by Anne Holt
‘She’s fine,’ Adam said, flopping down on the sofa beside her. ‘Probably just a dream. She wasn’t really awake. Now, where were we?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t actually know.’
‘I thought you were pleased about this project.’
She laid her hand on his stomach and crept into his embrace.
‘I am,’ she murmured. ‘But I’ve had an overdose of hatred at the moment. I haven’t even asked you how your day went.’
‘Please don’t.’
She could feel him slowly beginning to relax under her weight. His breathing became deeper, and she fell into the same rhythm. She could tell his belt was too tight from the roll of flesh bulging over the waistband of his trousers.
‘What do you think about some curtains, Adam?’
‘Hm?’
‘Curtains,’ she repeated. ‘Here in the living room. I just think the windows seem so big and dark in the winter.’
‘As long as I don’t have to choose them, go and buy them or hang them up.’
‘OK.’
They ought to get up. She ought to tidy all these papers. If the girls got up first tomorrow morning, as they usually did, things would be even more chaotic than they already were.
‘You smell so good,’ she whispered.
‘Everything about me is good,’ he said sleepily, and in his voice there was a feeling of security she hadn’t felt for a long time. ‘Besides which I am the best detective in the whole wide world.’
*
‘Police! Stop! Stop, I said!’
A young lad had just tumbled out of a dark green Volvo XC90. The number plates were so dirty they were illegible, despite the fact that the rest of the vehicle was quite clean. The oldest trick in the book, thought DC Knut Bork as he jumped out of the unmarked police car and set off in pursuit.
‘Stop that car!’ he yelled to his colleague, who was already striding across the carriageway.
For precisely five days it had been illegal to pay for sex in Norway. The new law had been passed by Stortinget without too much fuss, despite the fact that there was much to suggest that the new regulations would cause a significant setback for the sex industry. Open street prostitution had gone into hiding, presumably to wait and see what happened. However, there were still plenty of whores of both sexes in Oslo, and the punters hadn’t stayed away either. Everything was just a little bit trickier for them all. Perhaps that was the idea.
The boy was unsteady on his feet, but fast. However, it took Bork only fifty metres to catch up with him.
The punter in the expensive car was terrified. He was about thirty-five and had tried to cover up two child seats in the back of the car with an old blanket. His designer jeans were still open at the fly when the driver’s door was yanked open. He stepped out on to the pavement as requested, and began to cry.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ yelled the boy on the other side of the street. ‘You’re killing me!’
‘No, I’m not,’ said DC Bork. ‘And if you’re a good boy I won’t need to use the handcuffs, will I? OK? They’re not particularly comfortable, so if I were you …’
He could feel that the boy was reluctantly beginning to resign himself to the situation. The skinny body gradually relaxed. Bork slowly loosened his grip, and when the boy turned around he seemed younger than he had from a distance. His face was childish and his features soft, although he weighed no more than sixty kilos. A cold sore extended from his top lip right up into his left nostril, which was distended with scabs and pus. Bork felt sick, and was tempted to let the boy run away.
‘I haven’t fucking done anything!’ He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his padded jacket. ‘It’s not illegal to sell yourself. It’s that bastard who should go to jail!’
‘He’ll probably be fined. But since you’re our witness, that means we need to talk to you as well. Let’s go over to our car. Come on. What’s your name?’
The boy didn’t reply. He stubbornly refused to budge when Knut Bork indicated they should move.
‘Right,’ said Bork. ‘There are two ways of doing this. There’s the nice, easy way, and then there’s the way that isn’t cool at all. Not for either of us. But it’s your choice.’
No response.
‘What’s your name?’
Still nothing.
‘OK,’ said Knut Bork, getting out the handcuffs. ‘Hands behind your back, please.’
‘Martin. Martin Setre.’
‘Martin,’ Bork repeated, putting away the handcuffs. ‘Have you any form of ID on you?’
A slight shake of the head and a shrug.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
Knut Bork grinned.
‘Seventeen,’ said Martin Setre. ‘Almost. Almost seventeen.’
The punter’s sobs grew louder. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning, and there was very little traffic. They could hear the rattle of a tram from Prinsens Gate, and a taxi hooted angrily at the two badly parked cars as it whizzed past on the hunt for passengers, its FOR HIRE sign illuminated. The Christmas party season and the financial crisis had strangled the city’s night life in January, and the streets were more or less deserted.
‘Knut,’ his colleague shouted. ‘I think you should come over here for a minute.’
‘Come on,’ said Knut Bork, grabbing the boy by the upper arm, which was so thin he could easily get his hand around it.
The boy reluctantly went with him.
‘I think we need to take this guy in,’ said his colleague as they drew closer. ‘Look what we’ve got here!’
Bork peered into the car.
Between the seats the central console was open. Under the armrest, in the space meant for sweets and snacks, lay a bulging bag that only just fitted. Knut Bork pulled on a pair of plastic gloves and opened one corner.
‘Well, well,’ he said, smacking his lips appreciatively. ‘Well I never. Hash, I presume?’
