Police hh-10

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Talking about business,’ the voice said. ‘Perhaps we have something to discuss as well.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want some of your money to stay shtum, let me put it like that.’

  It had to be him, the nurse from Enebakk. The one Isabelle had hired to get rid of Asayev. She had claimed he would gladly take his payment in sex, but obviously that hadn’t been enough.

  ‘How much?’ Bellman asked, attempting to be businesslike, but noticed he failed to sound as cold-blooded as he would have liked.

  ‘Not much. I’m a man of simple tastes. Ten thousand.’

  ‘Too little.’

  ‘Too little?’

  ‘It sounds like a first instalment.’

  ‘We could say a hundred thousand.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’

  ‘Because I need money tonight, now, the banks are closed and you can’t get more than ten thousand from an ATM.’

  Desperate. That was good news. Or was it? Mikael walked to the edge of the terrace, looked down over his town and tried to concentrate. This was one of those situations where he was usually at his best, where everything was at stake and one false move could prove fatal.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Well, you can call me Dan. As in Danuvius.’

  ‘Great, Dan. You realise, do you, that although I’m negotiating with you, it doesn’t mean I admit anything? I could be trying to entice you into a trap and then arrest you for blackmail.’

  ‘The only reason you’re saying that is that you’re scared I’m a journalist who’s heard a rumour and is trying to trick you into giving yourself away.’

  Damn.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m at work, so you’ll have to come here. But somewhere discreet. Meet me in the locked ward. There’s no one there now. In three-quarters of an hour in Asayev’s room.’

  Three-quarters of an hour. He was in a rush. It could of course be a precaution. He didn’t want to give Mikael time to set a trap. But Mikael believed in simple explanations. Like being faced with a junkie anaesthetic nurse who had suddenly run out of supplies. And, if so, that would make things easier. He might even be able to keep that particular cat in the bag for good.

  ‘Fine,’ Mikael said, and rang off. Breathed in the strange, almost suffocating smell coming from the terrace. Then he went into the living room and shut the door behind him.

  ‘I have to go out,’ he said.

  ‘Now?’ Ulla said, staring at him with the wounded expression that would normally annoy him enough to snap at her.

  ‘Now.’ He thought of the gun he had locked in the boot of his car. A Glock 22, a present from an American colleague. Unused. Unregistered.

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t wait up.’

  He walked towards the hall, feeling her eyes on his back. He didn’t stop. Not until he reached the doorway.

  ‘No, I’m not meeting her. OK?’

  Ulla didn’t answer. Just turned to the TV and pretended to be interested in the weather report.

  Katrine swore, dripping with sweat in the Boiler Room’s clammy heat, but she kept typing.

  Where the hell was it hiding, the FBI’s statistic about dead witnesses? And what the hell did Harry want with it?

  She looked at her watch. Sighed and rang his number.

  He didn’t pick up. Of course not.

  She left a message saying she needed more time. She was deep in the FBI’s website, but this statistic had to be either very bloody secret or he’d misunderstood. Chucked the phone onto the desk. She felt like calling Leif Rødbekk. No, not him. Some other idiot who could be bothered to fuck her tonight. The first person to pop into her head produced a frown. Where did he come from? Sweet, but. . but what? Had she been unconsciously nurturing this thought for a while?

  She dismissed the notion and concentrated on the screen again.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the FBI, perhaps it was the CIA?

  She tried new search terms. Central Intelligence Agency, witness, trial and death. Return. The computer whirred. The first hits came in.

  The door behind her opened, and she felt the draught from the culvert outside.

  ‘Bjørn?’ she said, without looking up from the screen.

  Harry parked his car outside Jakob Church in Hausmanns gate and walked up to number 92.

  He stopped outside and looked up at the facade.

  There was a dim light on the second floor, and he noticed there were bars on the windows now. The new owner was probably sick of the burglaries via the rear fire escape.

