Authors: Anne Holt
The punter sobbed as Bork place a hand on his shoulder, demanding an answer.
‘Please! You can’t lock me up! I’ll do anything, I can’t … You can have whatever you—’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ warned Knut Bork, holding up a hand. ‘Don’t go making things worse for yourself. Let’s just calm down and—’
‘Can I go now?’ said Martin in a thin voice. ‘I mean, it’s not me you want. They’ll just send me to social services and it’ll mean a load of paperwork for you and—’
‘I thought you said you were an adult. Come on.’
A night bus came along. It had to zigzag between the two cars, each blocking one side of the carriageway. There was just one nocturnal passenger looking down with curiosity at the four men before the bus roared away and it was possible to talk once again.
‘My car,’ the man sobbed as he was led to the police car. ‘My wife needs it tomorrow morning! She has to take the kids to nursery!’
‘Let me put it this way,’ said Knut Bork as he helped the man into the back seat. ‘Your wife has far bigger problems than the fact that she hasn’t got transport tomorrow morning.’
T
he problem was that so many people had started to complain about the bad air. Quite frankly, there was a horrible smell. The receptionist had his hands full moving guests around as they came back from their allocated rooms and announced that they were uninhabitable. The strange thing was that it wasn’t just one particular area of the hotel. On the contrary, the complaints were coming from one room here, another there, and in the end he had run out of patience. Given the number of rooms that could no longer be used, the hotel was seriously overbooked.
The Hotel Continental in Oslo was a proud establishment that most definitely did not tolerate an unpleasant smell in its rooms.
Fritiof Hansen, the operations manager, had been trying to track down the problem for more than fifty minutes. He had begun with the first room that had been rejected by an irate Frenchman threatening to move to the Grand. A disgusting, sweetish smell assailed his nostrils as he opened the door. There was nothing to explain the stench as far as Fritiof Hansen could see. The bathroom was freshly cleaned. All the drawers were empty, apart from the obligatory copy of the New Testament and brochures about Oslo’s nightlife and the entertainment available. He did find a dirty cotton-wool ball under the bed, and, rather embarrassingly, a used condom behind one of the legs. But nothing that smelled. Nor were there any places in the room where the smell was stronger, as far as he could tell. And as soon as he stepped into the corridor, he was surrounded once more by the scent of luxury and carpet cleaner. In the room next door, all was as it should be. When he opened a door further along the corridor, the stench was there again.
It just didn’t make any sense.
He was now standing down in the foyer, legs apart and hands behind his back as he stuck his nose in the air and sniffed. Admittedly, Fritiof Hansen was a man of sixty-three with a reduced sense of smell after smoking twenty cigarettes a day for forty years. But he had stopped smoking three years ago, and his senses of taste and smell had both improved.
‘Edvard,’ he said, holding out his hand to a bellboy who was staggering past with a bag under his arm and a suitcase in each hand. ‘Is there a funny smell just here?’
‘No,’ gasped Edvard without stopping. ‘But it stinks down in the cellar!’
‘Right …’
Fritiof Hansen clicked his heels like a soldier before brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his uniform. It was green, freshly ironed and with razor-sharp creases. His black shoes had been polished until they shone. His identity card with its magnetic strip dangled from an extendable cord clipped to his belt; combined with the carefully chosen code 1111, it gave him access to every room in the building. When he set off, his bearing was erect and military.
The cellar of the Continental was a confusing labyrinth, but not to Fritiof Hansen. For more than sixteen years he had taken care of small details and major issues at the hotel. When he was given the title of operations manager the previous year, he realized it was just a way of recognizing his loyalty. He wasn’t really the manager of anything. Before he got the job at the Continental, he had packed paper clips in a protected workshop in Groruddalen. He proved himself to be unusually handy, and became a kind of informal caretaker there, until his boss had recommended him for a job at the Continental. Fritiof Hansen had turned up for the interview freshly shaven, wearing neat overalls and carrying his toolbox. He got the job, and since then he hadn’t missed a single day’s work.
