by Jo Nesbo
'What sort of pictures are they?' Harry asked.
'They're portraits. Can't you see that?'
'Right. Those are eyes?' He pointed. 'And that's a mouth?'
Anna tilted her head. 'If you like. There are three men.'
'Anyone I know?'
Anna gazed at Harry pensively for a long time before answering. 'No. I don't think you know any of them, Harry, but you could get to know them if you really wanted.'
Harry studied the pictures more closely. 'Tell me what you can see.'
'I can see my neighbour with a kicksled. I can see a man coming out of the backroom at the locksmith's as I'm leaving. And I can see the waiter in M. And that TV celeb, Per Stale Lonning.'
She laughed. 'Did you know that the retina reverses everything so your brain receives a mirror image first? If you want to see things as they really are, you have to see them in a mirror. Then you would have seen some quite different people in the pictures.' Her eyes were radiant and Harry couldn't bring himself to object that the retina didn't reverse images, it turned them upside down. 'This will be my final masterpiece, Harry. This is what I will be remembered for.'
'These portraits?'
'No, they're merely a part of the whole work of art. It's not finished yet. Just wait.'
'Mm, has it got a name?'
' "Nemesis",' she said in a low voice.
He gazed enquiringly at her and their eyes locked.
'After the goddess, you know.'
The shadow fell over one side of her face. Harry looked away. He had seen enough. The curve of her back begging for a dancing partner, one foot in front of the other as if unsure whether to move forwards or backwards, her heaving bosom and the slim neck with the veins he imagined he could see throbbing. He felt hot and a tiny bit faint. What was it she said? 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go.' Had he been?
'Harry . . .'
'I have to go,' he said.
He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop's screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother's bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: 'Mine for ever?'
'Not bloody likely,' he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him. 'Mine for ever?' 'Yes,' he groaned and came.
When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.
'After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,' she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.
The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS Elenora. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother's first lover -though not her first ever - in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.
Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn't matter.
That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna's grandmother's bed.
Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer on the white sheets of her grandmother's bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt cliche: 'You deserve someone better than me.'
At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.
That was seven years ago, and the relationship had only lasted six weeks. After that he had only met her twice. Once in a bar when she had gone over to him with tears in her eyes and asked him to go somewhere else, which he had done. And once at an exhibition where Harry had taken his younger sister. He had promised to call her, but he never did.
Harry rolled over to look at the clock again. 3.22. He had kissed her. At the end of the evening. Once he was safely outside the door of her flat with the wavy glass, he had leaned over to give her a goodnight hug and it had become a kiss. Easy and great. Easy, at any rate. 3.33. Christ, when had he become so sensitive that he felt pangs of guilt for giving an old flame a goodnight kiss? Harry tried to take deep, regular breaths to concentrate his mind on possible escape routes from Bogstadveien via Industrigata. In. Out. In again. He could still smell her fragrance. Feel the sweet pressure of her body. The rough insistence of her tongue.
6
Chilli
The day's first rays had just risen over the edge of Ekeberg Ridge, peeped under the half-drawn blind in the Crime Squad conference room and wedged themselves between the folds of skin around Harry's pinched eyes. Rune Ivarsson stood at the end of the long table, legs apart, rocking up and down on the soles of his feet, his hands behind his back. A flip chart with welcome in big red letters at his rear. Harry presumed this was something Ivarsson had picked up at a seminar on presentations and made a half-hearted attempt to stifle a yawn as the Head of the Robberies Unit began to speak.
'Good morning, everyone. The eight of us sitting around the table constitute the team assembled to investigate the bank robbery committed in Bogstadveien on Friday.'
'Murder,' Harry mumbled.
'I beg your pardon?'
Harry straightened up in his chair. The damned sun was blinding him whichever way he turned. 'I suppose it would be correct to base the investigation on the fact that it was a murder.'
Ivarsson gave a wry smile. Not to Harry, but to the others sitting
around the table whom he took in with one fleeting glance. 'I thought I should start by introducing you to each other, but our friend from Crime Squad has already made a start. Inspector Harry Hole has been kindly loaned by his superior, Bjarne Moller, as his speciality is murder.'
'Serious Crime,' Harry said.
