by Jo Nesbo
'Good,' said Harry.
'What are you wondering?'
'Wondering?'
'I'm getting to know your ways, Harry.'
'Mm. I was wondering why the waiter didn't phone the police straight away this morning. Ask him, alright?'
'In fact, I was intending to do just that, Harry.'
'Of course you were. Sorry.'
Harry hung up, but five minutes later his mobile rang again.
'What did you forget?' Harry asked.
'What?'
'Oh, it's you, Beate. Well?'
'Good news. I've finished at Scandia Hotel.'
'Did you find any DNA?'
'Don't know yet. I've got a couple of hairs which might belong to the cleaners or a previous guest. But I did get the ballistics results half an hour ago. The bullet in the milk carton at Jon Karlsen's place comes from the same weapon as the bullet we found in Egertorget.'
'Mm. That means the theory about several gunmen is weakened.'
'Yes. And there's more. The receptionist at Scandia Hotel remembered something after you left. This Christo Stankic had a particularly ugly piece of clothing. She reckoned it was a kind of imitation-'
'Let me guess. Camel-hair coat?'
'That's what she said.'
'We're in business, 'Harry yelled, so loud that the graffiti-covered wall of Blitz sent an echo around the deserted city-centre street.
Harry rang off and called Halvorsen back.
'Yes, Harry?'
'Christo Stankic is our man. Give the description of the camel-hair coat to the uniforms and the ops room and ask them to alert all patrol cars.' Harry smiled at an old lady tripping and scraping along with spiked cleats attached to the bottom of her fashionable ankle boots. 'And I want twenty-four-hour surveillance of telecommunications so we know if anyone calls Hotel International in Zagreb from Oslo. And which number they call from. Talk to Klaus Torkildsen in the Telenor Business Centre, Oslo region.'
'That's wiretapping. We need a warrant for that and it can take days.'
'It's not wiretapping. We just need the address of the incoming call.'
'I'm afraid Telenor won't be able to tell the difference.'
'Tell Torkildsen you've spoken to me. OK?'
'May I ask why he would be willing to risk his job for you?'
'Old story. I saved him from being beaten to pulp in the remand centre a few years back. Tom Waaler and his pals. You know what it's like when flashers and the like are brought in.'
'So he's a flasher?'
'Now retired. Happy to exchange services for silence.'
'I see.'
Harry rang off. They were on the move now, and he no longer felt the northerly wind or the onslaught of snow needles. Now and then the job gave him moments of unalloyed pleasure. He turned and walked back to Police HQ.
In the private room at Ulleval Hospital Jon felt the phone vibrate against the sheet and grabbed it at once. 'Yes?'
'It's me.'
'Oh, hi,' he said, without quite managing to conceal his disappointment.
'You sound as if you were hoping it was someone else,' Ragnhild said in the rather too cheerful tone that betrays a wounded woman.
'I can't say much,' Jon said, glancing at the door.
'I wanted to say how awful the news about Robert is,' Ragnhild said. 'And I feel for you.'
'Thank you.'
'It must be painful. Where are you actually? I tried to call you at home.'
Jon didn't answer.
'Mads is working late, so if you want I can walk over to yours.'
'No, thanks, Ragnhild, I'll manage.'
'I was thinking about you. It's so dark and cold. I'm afraid.'
'You're never afraid, Ragnhild.'
'Sometimes I am.' She put on her sulky voice. 'There are so many rooms here and there is no one about.'
'Move to a smaller house then. I have to ring off now. We're not allowed to use mobiles here.'
'Wait! Where are you, Jon?'
'I've got slight concussion. I'm in hospital.'
'Which hospital? Which department?'
Jon was taken aback. 'Most people would have asked how I got the concussion.'
'You know I hate not knowing where you are.'
Jon visualised Ragnhild marching in with a large bunch of roses during visiting time next day. And Thea's questioning looks, first at her and then at him.
'I can hear the sister coming,' he whispered. 'I'll have to ring off.'
