Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (26 page)

Harry opened his mouth to answer her, but his tongue was in the way. His mobile phone rang and he took the call.

‘Hole speaking.’

‘Harry? This is Oda Paulsen. Do you remember me?’

He didn’t remember her; anyway, she sounded too young.

‘From NRK,’ she said. ‘I invited you to
Bosse
last time.

The researcher. The honeytrap.

‘We were wondering whether you would like to join us again, tomorrow. We’d like to hear about this Snowman triumph. Yes, we know he’s dead, but nevertheless. About what goes through the head of this sort of person. If he can be called that –’

‘No,’ Harry said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t want to join you.’

‘It’s
Bosse
,’ Oda Paulsen said with genuine bewilderment in her voice. ‘On NRK TV.’

‘No.’

‘But listen, Harry, wouldn’t it be interesting to talk—?’

Harry threw the mobile phone at the black wall. A chip of plaster fell off.

Harry put his head in his hands, trying to hold it together so that it didn’t explode. He had to drink something. Anything. When he looked up again, he was alone in the room.

Perhaps it might have been avoided if Fenris Bar had not served alcohol. If Jim Beam had not been on the shelf behind the barman screaming with its hoarse whiskey-voice about anaesthesia and amnesty: ‘Harry! Come here, let’s reminisce about old times. About those awful ghosts we have dispelled, about the nights we could sleep.’

On the other hand, perhaps it might not.

Harry hardly registered his colleagues, and they took no notice of him. When he had entered the garish bar with the plush red Danish ferry interior, they were already well on the way. They were hanging off each other’s shoulders, shouting and breathing alcohol over each other, singing along with Stevie Wonder who claimed he had just called to say he loved you. They looked and sounded, in short, like a football team who had won the cup. And as Stevie Wonder finished by stating that his declaration of love came from the bottom of his heart, Harry’s third drink was placed in front of him on the bar.

The first drink had numbed everything, he had been unable to breathe and mused that was how taking carnadrioxide must feel. The second had almost made his stomach turn. But his body had got over the first shock and known that it had received what it had been demanding for so long. And now it was responding with a murmur of well-being. The heat washed through him. This was music for the soul.

‘Are you drinking?’

Katrine was standing by his side.

‘This is the last,’ Harry said, his tongue no longer feeling thick, but smooth and supple. Alcohol just improved his articulation. And people hardly noticed that he was drunk, up to a certain point. That was why he still had a job.

‘It’s not the last,’ Katrine said. ‘It’s the first.’

‘That’s one of those AA precepts.’ Harry looked up at her. The intense blue eyes, the thin nostrils, the full lips. God, she looked so wonderful. ‘Are you an alcoholic, Katrine Bratt?’

‘I had a father who was.’

‘Mm. Was that why you didn’t want to visit them in Bergen?’

‘You avoid visiting people because they have an illness?’

‘I don’t know. You may have had an unhappy childhood because of him or something like that.’

‘He couldn’t have made me unhappy. I was born like that.’

‘Unhappy?’

‘Maybe. What about you?’

Harry hunched his shoulders. ‘Goes without saying.’

Katrine sipped her drink, a shiny number. Vodka shiny, not gin grey, he established.

‘And what’s your unhappiness down to, Harry?’

The words came out before he had time to think. ‘Loving someone who loves me.’

Katrine laughed. ‘Poor thing. Did you have a harmonious start to life and a cheery disposition which was later destroyed? Or was your path marked out for you?’

Harry stared at the golden-brown liquid in his glass. ‘Sometimes I wonder. But not often. I try to think about other things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Other things.’

‘Do you sometimes think about me?’

Someone bumped into her and she stepped closer. Her perfume intermingled with the aroma of Jim Beam.

‘Never,’ he said, grabbing his glass and knocking back the contents. He stared ahead, into the mirror behind the bottles where he saw Katrine Bratt and Harry Hole standing much too close to each other. She leaned forward.

‘Harry, you’re lying.’

He turned to her. Her eyes seemed to be smouldering, yellow and blurred, like the fog lights on an approaching car. Her nostrils were flared, and she was breathing hard. There was a smell, as if she took lime in her vodka.

