by Jo Nesbo
Everything fitted. But did the essential ingredient fit? The motive. What was it Mikael Bellman had said? If a woman fantasises about rape, it doesn’t mean she wants to be raped. If a man fantasises about violence it doesn’t mean . . .
For Christ’s sake. Stop it!
But it wouldn’t stop. It wouldn’t give him any peace until he had solved the problem. And there were only two ways it could be solved. There was the old way. The one that every fibre of his body was screaming for now. A drink. The drink that multiplied, expunged, veiled, numbed. That was the provisional way. The bad way. The other was the final way. The necessary way. The one that eradicated the problem. The devil’s alternative.
Harry jumped to his feet. There was no alcohol in the house, there hadn’t been since he moved in. He started pacing the floor. Then stopped. Eyed the old corner cupboard. It reminded him of something. A drinks cabinet he had once stood and stared at in just this way. What was holding him back? How many times before had he sold his soul for less reward than this? Perhaps that was precisely the point. That the other times it had been for small change, justified by moral indignation. While this time it was . . . unclean. He wanted to save his own neck while he was at it.
But he could hear it inside him now, whispering to him. Take me out, use me. Use me in the way I should be used. And this time I’ll finish the job off. I won’t let a bulletproof vest fool me.
It would take him half an hour to drive from here to Truls Berntsen’s flat in Manglerud. With the arsenal in his bedroom that Harry had seen with his own eyes. Weapons, handcuffs, gas mask. Baton. So why was he putting it off? He knew what had to be done.
But was he right? Did Truls Berntsen really kill René Kalsnes on Mikael Bellman’s orders? There was no doubt Truls was off his trolley, but was Mikael Bellman as well?
Or was it just a construct his brain had assembled with the pieces he had at his disposal, forcing them to fit because it wanted, needed, demanded a picture, any picture which would give if not meaning then an answer, a feeling that the dots were joined up?
Harry took the phone from his pocket and selected A.
Ten seconds went by before he heard a grunt. ‘Yeah?’
‘Hi, Arnold, it’s me.’
‘Harry?’
‘Yes. Are you at work?’
‘It’s one in the morning, Harry. Like most normal people I’m in bed.’
‘Sorry. Do you want to go back to sleep?’
‘Since you ask, yes.’
‘OK, but now you’re awake . . .’ He heard a groan at the other end. ‘I’m wondering about Mikael Bellman. You used to work at Kripos when he was there. Did you ever notice anything to suggest he might be sexually attracted to men?’
There followed a long silence in which Harry listened to Arnold’s regular breathing and a train rattling by. From the acoustics Harry deduced that Arnold had a window open, you could hear more outside the bedroom than inside. He must have got used to the noise, and it didn’t interfere with his sleep. And it suddenly struck him, not like a revelation, more like a stray thought, that this was perhaps how it was with the case. Perhaps it was the noises, the familiar noises they didn’t hear and which therefore didn’t wake them, they should be listening to?
‘Have you fallen asleep, Arnold?’
‘Not at all. The idea is so new to me that I have to let it sink in first. So. In retrospect, putting everything in a different light . . . And even then I can’t make . . . but it’s obvious . . .’
‘What’s obvious?’
‘Well, it was Bellman and that dog of his with the boundless loyalty.’
‘Truls Berntsen.’
‘Exactly. The two of . . .’ Another pause. Another train. ‘Well, Harry, I can’t see them as a couple, if you know what I mean.’
‘I see. Sorry to have woken you. Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight. By the way . . . just a mo . . .’
‘Mm?’
‘There was a guy at Kripos. I’d forgotten all about it, but I went to the toilet once, and he and Bellman were over by the basins, both with very red faces. As though something had happened. Know what I mean? I remember the thought crossing my mind, but didn’t take too much notice of it. But the guy left Kripos soon afterwards.’
‘What was his name?’
‘No idea. I can find out, but not now.’
‘Thanks, Arnold. And sleep well.’
‘Thanks. What’s happening?’