He pressed the OFF button and stared at the ceiling until the phone had played its fanfare and the display was extinguished. She was right. It was dark. But he was the one who was afraid.
***
Ragnhild Gilstrup stood by the window with her eyes closed. Then she looked at her watch. Mads had said he had work to do for the board meeting and would be late. He had started saying things like that in recent weeks. Before, he had always given her a time and arrived on the dot, sometimes he was a little early. Not that she wanted him home earlier, but it was somewhat odd. Somewhat odd, that was all. Just as it was odd that all the calls had been itemised on the last landline bill. And she had not requested any such thing. But there it was: five pages with much too much information. She should have stopped ringing Jon, but she couldn't. Because he had that look. That Johannes look. It wasn't kind or clever or gentle or anything like that. But it was a look that could read whatever she thought before she had got as far as thinking it herself. That saw her as she was. And still liked her.
She opened her eyes again and surveyed the six-thousand-square-metre site of unsullied nature. The view reminded her of boarding school in Switzerland. The reflection off the snow shone into the large bedroom and covered the ceiling and walls in a bluish-white light.
She was the one who had insisted on building here, high above the city, well, in the forest in fact. It would make her feel less enclosed and restricted, she had said. And her husband, Mads Gilstrup, who had imagined the city was the restriction she was referring to, had gladly spent some of the money he possessed on the construction. The extravagance had cost him twenty million kroner. When they moved in, Ragnhild felt as though she were moving from a cell to a prison yard. Sun, air and room. Yet still confined. Like at boarding school.
At times – like this evening – she wondered how she had ended up here. Her external circumstances could be summed up as follows: Mads Gilstrup was heir to one of Oslo's great fortunes. She had met him during her degree outside Chicago, Illinois, where they had both studied business administration at a middling university that bestowed greater prestige than competent seats of learning in Norway, and anyway they were a lot more fun. Both came from wealthy families, but his was wealthier. While his family consisted of five generations of shipowners with old money, her family was peasant stock and their money still bore the whiff of printer's ink and farmed fish. They had lived in the interstices between agricultural subsidies and wounded pride until her father and uncle had sold their tractors and gambled their capital on a small fish farm in the fjord outside their sitting-room window on the southernmost, wind-blown coastline of Vest-Agder. The timing had been perfect, competition minimal, kilo price astronomical and in the course of four lucrative years they became multimillionaires. The house on the crag was demolished and replaced by a gateau of a house, bigger than the barn and boasting eight bay windows and a double garage.
Ragnhild had just turned sixteen when her mother sent her from one crag to another crag: Aron Schuster's private school for girls nine hundred metres above sea level in a town with a station, six churches and a Bierstube in Switzerland. The official reason was that Ragnhild was to learn French, German and art history, subjects that were considered useful as the kilo price of farmed fish was still hitting record levels.
The real reason for her exile, however, was of course her boyfriend, Johannes. Johannes of the warm hands, Johannes of the gentle voice and the look that could read whatever she thought before she had got as far as thinking i
t. Johannes, the country clod, who was going nowhere. Everything changed after Johannes. She changed after Johannes.
At Aron Schuster's private school she was freed from the nightmares, the guilt and the smell of fish, and learned all that young girls need to acquire a husband of their own or higher status. And with the inherited survival instinct that had enabled her to survive on the crag in Norway, she had slowly but surely buried the Ragnhild whose mind Johannes had read so well and become the Ragnhild who was going places, who did her own thing and would not be held back by anyone, least of all by upper-class French girls or spoilt Danish brats who sniggered in corners at the futile attempts of girls like Ragnhild to be anything but provincial or vulgar.
Her little revenge was to seduce Herr Brehme, the young German teacher with whom they were all infatuated. The teachers lived in a building facing the pupils' block and she simply crossed the cobbled square and knocked on the door of his little room. She visited him four times. And four nights she click-clacked her way back across the cobble stones, her heels echoing off the walls of both buildings.