The question was unnecessary, and went unanswered. Bork weighed the bag in his hand; he seemed to be thinking.
‘Exactly half a kilo,’ he said eventually. ‘Not bad.’
‘It’s not mine,’ sobbed the man. ‘It’s his!’
He pointed at Martin.
‘What?’ howled the boy. ‘Thanks for fucking nothing! I asked him for five grams for the job, and look what I got!’
He unzipped his jacket and fumbled for something in the inside pocket. Eventually he managed to get hold of something between his index and middle fingers and pulled it out.
‘Three grams max,’ he said, dangling the little ball wrapped in cling film in front of his face. ‘Max! As if I’d have got out of the car if that big bag was mine! As if I wouldn’t have taken it with me if it belonged to me! Are you fucking crazy?’
‘There’s something in what he says, don’t you think?’
The punter sobbed as Bork place a hand on his shoulder, demanding an answer.
‘Please! You can’t lock me up! I’ll do anything, I can’t … You can have whatever you—’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ warned Knut Bork, holding up a hand. ‘Don’t go making things worse for yourself. Let’s just calm down and—’
‘Can I go now?’ said Martin in a thin voice. ‘I mean, it’s not me you want. They’ll just send me to social services and it’ll mean a load of paperwork for you and—’
‘I thought you said you were an adult. Come on.’
A night bus came along. It had to zigzag between the two cars, each blocking one side of the carriageway. There was just one nocturnal passenger looking down with curiosity at the four men before the bus roared away and it was possible to talk once again.
‘My car,’ the man sobbed as he was led to the police car. ‘My wife needs it tomorrow morning! She has to take the kids to nursery!’
‘Let me put it this way,’ said Knut Bork as he helped the man into the back seat. ‘Your wife has far bigger problems than the fact that she hasn’t
got transport tomorrow morning.’
Street Boy
The problem was that so many people had started to complain about the bad air. Quite frankly, there was a horrible smell. The receptionist had his hands full moving guests around as they came back from their allocated rooms and announced that they were uninhabitable. The strange thing was that it wasn’t just one particular area of the hotel. On the contrary, the complaints were coming from one room here, another there, and in the end he had run out of patience. Given the number of rooms that could no longer be used, the hotel was seriously overbooked.
The Hotel Continental in Oslo was a proud establishment that most definitely did not tolerate an unpleasant smell in its rooms.
Fritiof Hansen, the operations manager, had been trying to track down the problem for more than fifty minutes. He had begun with the first room that had been rejected by an irate Frenchman threatening to move to the Grand. A disgusting, sweetish smell assailed his nostrils as he opened the door. There was nothing to explain the stench as far as Fritiof Hansen could see. The bathroom was freshly cleaned. All the drawers were empty, apart from the obligatory copy of the New Testament and brochures about Oslo’s nightlife and the entertainment available. He did find a dirty cotton-wool ball under the bed, and, rather embarrassingly, a used condom behind one of the legs. But nothing that smelled. Nor were there any places in the room where the smell was stronger, as far as he could tell. And as soon as he stepped into the corridor, he was surrounded once more by the scent of luxury and carpet cleaner. In the room next door, all was as it should be. When he opened a door further along the corridor, the stench was there again.
It just didn’t make any sense.
He was now standing down in the foyer, legs apart and hands behind his back as he stuck his nose in the air and sniffed. Admittedly, Fritiof Hansen was a man of sixty-three with a reduced sense of smell after smoking twenty cigarettes a day for forty years. But he had stopped smoking three years ago, and his senses of taste and smell had both improved.
‘Edvard,’ he said, holding out his hand to a bellboy who was staggering past with a bag under his arm and a suitcase in each hand. ‘Is there a funny smell just here?’
‘No,’ gasped Edvard without stopping. ‘But it stinks down in the cellar!’
‘Right …’
Fritiof Hansen clicked his heels like a soldier before brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his uniform. It was green, freshly ironed and with razor-sharp creases. His black shoes had been polished until they shone. His identity card with its magnetic strip dangled from an extendable cord clipped to his belt; combined with the carefully chosen code 1111, it gave him access to every room in the building. When he set off, his bearing was erect and military.
The cellar of the Continental was a confusing labyrinth, but not to Fritiof Hansen. For more than sixteen years he had taken care of small details and major issues at the hotel. When he was given the title of operations manager the previous year, he realized it was just a way of recognizing his loyalty. He wasn’t really the manager of anything. Before he got the job at the Continental, he had packed paper clips in a protected workshop in Groruddalen. He proved himself to be unusually handy, and became a kind of informal caretaker there, until his boss had recommended him for a job at the Continental. Fritiof Hansen had turned up for the interview freshly shaven, wearing neat overalls and carrying his toolbox. He got the job, and since then he hadn’t missed a single day’s work.
He didn’t like the cellar.