  Harry had imagined he would feel more. After all, this was where Gusto had been killed. Where he had almost had to pay with his own life.

  He felt the door. It was just like before. He opened up, went straight in. At the bottom of the stairs he took out the Odessa, released the safety catch, peered up the steps and listened as he breathed in the smell of urine- and vomit-marinated woodwork. Total silence.

  He started up the stairs. Moving as noiselessly as he could over wet newspaper, milk cartons and used syringes. On the second floor he stopped by the door. This was new as well. A metal door. Multiple locks. Only extremely motivated burglars would bother with this.

  Harry saw no reason to knock. No reason to surrender any possible element of surprise. So when he pressed the handle, felt the door react with taut springs, but found it unlocked, he gripped the Odessa with both hands and kicked the heavy door with his right foot.

  He dashed inside and to the left, so as not to stand like a silhouette in the doorway. The springs slammed the door shut behind him.

  Then all was still, there was only a low ticking sound.

  Harry blinked in astonishment.

  Apart from a small portable TV on standby, with white digits showing the wrong time, nothing had changed. It was the same cluttered junkie pit with mattresses and rubbish all over the floor. And one item of rubbish was sitting on a chair staring at him.

  It was Truls Berntsen.

  At least he thought it was Truls Berntsen.

  Had been Truls Berntsen.

  45

  The chair had been placed in the centre of the room, beneath the only light, a torn ricepaper lampshade hanging from the ceiling.

  Harry thought that the light, the chair and the TV with the stuttering ticking sound of a dying electrical appliance had to be from the seventies, but he wasn’t sure.

  The same was true of the body on the chair.

  Because it wasn’t easy to say if it was Truls Berntsen, born sometime in the seventies, dead this year, who was taped to the chair. The man had no face. What had once been there was a mush of relatively fresh red blood, black dried blood and white bone fragments. This mush would have run if it hadn’t been held in place by a transparent membrane of plastic wrapped tightly round the head. One of the bones stuck through the plastic. Cling film, Harry thought. Freshly packed mincemeat the way you see it in shops.

  Harry forced himself to look away and tried holding his breath to hear better as he hugged the wall. With his gun half raised, he scanned the room from left to right.

  Stared at the corner leading to the kitchen, saw the side of the old fridge and the work surface, but someone could have been there in the semi-darkness.

  Not a sound. Not a movement.

  Harry waited. Reasoned. If this was a trap someone had set for him, he should already be dead.

  He drew a deep breath. He had the advantage of having been here before, so he knew there was nowhere else to hide other than in the kitchen and the toilet. The disadvantage was that he would have to turn his back on one to check the other.

  He took a decision, strode towards the kitchen, poked his head round the corner, pulled it back fast and waited for his brain to process the information it had received. Stove, piles of pizza boxes and the fridge. No one there.

  He went towards the toilet. He stood in the doorway and pressed the light switch. Counted
to seven. Thrust his head out. Back in. Empty.

  Slid down to the floor with his back to the wall. Only now feeling how hard his heart had been pounding against his ribs.

  He sat like that for some seconds. Recovering.

  Then he walked over to the body on the chair. Crouched down and examined the red mass behind the plastic film. No face, but a prominent forehead, underbite and the cheap haircut left Harry in no doubt: it was Truls Berntsen.

  Harry’s brain had already started processing the fact that he had been wrong. Truls Berntsen was not the cop killer.

  The next thought came hard on its heels. It was definitely not alone.

  Could that be what he was witnessing here: the murder of an accessory, a murderer covering his tracks? Could Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen have been working with someone as sick as himself, who committed this atrocity? Could Valentin have been deliberately sitting in front of the CCTV at Ullevål Stadium while Berntsen performed the murder in Maridalen? And, if so, how had they divvied the murders between them? Which murders did Berntsen have alibis for?