Rumours started up, and she did little or nothing to stop them. When the news broke that Herr Brehme had resigned and hastily taken up a teaching post in Zurich, Ragnhild had beamed a smile of triumph to all the grief-stricken faces of the young girls in her class.
After the final year of school in Switzerland, Ragnhild returned home. Home at last, she thought. But then Johannes's eyes were there again. In the silver fjord, in the shadows of the verdigris forest, behind the shiny black windows of the chapel or in the cars that flashed past, leaving a cloud of dust that made your teeth crunch and was bitter to the taste. When the letter from Chicago arrived, with the offer of a place to study business administration – four years for a BA, five for an MA – she went to Daddy to ask him to transfer the study funds without delay.
It was a relief to go. A relief to be the new Ragnhild once again. She was looking forward to forgetting, but to do that she needed a project, a goal. In Chicago she found that goal. Mads Gilstrup.
She anticipated that it would be simple. After all, she had the theoretical and practical grounding to seduce upper-class boys. And she was good-looking. Johannes and several others had said that. Above all, it was her eyes. She had been blessed with her mother's light blue irises surrounded by unusually white sclera, which science had proven attracted the opposite sex as it signalled robust health and hearty genes. For that reason Ragnhild was seldom seen wearing sunglasses. Unless she had planned the effect it created by taking them off at a particularly favourable moment.
Some said she looked like Nicole Kidman. She understood what they meant. Beautiful in a stiff, severe way. Perhaps that was the reason. The severity. Because when she had tried to engineer some contact with Mads Gilstrup in the corridors or the campus canteen, he had behaved like a frightened wild horse, averted his eyes, tossed his fringe in the air and trotted off to a safe area.
In the end she staked everything on one card.
The evening before one of the many silly annual and, apparently, traditional parties, Ragnhild had given her room-mate money for a new pair of shoes and a hotel room in town and spent three hours in front of the mirror. For once she arrived early at the party. Because she knew Mads Gilstrup went to all parties early in order to pre-empt potential rivals.
He stuttered and stammered, barely daring to look into her eyes – light blue irises and clear sclera notwithstanding – and even less down the plunging neckline she had arranged with such care. She had come to the conclusion – contrary to her previous opinion – that confidence did not necessarily come with money. Later she was to conclude that the reason for Mads's bad self-image lay at the door of his brilliant, demanding, weakness-hating father who was unable to grasp why he had not been granted a son more in his own mould.
But she did not give up and dangled herself like bait in front of Mads Gilstrup. It was so obvious she was making herself accessible that she noticed the girls she called friends, and vice versa, were standing with their heads together in a huddle. When it came down to it, they were all herd animals. Then – after six American lagers and a growing suspicion that Mads Gilstrup was homosexual – the wild horse ventured out into open terrain and two lagers later they left the party.
She let him mount her, but in her best friend's bed. After all, it had cost her an expensive pair of shoes. And when, three minutes later, Ragnhild wiped him off with her room-mate's home-made crocheted bedspread, she knew she had lassoed him. Harness and saddle would follow in good time.
After their studies they travelled home as an engaged couple. Mads Gilstrup to administer his portion of the family fortune in the secure knowledge that he would never have to be tested in any rat race. His job consisted of finding the right advisers.
Ragnhild applied for and got a job with a trust manager, who had never heard of the mediocre university, but had heard of Chicago, and liked what he heard. And saw. He was not so brilliant, but he was demanding and found a soulmate in Ragnhild. Thus, after quite a short spell, she was removed from the intellectually somewhat over-demanding work as a share analyst and put behind a screen and telephone on one of the tables in the 'kitchen', as they called the traders' room. This was where Ragnhild Gilstrup (she had changed her name to Gilstrup as soon as they were engaged because it was 'more practical') came into her own. If it was not enough to advise brokerages' own and, one presumed, professional, investors to buy Opticum, she could purr, flirt, hiss, manipulate, lie and cry. Ragnhild Gilstrup could caress her way up a man's legs – and, if pushed, a woman's – in a way that shifted shares with far greater efficacy than any of her analyses had done. Her greatest quality, however, was her supreme understanding of the most important motivation of the equity market: greed.