He didn’t like the cellar.
The complex machinery down here was maintained by a team of specialists. Fritiof Hansen might occasionally change a light bulb or fix a door that had got stuck, but the hotel used external companies for renovations and maintenance. And for the air-conditioning system. The module that collected fresh air from outside was located
on the roof and in its own area on the top floor. The plant itself was in the cellar. Over the years it had been augmented in a way that made it into two independent appliances. During the latest phase of modernization it had been recommended that the whole thing be renewed, but this proved too expensive, so a compromise was reached between the hotel and the suppliers: a new, smaller plant was installed to ease the load on the old one. Fritiof Hansen could hear the low, monotone hum before he reached the inner corridor where the locked doors to the machine room were located.
As he walked down the stairs, he wrinkled his nose. It didn’t smell quite the same as the polluted rooms, but here, too, a strange, sweetish smell found its way into his nostrils, combined with damp and dust and the distinctive mustiness of old buildings.
Fritiof Hansen didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in his brother and in Arbeiderpartiet and the hotel management, who had promised him a job here for as long as he could stand on his own two legs. Over the years he had also begun to believe in himself. Ghosts were invisible. Anything you couldn’t see didn’t exist. And yet he always felt that strange sense of unease as he set off down the long, dark corridors lined with doors leading to rooms which concealed things he recognized, but often didn’t understand.
At the point where the corridor bore to the left, the smell grew stronger. He was getting close to the air-conditioning plants which were in two rooms next door to each other. With each step he took, the unpleasant feeling grew. Perhaps he should go and fetch someone. Edvard was a good lad who was always ready to stop for a chat when he had time.
But Edvard was just a bellboy. Fritiof Hansen was operations manager, with a badge on his chest and the code for every room in the entire building. This was his job, and the receptionist had told him he had an hour to sort out what was going on before the management called in professional help.
As if he wasn’t a professional.
Despite the fact that most things in the cellar were old, the door was locked with a modern card reader. He swiped his card and keyed in the code as steadily as he could.
He opened the door.
The stench hit him with such force that he took a couple of steps backwards. He cupped his hands over his nose before hesitantly moving forward.
He stopped in the doorway of the dark room. His free hand groped for the light switch. When he found it he was almost dazzled by the fluorescent tube which suddenly drenched the room in an unpleasant blue light.
Four metres away, half-hidden behind some kind of machinery that could have been for just about anything, he could see a pair of legs from the knees down. It was difficult to tell whether they belonged to a woman or a man.
Fritiof Hansen had a set evening ritual. Every weekday at 9.35 p.m. he watched
CSI
on TVNorge. A beer, a small packet of crisps and
Crime Scene Investigation
before bed. He liked both the Miami and New York versions, but it was Gil Grissom in the original version from Las Vegas who was Fritiof Hansen’s favourite. But Grissom was about to be replaced by that black guy, and Fritiof wasn’t at all sure if he’d bother watching it any more.
Grissom was the best.
Gil Grissom wouldn’t like it if an operations manager at a respectable hotel walked into a crime scene, destroying a whole lot of microscopic evidence that might be there. Fritiof Hansen was quite convinced this was a crime scene. At any rate, the person over by the wall was definitely dead. He remembered an episode where Grissom had established the time of death by studying the development of fly larvae on a pig’s carcass. It had been bad enough on television.
‘Dead as a doornail,’ he muttered, mainly to convince himself. ‘It stinks of death in here.’
Slowly he moved back and closed the door. He checked the lock had clicked into place and set off towards the stairs. Before he got around the corner where the corridor led off at an angle of ninety degrees, he had broken into a run.
*
‘I was actually thinking about letting him go. But then we found the hash. I needed to interview him properly, and then it struck me that …’
DC Knut Bork handed over a report to Silje Sørensen as they walked across the blue zone in the police station. She stopped as she glanced through the document.