  Harry straightened up and cast his eyes around. And why had he been summoned here? They would have found the body soon enough. And there were several things that didn’t tally. Truls Berntsen had never been involved in the investigation into Gusto Hanssen’s murder. It had been a small investigative unit consisting of Beate and a couple of other forensics officers who hadn’t had much to do because Oleg had been arrested as the presumed perpetrator minutes after they’d arrived and the evidence had supported the presumption. The only. .

  In the silence Harry could still hear the low ticking. Regular, unchanging, like clockwork. He completed his thought.

  The only other person bothered enough to investigate this trivial, sordid drug murder was here in the room. Himself.

  He had been — like the other policemen — summoned to die at the crime scene for the unsolved murder.

  The next second he was by the door pressing down the handle. And it was as he feared: it gave easily, no resistance, without opening. It was like a hotel-room door. Except that he didn’t have a key card.

  Harry scanned the room again.

  The thick windows with the steel bars on the inside. The iron door that had slammed shut by itself. He had walked straight into the trap like the crazed idiot he had always been, caught up in the thrill of the chase.

  The ticking hadn’t got louder; it just seemed like it.

  Harry stared at the portable TV. At the seconds ticking away. It wasn’t the wrong time. It wasn’t telling the time; clocks don’t go backwards.

  It had been 00.06.10 when he came in, now it was 00.03.51.

  It was a countdown.

  Harry walked over, grabbed the TV and tried to lift it. In vain. It must have been screwed to the floor. He aimed a hard kick at the top of the TV, and the plastic casing cracked with a bang. He looked inside. Metal pipes, glass tubes, leads. Harry was definitely no expert, but he had seen the innards of enough TVs to know there was too much in this one. And enough pictures of improvised explosives to recognise a pipe bomb.

  He assessed the leads and dismissed the idea at once. One of the bomb blokes in Delta had explained to him that cutting the blue or red wires and being home and dry was the good old days; now it was digital hell, with Bluetooth signals, codes and safeguards that sent the counter to zero if you fiddled with anything.

  Harry took a run-up and threw himself against the door. The door frame may have had frailties of its own.

  It didn’t.

  Nor the bars on the windows.

  His shoulders and ribs ached as he got to his feet again. He screamed at the window.

  No sounds came in, no sounds went out.

  Harry took out his mobile phone. Ops Room. Delta. They could use explosives. He looked at the clock on the TV. 00.03.04. They would hardly have time to transmit the address. 00.02.59. He stared at the contact list. R.

  Rakel.

  Ring her. Say farewell. To her and Oleg. Tell them he loved them. That they had to go on living. Living better than he had done. Be with them for the last two minutes. So as not to die alone. Have company, share a last traumatic experience with them, let them have a taste of death, give them a final nightmare to accompany them on their way.

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’

  Harry slipped the phone back in his pocket. Looked around. The doors had been removed. So that there was nowhere to hide.

  00.02.40.

  Harry strode into the kitchen, which constituted the short part of the L-shaped room. It wasn’t long enough. A pipe bomb would smash everything in here as well.

  He eyed the fridge. Opened it. A milk carton, two bottles of beer and a packet of liver paste. For a brief second he weighed up the alternatives, beer or panic, before plumping for panic and pulling out the shelves, sheets of glass and plastic boxes. They clattered to the ground behind him. He curled up and forced himself inside. Groaned. He couldn’t bend his neck enough to get his head inside. Tried again. Cursing his long limbs as he organised them in the most ergonomic way.

  Bloody impossible!

  He looked at the clock on the TV. 00.02.06.

  Harry shoved his head in, pulled up his knees, but now his back wasn’t flexible enough. Shit! He laughed out loud. The offer of free yoga he had rejected when he was in Hong Kong, was that going to be his downfall?

  Houdini. He remembered something about breathing in and out and relaxing.

  He breathed out, tried to clear his mind, concentrate on relaxing. Ignore the seconds. Just feel how his muscles and joints were becoming more flexible, more supple. Feel how he was gradually compressing himself.