Then one day she became pregnant. And, to her surprise, she found herself considering an abortion. Until then she had really believed she wanted children, or one anyway. Eight months later she gave birth to Amalie. She was filled with such happiness that she repressed the memory of her thoughts of abortion. Two weeks later Amalie was taken to hospital with a high temperature. Ragnhild could see that the doctors were uneasy, but they couldn't tell her what was wrong with her child. One night Ragnhild had considered praying to God, but then dismissed the idea. The next night, at eleven o'clock, little Amalie died of pneumonia. Ragnhild locked herself indoors and cried for four successive days.
'Cystic fibrosis,' the doctor had told her in private. 'It's genetic and means that either you or your husband is a carrier of the disease. Do you know if anyone has had it in your family or his? It may manifest itself in frequent asthma attacks or something similar.'
'No,' Ragnhild had answered. 'And I assume you're aware of client confidentiality.'
The period of grieving was managed with professional help. After a couple of months she was able to talk to people again. When summer came they went to Gilstrup's chalet on the west coast of Sweden and tried for another child. But one evening Mads found his wife crying in front of the bedroom mirror. She said this was her punishment because she had wanted an abortion. He comforted her, but when his tender caresses became bolder she pushed him away and said that would be the last time for a good while. Mads thought she meant having children and agreed right away. He was therefore disappointed, disconsolate, to find that she meant she wanted a break from the act itself. Mads Gilstrup had acquired a taste for mating and particularly appreciated the self-esteem he felt when giving her what he interpreted as small but distinct orgasms. Nevertheless, he accepted her explanation as the reactions to grieving and hormonal changes after childbirth. Ragnhild didn't think she could tell him that from her side the last two years had been a duty, or that the last remnants of pleasure she had been able to work up for him had disappeared in the delivery room when she had peered up into his stupid, gawping, terror-stricken face. And when he had cried with happiness and dropped the scissors just as he was supposed to cut the victory tape for all new fathers,
she had felt like walloping him. Nor did she think she could tell him that, as far as the mating department was concerned, for the last year she and her less than brilliant boss had been meeting each other's demanding needs.
Ragnhild was the only stockbroker in Oslo to have been offered a full partnership as she left for maternity leave. To everyone's surprise, however, she resigned. She had been offered another job. Managing Mads Gilstrup's family fortune.
She explained to her boss on the farewell night that she thought it was time that brokers schmoozed with her, and not vice versa. She didn't breathe a word about the real reason: that, sad to say, Mads Gilstrup had been unable to manage the sole task he had been entrusted with, that of finding good advisers, and that the family fortune had shrunk at such an alarmingly rapid rate that Ragnhild and her father-in-law, Albert Gilstrup, had both intervened. That was the last time she met her boss. A few months later she heard he had taken sick leave after years of affliction with asthma.
Ragnhild didn't like Mads's social circle and she noticed that Mads didn't, either. But they still went to the parties they were invited to, since the alternative – ending up outside the clique of people who meant or owned anything – was even worse. It was one thing to spend time with pompous, complacent men who deep in their hearts felt that their money gave them the right to be so; however, their wives, or the 'bitches', as Ragnhild labelled them in secret, were quite another. The chattering, shopaholic, health-freak housewives with tits that looked so genuine, not to mention the tan, although that was genuine, since they and their children had just returned from two weeks in St Tropez 'relaxing' away from au pairs and noisy workmen who never finished swimming pools and new kitchens. They talked with unfeigned concern about how bad the shopping had been in Europe over the last year, but otherwise their horizons didn't stretch further than skiing in Slemdal or swimming in Bogstad, both near Oslo, and at a pinch, Kragero, in the south. Clothes, facelifts and exercise apparatuses were the wives' topics of conversation as that was the means to holding onto their rich, pompous husbands, which of course was their sole real mission here on earth.