Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8) (7 page)

Stian blinked.

Why hadn’t he thought of that before?

He turned all the knobs on the console. And as the floodlights came on over the slope Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ rang out from the loudspeakers and filled the valley. That’s the way, now it was a bit more homely.

He drummed his fingers and looked at the spindle again. There was a hole at the top. He got up, grabbed the string from beside the fuse cupboard, doubled it and threaded it through the hole. Wrapped it round the spindle once and pulled carefully. This could actually work. He pulled a little harder. The string was holding. Even harder. The spindle moved. He yanked it.

The sound of the lift machinery died with a long-drawn-out groan culminating in a squeal.

‘Take that, you motherfucker!’ Stian shouted.

He leaned over the phone to ring the chairman and inform him the job was done. Remembered the chairman would hardly approve of rap being played at full blast over the speakers at night and switched it off.

Listened to the phone ringing. That was all he could hear now; suddenly it was very quiet. Come on, answer! And then there it was again. The feeling. The feeling that someone was there. Someone was watching him.

Stian Barelli slowly raised his head.

And felt the chill spread from an area at the back of his head, as though he were turning to stone, as though it were Medusa’s face he was staring at. But it wasn’t hers. It was a man dressed in a long, black leather coat. He had a lunatic’s staring eyes and a vampire’s open mouth with blood dripping from both corners. And he seemed to be floating above the ground.

‘Yes? Hello? Stian? Are you there? Stian?’

But Stian didn’t answer. He had stood up, knocked the chair over, edged backwards and clung to the wall, tearing Miss December off the nail and sending her to the floor.

He had found the emergency stop pole. It was protruding from the mouth of the man attached to one of the T-bars.

‘Then he was sent round and round on the ski lift?’ Gunnar Hagen asked, angling his head and studying the body hanging in front of them. There was something wrong about the shape, like a wax figure melting and being stretched out towards the ground.

‘That’s what the young man told us,’ said Beate Lønn, stamping her feet on the snow and looking up the illuminated tramway where her white-clad colleague had almost merged with the snow.

‘Found anything?’ Hagen asked in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer.

‘Loads,’ Beate said. ‘The trail of blood carries on four hundred metres to the top of the lift and four hundred metres back again.’

‘I meant anything apart from the obvious.’

‘Footprints in the snow from the car park, down the short cut and straight here,’ Beate said. ‘The pattern matches the victim’s shoes.’

‘He came here in
shoes
?’

‘Yes. And he came alone. There were no prints other than his. There’s a red Golf in the car park. We’re checking now to find the owner.’

‘No signs of the perpetrator?’

‘What do you reckon, Bjørn?’ Beate asked, turning to Holm, who at that moment was walking towards them with a roll of police tape in his hand.

‘Not so far,’ he panted. ‘No other footprints. But loads of ski tracks, of course. No visible fingerprints, hair or fabric so far. Perhaps we’ll find some on the toothpick.’ Bjørn Holm nodded towards the pole sticking out of the dead man’s mouth. ‘Otherwise all we can do is hope Pathology might find something.’

Gunnar Hagen shivered in his coat. ‘You make it sound as if you already know you won’t find much.’

‘Well,’ Beate Lønn said, a ‘well’ Hagen recognised; it was the word Harry Hole used to introduce bad news. ‘There was no DNA. There weren’t any fingerprints to be found at the other crime scene either.’

Hagen wondered whether it was the temperature, the fact that he had come straight from his bed or what his Krimteknisk leader had said that made him shiver.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, steeling himself.

‘I mean I know who it is,’ Beate said.

‘I thought you said you didn’t find any ID on him.’

‘That’s correct. And it took me a while to recognise him.’

‘You? I thought you never forgot a face?’

‘The fusiform gyrus gets confused when both cheeks have been smashed in. But that’s Bertil Nilsen.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘That’s why I rang you. He’s . . .’ Beate Lønn took a deep breath. Don’t say it, Hagen thought.

‘A policeman,’ Bjørn Holm said.

‘Worked at the police station in Nedre Eiker,’ Beate said. ‘We had a murder just before you came to Crime Squad. Nilsen contacted Kripos thinking the case bore similarities to a rape case he’d worked on in Krokstadelva, and offered to come to Oslo to give a hand.’

‘And?’