‘Tell me exactly, in detail, what you feel like doing now, Harry.’ There was gravel in her voice. ‘Everything. And don’t lie this time.’

His mind went back to the rumour Espen Lepsvik had mentioned, about Katrine Bratt and her husband’s predilections. Bullshit, his mind didn’t go back, it had been too far forward in his cerebral cortex the whole time. He breathed in. ‘OK, Katrine. I’m a simple man with simple needs.’

She had tipped back her head, as some animal species do to show submission. He raised his glass. ‘I feel like drinking.’

Katrine was sent staggering towards Harry when a colleague unsteady on his legs knocked her from behind. Harry broke her fall by grasping her left side with his free hand. Her face screwed up with pain.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘An injury?’

She held her ribs. ‘Fencing. It’s nothing. Sorry.’

She turned her back on him and ploughed a path through her colleagues. He saw several of the boys follow her with their eyes. She went into the toilet. Harry scanned the room, saw Lepsvik look away as their gazes met. He couldn’t stay here. There were other places he and Jim could chat. He paid and was about to leave. There was still a heeltap in his glass. But Lepsvik and two colleagues were watching him from the other side of the bar. It was just a question of some self-control. Harry wanted to move his legs, but they were stuck to the floor like glue. He took the glass, put it to his lips and drained the contents.

The cold night air was wonderful on his burning skin. He could kiss this town.

When Harry got home he tried to masturbate into the sink, but spewed instead and peered up at the calendar hanging on the nail under the top cupboard. He had been given it by Rakel for Christmas a few years ago. It had photos of all three of them. A photo for every month. November. Rakel and Oleg were laughing at him against a background of yellow autumnal foliage and a pale blue sky. As blue as the dress Rakel was wearing, the one with the small white flowers. The dress she had been wearing the first time. And he decided that tonight he would dream himself into that sky. Then he opened the cupboard under the worktop, swept away the empty Coke bottles, which tipped over with a clatter, and – right at the back – there it was. The untouched litre of Jim Beam. Harry had never risked being without alcohol in the house, not even in his most sober spells. Because he knew what he might do to get hold of the stuff once he had gone on a bender. As if to delay the inevitable, he ran his hand across the label. Then he opened the
bottle. How much was enough? The syringe Vetlesen had used was still coated in red after the poison, showing that it had been full. As red as cochineal. My darling, cochineal.

He breathed in and raised the bottle. Put it to his mouth, felt his body tense, steel itself for the shock. And then he drank. Greedily and desperately as if to get it over and done with. The sound from his throat between each swig sounded like a sob.

G
UNNAR
H
AGEN STRODE DOWN THE CORRIDOR AT SPEED.

It was Monday and four days since the Snowman case had been solved. They should have been four pleasant days. And there had been, it was true, congratulations, smiling bosses, positive comments in the press and even enquiries from foreign newspapers as to whether they could have the whole of the background story and the investigation from start to finish. And that was where the problem had started: the person who could have given Hagen the details of the success story had not been present. Four days had passed and no one had either seen or heard from Harry Hole. And the reason was obvious. Colleagues had seen him drinking at Fenris Bar. Hagen had kept this to himself, but the rumours had reached the ears of the Chief Superintendent. And Hagen had been summoned to his office that morning.

‘Gunnar, this won’t do any more.’

Gunnar Hagen had said there might be other explanations. Harry wasn’t always that prompt at letting them know he was working away from the office. There was a lot of investigating left to do on the Snowman case even though they had found the killer.

But the Chief Superintendent had made up his mind. ‘Gunnar, we’ve come to the end of the road as far as Hole is concerned.’

‘He’s our best detective, Torleif.’

‘And the worst representative for our force. Do you want that kind of role model for our young officers, Gunnar? The man’s an alcoholic. Everyone in-house knows he was drinking at Fenris, and that he hasn’t turned up for work since. If we tolerate that, we’re setting a very low standard and the damage will be practically irreparable.’

‘But dismissal? Can’t we—?’

‘No more warnings. The regulations regarding civil servants and alcohol abuse are abundantly clear.’

This conversation was still reverberating around the POB’s head as he knocked on the Chief Superintendent’s door once again.

‘He’s been seen,’ Hagen said.

