Phantom hh-9 Read online

  Truls fingered the knot of his tie. It hadn’t been his father who taught him how to do it; he couldn’t even tie his own. It had been Mikael who had taught him when they were going to the end-of-school party. He had shown Truls how to tie a simple Windsor knot, and when Truls had asked why Mikael’s knot seemed so much fatter Mikael had answered that it was because it was a double Windsor, but it was unlikely to suit Truls.

  Mikael’s gaze rested on him. He was still waiting for an answer to his question. Why Truls thought Mikael had been in on the stunt.

  Been in on the decision to murder him and Harry Hole at Hotel Leon.

  The doorbell rang, but Mikael didn’t move.

  Truls pretended to be scratching his forehead while using his fingertips to dry the sweat.

  ‘No,’ he said and heard his own grunted laugh. ‘An idea, that’s all. Forget it.’

  The stairs creaked under Stein Hanssen’s weight. He could feel every step and predict every creak and groan. He stopped at the top. Knocked on the door.

  ‘Come in,’ he heard from inside.

  Stein Hanssen entered.

  The first thing he saw was the suitcase.

  ‘Packed and ready?’ he asked.

  A nod.

  ‘Did you find the passport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve ordered a taxi to take you to the airport.’

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘OK.’ Stein looked around. The way he had in the other rooms. Said his farewells. Told them he wouldn’t be coming back. And listened to the echoes of their childhood. Father’s encouraging voice. Mother’s secure voice. Gusto’s enthusiastic voice. Irene’s happy voice. The only one he didn’t hear was his own. He had been silent.

  ‘Stein?’ Irene was holding a photograph in her hand. Stein knew which one, she had pinned it over her bed the same evening Simonsen, the solicitor, had brought her here. The photograph showing her with Gusto and Oleg.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you ever feel a desire to kill Gusto?’

  Stein didn’t answer. Just thought of that evening.

  The phone call from Gusto saying he knew where Irene was. Running to Hausmanns gate. And arriving: the police cars. The voices around him saying the boy inside was dead, shot. And the feeling of excitement. Yes, almost happiness. And after that, the shock. The grief. Yes, in a way he had grieved over Gusto. At the same time as nursing a hope that Irene would at last be clean. That hope had of course been extinguished as the days passed and he realised that Gusto’s death meant he had missed out on the chance to find her.

  She was pale. Withdrawal symptoms. It was going to be tough. But they would manage. They would manage between them.

  ‘Shall we…?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, opening the bedside-table drawer. Looking at the photograph. Pressing her lips against it and putting it in the drawer, face down.

  Harry heard the door open.

  He was sitting motionless in the darkness. Listened to the footsteps cross the sitting-room floor. Saw the movements by the mattresses. Glimpsed the wire as it caught the street lamp outside. The steps went into the kitchen. And the light came on. Harry heard the stove being moved.

  He rose and followed.

  Harry stood in the doorway watching him on his knees in front of the rathole, opening the bag with trembling hands. Placing objects beside each other. The syringe, the rubber tubing, the spoon, the lighter, the gun. The packages of violin.

  The threshold creaked as Harry shifted weight, but the boy didn’t notice, just carried on with his feverish activity.

  Harry knew it was the craving. The brain was focused on one thing. He coughed.

  The boy stiffened. The shoulders hunched, but he didn’t turn. Sat without moving, his head bowed, staring down at the stash. Didn’t turn.

  ‘I thought so,’ Harry said. ‘That this is where you would come first. You reckoned the coast was clear now.’

  The boy still hadn’t moved.

  ‘Hans Christian told you we found her for you, didn’t he? Yet you had to come here first.’

  The boy got up. And again it struck Harry. How tall he’d become. A man, almost.

  ‘What do you want, Harry?’

  ‘I’ve come to arrest you, Oleg.’

  Oleg frowned. ‘For possession of a couple of bags of violin?’

  ‘Not for dope, Oleg. For the murder of Gusto.’

  ‘Don’t!’ he repeated.

  But I had the needle deep into a vein, which was trembling with expectation.

