by Jo Nesbo
Harry cursed to himself. He slapped the handcuffs on Raskol and they shuffled sideways between the table and the wall to the door. Harry grabbed the door handle.
'Most bank robbers are simple souls,' Raskol said. 'That's why they become bank robbers.'
Harry stopped.
'One of the most celebrated bank robbers in the world was the American Willie Sutton,' Raskol said. 'When he was arrested and taken to court, the judge asked him why he robbed banks. Sutton answered: Because that's where the money is. It's become a standing expression in everyday American English and I suppose it's meant to show us how brilliantly direct and easy language can be. To me, it just represents an idiot who got caught. Good bank robbers are neither famous nor quotable. You've never heard of them because they've never been caught. Because they are not direct and simple. The one you're looking for is one of them.'
Harry waited.
'Grette,' Raskol said.
'Grette?' Beate stared at Harry with her eyes popping out of her head. 'Grette?' The vein on her neck was swollen. 'Grette has an alibi! Trond Grette is an accountant with bad nerves, not a bank robber! Trond Grette . . . is . . . is . . .'
'Innocent,' Harry said. 'I know.' He had closed the office door behind him and sunk deep into the chair in front of the desk. 'But we're not talking about Trond Grette.'
Beate's mouth closed with an audible, wet click.
'Have you heard of Lev Grette?' Harry asked. 'Raskol said he had only needed the first thirty seconds to know, but he'd wanted to see the rest to be sure because no one has seen Lev Grette for several years. According to the latest rumour Raskol had heard, Grette was living somewhere abroad.'
'Lev Grette,' Beate said, and her gaze wandered into the distance. 'He was such a wonder boy. I remember my father talking about him. I've read reports of robberies he was suspected of having been involved in when he was just sixteen. He was a legend because the police never caught him, and when he disappeared for good, we didn't even have his fingerprints.' She looked at Harry. 'How could I be so stupid? Same build. Similar features. Trond Grette's brother, isn't it.' Harry nodded.
Beate knitted her brows. 'But that means Lev Grette shot his own sister-in-law.'
'It makes a few things fall into place, doesn't it.'
She nodded slowly. 'The twenty centimetres between the faces. They knew each other.'
'And if Lev Grette knew he had been recognised . . .'
'Of course,' Beate said. 'She was a witness. He couldn't take the risk that she would give him away.'
Harry got up. 'I'll ask Halvorsen to brew up something really strong for us. Now let's have a look at the video.'
'My guess is that Lev Grette didn't know that Stine worked there,' Harry said, his eyes on the screen. 'The interesting thing is that he probably recognises her and still chooses to use her as the hostage. He must have known she would recognise him close up, by the voice, if nothing else.'
Beate shook her head in incomprehension as she absorbed the pictures of the bank concourse where everything was temporarily quiet, and August Schulz, with shambling gait, was in mid-trek. 'So why did he do it?'
'He's a pro. Doesn't leave anything to chance. Stine Grette was doomed from this moment on.' Harry freeze-framed the moment when the robber had come in the door and scanned the room. 'When Lev Grette saw her and knew there was a chance he could be identified, he knew she had to die. So he might just as well use her as the hostage.'
'Ice cold.'
'Minus forty. The only thing I don't quite see is why he's prepared to go as far as murder to avoid recognition when he's already wanted for other bank jobs.'
Weber came in with a tray of coffees.
'Yes, but Lev Grette is not wanted for any robberies,' he said, balancing the tray until it was on the coffee table. The room looked as if it had been decorated once in the fifties and then remained untouched by human hand. The plush chairs, the piano and the dusty plants on the windowsill radiated an eerie stillness. Even the pendulum of the grandfather clock in the corner swung soundlessly. The white-haired woman with the beaming eyes in the framed glass on the mantelpiece laughed without sound. The stillness which seemed to have entered when Weber was widowed eight years ago had silenced everything around him; it would even be difficult to get a note out of the piano. The flat was on the ground floor of an old apartment block in Toyen, but the noise of the cars outside merely emphasised the silence. Weber sat down in one of the wing chairs, cautiously, as though it were a display item in a museum.
'We never found any concrete evidence that Grette had been involved in any of the robberies. No statement from witnesses, no grasses had anything on him, no fingerprints and no other forensic leads. The reports only confirm that he was a suspect.'
'Mm. So, provided Stine Grette didn't report him, he was a man with a clean sheet?'
'Right. Biscuit?'
Beate shook her head.
It was Weber's day off, but Harry had insisted on the telephone that they had to talk immediately. He knew Weber was reluctant to receive visitors at home, but that couldn't be helped.
'We talked to the duty officer at Krimteknisk to compare the prints on the Coca-Cola bottle with the prints from earlier raids Lev Grette was suspected of carrying out,' Beate said. 'Nothing.'
'As I said,' Weber said, checking the lid of the coffee pot was on properly, 'Lev Grette's prints were never found at a crime scene.'
Beate thumbed through her notes. 'Do you agree with Raskol that Lev Grette is our man?'
'Well, why not?' Weber started pouring the coffee.
