by Jo Nesbo
A muffled wail. Harry pricks up his ears. It is not police sirens, though, just the telephone ringing in the next room.
The masked man turns and peers up at the surveillance camera hanging from the ceiling behind the counters. He holds up one hand and shows five black gloved fingers, then closes his hand and extends his forefinger. Six fingers. Six seconds too long. He turns towards Stine again, grasps the gun with both hands, holds it at hip height and raises the muzzle towards her head, standing with his legs slightly apart to withstand the recoil. The telephone keeps ringing. One minute and twelve seconds. The diamond ring flashes as Stine half-raises her hand, as though waving goodbye to someone.
It is exactly 15.22.22 when he pulls the trigger. The report is sharp and hollow. Stine's chair is forced backwards as her head dances on her neck like a mangled rag doll. Then the chair topples backwards. There is a thud as her head hits the edge of a desk and Harry can no longer see her. Nor can he see the poster advertising Nordea's new pension scheme glued to the outside of the glass partition above the counter, which now has a red background. All he can hear is the angry, insistent ringing of the telephone. The masked robber picks up the holdall. Harry has to make up his mind. The robber vaults the counter. Harry makes up his mind. In one quick movement he is out of the chair. Six strides. He is there. And picks up the phone:
'Speak!'
In the pause which follows he can hear the sound of the police siren on the TV in the sitting room, a Pakistani pop song from the neighbours and heavy steps up the stairwell sounding like fru Madsen's. Then there is a gentle laugh at the other end of the line. It is laughter from a long-distant encounter. Not in time, but just as distant. Like seventy per cent of Harry's past, which returns to him now and again in the form of vague rumours or total fabrications. But this was a story he could confirm.
'Do you really still use that macho line, Harry?'
'Anna?'
'Gosh, well done, Harry.'
Harry could feel the sweet warmth surging through his stomach, almost like whisky. Almost. In the mirror he saw a picture he had pinned up on the opposite wall. Of himself and Sis one summer holiday a long time ago in Hvitsten when they were small. They were smiling in the way that children do when they still believe nothing nasty can happen to them.
'And what do you do of a Sunday evening then, Harry?'
'Well.' Harry could hear his voice automatically mimicking hers. Slightly too deep, slightly too lingering. He didn't mean to do that. Not now. He coughed and found a more neutral pitch: 'What people usually do.'
'And that is?'
'Watch videos.'
3
The House of Pain
'Seen the video?'
The battered office chair screamed in protest as Police Officer Halvorsen leaned back and looked at his nine-years-senior colleague, Inspector Harry Hole, with an expression of disbelief on his innocent young face.
'Absolutely,' Harry said, running thumb and first finger down the bridge of his nose to show the bags under his bloodshot eyes. 'The whole weekend?'
'From Saturday morning to Sunday evening.' 'Well, at least you had a good time on Friday night,' Halvorsen said.
'Yes.' Harry took a blue folder out of his coat pocket and placed it on the desk facing Halvorsen's. 'I read the transcripts of the interviews.'
From the other pocket Harry took a grey packet of French Colonial coffee. He and Halvorsen shared an office at almost the furthest end of the corridor in the red zone on the sixth floor of Police Headquarters in Gronland. Two months ago they had gone to buy a Rancilio Silvia espresso coffee machine, which had taken
pride of place on the filing cabinet beneath a framed photograph of a girl sitting with her legs up on a desk. Her freckled face seemed to be grimacing, but in fact she was helpless with laughter. The background was the same office wall on which the picture was hanging.
'Did you know that three out of four policemen can't spell "uninteresting" properly?' Harry said, hanging his coat on the stand. 'They either leave out the "e" between the "t" and the "r", or—'
'Interesting.'
'What did you do at the weekend?'
'On Friday, thanks to some anonymous nutter's phone call warning us about a car bomb, I sat in a car outside the American ambassador's residence. False alarm, of course, but things are so sensitive right now that we had to sit there all evening. On Saturday, I made another attempt to find the woman of my life. On Sunday, I concluded that she doesn't exist. What did you get on the robber from the interviews?' Halvorsen measured the coffee into a double-cup filter.
'Nada,' Harry said, taking off his sweater. Underneath, he was wearing a charcoal-grey T-shirt - it had once been black and now bore the faded letters Violent Femmes. He collapsed into the office chair with a groan. 'No one has reported seeing the wanted man near the bank before the robbery. Someone came out of a 7-Eleven on the other side of Bogstadveien and saw the man running up Industrigata. It was the balaclava that caught his attention. The surveillance camera outside the bank shows both of them as the robber passes the witness in front of a skip outside the 7-Eleven. The only interesting thing he could tell us which wasn't on the video was that the robber crossed the road twice further up Industrigata.'
'Someone who can't make up his mind which pavement to walk on. That sounds pretty uninteresting to me.' Halvorsen put the double-cup filter in the portafilter handle. 'With two "e"s, one "r"
and one "s".'