  ‘I thought it would be Stein or Ibsen,’ I said. ‘Not you.’

  I didn’t see his fricking foot coming. It hit the needle, which sailed through the air and landed at the back of the kitchen, by the sink full of dishes.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Oleg,’ I said, looking up at him.

  Oleg stared at Harry for a long time.

  It was a serious, calm stare, without any real surprise. More like it was testing the lie of the land, trying to find its bearings.

  And when he did speak, Oleg sounded more curious than angry or confused.

  ‘But you believed me, Harry. When I told you it was someone else, someone with a balaclava, you believed me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry said. ‘I did believe you. Because I so wanted to believe you.’

  ‘But, Harry,’ Oleg said softly, gazing down at the bag of powder he had opened, ‘if you can’t believe your best friend what can you believe?’

  ‘Evidence,’ Harry said, feeling his throat thicken.

  ‘What evidence? We found explanations for the evidence, Harry. You and I, we crushed the evidence between us.’

  ‘The other evidence. The new stuff.’

  ‘Which new stuff?’

  Harry pointed to the floor by Oleg. ‘The gun there is an Odessa. It uses the same calibre as Gusto was shot with, Makarov, nine by eighteen millimetres. Whatever happens, the ballistics report will state with one hundred per cent certainty that this gun is the murder weapon, Oleg. And it has your dabs on it. Only yours. If anyone else used it and wiped their prints afterwards, yours would have been removed as well.’

  Oleg touched the gun, as if to confirm it was the one they were talking about.

  ‘And then there’s the syringe,’ Harry said. ‘There are lots of fingerprints on it, perhaps from two people. But it is definitely your thumbprint on the plunger. The plunger you have to press when you’re shooting up. And on that print there are particles of gunpowder, Oleg.’

  Oleg ran a finger along the syringe. ‘Why is there new evidence against me?’

  ‘Because you said in your statement you were high when you came into the room. But the gunpowder particles prove you injected the needle after because you had the particles on you. It proves you shot Gusto first and injected yourself afterwards. You were not high at the moment of the act, Oleg. This was premeditated murder.’

  Oleg nodded slowly. ‘And you’ve checked my fingerprints on the gun and the syringe against the police register. So they already know that I-’

  ‘I haven’t contacted the police. I’m the only person who knows about this.’

  Oleg swallowed. Harry saw the tiny movements in his throat. ‘How do you know they’re my prints if you didn’t check with the police?’

  ‘I had other prints I could compare them with.’

  Harry took his hand from his coat pocket. Placed the Game Boy on the kitchen table.

  Oleg stared at the Game Boy. Blinked and blinked as though he had something in his eye.

  ‘What made you suspect me?’ he whispered.

  ‘The hatred,’ Harry said. ‘The old man, Rudolf Asayev, said I should follow the hatred.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘He’s the man you called Dubai. It took me a while to realise he was referring to his own hatred. Hatred for you. Hatred for the fact that you killed his son.’

  ‘Son?’ Oleg raised his head and looked blankly at Harry.

  ‘Yes. Gusto was his son.’


  Oleg dropped his gaze, squatted and stared at the floor. ‘If…’ He shook his head. Started afresh. ‘If it’s true Dubai was Gusto’s father and if he hated me so much why didn’t he make sure I was killed in prison straight away?’

  ‘Because you were exactly where he wanted you. Because for him prison was worse than death. Prison eats your soul, death only liberates it. Prison was what he wished for those he hated most. You, Oleg. And he had total control over what you did there. It was only when you began to talk to me that you represented a danger, and he had to be content with killing you. But he didn’t manage that.’

  Oleg closed his eyes. Sat like that, still on his haunches. As though he had an important race in front of him, and now they just had to be quiet and concentrate.

  The town was playing its music outside: the cars, a distant foghorn, a half-hearted siren, noise as the sum of human activity, like the anthill’s perpetual, relentless rustle, monotonous, soporific, secure like a warm duvet.

  Oleg slowly leaned over without taking his eyes off Harry.

  Harry shook his head.