On closer investigation, Martin Setre had turned out to be fifteen years and eleven months old. He had spent the first part of his life with his biological parents. He was already perceived as an unlucky child during his time at nursery. Broken bones. Bruises. Admittedly, he was clumsy at nursery too, but most of his injuries were sustained at home. There was the suggestion of ADHD when a pre-school teacher asked for the boy to be checked out. Before this process could begin, the family had moved. Martin started school in a small community in Østfold. After only six months he was admitted to hospital with stomach pains, which no one could get to the bottom of. During the spring term in his first year the family moved again, after one of the teachers called round unannounced and found the boy locked in a bike shed, his clothing completely inadequate. The teacher informed the authorities, but before the case reached the top of the pile, the family had moved yet again. Martin’s life continued in this way until he was admitted to Ullevål Hospital at the age of eleven with a fractured skull. Fortunately, they had managed to save his life, but actually giving him any kind of life proved more difficult. Since then the boy had been in and out of various institutions and foster homes. The last time he had run away was at Christmas, from a residential youth care unit where he had been placed by the court.
The case against his parents was dropped due to lack of evidence.
‘Ffksk,’ mumbled Silje, looking up again.
‘What?’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ she clarified.
‘You could say that,’ agreed Knut Bork, leading her to an interview room. ‘He’s in here.’
He took out a key and inserted it in the lock.
‘We’re not really allowed to lock him in,’ he said, his voice subdued. ‘At least not without supervision. But this kid would have been long gone if I’d left the door open for one second. He tried to do a runner three times while we were bringing him in from the unit.’
‘Has he been there since last Monday?’
‘Yes, under supervision. He hasn’t been alone for more than five minutes.’
The door opened.
Martin Setre didn’t even look up. He was rocking back and forth on a chair, one foot on the table. The dark boot lay in a small lake of melted snow. The back of the chair was rhythmically hitting the wall, and had already started to leave a mark.
‘Pack that in,’ said Knut Bork. ‘Right now. This is DI Silje Sørensen. She wants to talk to you.’
The boy still didn’t look up. His fingers were playing with a snuff tin, but it didn’t look as if he had anything under his lip. However, the herpes infection was considerably worse.
‘Hi,’ said Silje, moving so that she was opposite him. ‘You can say hello to me if you like.’
She sat down.
‘I understand,’ she said, and started to laugh.
This time the boy did look up, but without meeting her eyes.
‘What the fuck are you laughing at?’
‘Not at you. At Knut here.’
She nodded in the direction of her younger colleague, who raised his eyebrows as high as he could before adopting the same indifferent expression once again. He had turned the chair around and was leaning over the back with his arms folded, a thin investigation file dangling from one hand.
‘You see,’ said Silje, ‘when he showed me your papers we made a bet. I bet 100 kronor that you would be rocking back and forward on the chair, fiddling with a snuff tin, and that you’d refuse to speak. Then I bet another hundred that you wouldn’t look me in the eye for the first quarter of an hour. It looks as though I’m going to be rich. That’s why I’m laughing.’
She laughed again.
The boy took his foot off the table, let the legs of the chair crash to the floor and stared her straight in the eye.
‘It hasn’t been quarter of an hour yet,’ he said. ‘You lost.’
‘Only partly. It’s 1-1 between Knut and me. What the score will be between you and me remains to be seen.’
A faint knock on the door made the boy glance in that direction.
‘Come in,’ Knut Bork called loudly, and the door opened.
A woman in her thirties blundered in, heavily overweight and panting, with layers of flapping clothes.
‘Sorry I’m a few minutes late,’ she said. ‘Busy day. I’m Andrea Solli, the social worker.’
She addressed her last remark to Martin and held out her hand. He responded hesitantly with a limp handshake. He didn’t get up.
‘Well, that’s the formalities out of the way,’ said Andrea Solli, sitting down on the remaining chair.
The boy closed his eyes and pretended to yawn. Andrea Solli was Number 62 in the series of social workers, experts, solicitors and lay judges who had played some part in Martin’s life. The very first one had got him to talk. He had told her everything, concluding with an account of how his father had smashed his head against a toilet until he no longer knew whether he was alive or not.