Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8)

by Jo Nesbo

  Beate groaned aloud.

  ‘I promise there won’t be any trouble,’ Katrine hastened to add. ‘Listen, I’ll pop round to yours now, borrow the key, find the gum, cut off a tiny chunk, put everything back nicely and tomorrow morning the chunk’s tested at the Institute. If they ask, I’ll say it’s for another case. Yes? OK?’

  The head of Krimteknisk weighed up the pros and cons. It wasn’t hard. It wasn’t OK at all. She took a deep breath.

  ‘As Harry used to say,’ Katrine said. ‘Just get the ball, for Christ’s sake.’

  Rico Herrem lay in bed watching TV. It was five o’clock in the morning, but he had lost track of time and couldn’t sleep. The programme was a repeat of one he saw yesterday. A Komodo dragon was lolloping across a beach. The long lizard tongue flashed out, swept round and was retracted. It was following a water buffalo it had given an apparently harmless bite. Had been following it for several days. Rico had turned down the sound so that all that could be heard was the wheeze of the air-conditioning unit which couldn’t make the hotel room cold enough. Rico had already felt the sniffles coming on the flight. Classic. Air conditioning and summer clothes on the way to a hot country, and the holiday becomes a headache, a runny nose and a high temperature. But he had time; he didn’t have to go home for a long while. Why should he? He was in Pattaya, the paradise of all pervs and criminals on the run. Everything he wanted was here, outside his hotel door. Through the mosquito net by the window he could hear the traffic and voices gabbling away in a foreign language. Thai. He couldn’t understand a word. He didn’t need to. Because they were there for him, not vice versa. He had seen them when he was driven here from the airport. They lined up outside the go-go bars. The young. The very young. And further down the alleys, behind the trays they sold chewing gum from, the much too young. But they would still be there when he was back on his feet. He listened for waves breaking, even though he knew the cheap hotel he had moved into was a long way from the beach. But they were out there as well. Them and the scorching hot sun. And the drinks and the other farangs who were there on the same mission as him and could give him some tips about how to go about things. And about the Komodo dragon.

  Last night he had dreamt about Valentin again.

  Rico stretched out his hand for the bottle of water on the bedside table. It tasted of his own mouth, death and contagion.

  He had been given two-day-old Norwegian newspapers with the Western breakfast he’d hardly touched. There hadn’t been anything about Valentin being arrested yet. It wasn’t difficult to surmise why. Valentin wasn’t Valentin any more.

  Rico had wondered whether he should tell them. Ring, get hold of that policewoman, Katrine Bratt. Tell her he had changed. Rico had seen that down here you could get that kind of thing done for a few thousand Norwegian kroner at one of the private clinics. Ring Bratt, leave an anonymous message that Valentin had been seen near Fiskebutikken and that he’d had comprehensive plastic surgery. Without asking for anything in return. Just to help them catch him. To help him sleep at night without dreaming about him.

  The Komodo dragon had crouched a few metres from the waterhole where the water buffalo had settled down in the cooling mud, apparently unaffected by the three-metre-long, carnivorous monster just lying in wait.

  Rico could feel the nausea rising and swung his legs out of bed. His muscles ached. Jesus, this was full-blown flu.

  When he returned from the bathroom it was with bile acid still burning in his throat and two decisions made. He would visit one of those clinics and get himself some of that strong medicine they wouldn’t give you in Norway. The second was that when he had it and felt a bit better, he would ring Bratt. Give her a description. So that he could sleep.

  He turned up the volume with the remote control. An enthusiastic voice explained in English that it had long been thought that the Komodo dragon killed through the bacteria-infected spit that was injected into the victim’s bloodstream with a bite, but now it had been discovered that in fact the poison in the lizard’s glands stopped the victim’s blood from coagulating so it slowly bled to death from what seemed to be an innocent wound.

  Rico shivered. Closed his eyes to sleep. Rohypnol. The thought had occurred to him. That this wasn’t flu at all, but withdrawal symptoms. And Rohypnol was probably something they had on the room-service menu here in Pattaya. His eyes opened wide. He couldn’t breathe. For a moment in sheer, utter panic, Rico writhed around as if fighting an invisible attacker. It was just the same as at Fiskebutikken; there was no oxygen in the room! Then his lungs got what they wanted, and he fell back onto his bed.