'You don't know much about bank robberies, do you, Halvorsen.'
'Why should I? We're supposed to catch murderers. The guys from Hedmark can take care of the robbers.'
'Hedmark?'
'Haven't you noticed as you walk around the Robberies Unit? The rural dialect, the knitted cardigans. But what's the point you're making?'
'The point is Victor.'
'The dog handler?'
'As a rule, the dogs are the first on the scene, and an experienced bank robber knows that. A good dog can follow a robber on foot, but if he crosses the street and cars pass, the dog loses the scent.'
'So?' Halvorsen compressed the coffee with the tamper and finished off by smoothing the surface with a twist, which he maintained was what distinguished the professionals from the amateurs.
'It corroborates the suspicion that we are dealing with an experienced bank robber. And that fact alone means we can concentrate on a dramatically smaller number of people than we might otherwise have done. The Head of Robberies told me—'
'Ivarsson? Thought you weren't exactly on speaking terms?'
'We aren't. He was talking to the whole of the investigation team. He said there are under a hundred bank robbers in Oslo. Fifty of them are so stupid, doped up or mental that we nail them almost every time. Half of them are in prison, so we can ignore them. Forty are skilled craftsmen who manage to slip through so long as someone helps them with the planning. And then there are ten pros, the ones who attack security vans and cash-processing centres. To get them we need a lucky break, and we try to keep tabs on them at all times. They're being asked to give alibis right now.' Harry cast a glance at Silvia, who was gurgling away on the filing cabinet. 'And I had a word with Weber from Forensics on Saturday.'
'Thought Weber was retiring this month.'
'Someone slipped up. He won't be stopping until the summer.'
Halvorsen chuckled. 'He must be even grumpier than usual then.'
'He is, but that's not the reason,' Harry said. 'His lot found sod all.' 'Nothing?'
'Not one fingerprint. Not one strand of hair. Not even clothing fibres. And, of course, you could see from the footprint that he was wearing brand new shoes.'
'So they can't check the patterns of wear against other shoes?'
'Cor-rect,' Harry said, with a long 'o'.
'And the bank robber's weapon?' said Halvorsen, taking one of the cups of coffee over to Harry's desk. On looking up, he noticed that Harry's left eyebrow was almost into his cropped blond hair. 'Sorry. The murder weapo
n.'
'Thank you. It wasn't found.'
Halvorsen sat on his side of the two desks sipping at his coffee. 'So, in a nutshell, a man walked into a crowded bank in broad daylight, took two million kroner, murdered a woman, strolled out, up a relatively unpopulated but heavily trafficked street in the centre of the capital of Norway, a few hundred metres from a police station and we, the salaried police professionals, do not have a thing to go on?'
Harry nodded slowly. 'Almost nothing. We have the video.'
'Which you can visualise every second of, if I know you.'
'No, every tenth of a second, I would say.'
'And you can quote the witnesses' statements verbatim?'
'Only August Schulz's. He told me a lot of interesting things about the War. Reeled off the names of competitors in the clothing industry; so-called good Norwegians who had supported the confis-cation of his family's property during the War. He knew precisely what these people are doing nowadays. Yet he didn't realise that a bank robbery had been committed.'
They drank their coffee in silence. The rain beat against the window.
'You like this life, don't you,' Halvorsen said suddenly. 'Sitting alone all weekend chasing ghosts.' Harry smiled, but didn't answer.
'I thought that now you had family obligations you'd given up the solitary lifestyle.'
Harry sent his younger colleague an admonitory grimace. 'Don't know if I see it like that,' he said slowly. 'We don't even live together, you know.'
'No, but Rakel has a little boy and that makes things different, doesn't it?'
'Oleg,' Harry said, edging his way towards the filing cabinet. 'They flew to Moscow on Friday.'
'Oh?'
'Court case. Father wants custody.' 'Ah, that's right. What's he like?'
'Hm.' Harry straightened the crooked picture above the coffee machine. 'He's a professor Rakel met and married while she was working there. He comes from a wealthy, traditional family with loads of political influence, Rakel says.'
'So they know a few judges, eh?'
'Bound to, but we think it'll be alright. The father's a wacko, and everyone knows that. Bright alcoholic with poor self-control, you know the type.'
'I think I do.'
Harry looked up smartly, just in time to see Halvorsen wipe away a smile.