'Because he never used violence in any of the raids where he was a suspect. And because she was his sister-in-law. Murdering because you might be recognised - isn't that a rather feeble motive for murder?'
Weber stopped pouring and looked at her. He glanced quizzically at Harry, who shrugged his shoulders.
'No,' he said. And continued to pour. Beate flushed a deep red.
'Weber comes from the classical school of detection,' Harry said almost apologetically. 'His opinion is that murder by definition excludes rational motives. There are just degrees of confused motives, which can at times resemble reason.'
'That's how it is,' Weber said, putting down the coffee pot.
'I wonder,' Harry said, 'why Lev Grette left the country if the police had nothing on him anyway.'
Weber brushed invisible dust off the arm of the chair. 'I don't know for sure.'
'For sure??
Weber pressed the thin, fragile porcelain coffee-cup handle between a large, fat thumb and a nicotine-stained index finger. 'There was a rumour going round at the time. Nothing we had any faith in. Allegedly, he wasn't fleeing from the police. Someone had heard the last bank job hadn't gone according to plan. Grette had left his partner in the lurch.'
'In what way?' Beate asked.
'No one knew. Some thought Grette had been the getaway driver and had driven off when the police arrived, leaving the other man in the bank. Others said the raid had been a success, but Grette had cleared off abroad with all the money.' Weber took a sip and lowered the cup with care. 'The interesting side to the case we're talking about now is perhaps not the how, but the who. Who was this second person?'
Harry searched Weber's eyes. 'Do you mean it was . . . ?' The veteran forensics expert nodded. Beate and Harry exchanged glances.
'Fuck,' said Harry.
Beate kept an eye on the traffic to the left, waiting for a gap in the stream of cars from the right in Toyengata. The rain beat down on the roof. Harry closed his eyes. He knew if he concentrated he could make the swish of passing cars become waves beating against the bows of the ferry as he stood in the breeze gazing down at the white froth, holding his grandfather's hand. But he didn't have time.
'So Raskol had unfinished business with Lev Grette,' Harry said, opening his eyes. 'And picks him out as the robber. Is it really Grette in the video or is it just Raskol getting his own back? Or yet another of Raskol's tricks to fool us?'
&
nbsp; 'Or as Weber said - just a rumour,' Beate said. The cars continued to pass from the right as she impatiently drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
'You may be right,' Harry said. 'If Raskol wanted to get his own back on Grette, he wouldn't have needed police help. Supposing they're only rumours, why pick out Grette, if Grette didn't do it?'
'A whim?'
Harry shook his head. 'Raskol is a strategist. He doesn't pick out the wrong man without a good reason. I'm not sure the Expeditor was working solo here.'
'What do you mean?'
'Perhaps someone else planned the robberies. Part of a network importing arms. The getaway car. Undercover flat. A cleaner, who spirits away the clothes and weapons afterwards. And a launderer, who launders the money.'
'Raskol?'
'If Raskol wanted to distract our attention from the real guilty party, what better than to send us off on a search for a man whose whereabouts no one knows, who is dead and buried or who has settled abroad under a new name, a suspect we'll never eliminate from our inquiries? By selling us a long-term lemon he can have us chasing our shadows instead of his man.'
'So you think he's lying?'
'All gypsies lie.' 'Oh?'
'I'm quoting Raskol.'
'He's got a good sense of humour then. And why shouldn't he lie to you, if he's lied to everyone else?' Harry didn't answer.
'At last a gap,' Beate said, lightly touching the accelerator. 'Wait!' Harry said. 'Turn right. To Finnmarkgata.' 'Right,' she said, dismayed, and turned into the road in front of Toyen park. 'Where are we going?'
'We're going to pay Trond Grette a visit at home.'
The net in the tennis court had been removed. And there was no light in any of the windows in Grette's house.
'He's not at home,' Beate concluded after ringing twice.
The neighbour's window opened.
'Trond's in alright,' came the trill from the woman's wrinkled face, which Harry thought even browner than the last time they had seen it. 'He just won't open up. Keep your finger on the bell, then he'll come.'
Beate pressed the button and they could hear the terrorising ring inside the house. The neighbour's window closed and immediately afterwards they were looking into a pale face with two bluish-black bags beneath unresponsive eyes. Trond Grette was wearing a yellow dressing gown. He looked as if he had just got out of bed after sleeping for a week. And it hadn't been enough. Without a word, he raised his hand and waved them in. There was a flash of sunlight as it caught the diamond ring on the little finger of his left hand.
'Lev was different,' Trond said. 'He tried to kill a man when he was fifteen.'
He smiled into space, as though recalling a dear memory.
'We seemed to have been given a complete set of genes to share between us. What he didn't have, I had - and vice versa. We grew up here in Disengrenda, in this house. Lev was a legend in the area, but I was just Lev's little brother. One of the first things I can remember was from school when Lev was balancing on the school roof in the break. That was four floors up and none of the teachers dared to bring him down. We stood below cheering while he danced around with his arms out to the side. I can still see his body against the blue sky. I wasn't frightened for a moment; it didn't even occur to me that my brother might fall off. I think everyone felt like that. Lev was the only one who stood up to the Gausten brothers from the flats in Traverveien, even though they were at least two years older and had been in a youth detention centre. Lev took Dad's car when he was fourteen, drove to Lillestrom and came back with a bag of Twist which he'd nicked from the station kiosk. Dad didn't know anything about it. Lev gave me the sweets.'
