by Jo Nesbo
Martine smiled and shook her head. 'I can see you don't know much about the Salvation Army. Two-thirds of the officers are women.'
'But the commander is a man? And the chief administrator?'
Martine nodded. 'Our founder William Booth said his best men were women. Nevertheless, we are like the rest of society. Stupid, self-assured men ruling over smart women with a fear of heights.'
'So the boys fought every summer to be the one who ruled over Thea?'
'For a while. But Thea stopped going to Ostgard all of a sudden, so the problem was solved.'
'Why did she stop?'
Martine shrugged. 'Perhaps she didn't want to go. Or her parents didn't want her to go. So many boys around day and night at that age. .. you know.'
Harry nodded. But he didn't know. He had never even been to a confirmation camp. They walked up Stensberggata.
'I was born here,' Martine said, pointing to the wall that used to run around Rikshospitalet before it was pulled down. Before long the new residential project Pilestredet Park would be there.
'They've kept the building with the maternity ward and converted it into flats,' Harry said.
'Do people really live there? Think of all the things that have happened there. Abortions and…'
Harry nodded. 'Sometimes when you walk around here at midnight you can still hear the screams of children coming from there.'
Martine ogled Harry. 'You're joking! Are there ghosts?'
'Well,' Harry said, turning into Sofies gate, 'it might be because families with children have moved in.'
Martine slapped him on the shoulder with a laugh. 'No jokes about ghosts. I believe in them.'
'Me too,' said Harry. 'Me too.'
Martine stopped laughing.
'I live here,' Harry said, pointing to a light blue front door.
'Didn't you have any more questions?'
'Yes, but they can wait until the morning.'
She cocked her head to the side. 'I'm not tired. Have you got any tea?'
A car crawled forward on creaking snow, but pulled into the pavement fifty metres lower down and blinded them with bluish-white light. Harry gave her a thoughtful look as he groped for his keys. 'Just Nescafe. Listen, I'll ring-'
'Nescafe's fine,' Martine said. Harry went to put the key in the lock but Martine was a step ahead. She pushed open the light blue front door. Harry watched it spring back and close against the frame, but it didn't snap shut.
'It's the cold,' he mumbled. 'The building's shrinking.'
Harry slammed the door after them, then they went up the stairs.
'Tidy here,' Martine said, taking off her boots in the hall.
'I don't have a lot of things,' Harry said from the kitchen.
'What do you like best?'
Harry gave that some thought. 'Records.'
'Not the photo album?'
'I don't believe in photo albums,' Harry said.
Martine went into the kitchen and slunk onto one of the chairs. From the corner of his eye Harry watched her tuck her legs under her with the agility of a cat.
'You don't believe?' she asked. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'They destroy the ability to forget. Milk?'
She shook her head. 'But you believe in records?'
'Yes. They lie in a more truthful way.'
'But don't they destroy the ability to forget?'
Harry paused mid-pour. Martine was chuckling. 'I don't believe in this surly, disillusioned inspector. I think you're a romantic, Hole.'
'Let's go into the sitting room,' Harry said. 'I've just bought a great new record. For the moment it comes without any memories attached.'
Martine slipped onto the sofa while Harry put on Jim Stark's debut record. Then he sat in the green wing chair and caressed the coarse woollen material to the accompaniment of the first guitar notes. He remembered the chair had been bought from Elevator, the Salvation Army's second-hand shop. He cleared his throat. 'Robert may have been having a relationship with a girl who was much younger than him. What do you think about that?'
'What do I think about relationships between younger women and older men?' She chuckled but flushed deep red in the silence that followed. 'Or whether I think Robert liked underage girls?'
'I didn't say that, but a teenager maybe. Croatian.'
'Izgubila sam se.'
'Pardon?'
'That's Croat. Or Serbo-Croat. We used to spend the summer in Dalmatia when I was small, before the Salvation Army bought Ostgard. When Daddy was eighteen he went to Yugoslavia to help with recon-struction after the Second World War. He got to know the families of a lot of the builders. That was why he committed us to taking refugees from Vukovar.'
