Authors: Jo Nesbø
‘Hi, it’s me again . . .’
Harry felt his heart skip a beat and he reacted before thinking. He pressed STOP. But it was as if the echo of the words spoken in the charming, slightly husky woman’s voice continued to wash back and forth between the walls.
‘What was that?’ Rakel asked.
Harry took a deep breath. One thought struggled to reach him before he answered, but it arrived too late: ‘Just the radio.’ He cleared his throat. ‘When you’re sure, let me know which flight you’ll be on and I’ll pick you up.’
‘Of course I will,’ she said with surprise in her voice.
There was a strained pause.
‘I have to hang up now,’ Rakel said. ‘Shall we talk at eight tonight?’
‘Yes. I mean, no. I’ll be busy then.’
‘Oh? I hope it’s something nice for a change.’
‘Well,’ Harry said with a sharp intake of breath. ‘I’m going out with a woman anyway.’
‘Who’s the lucky person?’
‘Beate Lønn. New officer in the Robberies Unit.’
‘And what is the occasion?’
‘A chat with Stine Grette’s husband. She was shot during the Bogstadveien hold-up I told you about. And with the branch manager.’
‘Enjoy yourself. We’ll talk tomorrow. Oleg wants to say goodnight first.’
Harry heard small feet running and then excited breathing on the line.
After they had finished speaking, Harry stood in the hall staring at the mirror above the telephone table. If his theory held true, he was now looking at a competent policeman. Two bloodshot eyes, one on each side of a large nose with a network of fine blue veins in a pale, bony face with deep pores. His wrinkles looked like random knife slashes across a wooden beam. How had it happened? In the mirror he saw behind him the wall with the photograph of the suntanned, smiling face of the boy with his sister. But it wasn’t lost good looks or lost youth Harry’s mind was occupied with, because the thought had finally made its way through now. He was searching his own features for the deceit, the evasion, the cowardice which had just made him break one of the few promises he had made to himself: that he would never, ever, come what may, lie to Rakel. Of all the skerries in the sea for their relationship to founder on, and there were many, lies would not be one. So why had he told a lie? It was true he and Beate were going to meet Stine Grette’s husband, but why had he not told her he was going to meet Anna afterwards? An old flame, but so what? It had been a brief stormy affair which had left scars, though no lasting
injuries. They were only going to chat over a cup of coffee and tell each other the what-they-did-afterwards stories. And then each go their separate ways.
Harry pressed PLAY on the answerphone to hear the rest of the message. Anna’s voice filled the hall: ‘. . . look forward to seeing you at M this evening. Just two things. Could you pop into the locksmith’s in Vibes gate on the way and pick up the keys I ordered? They’re open till seven and I’ve told them to keep them in your name. And would you mind wearing the jeans you know I like so much?’
Deep, husky laugh. The room seemed to vibrate to the same rhythm. No doubt about it, she had not changed.
T
HE RAIN WAS MAKING SPEED LINES AGAINST THE PRE
-maturely darkened October sky in the light from the outside lamp. From the ceramic sign beneath, Harry read that Espen, Stine and Trond Grette lived here, ‘here’ being a yellow terraced house in Disengrenda. He pressed the bell and surveyed the locality. Disengrenda was four long rows of terraced houses at the centre of a large flat field encircled by blocks of flats, which reminded Harry of pioneers on the prairie taking up a defensive position against Indian attacks. Perhaps that was how it was. The terraced houses were built in the sixties for the burgeoning middle classes and perhaps the dwindling local population of workers in the blocks in Disenveien and Traverveien already knew that these were the new conquerors; that they would have hegemony over the new country.
‘Doesn’t seem to be at home,’ Harry said, pressing the button once more. ‘Are you sure he understood we were coming this afternoon?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ Harry turned and looked down at Beate Lønn shivering under the umbrella. She was wearing a skirt and high-heeled shoes,
and when she picked him up outside Schrøder’s it had crossed his mind that she seemed to be dressed for a coffee morning.
‘Grette confirmed the meeting twice when I rang,’ she said. ‘But he seemed completely . . . out of it.’
Harry leaned across the step and flattened his nose against the kitchen window. It was dark inside and all he could see was a white Nordea Bank calendar on the wall.
‘Let’s go back,’ he said.