Trond Grette seemed to be trying to laugh. They had sat down around the table. Trond had made cocoa. He had poured the cocoa powder from a tin he had stood staring at for a long time. Someone had written cocoa on the metal tin with a felt pen. The handwriting was neat, feminine.
'The worst thing was that Lev could have done well for himself,' Trond said. 'His problem was that he tired of things so quickly. Everyone said he was the greatest football talent there had been in Skeid for many years, but when he was selected for the national boys' team he didn't even bother to turn up. When he was fifteen he borrowed a guitar and two months later he was performing his own songs at school. Afterwards he was asked by a guy called Waaktar to join a band in Grorud, but he turned him down because they weren't good enough. Lev was the type who can do everything. He could have got through school as easy as you like if he'd done his homework and hadn't skived so much.' Trond gave a crooked smile. 'He paid me in stolen goods to copy his handwriting and do his essays for him. At least his mark in Norwegian was in safe hands.' Trond laughed, but was soon serious again. 'Then he got sick of the guitar and began to hang out with a gang of older boys from Arvoll. Lev never seemed to think there was any danger in letting go of what he had. There was always something else, something better, something more exciting around the next bend.'
'This may seem a stupid thing to ask a brother, but would you say you knew him well?' Harry asked.
Trond reflected. 'No, it's not a stupid question. Yes, we grew up together. And yes, Lev was outgoing and funny, and everyone - boys as much as girls - wanted to know him. But actually Lev was a lone wolf. He once said to me he had never had any real pals, just fans and girlfriends. There was a lot I didn't know about Lev. Like when the Gausten brothers came to cause trouble. There were three of them and they were all older than Lev. I and the other local boys cleared off as soon as we saw them. But Lev stayed where he was. For five years, they beat him up. Then, one day, the oldest boy came on his own - Roger. We cleared off as usual. When I peered round the corner of the house I could see Roger lying on the ground with Lev on top. Lev had his knees on Roger's arms and was holding a stick. I went closer to see. Apart from the heavy breathing, not a sound came from either of them. That was when I saw that Lev had put the stick in Roger's eye socket.'
Beate shifted position in her chair.
'Lev was fully concentrated, as if he was doing something which required great precision and care. He seemed to be trying to prise out the eyeball. Roger was weeping blood; it ran from the eye, down his ear and dripped from the lobe onto the tarmac. It was so quiet you could hear the blood hitting the ground. Drip, drip, drip.'
'What did you do?' Beate asked.
'I threw up. I've never been able to stand the sight of blood; it makes me dizzy and feel unwell.' Trond shook his head. 'Lev let Roger go and came back home with me. Roger had his eye repaired, but we never saw the Gausten brothers on our patch again. I'll never forget the sight of Lev with the stick, though. It was at moments like that when I thought my big brother could occasionally become someone else, someone I didn't know, who dropped by on the odd unexpected visit. Unfortunately the visits became more and more frequent after that.'
'You said something about him trying to kill a man.'
'It was a Sunday morning. Lev had a screwdriver and a pencil with him, and cycled down to one of the footbridges over Ringveien. You know these bridges, don't you? They're a bit scary because you have to walk on square metal grids and look down on the tarmac seven metres below. As I said, it was Sunday morning, and there weren't many people about. He loosened the screws of one of the grids and left two screws on one side and the pencil in the corner under the grid. Then he waited. First of all, a lady came along, looking 'freshly fucked' as he put it. Well dressed, tousled hair, cursing and hobbling on a broken stiletto heel.' Trond laughed quietly. 'For a fifteen-year-old, Lev had a lot about him.' He lifted the cup to his mouth and looked out of the kitchen window in surprise; a dustbin lorry was parked in front of the rubbish bins behind the rotary driers. 'Is it Monday today?'
'No,' said Harry, who hadn't touched his cup. 'What happened to the girl?
'There are two lines of metal grids. She took the one to the left. Bad luck, Lev said. He said he would have preferred her rather than the guy. Then the man came. He walked on the right-han
d side. Because of the pencil in the corner the loose grid was a bit higher than the others. Lev thought the man had seen the danger as he walked slower and slower, the nearer he came. Just as he was going to take the last step he seemed to freeze in the air.'
Trond slowly shook his head as he watched the lorry groaning and chewing up all the neighbours' refuse.
'As he put his foot down, the grid opened like a trapdoor. You know, like the ones they used in hangings. The man broke both legs as he hit the tarmac. Had it not been a Sunday morning he would have been run over straightaway. Bad luck, Lev called it.'
'Did he say that to the police, too?' Harry asked.
'The police, yes,' Trond said, gazing into his cup. 'They came two days later. I opened the door. They asked if the bike outside belonged to anyone in the house. I said yes. Turned out a witness had seen Lev cycling away from the footbridge and had given a description of the bike and a boy in a red jacket. So I showed them the quilted jacket Lev had been wearing.'