‘Dead duck. He came, but basically just delayed the proceedings. The man or men were never caught.’

Hagen nodded. ‘Where . . .?’

‘Here,’ Beate said. ‘Raped in the ski-lift hut and carved up. Part of the body was found in the lake here, another a kilometre south and a third seven kilometres in the opposite direction, by Lake Aurtjern. That was the reason it was thought there was more than one person involved.’

‘And the date . . .?’

‘. . . is the same, to the day.’

‘How long . . .?’

‘Nine years ago.’

A walkie-talkie crackled. Hagen watched Bjørn Holm lift it to his ear and speak softly. Put it back down. ‘The Golf in the car park is registered in the name of a Mira Nilsen. Same address as Bertil Nilsen. Must be his wife.’

Hagen released his breath with a groan, and it hung out of his mouth like a white flag. ‘I’ll have to report this to the Chief,’ he said. ‘Don’t mention the murdered girl for now.’

‘The press’ll find out.’

‘I know. But I’m going to advise the Chief to let the press speculate for the time being.’

‘Wise move,’ Beate said.

Hagen sent her a quick smile, as thanks for very much needed encouragement. Glanced up the mountainside to the car park and the march ahead of him. Looked up at the body. Shivered again. ‘Do you know who I think of when I see a tall, thin man like that?’

‘Yes,’ Beate Lønn said.

‘I wish he was here now.’

‘He wasn’t tall and thin,’ said Bjørn Holm.

The two others turned to him. ‘Harry wasn’t . . .?’

‘I mean this guy,’ Holm said, nodding towards the body on the wire. ‘Nilsen. He got tall overnight. If you feel his body it’s like jelly. I’ve seen the same happen to people who’ve fallen a long way and crushed all the bones in their body. With the skeleton broken the body hasn’t got a frame, and the flesh says follow gravity until rigor mortis sets in. Funny, isn’t it?’

They regarded the body in silence. Until Hagen turned on his heel and left.

‘Too much information?’ Bjørn Holm asked.

‘A trifle superfluous perhaps,’ Beate said. ‘And I also wish he was here.’

‘Do you think he’ll ever come back?’ Bjørn Holm asked.

Beate shook her head. Bjørn Holm didn’t know if it was in response to his question or the whole situation. He turned and his eye caught a spruce branch swaying on the edge of the forest. A chilling bird cry filled the silence.

6

THE BELL OVER
the door rang furiously as Truls Berntsen stepped in from the freezing cold street and into the damp warmth. There was a smell of rotten hair and hair lotion.

‘Trim?’ said the young man with the glistening black hairstyle Truls was fairly confident he had acquired in a different salon.

‘Two hundred?’ Truls asked, brushing snow off his shoulders. March, the month of broken promises. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to make sure the board outside was still accurate. Gentlemen 200. Children 85. Pensioners 75. Truls had seen people bring their dogs in here.

‘Same as always, pal,’ the hairdresser said in a Pakistani accent, ushering him into one of the salon’s two free chairs. In the third sat a man Truls immediately categorised as an Arab. Dark terrorist eyes beneath a fringe plastered to his forehead. Eyes that darted away in fear after meeting Truls’s in the mirror. Perhaps the man could smell bacon, or recognised the police look. In which case perhaps he was one of those selling drugs down by Brugata. Just hash. The Arabs were cautious with harder drugs. Maybe the Koran equated speed and heroin with a pork chop? Pimp maybe – the gold chain suggested as much. Small-time one, if so. Truls knew the faces of all the big-timers.

On with the babies’ bib.

‘Hair’s got long, pal.’

Truls didn’t like being called ‘pal’ by Pakis, especially not Paki poofs and extra-especially not Paki poofs who would soon be touching you. But the advantage of these powder-puffs was that at least they didn’t rest their hips against your shoulder, tilt their heads, run a hand through your hair, look into your eyes in the mirror and ask whether you want it like this or like that. They just got down to it. They didn’t ask if you wanted your greasy hair washed, they just sprayed it with water, ignored any instructions you might have and went for it with scissors and comb as if it were the Australian sheep-shearing championships.