  But Oleg grabbed the gun. Carefully, as though afraid it would explode in his hands.

  43

  Truls had fled to be alone on the terrace.

  He had stood on the periphery of a couple of conversations, sipping champagne, eating from toothpicks and trying to look as if he belonged there. A few of these well-brought-up individuals had attempted to include him. Said hello, asked him who he was and what he did. Truls had given brief replies, and it had not occurred to him to return the favour. As though he wasn’t in a position to do that. Or was frightened he ought to know who they were and what kind of bloody important jobs they had.

  Ulla had been busy serving and smiling and chatting to these people, as if they were old acquaintances, and Truls had achieved eye contact with her only on a couple of occasions. And then, with a smile, she had mimed something he guessed was supposed to mean she would have liked to talk to him but a hostess’s duties called. It transpired that none of the other boys who had worked on the house had been able to come, and the Chief of Police hadn’t recognised Truls and neither had the unit heads. He almost felt like telling them he was the officer who had punched the lights out of the boy.

  But the terrace was wonderful. Oslo lay glittering like a jewel beneath him.

  The autumn chill had come with the high pressure. Night temperatures down to zero had been forecast on higher ground. He heard distant sirens. An ambulance. And at least one police vehicle. From somewhere in the centre. Truls would have most liked to sneak away, switch on the police radio. Hear what was going on. Feel the pulse of his town. Feel that he belonged.

  The terrace door opened, and Truls automatically took two steps back, into the shadows, to avoid being drawn into a conversation where he would have to shrink still further.

  It was Mikael. And the politician woman. Isabelle Skoyen.

  She was clearly stewed; at any rate Mikael was supporting her. Big woman, she towered above him. They stood by the railing with their backs to Truls, in front of the windowless bay, so that they were hidden from the guests in the lounge.

  Mikael stood behind her, and Truls half expected to see someone produce a Zippo and light a cigarette, but that didn’t happen. And when he heard the rustle of a dress and Isabelle Skoyen’s low, protesting laugh it was already too late to make his presence known. He saw the flash of a white thigh before the hem was pulled down firmly. Instead she turned to him, and their heads merged into one silhouette against the town below. Truls could hear wet tongue noises. He turned towards the lounge. Saw Ulla smiling and running between people with a tray of new provisions. Truls couldn’t understand it. Couldn’t bloody understand it. Not that he was shocked, it wasn’t the first time Mikael had been involved with another woman, but he couldn’t understand how Mikael had the stomach for it. The heart for it. When you have a woman like Ulla, when you have such incredible good luck, when you’ve hit the jackpot, how could you want to risk everything for a shag on the side? Is it because God, or whoever the hell it is, has given you the things women want in men — good looks, ambition, a smooth tongue that knows what to say — that you feel obliged to exercise your potential, as it were? Like people measuring two metres twenty think they have to play basketball. He didn’t know. All he knew was that Ulla deserved better. Someone to love her. Who loved her the way he had always loved her. And always would. The business with Martine had been a frivolous adventure, nothing serious, and it would never be repeated anyway. Every so often he had thought that in some way or other he ought to let Ulla know that if she were ever to lose Mikael, he, Truls, would be there for her. But he had never found the right words to tell her. Truls pricked up his ears. They were talking.

  ‘I just know he’s gone,’ Mikael said, and Truls could hear from the slightly slurred speech that he was not totally sober, either. ‘But they found the other two.’

  ‘His Cossacks?’

  ‘I still believe that all the stuff about them being Cossacks is bollocks. Anyway, Gunnar Hagen from Crime Squad contacted me and wondered if I could help. Tear gas and automatic weapons were used, so they have a theory it might have been the settling of an old score. He wondered if Orgkrim had any candidates. They were tapping in the dark, he said.’

  ‘And you answered?’

  ‘I answered that I had no idea who it could be, which is the truth. If it’s a gang they’ve managed to sail under the radar.’

  ‘Do you think the old boy could have escaped?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I think his body’s rotting somewhere down there.’ Truls saw a hand point into the starry sky. ‘Maybe we’ll find it very soon, maybe we’ll never find it.’

