and say a few words.’
Harry looked at Hagen and realised that there must have been something in his eyes because Hagen let go of his arm as though he had been burned.
‘Just going to the toilet,’ Harry said.
Hagen gave a quick smile and nodded.
Harry went to his office, got his jacket and walked slowly downstairs, out of Police HQ and down to Grønlandsleiret. There were a few flakes of snow in the air, lights twinkled on Ekeberg Ridge, a siren rose and fell like the distant song of a whale. Two Pakistanis were having a good-natured argument outside Harry’s local shops as the snow settled on their oranges, and a swaying drunk was singing a sea shanty in Grønlands torg. Harry could sense the creatures of the night sniffing the air, wondering if it was safe to come out. God, how he loved this town.
‘You in here?’
Eli Kvale looked in surprise at her son Trygve, who was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. The radio was droning away in the background.
She was going to ask why he didn’t sit in the living room with his father, but it struck her that it should be equally natural for him to want to talk to her. Except that it wasn’t. She poured herself a cup of tea, sat down and watched him in silence. He was so good-looking. She had always believed she would find him ugly, but she had been wrong.
The voice on the radio said men were no longer the cause of women’s inability to get into Norwegian boardrooms; companies were struggling to reach the legally determined quota of women because the majority seemed to have a chronic aversion to posts where they might be exposed to criticism, find themselves professionally challenged or have no one to hide behind.
‘They’re like kids who cry and cry to have a pistachio, but spit it out when they finally get it,’ the voice said. ‘Bloody irritating to see. It’s about time women took some responsibility and showed some guts.’
Yes, thought Eli. It is about time.
‘Someone came up to me in ICA today,’ Trygve said.
‘Oh yes?’ Eli said, her heart in her throat.
‘Asked me if I was your son, yours and Dad’s.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Eli said softly, all too softly, feeling giddy. ‘And what did you answer?’
‘What did I answer?’ Trygve looked up from his magazine. ‘I answered yes, of course.’
‘And who was the man who asked?’
‘What’s the matter, Mum?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re so pale.’
‘Nothing, my love. Who was he?’
Trygve went back to his magazine. ‘I didn’t say it was a man, did I?’
Eli got to her feet, turned down the radio as a woman’s voice was thanking the Minister of Industry and Arve Støp for the debate. She stared into the dark as a couple of snowflakes swirled hither and thither, aimless, unaffected by gravity and their own will apparently. They would land wherever chance dictated. And then they would melt and vanish. There
was some comfort in that.
She coughed.
‘What?’ Trygve said.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’
Harry drifted aimlessly, without any will of his own, through the streets of Oslo. It was only when he was standing outside Hotel Leon that he realised that was where he had been heading. The prostitutes and the dope dealers had already taken up their positions in the neighbouring streets. It was rush hour. Customers preferred to deal in sex and dope before midnight.
Harry walked into reception and saw from Børre Hansen’s horrified expression that he had been recognised.
‘We had a deal!’ squealed the hotel owner, wiping the sweat from his brow.
Harry wondered why men who lived off others’ urges always seemed to wear this glistening film of sweat, like a veneer of false shame at their unscrupulousness.
‘Give me the key to the doctor’s room,’ Harry said. ‘He’s not coming tonight.’
Three of the hotel-room walls had seventies wallpaper with psychedelic patterns of brown and orange while the main bathroom wall was painted black and shot through with grey cracks and blotches where the plaster had fallen off. The double bed sagged in the middle. The needle-felt carpet was hard. Water and semen repellent, Harry assumed. He removed a threadbare hand towel from the chair at the foot of the bed and sat down. Listened to the rumbles of expectant excitement in the town and sensed that the dogs were back. They snapped and barked, pulled at the iron chains, shouting: just one drink, just a shot so that we can leave you in peace and lie at your feet. Harry was not in a laughing mood, but laughed anyway. Demons had to be exorcised, and pain drowned. He lit a cigarette. The smoke curled up to the rice-paper lamp.
What demons had Idar Vetlesen been grappling with? Had he brought them here, or was this the sanctuary, the refuge? Perhaps he had discovered some answers, but not all of them. Never all of them. Like whether madness and evil are two different entities, or whether when we no longer understand the purpose of destruction we simply term it madness. We’re capable of understanding that someone has to drop an atomic bomb on a town of innocent civilians, but not that others have to cut up prostitutes who spread disease and moral depravity in the slums of London. Hence we call the former realism and the latter madness.
Christ, how he needed a drink. Just one to take the edge off the pain, off this day, off this night.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Yes,’ Harry yelled and started at the sound of his own anger.
The door opened and a black face came into view. Harry looked her over. Beneath the beautiful, strong head and neck she wore a short jacket, so short that the rolls of fat bulging the over top of her tight trousers could be seen.
‘Doctor?’ she asked in English. The stress on the second syllable gave the word a French timbre.
He shook his head. She looked at him. Then the door was closed and she was gone.
A couple of seconds passed before Harry got off his chair and went to the door. The woman had reached the end of the corridor.
‘Please!’ Harry shouted in English. ‘Please, come back.’
She stopped and regarded him warily.
‘Two hundred kroner,’ she said. Stress on the last syllable.
Harry nodded.
She sat on the bed and listened to his questions, perplexed. About Doctor, this evil man. About the orgies with several women. About the children he wanted them to bring. And with every new question she shook her head in incomprehension. In the end, she asked if he was from the police.