'Serious Crime. On the left of Hole, we have Torleif Weber from Forensics who led the inquiry at the crime scene. As many of you know, Weber is our most experienced forensic investigator. Famous for his analytical powers and unerring intuition. The Chief Superintendent once said that he would have liked to have Weber with him as a tracker dog in his hunting parties.'
Laughter around the table. Harry didn't need to look at Weber to know that he wasn't smiling. Weber almost never smiled, at least not for people he didn't like, and he liked almost no one. Especially among the younger stratum of bosses which, in Weber's opinion, was comprised exclusively of incompetent careerists with no feeling for the profession or the force, but who had stronger instincts for the administrative power and influence which could be attained through brief appearances at Police HQ.
Ivarsson smiled and swayed up and down like the skipper of a sea-going vessel as he waited for the laughter to die down.
'Beate Lonn is quite new in this context and our video recording specialist.'
Beate's face went as red as a beetroot.
'Beate is the daughter of Jorgen
Lonn who served for over twenty years in what was then called the Robberies and Serious Crime Unit. So far she seems to be following in her legendary father's footsteps. She has already contributed vital evidence which has helped solve a number of cases. I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but over the last year in the Robberies Unit we have had a conviction rate bordering on fifty per cent, which in an international context is reckoned to be—'
'You have mentioned it before, Ivarsson.'
'Thank you.'
This time Ivarsson eyed Harry directly when he smiled. A stiff, reptilian smile baring his teeth far beyond the jawbone on both sides. And he continued to smile that smile for the rest of the intro-ductions. Harry knew two of them. Magnus Rian, a young detective from Tomrefjord who had been in Crime Squad for six months and made a solid impression. The other was Didrik Gudmundson, the most experienced investigator around the table and the second-in-command of the Robberies Unit. A quiet, methodical policeman with whom Harry had never had any problems. The last two were also from the Robberies Unit, both with Li as a surname, but Harry immediately established that they were not identical twins. Toril Li was a tall blonde woman with a narrow mouth and a closed face, while Ola Li was a squat, red-haired man with a rounded face and laughing eyes. Harry had seen them enough times in the corridor for many to think it would be natural to say hello, but it had never occurred to him.
'As for myself, I should be familiar to you from other contexts,' Ivarsson concluded the round by saying. 'But just for formality's sake, I am the PAS of the Robberies Unit and have been appointed to lead this investigation. And to come back to what you said initially, Hole, this is not the first time we have had to investigate a robbery with a fatal outcome for the innocent parties.'
Harry tried not to rise to the bait. He really did, but the crocodile grin made it impossible.
'Also with a conviction rate of just under fifty per cent?'
Only one person at the table laughed, but his laughter was loud. Weber.
'My apologies, I obviously omitted to mention something about Hole,' Ivarsson said without smiling. 'He is said to have a talent for comedy. A real wit, I've heard say.'
There was a second's embarrassed silence. Then Ivarsson gave a brief honk of laughter and a low chuckle spread around the table.
'OK, let's start with a summary.' Ivarsson flipped over the front sheet. The next bore the title forensic evidence. He took the top off a marker and prepared himself. 'It's all yours, Weber.'
Karl Torleif Weber stood up. He was a short man with a lion's mane of grey hair and a beard. His voice was an ominous, low-frequency rumble, but, for all that, clear. 'I'll be brief.'
'By all means,' Ivarsson said, putting the pen to paper. 'But take all the time you need, Karl.'
'I'll be brief because I don't need much time,' Weber growled. 'We haven't got a thing.'
'Right,' Ivarsson said, lowering the pen. 'You haven't got a thing. Exactly what do you mean by that?'
'We have a print of a brand new Nike shoe, size 45. Most things about this robbery have such a professional ring about them that the only information I can infer is that it is unlikely to be the size he normally takes. The bullet has been analysed by the ballistics boys. It is standard 7.62 millimetre ammo for the AG3, the most common ammunition to be found in the kingdom of Norway since it is in every military barracks, arms store and home of a reserve officer or volunteer around the country. In other words, impossible to trace. Apart from that, you would think he had never been in the bank or outside it. We've searched for evidence there, too.'
Weber sat down.
'Thank you, Weber, that was . . . erm, informative.' Ivarsson turned over the next sheet. Witnesses.
'Hole?'