'With regard to Ostgard, do you remember a Mads Gilstrup, the grandson of the people you bought it off?'
'Oh, yes. He was there for some days the summer we took it over. I didn't speak to him. No one spoke to him, I remember. He seemed so angry and introverted. But I think he liked Thea, too.'
'What makes you think that? If he didn't speak to anyone, I mean.'
'I saw him watching her. And when we were with Thea all of a sudden there he was. But he didn't say a word. He seemed weird, I thought. Almost a bit scary.'
'Oh?'
'Yes. He slept at the neighbours' house on the days he was there, but one night I woke up in the room where a few of the girls slept. And I saw a face pressed against the window. Then it went. I'm almost positive it was him. When I told the other girls they said I was seeing things. They were convinced there had to be something wrong with my eyesight.'
'Why's that?'
'Haven't you noticed?'
'What?'
'Come and sit here, and I'll show you,' Martine said, patting the sofa beside her. 'Can you see my pupils?'
Harry leaned forward and felt her breath on his face. And then he saw it. The pupils inside the brown irises looked as though they had spilt into the iris, forming a keyhole shape.
'It's congenital,' she said. 'It's called iris coloboma. But you can still have normal eyesight.'
'Interesting.' Their faces were so close he could smell her skin and her hair. He breathed in and had the tremulous sensation of slipping into a hot bath. A short, firm buzz sounded.
It took Harry a moment to realise it came from the door. Not the intercom. Someone was standing outside his door on the landing.
'Must be Ali,' Harry said, getting up from the sofa. 'The neighbour.'
In the six seconds it took Harry to get off the sofa, go into the hall and open the door, it went through his mind that it was too late to be Ali. And he usually knocked, anyway. And if anyone had come in to the block or gone out after Martine and him the main door was bound to have been left open.
It wasn't until the seventh second that he realised he shouldn't have opened up. He looked at the person standing there and had an intimation of what was in the offing.
'Now you're happy, I suppose,' Astrid said with a slight slur.
Harry didn't answer.
'I've just come from a Christmas dinner. Are you going to invite me in, Harry boy?' Her red lips tautened against her teeth as she smiled and her stiletto heels clattered on the floor as she stepped sideways to regain balance.
'It's not convenient,' Harry said.
She scrunched up her eyes and studied his face. Then she peered over his shoulder. 'Got a lady there, have you? Is that why you skipped the meeting today?'
'We can talk another time, Astrid. You're drunk.'
'We discussed Step Three at the meeting today. We took the decision to put our lives in God's care. But I can't see any God, I can't, Harry.' She took a half-hearted swipe at him with her bag.
'There is no third step, Astrid. Everyone has to look after themselves.'
She stiffened and looked at him as the tears welled in her eyes. 'Let me in, Harry,' she whispered.
'It won't help, Astrid.' He put a hand on her shoulder. 'I'll ring for a taxi to take you home.'
/> His hand was knocked away with surprising force. 'Home?' she screeched. 'I'm not fucking going home, you bloody impotent lecher.'
She swivelled round and started to stagger down the stairs.
'Astrid…'
'Get out of my sight! Screw your other tart.'
Harry watched her until she was gone, heard her fighting with the door, her curses, the creaking door hinges and then the silence.
When he turned Martine was right behind him in the hall slowly doing up her coat.
'I…' he began.
'It's late.' She flashed a fleeting smile. 'I was a bit tired anyway.'
It was three o'clock in the morning and Harry was still sitting in the wing chair. Tom Waits was singing in a low voice about Alice as the brushes swished on the snare drum.
'It's dreamy weather we're on. You wave your crooked wand along an icy pond.'
His mind ran unchecked. All the bars were closed now. He hadn't refilled his hip flask after emptying it down the dog's gullet in the container terminal. But he could phone Oystein. He drove a taxi almost every night and always kept a bottle of gin under the seat.
'It won't help.'