‘Not a lot, Arnold,’ Harry said, rang off and slipped the phone into his pocket.
Opened his other hand.
Stared at the CD shelf. The key was under W.
‘Not a lot,’ he repeated.
He took off his T-shirt on the way to the bathroom. He knew the bedlinen was white, clean and cold. And the silence outside the open window would be total and the night air suitably crisp. And he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a second.
In bed, he lay listening to the wind. It was whistling. Whistling through the keyhole of a very old, black corner cupboard.
The duty officer on the switchboard received the message about a fire at 4.06 a.m. When she heard the fireman’s agitated voice she automatically assumed it had to be a major incident, one that might require the traffic to be redirected, personal possessions to be safeguarded or casualties and fatalities to be dealt with. She was therefore a little surprised when the fireman said that smoke had triggered an alarm in a bar in Oslo, which had been closed for the night, and that the fire had burnt itself out before they arrived. And even more surprised when the fireman told her to get some officers there right away. She could hear that what she had at first taken for agitation in the man’s voice was horror. The voice trembled, like the voice of someone who had probably seen a lot in his career but nothing that could have prepared him for what he was trying to communicate.
‘There’s a young girl. She must have been doused in something. There are empty bottles of spirits on the bar.’
‘Where are you?’
‘She’s . . . she’s completely charred. And she’s been tied to a pipe.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Round the neck. Looks like a bike lock. You’ve got to come, I’m telling you.’
‘Yes, but where—?’
‘Kvadraturen. The place is called Come As You Are. Jesus Christ, she’s only a young girl . . .’
40
STÅLE AUNE WAS woken at 6.28 by a ringing sound. For some reason, he thought at first it was the phone, before realising it was his alarm clock. Must have been something in his dream. But since he didn’t believe in interpreting dreams any more than he believed in psychotherapy he made no attempt to trace his train of thought back. He brought his hand down hard on the clock and closed his eyes to enjoy the two minutes before a second alarm clock went off. As a rule, this was when he heard Aurora’s bare feet hit the floor and make a sprint for the bathroom to get in first.
Silence.
‘Where’s Aurora?’
‘She’s got a sleepover at Emilie’s,’ Ingrid mumbled in a thick voice.
Ståle Aune got up. Showered, shaved, had breakfast with his wife in companionable silence while she read the newspaper. Ståle had become pretty good at reading upside down. He skipped the police murders, no news there, only new speculation.
‘Isn’t she coming home before she goes to school?’ Ståle asked.
‘She had her school things with her.’
‘Oh, right. Is it OK to have a sleepover when you have school the next day?’
‘No, it’s bad for her. You should do something about it.’ She turned a page.
‘Do you know what lack of sleep does to the brain, Ingrid?’
‘The Norwegian state funded six years of research for you to find out, Ståle, so I would regard it as a waste of my taxes if I also knew.’
Ståle had always felt a mixture of annoyance and admiration for Ingrid’s ability to be, cognitively, so alert at such an early hour. She wiped the floor with him befo
re ten. He didn’t get a verbal jab in until closer to midday. Basically he didn’t have a hope of winning a round until about six.
He was musing about this as he was reversing the car out of the garage and driving to his consulting room in Sporveisgata. He didn’t know if he could stand living with a woman who didn’t give him a daily trouncing. And if he hadn’t known so much about genetics it would have been a mystery how the two of them could have produced such an endearing, sensitive child as Aurora. Then he forgot about her. The traffic was slow, but no slower than usual. The most important thing was the predictability of it, not the time it took. There was a meeting at the Boiler Room at twelve, and there were three patients before that.
He switched on the radio.
Listened to the news and heard his phone ring at the same time, knowing instinctively there was a connection.
It was Harry. ‘We have to postpone the meeting. There’s been another murder.’
‘The girl they’re talking about on the radio?’
‘Yes. At least we’re pretty sure it’s a girl.’
‘You don’t know who it is?’
‘No. No one’s been reported missing.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Impossible to say, but from the size and shape of the body I would guess somewhere between ten and fourteen.’