  ‘Bodies always turn up, don’t they?’

  No, Truls thought. He stood with his weight distributed evenly across both feet, felt them press against the cement of the terrace, and vice versa. They don’t.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Mikael said, ‘someone has done it, and he’s new. We’ll soon see who is Oslo’s new king of the dope heap.’

  ‘And what do you think that will mean for us?’

  ‘Nothing, my love.’ Truls could see Mikael Bellman place his hand behind Isabelle Skoyen’s neck. In silhouette, it looked as if he was about to strangle her. She lurched to the side. ‘We’ve got where we wanted to be. We jump off here. In fact, it couldn’t have had a better end than this. We didn’t need the old boy any more, and considering what he had on you and me in the course of… our cooperation, it’s…’

  ‘It’s?’

  ‘It’s…’

  ‘Remove your hand, Mikael.’

  Alcoholic laughter, as smooth as velvet. ‘If this new king hadn’t done the job for us I might have had to do it myself.’

  ‘Let Beavis do it, you mean?’

  Truls started at the sound of the hated nickname. Mikael had been the first person to use it. And it had stuck. People had caught on to the underbite and the grunted laugh. Mikael had even consoled him by saying he had been thinking more about the ‘anarchistic perception of reality’ and the ‘nonconformist morality’ of the cartoon character on MTV. Had made it sound as if he had awarded Truls an honorary bloody title.

  ‘No, I would never have let Truls know about my role in this.’

  ‘I still think it’s strange you don’t trust him. Aren’t you old friends? Didn’t he make this terrace for you?’

  ‘He did. In the middle of the night on his ownsome. See what I mean? We’re talking about a man who’s not a hundred per cent predictable. He’s prone to all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas.’

  ‘Yet you advised the old boy to recruit Beavis as a burner?’

  ‘That’s because I’ve known Truls since childhood, and I know he’s corrupt through and through and easily bought.’

  Isabelle Skoyen screeched with laughter, and Mikael shushed her.

  Truls had stopped breathing. His throat tightene
d, and it was as if he had an animal in his stomach. A small roving animal searching for a way out. It tickled and quivered. It tried an upward route. It pressed against his chest.

  ‘By the way, you’ve never told me why you chose me as your business partner,’ Mikael said.

  ‘Because you’ve got such a great cock, of course.’

  ‘No, be serious. If I hadn’t agreed to work with you and the old boy, I would’ve had to arrest you.’

  ‘Arrest?’ She snorted. ‘Everything I’ve done has been for the good of the town. Legalising marijuana, distributing methadone, financing a room for fixes. Or clearing the way for a drug that results in fewer ODs. What’s the difference? Drug policies are pragmatism, Mikael.’

  ‘Relax, I agree, goes without saying. We’ve made Oslo a better place. Skal to that.’

  She ignored his raised glass. ‘You would never have arrested me anyway. Because, if you had, I would’ve told anyone who wanted to listen that I was fucking you behind your sweet little wife’s back.’ She giggled. ‘ Right behind her back. Do you remember the first time we met at that premiere and I said you could fuck me? Your wife was standing right behind you, barely out of earshot, but you didn’t even blink. Just asked me for fifteen minutes to send her home.’

  ‘Shh, you’re drunk,’ Mikael said, placing a hand on her spine.

  ‘That was when I knew you were a man after my own heart. So when the old boy said I should find myself an ally with the same ambitions as me, I knew exactly who to approach. Skal, Mikael.’

  ‘Speaking of which, we need a top-up. Perhaps we should go back and-’

  ‘Delete what I said about after my own heart. There are no men after my heart, they’re after my…’ Deep rumble of laughter. Hers.

  ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  ‘Harry Hole!’

  ‘Shh.’

  ‘There’s a man after my own heart. Bit stupid, of course, but… hm. Where do you think he is?’

  ‘Having trawled the town for him for so long without success, I assume he’s left the country. He got Oleg acquitted, he won’t be back.’

  Isabelle swayed, but Mikael caught her.

  ‘You’re a bastard, Mikael, and we bastards deserve each other.’