Unless you believed in ghosts, of course. Believed in those encircling his chair and staring down at him with dark, hollow eye sockets. In Birgitta who had come up from the sea with the anchor still around her neck; in Ellen who was laughing with the baseball bat protruding from her head; in William who hung like a galleon figurehead from the rotary dryer and Tom who had come to get his watch back waving a bloody stump of an arm.
The booze couldn't free him; it could only give temporary relief. And right now he was willing to pay a lot for that.
He lifted the telephone and tapped in a number. It was answered on the second ring.
'How is it, Halvorsen?'
'Cold. Jon and Thea are asleep. I'm sitting in the room with a view of the road. I'll have to have a nap tomorrow.'
'Mm.'
'We have to drive back to Thea's flat tomorrow to get more insulin. She's a diabetic.'
'OK, but take Jon with you. I don't want him left on his own.'
'I could get someone to come here.'
'No!' Harry said sharply. 'I don't want anyone else involved for the time being.'
'Right.'
Harry sighed. 'Listen, I know babysitting isn't in the job description. You'll have to say if there's anything I can do in return.'
'Well…'
'Come on.'
'I promised to take Beate out one evening before Christmas to let her try lutefisk. She's never tasted it before, poor thing.'
'That's a promise.'
'Thanks.'
'And, Halvorsen?'
'Yes?'
'You're…' Harry took a deep breath. '… OK.'
'Thanks, boss.'
Harry rang off. Waits was singing that the skates on the icy pond spelt Alice.
21
Friday, 19 December. Zagreb.
He sat shaking with cold on a bit of cardboard on the pavement by Sofienberg Park. It was rush hour and people were racing by. Some still had time to drop a few kroner in the paper cup in front of him. It would soon be Christmas. His lungs ached because he had been on his back breathing in smoke all night. He raised his eyes and looked up Goteborggata.
That was all he could do now.
He thought about the Danube flowing past Vukovar. Patient, unstoppable. As he would have to be. Patient, waiting for the tank to come, for the dragon to stick its head out of the cave. For Jon Karlsen to come home. He looked at a pair of knees that had stopped right in front of him.
He peered up at a man with a red beard and a paper cup in his hand. The beard said something. Loud and angry.
'Excuse me?'
The man answered in English. Something about turf.
He could feel the gun in his pocket. One bullet. Instead he took out the large, sharp chunk of glass he kept in his other pocket. The beggar glowered at him but slunk off.
He dismissed the idea that Karlsen might not come. He had to come. And in the meantime he would be the Danube. Patient and unstoppable.
'Come in,' ordered the happy, buxom woman in the Salvation Army flat in Jacob Aalls gate. She pronounced the 'n'with the tip of her tongue against her teeth, as is often the case when adults learn Norwegian later in life.
'Hope we're not disturbing,' Harry said as he and Beate Lonn entered the hall. The floor was covered with shoes, big and small.
The woman shook her head while they started to take off their footwear.
'Cold,' she said. 'Hungry?'
'I've just had breakfast, thank you,' Beate said.
Harry shook his head with a friendly smile.
She led them into the sitting room. Around the table sat what Harry assumed was the Miholjec family: two men, a boy of Oleg's age, a small girl and a teenage girl Harry guessed would have to be Sofia. She hid her eyes behind a curtain of black hair and held a baby on her lap.
'Zdravo,' the older man said. He was lean with thick, greying hair and black eyes that Harry recognised, the angry, frightened eyes of an outcast.
'This is my husband,' the woman said. 'He understands Norwegian, but doesn't speak much. This is Uncle Josip. He's visiting us for Christmas. My children.'
'All four of them?' Beate asked.
'Yes,' she laughed. 'The last was a gift from God.'
'A real sweetie,' Beate said, pulling a face at the baby who gurgled back with delight. And, as Harry had already suspected, she couldn't resist the temptation to tweak the chubby, red cheeks. He gave Beate and Halvorsen one, maximum two years, before they produced one like it.