  He stared at the door.

  It was locked.

  There was no one else here. No one. Just him.

  20

  KATRINE WALKED UP the hill under cover of night. A wan, anaemic moon hung low in the sky behind her, but Police HQ’s facade didn’t reflect any of the little light the moon cast, it swallowed it like a black hole. She glanced at the compact, professional wristwatch she had inherited from her father, a fallen policeman with the fitting nickname of Iron Rafto. A quarter past eleven.

  She tugged open the front door of Police HQ with its strange, staring porthole and hostile weight. As though the suspicion started right here.

  She waved in the direction of the duty officer, who sat hidden on the left, but could see her. And unlocked the door to the atrium. Walked past the unmanned reception desk and went over to the lift, which she took down to the lower ground floor. Exited and crossed the concrete floor in the meagre light, hearing her own footsteps as she listened for others.

  During the day the iron door to the Evidence Room opened on to a counter. She fished out the key Beate had given her, put it in the lock, twisted and opened. Stepped inside. Listened.

  Then she locked the door behind her.

  Switched on the light, lifted the hinged section of the counter and advanced into the darkness, which was so dense the torchlight seemed to need time to bore its way through, to find the rows of broad shelves filled with boxes made of frosted plastic through which you could only just make out the objects inside. The person in charge must have had an orderly mind because the boxes were lined up on the shelves with such precision that the short sides formed an unbroken surface. Katrine strode along reading the case numbers stuck to the boxes. They were numbered chronologically from the far left of the room inwards, where they took the place of evidence from time-restricted cases once the stored material was returned to the owners or destroyed.

  She had almost reached the end of the middle row when the torch beam fell on the box she was after. It was on the lowest shelf and scraped against the brick floor as she pulled it out. She whipped off the lid. The contents tallied with the report. An ice scraper. A seat cover. A plastic bag containing some strands of hair. A plastic bag containing some chewing gum. She put down the torch, opened the bag, removed the gum with tweezers and was about to cut off a bit when she felt a draught in the clammy air.

  She looked down at her forearm, which was caught in the torchlight, and saw the shadow of fine hairs standing up. Then she raised her eyes, grabbed the torch and shone it at the wall. Beneath the ceiling there was an inset hatch fan. But as it was only inset it was unlikely it could have caused on its own what she was fairly certain was a movement in the air.

  She listened.

  Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the throbbing of blood in her ears.

  She concentrated on the hard piece of chewing gum again. Cut off a tiny piece with the Swiss army knife she had brought along. And froze.

  It came from somewhere by the door, so far away the ear hadn’t been able to identify what it was. The rattle of a key? The banging of a counter? It was probably nothing; perhaps you just get strange sounds in a large building.

  Katrine switched off the torch and held her breath. Blinked into the darkness as though that might help her to see. It was quiet. As quiet as the . . .

  She tried not to continue that train of tho
ught.

  Instead she tried another train of thought, one that would slow her heart down: what was actually the worst that could happen? She was caught exceeding the call of duty and they were all reprimanded? Perhaps she would be sent home to Bergen? Tedious, but not exactly a reason for her heart to pound like a pneumatic drill inside her chest.

  She waited, listening.

  Nothing.

  Still nothing.

  And that was when she realised. Pitch black. If someone had really been there they would of course have switched on the light. She grinned at her own stupidity, felt her heart slowing down. Switched the torch on, put the evidence back in the box and replaced it. Made sure it was exactly in line with the other boxes, and walked towards the exit. A thought flashed through her mind. A stray thought that caught her by surprise. She was looking forward to ringing him. Because that was what she was going to do. Ring him and tell him what she had done. She came to an abrupt halt.

  The torch beam had caught something.

  Her first instinct was to keep walking; a small, cowardly voice that told her to get out as fast as she could.

  But she shone the light back.

  An unevenness.