‘Who?’

‘Hole. Li rang me to say he’d seen him go into his office and close the door behind him.’

‘Right,’ said the Chief Superintendent, getting to his feet. ‘Then let’s go and have a chat with him straight away.’

They stomped through Crime Squad, the red zone on the sixth floor of Police HQ. And staff, as though scenting something in the air, came to the doors of their offices, poked their heads out and watched the two men walking side by side with stern, closed faces.

When they reached the door labelled 616, they stopped. Hagen took a deep breath.

‘Torleif …’ he began, but the Chief Superintendent had already gripped the door handle and thrust it open.

They stood in the doorway, their eyes wide with disbelief.

‘Good God,’ whispered the Chief Superintendent.

Harry Hole, in a T-shirt, sat behind his desk with an elastic band tightened around his forearm, his head bent forward. A syringe hung from the skin directly under the elastic band. The contents were transparent and even from the door they could see several red dots where the needle had punctured the milky-white arm.

‘What the hell are you doing, man?’ hissed the Chief Superintendent, pushing Hagen in front of him and slamming the door behind them.

Harry’s head bobbed up, and he looked at them from miles away. Hagen observed that Harry was holding a stopwatch. Suddenly Harry snatched out the syringe, looked at the remaining contents, threw aside the syringe and made notes on a piece of paper.

‘Th-this makes it easier in fact, Hole,’ the Chief Superintendent stammered. ‘Because we have bad news.’

‘
I
have bad news, gentlemen,’ Harry said, tearing a piece of cotton wool from a bag and dabbing his arm. ‘Idar Vetlesen can’t possibly have committed suicide. And I presume you know what that means?’

Gunnar Hagen felt a sudden urge to laugh. The whole situation appeared so absurd to him that his brain simply could not come up with any other satisfactory reaction. And he could see from the Chief Superintendent’s face that he didn’t know what to do, either.

Harry looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Come to the meeting room in exactly one hour, then you’ll find out why,’ he said. ‘Right now I have a couple of other matters that need to be sorted out.’

The inspector hurried past his two astonished superiors, opened the door and disappeared down the corridor with long, sinewy strides.

One hour and four minutes later Gunnar Hagen trooped into a hushed K1 with the Chief Superintendent and the Chief Constable. The room was filled to the rafters with officers from Lepsvik’s and Hole’s investigation teams, and Harry Hole’s voice was the only thing to be heard. They found standing room at the back. Pictures of Idar Vetlesen were projected onto the screen, showing how he was found in the curling hall.

‘As you can see, Vetlesen has the syringe in his right hand,’ Harry Hole said. ‘Not unnatural since he was right-handed. But it was his boots that triggered my curiosity. Look here.’

Another picture showed a close-up of the boots.

‘These boots are the only real forensic evidence we have. But it’s enough. Because the print matches those we found in the snow at
Sollihøgda. However, look at the laces.’ Hole indicated with a pointer. ‘Yesterday I carried out some tests with my own boots. For the knot to lie like that, I would have to do up my laces back to front. As if I were left-handed. The alternative would be to stand in front of the boot as if I were doing it for someone else.’

A ripple of unease went through the room.

‘I’m right-handed.’ It was Espen Lepsvik’s voice. ‘And I tie my laces like that.’

‘Well, this may just be an oddity. However, it’s this sort of thing that arouses a certain …’ Hole looked as if he was tasting the word before he chose it, ‘… disquiet. A disquiet that forces you to ask other questions. Are they really Vetlesen’s boots? These boots are a cheap make. I visited Vetlesen’s mother yesterday and got permission to see his collection of shoes. They’re expensive, every pair without exception. And, as I thought, he was no different from the rest of us, he sometimes kicked his shoes off without undoing the laces. That’s why I can say –’ Hole banged the pointer on the image – ‘that I know Idar Vetlesen did not tie his shoelaces like this.’

Hagen glanced across at the Chief Superintendent whose forehead was lined with a deep furrow.

‘The question that emerges,’ Hole said, ‘is whether someone could have put the boots on Vetlesen. The same ones that the individual in question wore in Sollihøgda. The motive would be to make it seem as if Vetlesen was the Snowman, of course.’