Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8) Read online

  ‘That sounds reassuring, but I think I’ll stick to the rules.’ She sent him a fleeting smile. And then, perhaps as a counterbalance to the implicit reproof, she took a sip from the cup.

  Anton felt a stab of irritation and was about to say something about the independent thinking that would come with experience, but he hadn’t managed to formulate it before his attention was caught by something further down the corridor. A white figure appeared to be floating towards them. He heard Silje get up. The figure took on firmer features. And became a plump blonde nurse in a loose hospital uniform. He knew she was on the night shift. And that tomorrow night she was free.

  ‘Evening,’ the nurse said with a mischievous smile, holding up two syringes in one hand, walking towards the door and placing the other on the handle.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Silje said, stepping up. ‘I’m afraid I have to examine your ID. Also, have you got today’s password?’

  The nurse sent Anton a surprised look.

  ‘Unless my colleague here can vouch for you,’ Silje said.

  Anton nodded. ‘Just go in, Mona.’

  The nurse opened the door and Anton watched her enter. In the darkened room he could make out the machinery around the bed and toes sticking out from under the duvet. The patient was so tall they’d had to requisition a longer bed. The door closed.

  ‘Good,’ Anton said with a smile to Silje, and could see she didn’t like it. Could see she regarded him as a male chauvinist who had just assessed and graded a younger female colleague. But she was a student for Christ’s sake, she was supposed to learn from experienced officers during her training year. He stood rocking back on his heels, unsure how to tackle the situation. She spoke up first.

  ‘As I said, I’ve read the rules and regulations. And I suppose you have a family waiting for you.’

  He lifted his coffee to his mouth. What did she know about his civil status? Was she insinuating something, about him and Mona, for example? That he had driven her home a couple of times after her shift and it hadn’t stopped there?

  ‘The teddy bear sticker on your bag,’ she smiled.

  He took a long swig from his cup. And cleared his throat. ‘I’ve got time. As it’s your first shift perhaps you ought to use the opportunity to ask any questions you may have. Not everything’s in the rules and regulations, you know.’ He shifted feet. Hoping she could hear and understand the subtext.

  ‘As you wish,’ she said with the irritating self-confidence you have to be under twenty-five to be so presumptuous as to possess. ‘The patient in there, who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s also in the rules. He’s anonymous and has to stay that way.’

  ‘But you know something.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Mona. You can’t be on first-name terms with people without having chatted first. What did she tell you?’

  Anton Mittet weighed her up. She was attractive, that was true enough, but there was no warmth or charm about her. Bit too slim for his taste. Untidy hair and a top lip that looked as if it was held in place by an over-taut tendon, causing two uneven front teeth to appear. But youth was on her side. Firm and fit underneath the black uniform, he would bet on it. So if he told her what he knew, would it be because he was subconsciously calculating that his obliging attitude would increase his chances of bedding her by 0.01 per cent? Or because girls like Silje would be inspectors or detectives within five years? They would be his bosses, while he would remain on the beat, an officer on the bottom rung of the ladder, because the Drammen case would always be there, a wall, a stain that could not be removed.

  ‘Case of attempted murder,’ Anton said. ‘Lost a lot of blood. They reckon he barely had a pulse when he came here. Been in a coma the whole time.’

  ‘Why the guard?’

  Anton shrugged. ‘Potential witness. If he survives.’

  ‘What does he know?’

  ‘Drugs stuff. High level. If he wakes up he probably has the goods to bring down some important heroin dealers in Oslo. Plus he can tell us who was trying to kill him.’

  ‘So they think the murderer will return and finish off the job?’

  ‘If they find out he’s alive and where he is, yes. That’s why we’re here.’

  She nodded. ‘And is he going to survive?’

  Anton shook his head. ‘They reckon they can keep him alive for a few more months, but the odds of him pulling out of the coma are slim. Nevertheless . . .’ Anton shifted feet again; her probing stare was becoming uncomfortable. ‘Until then we have to keep an eye on him.’

  Anton Mittet left her, feeling crushed, went down the stairs from reception and stepped into the autumn night. It was only when he was sitting in his parked car that he noticed his mobile was ringing.

  The call came from the Ops Room.

  ‘Maridalen, murder,’ 01 said. ‘I know you’ve finished for the day, but they need help to secure the crime scene. And as you’re already in uniform . . .’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘You’ll be relieved after three hours, max.’