Truls looked at the front page of the newspaper lying on the shelf below the mirror. It was the same refrain: what was the so-called cop killer’s motive? Most of the speculation centred on a crazy police-hater or an extreme anarchist. Some mentioned foreign terrorism, but terrorists usually claimed the honour of a successful action, and no one had come forward. No one doubted that the two murders were connected – the dates and the crime scenes saw to that – and for a while the police had searched for a criminal both Vennesla and Nilsen had arrested, questioned or offended in some way. But no such connection could be found. So in the interim they had worked on a theory that Vennesla’s murder was one individual’s revenge after an arrest, a bout of jealousy, an inheritance or any of the standard motives. And Nilsen’s murder was another individual with a different motive, but he had been clever enough to copy Vennesla’s murder to fool the police into thinking a serial killer was at work and stop them looking in the obvious places. But then the police had done exactly that, searched in the obvious places as though these were two separate murders. And they didn’t find anything there either.

So the police had gone back to square one. A police murderer. And the press had done the same and kept nagging: why can’t the police catch the person who has killed two of their own?

Truls felt both satisfaction and anger when he saw these headlines. Mikael had probably been hoping that by Christmas and New Year the press would have forgotten the murders and started focusing on other things, allowing them to work in peace. Letting him continue to be the sexy new sheriff in town, the whizz-kid, the town’s guardian. And not someone who failed, who messed up, who sat in front of the flashing cameras with a loser’s face radiating dejected Norwegian Rail-style incompetence.

Truls didn’t need to look at the papers, he had read them at home. He had laughed out loud at Mikael’s feeble statement about where the investigation stood. ‘At this moment in time it’s not possible to say . . .’ and ‘There is no information regarding . . .’ They were sentences taken directly from the chapter about handling the press in Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s
Investigative Methods
, which had been a set text at Police College and in which it said police officers should use these generic quasi-sentences because journalists got so frustrated with ‘no comment’. And also that they should avoid adjectives.

Truls had checked the photos for traces of desperation on Mikael’s face, the expression he used to wear when the big boys in Manglerud reckoned it was time to shut the poncy upstart’s gob, and Mikael needed help. Truls’s help. And of course Truls stepped up. And he was the one who went home with black eyes and thick lips, not Mikael. No, his good looks were spared. For Ulla.

‘Don’t cut off
too
much,’ Truls said. He watched his hair falling from his pale, slightly protruding forehead in the mirror. The forehead and the sturdy underbite often led people to assume he was stupid. Which on occasion was an advantage. On occasion. He closed his eyes. Trying to decide whether Mikael’s desperate expression was there in the press conference photos or if he saw it only because he wanted to see it.

Suspension. Expulsion. Rejection.

He was still getting his salary. Mikael had been apologetic. Placed a hand on his shoulder and said it was in everyone’s best interest, Truls’s too. Until it was decided what the consequences would be for a policeman who had received money he couldn’t or wouldn’t account for. Mikael had even made sure that Truls was entitled to keep some allowances. So it wasn’t as if he had to go to cheap hairdressers. He had always come here. But he liked it even better now. He liked having exactly the same haircut as the Arab in the next chair. The terrorist cut.

‘What are you laughing at, pal?’

Truls stopped abruptly when he heard his own grunted guffaws. Those which had given him the sobriquet Beavis. No, Mikael had given it to him. During the school party, to the amusement of everyone else, as they discovered, holy shit, that Truls Berntsen did indeed look and sound like the MTV cartoon character! Had Ulla been there? Or was Mikael sitting with his arm round another girl? Ulla with the gentle eyes, with the white sweater, with the slender hand she had once placed on his neck and drawn his head closer, shouted in his ear to drown the roars of the Kawasakis one Sunday in Bryn. She only wanted to ask where Mikael was. But he could still remember the warmth of her hand, it had felt as if it would melt him, make his knees buckle under him on the bridge over the motorway, then and there in the morning sun. And with her breath in his ear and on his cheek, his senses had been working overtime. Even surrounded by the stench of petrol, exhaust and burnt rubber from motorbikes below he could identify her toothpaste, tell her lip gloss was strawberry flavour and that her sweater had been washed in Milo. That Mikael had kissed her. Had had her. Or had he been imagining it? He definitely remembered he had answered he didn’t know. Even though he did. Even though part of him had wanted to tell her. Had wanted to crush the gentleness, the purity, the innocence and the naivety in her eyes. To crush him, Mikael.