  Possible.

  Hallelujah, it really was possible! He was inside the fridge. A fridge with enough metal and insulation to save him. Perhaps. If it wasn’t the pipe bomb from hell.

  He held the edge of the door, cast a final glance at the TV before trying to close it. 00.01.47.

  Wanted to close it but his hand wouldn’t obey. It wouldn’t obey because his brain refused to reject what his eyes had seen, but the rationally controlled section of his brain tried to ignore. To ignore because it had no relevance for the only thing that was important now, surviving, saving itself. To ignore because he couldn’t afford to do otherwise, didn’t have the time, didn’t have the empathy.

  The mincemeat on the chair.

  It had acquired two white spots.

  White as in the whites of the eyes.

  Staring straight at him through the cling film.

  The bugger was alive.

  Harry let out a yell and squeezed out of the fridge. Ran to the chair with the TV screen at the margin of his vision. Ripped the cling film off the face. The eyes in the mince blinked and he heard a shallow breath. He must have got some air through the hole where the bone had punctured the film.

  ‘Who did this?’ Harry asked.

  Got no more than breath by way of an answer. The mincemeat mask began to trickle down like melting candle wax.

  ‘Who is he? Who’s the cop killer?’

  Still only breath.

  Harry looked at the clock. 00.01.26. It would take time to squeeze back in.

  ‘Come on, Truls! I can catch him.’

  A bubble of blood began to grow where Harry guessed the mouth had to be. As it burst there was an almost inaudible whisper.

  ‘He wore a mask. Didn’t speak.’

  ‘What kind of mask?’

  ‘Green. All green.’

  ‘Green?’

  ‘Sur. . geon. .’

  ‘Surgeon’s mask?’

  A small nod, then the eyes closed again.

  00.01.05.

  No more to be gleaned. He ran back to the kitchen. He was faster this time. He closed the door and the light went out.

  Shivering in the darkness, he counted the seconds. Forty-nine.

  The bastard would have died anyway.

  Forty-eight.

  Better that someone else did the job.
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  Forty-seven.

  Green mask. Truls Berntsen had given Harry what he knew without asking for anything in return. So there was a bit of policeman left in him.

  Forty-six.

  No point thinking about it. There wasn’t any more room for him in here anyway.

  Forty-five.

  Besides, there was no time to release him from the chair.

  Forty-four.

  Even if he’d wanted to, there was no time left now.

  Forty-three.

  All over now.

  Forty-two.

  Shit.

  Forty-one.

  Shit, shit, shit!

  Forty.

  Harry kicked open the fridge door with one foot and squeezed himself out with the other. Pulled open the drawer under the worktop, grabbed what had to be a bread knife, ran to the chair and cut off the tape on the arms of the chair.

  Avoided glancing at the TV, but heard the ticking.

  ‘Fuck you, Berntsen!’

  He walked round the chair and cut the tape on the back and around the chair legs.

  Put his arms round his chest and heaved.

  Needless to say, the bugger was extremely heavy.

  Harry pulled and cursed, dragged and cursed, no longer hearing the words coming from his mouth, hoping only they offended heaven and hell enough so that at least one of them would intervene in this idiotic but inevitable course of events.

  He aimed at the open fridge, manoeuvred Truls Berntsen through the opening. The bloodstained body slumped and slipped out again.

  Harry tried to stuff him in again, but it was no use. He pulled Berntsen out of the fridge, leaving trails of blood along the linoleum, let go, dragged the fridge from the wall, heard the plug come out, pushed the fridge over onto its back between the worktop and the stove. Grabbed Berntsen and thrust him up and in. Crawled in after him. Used both legs to push him as close to the back of the fridge as possible, to where the heavy refrigeration motor was housed. Lay on top of Berntsen, inhaling the smell of sweat, blood and piss that comes from sitting in a chair knowing your death is imminent.