Harry slumped even further into his chair. 'Everyone who was in the bank was questioned immediately afterwards, and no one can tell us anything we can't see on the video. That is to say, they remember a few things which we know to be incorrect. one witness saw the robber heading up Industrigata. No one else has called in.'
'Which brings us to the next point - getaway cars,' Ivarsson said.
'Toril?'
Toril Li stepped forward, switched on the overhead projector, where there was already a transparency with a summary of private vehicles stolen over the past three months. In her strong Sunnmorsk dialect she explained which four cars she considered to be the most probable getaway cars, basing her judgement on the fact that they were run-of-the-mill brands and models, neutral, light colours and new enough for the robber to feel confident that they wouldn't let him down. One particular car, a Volkswagen GTI parked in Maridalsveien was of interest as it had been stolen the night before the bank raid.
'Bank robbers tend to steal cars as near the time to the robbery as possible so they don't appear on patrol-car lists,' Toril Li elucidated. She switched off the overhead projector and picked up the transparency on her way back to her seat.
Ivarsson nodded. 'Thanks.'
'For nothing,' Harry whispered to Weber.
The title on the next sheet was video analysis. Ivarsson had put the top back on the marker. Beate swallowed, cleared her throat, took a sip of water from the glass in front of her and coughed again before beginning, her eyes firmly fixed on the table. 'I've measured the height—'
'Speak a little louder, would you please, Beate.' Reptilian smile. Beate cleared her throat several times.
'I've measured the height of the robber from the video. He's 1.79. I checked this out with Weber, who agrees.'
Weber nodded.
'Brilliant!' Ivarsson called out with laboured enthusiasm in his voice. He snatched the top off the marker and wrote: height 1.79 m.
Beate continued talking to the table: 'I've just spoken to Aslaksen from the university, our voice analyst. He's had a look at the five words the robber says in English. He . . .' Beate peered nervously up at Ivarsson, who was standing with his back to her, ready to take notes. '. . . said the recording quality was too poor to do anything with. It was unusable.'
Ivarsson dropped his arm at the same time as the low sun disappeared behind a cloud and the large rectangle of light on the wall behind them faded away. There was a deafening silence in the room. Ivarsson inhaled and moved forward onto the balls of his feet.
'Fortunately, we have saved our trump for last.'
The Head of the Robberies Unit flipped over the last sheet of paper.
Surveillance.
'For those of you who do not work in the Robberies Unit we should perhaps explain that we always bring in the surveillance section first when we have a video recording of a bank raid. In seven out of ten cases a good video recording will reveal the identity of the robber, if he's one of our old friends.'
'Even if he's masked?' Weber asked.
Ivarsson nodded. 'A good undercover investigator will identify an old lag by his build, body language, the way he speaks during the robbery, all the small details you cannot hide behind a mask.'
'But it's not enough knowing who it is,' Ivarsson's second-in-command Didrik Gudmundson interposed. 'We have to—'
'That's right,' Ivarsson broke in. 'We have to have proof. A robber can spell his name out to the camera, but so long as he's masked and does not leave tangible evidence, in the eyes of the law we have nothing.'
'So, how many of the seven you recognise end up being convicted?' Weber asked.
'A few,' Gudmundson said. 'It's still better to know who has committed a robbery, even if they go free. Then we learn something about the pattern and their methods. And we get them the next time.'
'And if there's no next time?' Harry asked. He noticed how the thick veins over Ivarsson's ears expanded when he laughed.
'Dear murder expert,' Ivarsson said, still in jocular mood. 'If you look around you, you'll see that most people are smiling in their beards at what you just asked. That's because a bank robber who has pulled off a successful raid will always - always - strike again. That's a law of gravity with bank robbers.' Ivarsson
peered out of the window and allowed himself another chuckle before spinning round on his heel. 'If that's the end of adult education for today, perhaps we can see if we have any suspects.'
Ola Li looked at Ivarsson, uncertain whether he should get up or not, but decided in the end to remain seated. 'Well, I was on duty last weekend. We had an edited video ready by eight on Friday evening, and I got the surveillance folk in to view the video in the House of Pain. Those not on duty were called in on Saturday. In all, thirteen surveillance officers were here, the first at eight o'clock on Friday and the last . . .'
'That's fine, Ola,' Ivarsson said. 'Just tell us what you found.' Ola laughed nervously. It sounded like the tentative cry of a seagull. 'Well?'