  One of the boxes wasn’t in line.

  She went closer. Shone the torch on the label.

  Harry thought he heard a door slam. He pulled out his earphones on the sound of Bon Iver’s new recording, which so far had lived up to the hype. Listened. Nothing.

  ‘Arnold?’ he called.

  No answer. He was used to having this wing of PHS to himself so late in the evening. Of course it could have been a member of the cleaning staff who had forgotten something. But a quick look at his watch confirmed it was not evening but night. Harry glanced to the left of the pile of uncorrected assignments on his desk. Most students had printed them on the rough recycled paper they used at the library, and it was so dusty that Harry went home with nicotine-yellow fingertips, which Rakel told him to wash before he was allowed to touch her.

  He looked out of the window. The moon hung in the sky, big and round, reflecting on the windows and the roofs of the blocks towards Kirkeveien and Majorstuen. To the south he saw the green, shimmering silhouette of the KPMG financial services building beside the Colosseum cinema. It wasn’t magnificent, beautiful or even picturesque. But it was the town he had lived and worked in almost all his life. There were some mornings in Hong Kong when he had put a bit of opium in a cigarette and gone up onto the roof of Chungking to see the day break. Sitting there in the darkness wishing the town, which would soon come to life, were his. A modest town with low, self-effacing buildings instead of these intimidating steel steeples. Wishing he could see Oslo’s soft, green ridges instead of Hong Kong’s brutally steep, black mountainsides. Hear the sound of a tram clanking and braking or the Denmark ferry entering the fjord and whistling, elated that today too it had succeeded in crossing the sea between Frederikshavn and Oslo.

  Harry looked down at the paper centred in the beam from the reading lamp, the only light in the room. He could, of course, have taken everything with him to Holmenkollveien. Coffee, a babbling radio, the fragrance of fresh trees through an open window. But he had decided not to mull over why he preferred to sit here alone instead of there alone. Presumably because he had an inkling what the response would be. That there he wasn’t alone. Not quite. The black timber fortress with three locks on the door and sprinklers in front of all the windows still couldn’t keep the monsters out. The ghosts were sitting in the dark corners watching him through their empty eye sockets. His phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and saw the text on the illuminated screen. It was from Oleg and there were no letters, only numbers. 665625. Harry smiled. Naturally it was a long way off Stephen Krogman’s legendary Tetris world record of 1,648,905 points in 1999, but Oleg had long smashed Harry’s best scores in the slightly antiquated computer game. Ståle Aune had maintained there was a line where Tetris records went from being impressive to just being sad. And that Oleg and Harry had crossed it a long time ago. But no one else knew of the other line they had crossed. The one to death and back. Oleg on a chair beside Harry’s bed. Harry feverish as his body fought against the damage Oleg’s bullets had caused, Oleg crying as his body shook with cold turkey. Not much was said, but Harry had a vague memory of them holding hands so hard at one point that it had hurt. And this image, two men clinging to each other, not wanting to let go, would always be with him.

  Harry texted I’ll be back in return. A number answered with three words. It was enough. Enough to know that the other person was there, even if the next time they saw each other could be weeks away. Harry put the earphones back and searched for the music Oleg had sent over without any comment. The band was the Decemberists and was more Harry than Oleg, who preferred harder stuff. Harry heard a lone Fender guitar with the pure, warm twang, which was only a pipe amplifier and not a fixed box, or perhaps a deceptively good box, and leaned over the next sheet. The student had written that after a sudden hike in the murder rate in the 1970s, the figure had stabilised at the new, higher level. There were around fifty murders a year in Norway, so about one a week.

  Harry noticed that the air had become close and he ought to open a window.

  The student remembered that the clear-up rate was around ninety-five per cent. And concluded that there had to be approximately fifty unsolved murders over the last twenty years. Seventy-five over the last thirty years.

  ‘Fifty-eight.’

  Harry jumped in his chair. The voice had reached his brain before the perfume. His doctor had explained that his sense of smell – or more specifically the olfactory cells – had been damaged by years of smoking and alcohol abuse. But that wasn’t why it took him a minute to place the scent. It was called Opium, made by Yves Saint Laurent, and stood by the bath at home in Holmenkollveien. He tore out his earphones.

