by Jo Nesbo
‘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 before 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. .
Harry looked around the bar.
‘The lock on the back door was picked,’ the officer behind him said.
Harry nodded. He had seen the scratch marks around the lock.
Lock picking. Police handiwork. That was why the alarm hadn’t gone off.
Harry hadn’t seen any signs of resistance. No objects had been knocked over, nothing on the floor, no chairs or tables kicked out of a position it would be natural to leave them in overnight. The owner was being questioned. Harry had said he didn’t need to meet him. He hadn’t said he didn’t want to meet him. He hadn’t given any reason. Such as not wanting to risk being recognised.
Harry sat on a bar stool, reconstructing how he had sat there that night with an untouched glass of Jim Beam in front of him. The Russian had attacked from behind; he had tried to press the blade of the Siberian knife into his carotid artery. Harry’s titanium prosthesis had been in the way. The owner had stood behind the bar, paralysed with fear, as Harry had scrabbled for the corkscrew. The blood that had discoloured the floor beneath them, as if a full bottle of red wine had been knocked over.
‘Nothing in the way of clues so far,’ Bjørn said.
Harry nodded again. Of course not. Berntsen had had the place to himself, he was able to take his time. Clear up after him before he wet her, doused her. . The word came to him without his wanting it to. Marinated her.
Then he had flicked the lighter.
Gram Parsons’ ‘She’ sounded and Bjørn lifted his phone to his ear.
‘Yes?. . A match? Hang on. .’
He took out a pencil and his ever-present Moleskine notebook. Harry suspected Bjørn
liked the patina of the cover so much he erased the notes when the book was full and used it again.
‘No record, no, but he’s worked on murder investigations. . Yes, I’m afraid we had a suspicion. . And his name is?’
Bjørn had put his notebook down on the bar counter, ready to write. But the pencil tip stopped. ‘What did you say the father’s name was?’
Harry could hear from his colleague’s voice that something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
As Ståle Aune tore open the classroom door the following thoughts whirled through his head: he had been a bad father; he wasn’t sure if Aurora’s class had their own room; and if they did, if it was still this room.
It was two years since he had been here, during a school open day when all the classes had exhibited drawings, matchstick models, clay figures and other nonsense that had left him unimpressed. A better father would have been impressed of course.
The voices went quiet, and the class turned in his direction.
And in the silence he scoured the young, soft-skinned faces. The unscarred, undefiled faces that had not lived as long as they would, faces that were yet to be formed, yet to assume character and over the years stiffen into the mask which would become who they were inside. Which he had become. His girl.
His sweeping gaze found faces he had seen in class photos, at birthday parties, all too few handball games, last days of term. Some he could identify by name, most he couldn’t. Continued searching for the one face, as her name was formed, grew like a sob in his throat: Aurora. Aurora. Aurora.
Bjørn slipped the phone into his pocket. Stood by the counter with his back to Harry, motionless. Slowly shaking his head. Then he turned. His face looked as if it had been bled. Pale, bloodless.
‘It’s someone you know well,’ Harry said.
Bjørn nodded slowly, like a sleepwalker. Swallowed. ‘It just can’t be possible. .’
‘Aurora.’