The complex machinery down here was maintained by a team of specialists. Fritiof Hansen might occasionally change a light bulb or fix a door that had got stuck, but the hotel used external companies for renovations and maintenance. And for the air-conditioning system. The module that collected fresh air from outside was located on the roof and in its own area on the top floor. The plant itself was in the cellar. Over the years it had been augmented in a way that made it into two independent appliances. During the latest phase of modernization it had been recommended that the whole thing be renewed, but this proved too expensive, so a compromise was reached between the hotel and the suppliers: a new, smaller plant was installed to ease the load on the old one. Fritiof Hansen could hear the low, monotone hum before he reached the inner corridor where the locked doors to the machine room were located.
As he walked down the stairs, he wrinkled his nose. It didn’t smell quite the same as the polluted rooms, but here, too, a strange, sweetish smell found its way into his nostrils, combined with damp and dust and the distinctive mustiness of old buildings.
Fritiof Hansen didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in his brother and in Arbeiderpartiet and the hotel management, who had promised him a job here for as long as he could stand on his own two legs. Over the years he had also begun to believe in himself. Ghosts were invisible. Anything you couldn’t see didn’t exist. And yet he always felt that strange sense of unease as he set off down the long, dark corridors lined with doors leading to rooms which concealed things he recognized, but often didn’t understand.
At the point where the corridor bore to the left, the smell grew stronger. He was getting close to the air-conditioning plants which were in two rooms next door to each other. With each step he took, the unpleasant feeling grew. Perhaps he should go and fetch someone. Edvard was a good lad who was always ready to stop for a chat when he had time.
But Edvard was just a bellboy. Fritiof Hansen was operations manager, with a badge on his chest and the code for every room in the entire building. This was his job, and the receptionist had told him he had an hour to sort out what was going on before the management called in professional help.
As if he wasn’t a professional.
Despite the fact that most things in the cellar were old, the door was locked with a modern card reader. He swiped his card and keyed in the code as steadily as he could.
He opened the door.
The stench hit him with such force that he took a couple of steps backwards. He cupped his hands over his nose before hesitantly moving forward.
He stopped in the doorway of the dark room. His free hand groped for the light switch. When he found it he was almost dazzled by the fluorescent tube which suddenly drenched the room in an unpleasant blue light.
Four metres away, half-hidden behind some kind of machinery that could have been for just about anything, he could see a pair of legs from the knees down. It was difficult to tell whether they belonged to a woman or a man.
Fritiof Hansen had a set evening ritual. Every weekday at 9.35 p.m. he watched CSI on TVNorge. A beer, a small packet of crisps and Crime Scene Investigation before bed. He liked both the Miami and New York versions, but it was Gil Grissom in the original version from Las Vegas who was Fritiof Hansen’s favourite. But Grissom was about to be replaced by that black guy, and Fritiof wasn’t at all sure if he’d bother watching it any more.
Grissom was the best.
Gil Grissom wouldn’t like it if an operations manager at a respectable hotel walked into a crime scene, destroying a whole lot of microscopic evidence that might be there. Fritiof Hansen was quite convinced this was a crime scene. At any rate, the person over by the wall was definitely dead. He remembered an episode where Grissom had established the time of death by studying the development of fly larvae on a pig’s carcass. It had been bad enough on television.
‘Dead as a doornail,’ he muttered, mainly to convince himself. ‘It stinks of death in here.’
Slowly he moved back and closed the door. He checked the lock had clicked into place and set off towards the stairs. Before he got around the corner where the corridor led off at an angle of ninety degrees, he had broken into a run.
*
‘I was actually thinking about letting him go. But then we found the hash. I needed to interview him properly, and then it struck me that …’
DC Knut Bork handed over a report to Silje Sørensen as they walked across the blue zone in the police station. She stopped as
she glanced through the document.
On closer investigation, Martin Setre had turned out to be fifteen years and eleven months old. He had spent the first part of his life with his biological parents. He was already perceived as an unlucky child during his time at nursery. Broken bones. Bruises. Admittedly, he was clumsy at nursery too, but most of his injuries were sustained at home. There was the suggestion of ADHD when a pre-school teacher asked for the boy to be checked out. Before this process could begin, the family had moved. Martin started school in a small community in Østfold. After only six months he was admitted to hospital with stomach pains, which no one could get to the bottom of. During the spring term in his first year the family moved again, after one of the teachers called round unannounced and found the boy locked in a bike shed, his clothing completely inadequate. The teacher informed the authorities, but before the case reached the top of the pile, the family had moved yet again. Martin’s life continued in this way until he was admitted to Ullevål Hospital at the age of eleven with a fractured skull. Fortunately, they had managed to save his life, but actually giving him any kind of life proved more difficult. Since then the boy had been in and out of various institutions and foster homes. The last time he had run away was at Christmas, from a residential youth care unit where he had been placed by the court.
The case against his parents was dropped due to lack of evidence.
‘Ffksk,’ mumbled Silje, looking up again.
‘What?’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she clarified.
‘You could say that,’ agreed Knut Bork, leading her to an interview room. ‘He’s in here.’
He took out a key and inserted it in the lock.