The man said something and the wife replied. Then she turned to Harry. 'He wants me to say that you only like Norwegians working in Norway. He's tried to find work, but can't get any.'
Harry met the man's eyes and sent him a nod, which went unanswered.
'Here,' the wife said, pointing to two vacant chairs.
They sat down. Harry saw that Beate had taken out her notepad before he started speaking.
'We've come here to ask about-'
'Robert Karlsen,' the wife said, looking at her husband, who was nodding assent.
'That's right. What can you tell us about him?'
'Not much. In fact, we've only just met him.'
'Just met him.' The wife's glance happened to catch Sofia, who was sitting with her nose buried in the baby's rumpled hair. 'Jon asked Robert to help us when we moved from the little flat in A Block this summer. Jon is a good person. He saw to it that we got a bigger flat when we had him there, you know.' She laughed at the baby. 'But Robert stood around chatting to Sofia most. And… well, she's fifteen.'
Harry noticed the young girl's face change colour. 'Mm. We'd also like to talk to Sofia.'
'Talk away,' the mother said.
'Alone,' Harry said.
The mother's and father's eyes met. The duel lasted two seconds, but Harry managed to read quite a bit into it. Perhaps once he had been the one who took the decisions, but in the new reality, in the new country, where she had turned out to be more adaptable, she was the decision-maker. She nodded to Harry.
'Sit in the kitchen. We won't disturb you.'
'Thank you,' Beate said.
'No need for thanks,' the wife said gravely. 'We want you to catch the man who did it. Do you know anything about him?'
'We believe he is a hired killer and lives in Zagreb,' Harry said. 'At least he phoned a hotel there from Oslo.'
'Which one?'
Startled, Harry looked at the father who had spoken in Norwegian.
'Hotel International,' he said, and watched the father exchange glances with the uncle. 'Do you know anything?'
The father shook his head.
'If so, I would be very grateful,' Harry said. 'The man is after Jon now. He peppered Jon's flat with bullets the day before yesterday.'
Harry watched the father's expression change to incredulity. But he held his tongue.
The mother led the way into the kitchen with Sofia dragging her feet behind her. As most teenagers would have done, Harry assumed. As Oleg might well do in a few years' time.
Once the mother was gone, Harry took out his notepad and Beate positioned herself on a chair opposite Sofia.
'Hi, Sofia. My name's Beate. Was Robert your boyfriend?'
Sofia looked down and shook her head.
'Were you in love with him?'
Another shake of the head.
'Did he hurt you?'
For the first time since their arrival Sofia opened the curtain of black hair and looked straight into Beate's eyes. Harry guessed that behind the heavy make-up there was a pretty girl. Now he could see only the father, angry and frightened. And a bruise on her forehead that the make-up could not quite conceal.
'No,' she said.
'Did your father tell you not to say anything, Sofia? That's what I can see.'
'What can you see?'
'Someone has hurt you.'
'You're lying.'
'How did you get the mark on your forehead?'
'I walked into a door.'
'Now you are lying.'
Sofia snorted. 'You sound clever and all that, but you know nothing.
You're just an old policewoman who would prefer to be at home with children. I saw you in there.' The anger was still there, but the voice had already started to thicken. Harry gave her one, two sentences at most.
Beate sighed. 'You have to trust us, Sofia. And you have to help us. We're trying to stop a murderer.'
'That's not my fault, is it?' Her voice cracked and Harry could see that she had managed only the one sentence. Then the tears came. A cloudburst of tears. Sofia hunched over and the curtain closed again.
Beate put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off.
'Go away!' she shouted.
'Did you know that Robert went to Zagreb this autumn?' Harry asked.
Her head shot up and she looked at Harry with an expression of disbelief, coated in wet make-up.
'So he didn't tell you?' Harry went on. 'Then he may not have told you that he was in love with a girl called Thea Nilsen, either?'
'No,' she whispered tearfully. 'And so what if he was?'
Harry tried to read her reaction to the information, but it was difficult with all the black cosmetics running.