  Anton was astonished. These days they did whatever they could to prevent people from working overtime. The combination of rigid rules and budgets didn’t even allow deviations for reasons of practicality. He had an intuition there was something special about this murder. He hoped it wasn’t a child.

  ‘OK,’ Anton Mittet said.

  ‘I’ll send you the coordinates.’ This was new: satnav, a detailed map of Oslo and district and an active transmitter for Ops to track you down. That must have been why they rang him. He was closest.

  ‘OK,’ Anton Mittet said. ‘Three hours.’

  Laura would be in bed, but she liked knowing when he would be home from work, so he texted her before putting the car into gear and heading for Lake Maridal.

  Anton didn’t need to look at the satnav. At the entrance to Ullevålseterveien there were four patrol cars, and a bit further away orange-and-white tape showed the way.

  Anton took the torch from the glove compartment and walked over to the officer outside the cordon. Through the trees he saw lights flashing, but also the forensics team’s lamps, which always reminded him of film sets. Not so daft actually; nowadays they didn’t just take stills, they used HD video cameras as well, which not only captured the victims but the whole crime scene so that at a later date they could go back, freeze and zoom in on details they hadn’t appreciated were relevant at first.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked the officer with crossed arms, who was shivering by the tape.

  ‘Murder.’ The officer’s voice was thick, his eyes red-rimmed in an unnaturally pale face.

  ‘So I heard. Who’s the boss here?’

  ‘Forensics. Lønn.’

  Anton heard the buzz of voices from inside the trees. There were lots of them. ‘No one from Kripos or Crime Squad yet?’

  ‘There’ll be even more officers here soon. The body has just been found. Are you taking over from me?’

  Even more. And yet they had given him overtime. Anton examined the officer closer. He was wearing a thick coat, but the shivering had got worse. And it wasn’t that cold.

  ‘Were you the first on the scene?’

  The officer nodded without speaking, looked down. Stamped his feet hard on the ground.

  Bloody hell, thought Anton. A child. He swallowed.

  ‘Well, Anton, did 01 send you?’

  Anton looked up. He hadn’t heard the two of them coming, although they emerged from dense thickets. He had seen it before, how forensics officers moved at crime scenes, like somewhat ungainly dancers, bending and twisting, positioning their feet, as though they were astronauts on the moon. Or perhaps it was the white overalls drawing that association.

  ‘Yes, I had to take over from someone,’ Anton said to the woman. He knew who she was, everyone did. Beate Lønn, the head of Krimteknisk, who had a reputation as a kind of Rain Woman because of her ability to recognise faces, which was often employed to identify
bank robbers on grainy disjointed CCTV footage. They said she could recognise even well-disguised robbers if they were ex-cons and she had a database of several thousand mugshots stored in her fair-haired little head. So this murder had to be special, otherwise they wouldn’t send out bosses in the middle of the night.

  Beside the petite woman’s pale, almost transparent face her colleague’s appeared to be flushed. His freckled cheeks were adorned with two bright red mutton-chop sideburns. His eyes bulged slightly, as though there was too much pressure inside, which lent him a somewhat gawping expression. But what attracted most attention was the hat which appeared when he removed his white hood: a big Rasta hat in Jamaican colours, green, yellow and black.

  Beate Lønn patted the shoulder of the trembling officer. ‘Off you go then, Simon. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I suggest a strong drink and then bed.’

  The officer nodded, and three seconds later he was swallowed up by the darkness.

  ‘Is it gruesome?’ Anton asked.

  ‘No coffee?’ Rasta Hat asked, opening a Thermos. These two words told Anton he wasn’t from Oslo. From the provinces, that was clear, but like most Norwegians from Østland Anton had no idea about, and no particular interest in, dialects.

  ‘No,’ Anton said.

  ‘It’s always a good idea to take your own coffee to a crime scene,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘You never know how long you’ll have to stay.’

  ‘Come on, Bjørn. He’s worked on murder investigations before,’ said Beate Lønn. ‘Drammen, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Right,’ Anton said, rocking on his heels. Used to work on murder investigations, more accurately. And unfortunately he had a suspicion as to why Beate Lønn could remember him. He breathed in. ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘He did,’ said Beate Lønn, nodding in the direction of the police officer’s car. They could hear the engine revving.

  ‘I mean who tipped us off?’