‘And you think this has something to do with our case?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she was found on the site of an unsolved murder. A bar called Come As You Are. And because . . .’ Harry cleared his throat. ‘. . . she has a cycle lock around her neck, attaching her to a pipe.’
‘Sweet Jesus!’
He heard Harry cough again.
‘Harry?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you OK?’
‘No.’
‘Is there . . . is there something wrong?’
‘Yes.’
‘Apart from the cycle lock? I appreciate it’s . . .’
‘He doused her in alcohol before striking a match. The empty bottles are on the bar here. Three, all the same brand. Even though there are many other bottles he could have taken.’
‘It’s . . .’
‘Yes, Jim Beam.’
‘. . . your brand.’
Ståle heard Harry shout at someone not to touch anything. Then he was back. ‘Do you want to come and see the crime scene?’
‘I’ve got some patients. Afterwards perhaps.’
‘OK, it’s up to you. We’ll be here for quite a while.’
They rang off.
Ståle tried to concentrate on driving. He could feel his breathing was laboured, his nostrils were flaring and his chest was heaving. Today, he knew, he was going to be an even worse therapist than usual.
Harry went out of the door into the busy street where people, bicycles, cars and trams were hurrying past. Blinked into the light after all the darkness, watched the meaningless hustle and bustle of life which was unaware that a few metres behind him there was an equally meaningless death, sitting on a chair with a melted plastic seat, in the form of the blackened corpse of a girl. They had no idea who she was. Well, Harry had an idea, but he didn’t dare think it through. He took several deep breaths and thought it through anyway. Then he rang Katrine, whom he had sent back to the Boiler Room to sit by her computer.
‘Still no one reported missing?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘OK. Check which detectives have daughters aged between eight and sixteen. Start with those on the Kalsnes case. If there is anyone, ring them and ask if they’ve seen their daughter today. Tread warily.’
‘Will do.’
Harry broke the connection.
Bjørn came out and stood beside him. His voice was low, soft, as if they were in church.
‘Harry?’
‘Yes?’
‘That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’
Harry nodded. He was aware of some of the things Bjørn had seen, but knew this was true.
‘The person who did this . . .’ Bjørn raised his hands, took a quick breath, sighed in desperation and dropped his hands again. ‘He should be plugged with lead.’
Harry clenched his fists in his jacket pockets. Knowing this was true as well. He should be shot. Using a bullet or three from an Odessa in a cupboard in Holmenkollveien. Not now, he should have been shot last night. When a very cowardly ex-cop went to bed because he couldn’t be the executioner as long as he didn’t have his own motives clear. Was he doing it for the potential victims’ sakes, for Rakel and Oleg’s sakes or just for his own? Well. The girl inside wouldn’t be asking him about his motive. For her and for her parents it was too late. Shit, shit, shit!
He looked at his watch.
Truls Berntsen knew Harry was after him now and he would be ready. He had invited him, tempted him by committing the murder on this former crime scene, humiliated him by using the drunk’s regular poison, Jim Beam, and the lock half the force had heard about. The great Harry Hole had been attached to a No Parking sign in Sporveisgata like a dog on a lead.
Harry inhaled. He could throw in his cards, tell all, about Gusto, Oleg and the dead Russian and afterwards raid Truls Berntsen’s flat with Delta, and if Berntsen escaped he could spread a net from Interpol to every rural police station in the country. Or . . .
Harry went to pull out the creased packet of Camel. Pushed it back down. He was sick of smoking.
. . . or he could do precisely what the bastard wanted.
It wasn’t until the break after the second patient that Ståle completed his train of thought.
Or trains – there were two of them.
The first was that no one had reported the girl’s disappearance. A girl aged from ten to fourteen years old. The parents should have missed her when she didn’t turn up in the evening. Should have reported her.
The second was what connection the victim could possibly have to the police murders. So far the murderer had only targeted detectives and now perhaps the typical tendency of serial killers to step up their violence had reared its head: what more could you do to someone than kill them? Simple, kill their offspring. The child. So in that case the question was: whose turn was next? Obviously not Harry’s. He didn’t have any children.