  ‘Fifty-eight over the last thirty years,’ she said. She had put on make-up. Sported a red dress and was barefoot. ‘But Kripos’s statistics don’t include Norwegian citizens killed abroad. For that you would have to use Statistics Norway. And then the figure is seventy-two. Which means that the clear-up rate in Norway is higher. Which the Chief of Police regularly uses in his publicity.’

  Harry pushed his chair away from her. ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘I’m the class rep. I have keys.’ Silje Gravseng perched on the edge of the desk. ‘But the point is that the majority of murders abroad are assaults, so we can assume the perp doesn’t know the victim.’ Harry registered suntanned knees and thighs where her skirt rode up. She must have been on holiday recently. ‘And for that type of murder the clear-up rate in Norway is lower than in countries we ought to be comparing ourselves with. It is frighteningly low, actually.’ She had angled her head down to one shoulder so that damp blonde hair fell across her face.

  ‘Oh yes?’ Harry said.

  ‘Yes. There are in fact only four detectives in Norway with a hundred per cent clear-up rate. And you’re one of them . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s correct,’ Harry said.

  ‘But I am.’ She smiled at him, squinting as though she had the low afternoon sun in her eyes. Dangling her bare feet as though she were sitting on the edge of a jetty. Holding his eyes as though she thought she could suck the eyeballs out of the sockets.

  ‘What are you doing here so late?’ Harry asked.

  ‘I’ve been doing some training in the fitness room.’ She pointed to the rucksack on the floor and flexed her right arm. A pronounced biceps muscle appeared. He remembered the combat instructor mentioning something about her flooring several of the boys.

  ‘Training on your own so late?’

  ‘Got to learn as much as I can. But perhaps you could show me how to bring down a suspect?’

  Harry looked at his watch. ‘Tell me, shouldn’t you be . . .?’

  ‘Asleep? I can’t sleep, Harry. I just think about . . .’

  He looked at her. She pouted. Placed a fi
nger against her bright red lips. He could feel a certain irritation mounting. ‘It’s good you use your brain, Silje. Keep doing it. And I’ll keep . . .’ He pointed to the pile of papers.

  ‘You haven’t asked what I think about, Harry.’

  ‘Three things, Silje. I’m your lecturer and not your confessor. You’ve no business to be in this wing without an appointment. And to you I’m Hole, not Harry. OK?’ He knew his voice had been sterner than necessary, and when he looked up again he discovered her eyes were big and round with disbelief. She dropped the finger from her lips. She dropped the pout as well. And when she spoke again her voice was hardly more than a whisper.

  ‘I was thinking about you, Harry.’

  Then she laughed a loud, shrill laugh.

  ‘I suggest we stop right there, Silje.’

  ‘But I love you, Harry.’ More laughter.

  Was she high? Drunk? Had she come straight from a party perhaps?

  ‘Silje, don’t . . .’

  ‘Harry, I know you’ve got obligations. And I know there are rules for lecturers and students. But I know what we can do. We can go to Chicago. Where you did the serial killer course. I can apply to do it and you can—’

  ‘Stop!’

  Harry heard his shout echo down the corridor. Silje had hunched up as if he’d hit her.

  ‘Now I’ll accompany you to the door, Silje.’

  She blinked at him in astonishment. ‘What’s the matter, Harry? I’m the second-best-looking girl in the year. I could have whoever I want in this place. Including the lecturers. But I’ve saved myself for you.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Do you want to know what I’ve got under my dress, Harry?’

  She put a bare foot on the desk and opened her thighs. Harry was so quick she didn’t have a chance to react when he knocked her foot off the desk.

  ‘No one puts their feet on my desk except me, thank you.’

  Silje crumpled. Hid her face in her hands. Ran them over her head, as though she wanted to creep into a hiding place under her long, muscular arms. She cried. Sobbed quietly. Harry let her sit like this until the sobbing had subsided. He was about to put his hand on her shoulder, but then changed his mind.