  ‘The wife rang when he didn’t come back from a bike ride,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘Should have been away for an hour, and she was worried about his heart. He was using his satnav, which has a transmitter, so they found him quickly.’

  Anton nodded slowly, picturing it all. Two policemen ringing the doorbell, a man and a woman. The officers coughing, looking at the wife with that grave expression which is meant to tell her what they will soon repeat in words, impossible words. The wife’s face, resistant, not wanting to hear, but then it seems to turn inside out, shows her inner emotions, shows everything.

  The image of Laura, his wife, appeared.

  An ambulance drew up, without a siren or a blue light.

  It slowly dawned on Anton. The fast reaction to a missing-person message. The rapidly traced satnav signal. The big turnout. Overtime. The colleague who was so shaken he had to be sent home.

  ‘It’s a policeman,’ he whispered.

  ‘I’d guess the temperature here is one and a half degrees lower than in town,’ Beate Lønn said, pulling up a number on her mobile phone.

  ‘Agreed,’ Rasta Hat said, swigging a mouthful from the Thermos cup. ‘No skin discoloration yet. So somewhere between eight and ten?’

  ‘A policeman,’ Anton repeated. ‘That’s why they’re all here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Katrine?’ Beate said. ‘Can you check something for me? It’s about the Sandra Tveten case. Right.’

  ‘Goddamn!’ Rasta Hat exclaimed. ‘I asked them to wait until the body bags had come.’

  Anton turned and saw two men struggling through the forest with a stretcher between them. A pair of cycling shoes poked out from under the blanket.

  ‘He knew him,’ Anton said. ‘That was why he was shaking like that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘He said they worked together in Økern before Vennesla started in Kripos,’ Rasta Hat said.

  ‘Have you got the date to hand?’ Lønn said on the phone.

  There was a scream.

  ‘What the . . .?’ Rasta Hat said.

  Anton turned. One of the stretcher-bearers had slipped into the ditch beside the path. The beam from his torch swept over the stretcher. Over the blanket that had fallen off. Over . . . over what? Anton stared. Was that a head? The thing on top of what was indubitably the human body, had it really been a head? In the years Anton had worked at Crime Squad, before the Great Mistake, he had seen a great many bodies, but nothing like this. The hourglass-shaped substance reminded Anton of the family’s Sunday breakfast, of Laura’s lightly boiled egg with the remains of the shell still hanging from it, cracked with the yellow yolk running out and drying on the outside of the stiff but still soft egg white. Could that really be a . . . head?

  Anton stood blinking in the darkness as he watched the rear lights of the ambulance disappearing. And he realised that these were replays, he had seen all this before. The white figures, the Thermos, the feet protruding from under the blanket, he had just seen this at the Rikshospital. As though they all had been portents. The head . . .

  ‘Thanks, Katrine,’ Beate said.

  ‘What was that about?’ Rasta Hat asked.

  ‘I worked with Erlend on this very spot,’ Beate said.

  ‘Here?’ Rasta Hat queried.

  ‘Right here. He was in charge of the investigation. Must have been ten years ago. Sandra Tveten. Raped and killed. Just a child.’

  Anton swallowed. Child. Replays.

  ‘I remember that case,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘Fate’s a funny thing, dying at your own crime scene. Imagine. Wasn’t the Sandra Tveten case also in the autumn?’

  Beate nodded slowly.

  Anton blinked, and kept blinking. He had seen a body like it.

  ‘Goddamn!’ Rasta Hat cursed under his breath. ‘You don’t mean to say that . . .?’

  Beate Lønn took the cup of coffee from him. Took a sip. Passed it back. Nodded.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Rasta Hat said under his breath.

  3

  ‘DÉJÀ VU,’ STÅLE Aune said, looking at the packed snowdrift across Sporveisgata where the December-morning gloom was receding to allow a short day. Then he turned back to the man in the chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Déjà vu is the feeling we’ve seen something before. We don’t know what it is.’

  By ‘we’ he meant psychologists in general, not only therapists.

  ‘Some psychologists believe that when we’re tired, information sent to the conscious part of the brain is delayed, so that when it surfaces it’s already been in the subconscious for a while. And that’s why we experience it as recognition. The tiredness explains why déjà vu usually occurs at the end of a working week. But that’s about all research has to contribute. Friday is déjà vu day.’