And that was when cold sweat without warning or restraint broke from all the pores of Ståle Aune’s voluminous body. He grabbed the phone in the open drawer, found Aurora’s name and called.
It rang eight times before he went through to her voicemail.
She didn’t answer of course, she was at school and, quite sensibly, they were not allowed to have their phones on.
What’s was Emilie’s surname? He had heard it often enough, but this was Ingrid’s domain. He considered ringing, but decided not to worry her unnecessarily and instead looked for ‘school camp’ in his inbox. Sure enough, he found lots of emails from last year with the addresses of all the parents in Aurora’s class. He scanned through them hoping to find it and erupt with an ‘Aha!’ He didn’t have to wait long. Torunn Einersen. Emilie Einersen – it was even easy to remember. And, best of all, the parents’ telephone numbers were listed underneath. He noticed his fingers were trembling, it was hard to hit the right keys, he must have been drinking or he hadn’t had enough coffee.
‘Torunn Einersen.’
‘Oh, hello, this is Ståle Aune, Aurora’s father. I . . . er, just wanted to know if everything was OK last night.’
Pause. Too long.
‘With the sleepover,’ he added. And to be absolutely sure: ‘With Emilie.’
‘Oh, I see. I’m afraid Aurora didn’t come for a sleepover. I know they were chatting about it, but—’
‘I must have misremembered,’ Ståle said, and could hear his voice was taut.
‘Yes, it’s not easy to keep track of who’s having a sleepover with whom these days,’ Torunn Einersen laughed, but her voice was uneasy on his behalf, for the father who didn’t know where his
daughter had spent the night.
Ståle rang off. His shirt was already well on the way to becoming wet.
He called Ingrid. Got her voicemail. Left a message for her to ring. Then got up and dashed out of the door. The last patient, a middle-aged woman in therapy for reasons unfathomable to Ståle, looked up.
‘I’m afraid I have to cancel today’s session . . .’ He intended to say her name, but couldn’t remember it until he was downstairs, out of the door and running down Sporveisgata to his car.
Harry sensed he was squeezing the paper cup of coffee too hard as the covered stretcher was carried past them into the waiting ambulance. He scowled at the flock of rubbernecks thronging nearby.
Katrine had phoned. Still no one had been reported missing, and no one in the investigation team on the Kalsnes case had a daughter between eight and sixteen. So Harry had asked her to extend her search to the rest of the force.
Bjørn came out of the bar. He pulled off the latex gloves and the hood of the white overall.
‘Still no news from the DNA team?’ Harry asked.
‘No.’
The first thing Harry did when he arrived at the crime scene was to have a tissue sample taken and sent urgently to Forensics. A full DNA test took time, but getting the initial profile could happen quite quickly. And that was as much as they needed. All the murder investigators, plain clothes and forensics officers, had registered their DNA profiles in case they contaminated a crime site. Over the last year they had also registered officers who arrived first at the scene or who guarded crime scenes, even civilians who it was thought might conceivably be there. It was a simple probability calculation. With only the first three or four digits out of eleven they would already have eliminated the most relevant police officers. With five or six, all of them. That is, if he was correct, minus one.
Harry looked at his watch. He didn’t know why, didn’t know what they were trying to do, only knew they didn’t have a lot of time. He didn’t have a lot of time.
Ståle Aune parked his car in front of the school gates and switched on the hazard lights. He heard the echo of his running feet resound between the buildings around the playground. The lonely sound of childhood. The sound of arriving late for lessons. Or the sound of summer holidays when everyone had left town, of being abandoned. He tore open the heavy door, sprinted down the corridor, no echo now, just his own panting. That was the door to her classroom. Wasn’t it? Group or class? He knew so little about her everyday life. He hadn’t seen much of her over the last six months. There was so much he wanted to know. He would spend so much time with her from now on. So long as, so long as . . .