At Police HQ it was fairly well known that Harry had alcohol problems. Nowadays, alcoholism is not in itself grounds for dis-missing a civil servant, but to be drunk during working hours is. The last time Harry had had a relapse, there were people higher up in the building who had advocated having him removed from the force, but Politiavdelingssjef, PAS for short, Bjarne Moller, head of Crime Squad, had spread a protective wing over Harry pleading extenuating circumstances. The circumstances had been the woman in the picture above the espresso machine - Ellen Gjelten, Harry's partner and close friend - who had been beaten to death with a baseball bat on a path down by the river Akerselva. Harry had struggled to his feet again, but the wound still stung. Particularly because, in Harry's opinion, the case had never been cleared up satisfactorily. When Harry and Halvorsen had found forensic evidence incriminating the neo-Nazi Sverre Olsen, Inspector Tom Waaler had wasted no time in going to Olsen's home to arrest him. Olsen had apparently fired a shot at Waaler, who had returned fire in self-defence and killed him. According to Waaler's report, that is. Neither the investigations at the scene of the shooting, nor the inquiry by SEFO, the independent police authority, suggested otherwise. On the other hand, Olsen's motive for killing Ellen had never been explained, beyond indications that he had been involved in the illegal arms trafficking which had caused Oslo to be flooded with handguns over recent years, and Ellen had stumbled onto his trail. Olsen was just an errand boy, though; the police still didn't have any leads on those behind the liquidation.
After a brief guest appearance with Politiets Overvakningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, on the top floor, Harry had applied to rejoin Crime Squad to work on the Ellen Gjelten case. They had been all too happy to get rid of him. Moller was pleased to have him back on the sixth floor.
'I'll just nip upstairs to give Ivarsson this,' Harry muttered, waving the VHS cassette. 'He wanted to take a look with a new wunderkind they have up there.'
'Oh? Who's that?'
'Someone who left Police College this summer and has apparently solved three robberies simply by studying the videos.' 'Wow. Good-looking?'
Harry sighed. 'You young ones are so boringly predictable. I hope she's competent. I don't care about the rest.' 'Sure it's a woman?'
'Herr and fru Lonn might have called their son Beate for a joke, I suppose.'
'I have an inkling she's good-looking.'
'Hope not,' Harry said, ducking, out of ingrained habit, to allow his 192 centimetres to pass under the door frame.
'Oh?'
The answer was shouted from the corridor: 'Good police officers are ugly.'
At first sight, Beate Lonn's appearance didn't give any firm indicators either way. She wasn't ugly; some would even call her doll-like. But that might have been mostly because she was small: her face, nose, ears - and her body. Her most prominent feature was her pallor. Her skin and hair were so colourless that she reminded Harry of a corpse Ellen and he had once fished out of Bunnefjord. Unlike with the woman's body, however, Harry had a feeling that if he just turned away for a second he would forget what Beate Lonn looked like. Which, it seemed, she wouldn't have minded as she mumbled her name and allowed Harry to shake her small, moist hand before she quickly retrieved it.
'Inspector Hole is a kind of legend here in the building, you know,' PAS Rune Ivarsson said, standing with his back to them and fiddling with a bunch of keys. At the top of the grey iron door in front of them a sign said, in Gothic letters: the house of pain. And underneath: conference room 508. 'Isn't that right, Hole?'
Harry didn't answer. He had absolutely no doubt about the kind of legendary status Ivarsson had in mind; he had never made the slightest attempt to hide his view that Harry was a blot on the force and should have been removed years ago.
Ivarsson finally unlocked the door and they went in. The House of Pain was the Robberies Unit's dedicated room for studying, editing and copying video recordings. There was a large table in the middle with three workplaces; no windows. The walls were covered with shelving packed with video tapes, a dozen posters of wanted robbers, a large screen on one wall, a map of oslo and various trophies from successful arrests: for example beside the door, where two cut-off woollen sleeves with holes for eyes and mouth hung from the wall. Otherwise the room contained grey PCs, black TV monitors, video and DVD players as well as a number of other machines which Harry could not have identified.
'What has Criiime Squad got out of the video?' Ivarsson asked, flopping down onto one of the chairs. He drawled the diphthong in an exaggerated fashion.
'Something,' Harry said, walking over to a shelf of video cassettes.
'Something?'
'Not very much.'
'Shame you lot didn't come to the lecture I gave in the canteen last September. All the units were represented except yours, if I'm not very much mistaken.'
Ivarsson was tall, long-limbed, with a fringe of undulating blond hair above two blue eyes. His face had those masculine characteristics which models for German brands like Boss tend to have, and was still tanned after many summer afternoons on the tennis court and perhaps the odd solarium session in a fitness centre. In short, Rune Ivarsson was what most would regard as a good-looking man, and as such he underpinned Harry's theory about the link between looks and competence in police work. However, what Rune Ivarsson lacked in investigative talent, he made up for with a nose for politics and the ability to form alliances within the Police HQ hierarchy. Furthermore, Ivarsson had the natural self-confidence that many misinterpret as a leadership quality. In his case, this confidence was based solely on being blessed with a total blindness to his own shortcomings, a quality which would inevitably take him t
o the top and one day make him - in one way or another - Harry's superior. Initially, Harry saw no reason to complain about mediocrity being kicked upwards, out of the way of investigations, but the danger with people like Ivarsson was that they could easily get it into their heads that they should intervene and dictate to those who really understood detection work.
'Did we miss anything?' Harry asked, running a finger along the small handwritten labels on the videos.