  Ståle Aune had perhaps been hoping for a smile. Not because smiling meant anything at all in his professional efforts to get people to repair themselves, but because the room required it.

  ‘I don’t mean déjà vu in that sense,’ the patient said. The client. The customer. The person who in roughly twenty minutes would be paying in reception and helping to cover the overheads of the five psychologists who each had their own practice in the featureless, yet old-fashioned four-storey building in Sporveisgata which ran through Oslo’s medium-elegant West End district. Ståle Aune sneaked a glimpse of the clock on the wall behind the man’s head. Eighteen minutes.

  ‘It’s more like a dream I have again and again.’

  ‘Like a dream?’ Ståle Aune’s eyes scanned the newspaper he had lying open in a desk drawer so that it couldn’t be seen by the patient. Most therapists nowadays sat on a chair opposite the patient, and when the massive desk had been manoeuvred into Ståle’s office, grinning colleagues had confronted him with the modern therapy theory that it was best to have as few barriers as possible between themselves and the patient. Ståle’s retort had been swift: ‘Best for the patient maybe.’

  ‘It’s a dream. I dream.’

  ‘It’s common,’ Aune said, passing his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. He reflected longingly on the dear old sofa th
at had been carried out of his office and now stood in the reception area, where with the weight racks alongside and a barbell above, it functioned as a psychotherapist’s in-joke. Patients on the sofa had made the uninhibited reading of newspapers even easier.

  ‘But it’s a dream I don’t want.’ Thin, self-conscious smile. Thin, well-groomed hair.

  Enter the dream exorcist, Aune thought, trying to respond with an equally thin smile. The patient was wearing a pinstriped suit, a red-and-grey tie, and black, polished shoes. Aune had a tweed jacket on, a cheery bow tie under his double chins and brown shoes that hadn’t seen a brush for quite a while. ‘Perhaps you might tell me what the dream was about?’

  ‘That’s what I’ve just done.’

  ‘Exactly. But perhaps you could give me some more detail?’

  ‘It starts, as I said, where Dark Side of the Moon finishes. “Eclipse” fades out with David Gilmour singing about everything being in tune . . .’

  ‘And this is what you dream?’

  ‘No! Yes. I mean, the record stops like that in reality too. Optimistic. After three-quarters of an hour about death and madness. So you think everything will end well. Everything is back in harmony. But then as the album fades out, you can just hear a voice in the background mumbling something about it all being dark. Do you understand?’

  ‘No,’ Aune said. According to the manual he should have asked ‘Is it important for you that I understand?’ or something like that. But he couldn’t be bothered.

  ‘Evil doesn’t exist because everything is evil. Cosmic space is dark. We are born evil. Evil is the starting point, natural. Then, sometimes, there is a speck of light. But it is only temporary, because we have to go back to the darkness. And that’s what happens in the dream.’

  ‘Continue,’ Aune said, swinging round on the chair and gazing out of the window with a pensive air. The air was to hide the fact that he only wanted to gaze upon something that was not the man’s facial expression, which was a combination of self-pity and self-satisfaction. He obviously considered himself unique, a case a psychologist could really get his teeth into. The man had undoubtedly been in therapy before. Aune watched a car-park attendant with bow legs swaggering down the street like a sheriff and wondered what other professions he might be cut out for. And drew a speedy conclusion. None. Besides, he loved psychology, loved navigating the area between what we knew and what we didn’t, combining his heavy ballast of factual knowledge with intuition and curiosity. At least, that was what he told himself every morning. So why was he sitting here wishing this individual would shut his mouth and get out of his office, out of his life? Was it the person or his job as a therapist? It was Ingrid’s undisguised, clear ultimatum that he should work less and be more present for her and for their daughter Aurora which had enforced the changes. He had dropped the time-consuming research, the consultancy work for Crime Squad and the lectures at PHS, the police training college. He had become a full-time therapist with fixed working hours. The new priorities had seemed like a great decision. For of the things he gave up what did he actually miss? Did he miss profiling sick souls who killed people with such gruesome acts of brutality that he was deprived of sleep at night? Only to be woken up by Inspector Harry Hole demanding quick answers to impossible questions if he did finally fall asleep? Did he miss Hole turning him into the inspector’s image, a starved, exhausted, monomaniacal hunter? Snapping at everyone who disturbed his work on the one thing he thought had any significance, slowly but surely alienating colleagues, family and friends?