Harry nodded.
Her eyebrows puckered. ‘Why you ask these questions? Where is Doctor?’
‘Doctor killed people,’ Harry said.
She studied him suspiciously. ‘Not true,’ she said at length.
‘Why not?’
‘Because Doctor is a nice man. He helps us.’
Harry asked how Doctor helped them. And now he was the one to sit and listen as the black woman told him that every Monday and Thursday Doctor sat in this room with his bag, talked to them, sent them to the toilet to provide urine samples, took blood samples and tested them for venereal diseases. He gave them pills and treatment if they had any of the usual sexual diseases. And the address of the hospital if they had the other one, the Plague. If there was anything else wrong with them, he gave them pills for that, too. He never took payment, and the only thing they had to do was promise that they wouldn’t tell anyone apart from their colleagues on the street. Some of the girls had brought their children when they were ill, but the hotel owner had stopped them.
Harry smoked a cigarette as he listened. Was this Vetlesen’s indulgence? The counterpoint to evil, the necessary balance. Or did it just accentuate the evil, set it into relief? Dr Mengele was said to have been very fond of children.
His tongue kept growing in his mouth; it would suffocate him if he didn’t have a drink soon.
The woman had stopped talking. She was fingering the two-hundred-krone note.
‘Will Doctor come back?’ she asked finally.
Harry opened his mouth to answer her, but his tongue was in the way. His mobile phone rang and he took the call.
‘Hole speaking.’
‘Harry? This is Oda Paulsen. Do you remember me?’
He didn’t remember her; anyway, she sounded too young.
‘From NRK,’ she said. ‘I invited you to Bosse last time.
The researcher. The honeytrap.
‘We were wondering whether you would like to join us again, tomorrow. We’d like to hear about this Snowman triumph. Yes, we know he’s dead, but nevertheless. About what goes through the head of this sort of person. If he can be called that –’
‘No,’ Harry said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t want to join you.’
‘It’s Bosse,’ Oda Paulsen said with genuine bewilderment in her voice. ‘On NRK TV.’
‘No.’
‘But listen, Harry, wouldn’t it be interesting to talk—?’
Harry threw the mobile phone at the black wall. A chip of plaster fell off.
Harry put his head in his hands, trying to hold it together so that it didn’t explode. He had to drink something. Anything. When he looked up again, he was alone in the room.
Perhaps it might have been avoided if Fenris Bar had not served alcohol. If Jim Beam had not been on the shelf behind the barman screaming with its hoarse whiskey-voice about anaesthesia and amnesty: ‘Harry! Come here, let’s reminisce about old times. About those awful ghosts we have dispelled, about the nights we could sleep.’
On the other hand, perhaps it might not.
Harry hardly registered his colleagues, and they took no notice of him. When he had entered the garish bar with the plush red Danish ferry interior, they were already well on the way. They were hanging off each other’s shoulders, shouting and breathing alcohol over each other, singing along with Stevie Wonder who claimed he had just called to say he loved you. They looked and sounded, in short, like a football team who had won the cup. And as Stevie Wonder finished by stating that his declaration of love came from the bottom of his heart, Harry’s third drink was placed in front of him on the bar.
The first drink had numbed everything, he had been unable to breathe and mused that was how taking carnadrioxide must feel. The second had almost made his stomach turn. But his body had got over the first shock and known that it had received what it had been demanding for so long. And now it was responding with a murmur of well-being. The heat washed through him. This was music for the soul.
‘Are you drinking?’
Katrine was standing by his side.
‘This is the last,’ Harry said, his tongue no longer feeling thick, but smooth and supple. Alcohol just improved his articulation. And people hardly noticed that he was drunk, up to a certain point. That was why he still had a job.
‘It’s not the last,’ Katrine said. ‘It’s the first.’
‘That’
s one of those AA precepts.’ Harry looked up at her. The intense blue eyes, the thin nostrils, the full lips. God, she looked so wonderful. ‘Are you an alcoholic, Katrine Bratt?’
‘I had a father who was.’
‘Mm. Was that why you didn’t want to visit them in Bergen?’
‘You avoid visiting people because they have an illness?’
‘I don’t know. You may have had an unhappy childhood because of him or something like that.’
‘He couldn’t have made me unhappy. I was born like that.’
‘Unhappy?’
‘Maybe. What about you?’
Harry hunched his shoulders. ‘Goes without saying.’
Katrine sipped her drink, a shiny number. Vodka shiny, not gin grey, he established.
‘And what’s your unhappiness down to, Harry?’
The words came out before he had time to think. ‘Loving someone who loves me.’
Katrine laughed. ‘Poor thing. Did you have a harmonious start to life and a cheery disposition which was later destroyed? Or was your path marked out for you?’
Harry stared at the golden-brown liquid in his glass. ‘Sometimes I wonder. But not often. I try to think about other things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Other things.’
‘Do you sometimes think about me?’
Someone bumped into her and she stepped closer. Her perfume intermingled with the aroma of Jim Beam.
‘Never,’ he said, grabbing his glass and knocking back the contents. He stared ahead, into the mirror behind the bottles where he saw Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole standing much too close to each other. She leaned forward.
‘Harry, you’re lying.’
He turned to her. Her eyes seemed to be smouldering, yellow and blurred, like the fog lights on an approaching car. Her nostrils were flared, and she was breathing hard. There was a smell, as if she took lime in her vodka.