At that moment the neighbour’s kitchen window opened with a bang. ‘Are you looking for Trond?’
The words were articulated in
bokmål
, standard Norwegian, but in a Bergen accent with such strong trilled ‘r’s that it sounded like a medium-sized train being derailed. Harry turned round and gazed into a woman’s brown, wrinkled face caught in an attempt to smile and appear grave at the same time.
‘We are,’ Harry confirmed.
‘Family?’
‘Police.’
‘Right,’ the woman said and dropped the funereal expression. ‘I thought you had come to express your sympathy. He’s on the tennis court, poor thing.’
‘Tennis court?’
She pointed. ‘On the other side of the field. He’s been there since four o’clock.’
‘But it’s dark,’ Beate said. ‘And it’s raining.’
The woman rolled her shoulders. ‘Must be the grief, I suppose.’ She trilled her ‘r’s so much that Harry began to think about when he was growing up in Oppsal and about the bits of cardboard they used to insert in cycle wheels so they flapped against the spokes.
‘You grew up in East Oslo, too, I can hear,’ Harry said as he and Beate walked towards where the woman had indicated. ‘Or am I mistaken?’
‘No,’ Beate said, unwilling to expatiate.
The tennis court was positioned halfway between the blocks and
the terraced houses. They could hear the dull thud of racquet strings on wet tennis ball. Inside the high wire-mesh fence they could make out a figure standing and serving in the quickly gathering autumn gloom.
‘Hello!’ Harry shouted when they reached the fence, but the man didn’t answer. It was only now that they saw he was wearing a jacket, shirt and tie.
‘Trond Grette?’
A ball hit a black puddle of water, bounced up, hit the fence and sprayed them with a fine shower of rainwater, which Beate fended off with her umbrella.
Beate pulled at the gate. ‘He’s locked himself in,’ she whispered.
‘Police! Officers Hole and Lønn!’ Harry yelled. ‘We were due to meet. Can we . . . Christ!’ Harry hadn’t seen the ball until it lodged itself in the wire fence with a smack a few centimetres from his face. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked down: he had been spray-painted with dirty, reddish-brown water. Harry automatically turned his back when he saw the man toss up the next ball.
‘Trond Grette!’ Harry’s shout echoed between the blocks. They watched a tennis ball curve in an arc towards the lights in the blocks before being swallowed by the dark and landing somewhere in the field. Harry faced the tennis court again, only to hear a wild roar and see a figure rushing towards him out of the dark. The metal fence squealed as it checked the charging tennis player. He fell onto the shale on all fours, picked himself up, took a run-up and charged the fence again. Fell, got up and charged.
‘My God, he’s gone nuts,’ Harry mumbled. He instinctively took a step back as a white face with staring eyes loomed up in front of him. Beate had managed to switch on a torch and shone it at Grette, who was hanging on the fence. With wet, black hair stuck to his white forehead, he seemed to be searching for something to focus on as he slid down the fence like sleet on a car windscreen, until he lay lifeless on the ground.
‘What do we do now?’ Beate breathed.
Harry felt his teeth crunching and spat into his hand. From the light of the torch he saw red grit.
‘You ring for an ambulance while I get the wirecutters from the car,’ he said.
‘Then he was given sedatives, was he?’ Anna asked.
Harry nodded and sipped his Coke.
The young West End clientele perched on bar stools around them drinking wine, shiny drinks and Diet Coke. M was like most cafés in Oslo – urban in a provincial and naive but, as far as it went, pleasant way, which made Harry think about Kebab, the bright, well-behaved boy in his class at school who, they discovered, kept a book of all the slang expressions the ‘in’ kids used.
‘They took the poor guy to hospital. Then we chatted to the neighbour again and she told us he had been out there hitting tennis balls every evening since his wife had been killed.’
‘Goodness. Why?’
Harry hunched his shoulders. ‘It’s not so unusual for people to become psychotic when they lose someone in those circumstances. Some repress it and act as if the deceased were still alive. The neighbour said Stine and Trond Grette were a fantastic mixed-doubles pair, that they practised on the court almost every afternoon in the summer.’
‘So he was kind of expecting his wife to return the serve?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Jeesus! Will you get me a beer while I go to the loo?’
Anna swung her legs off the stool and wiggled her way across the room. Harry tried not to follow her movements. He didn’t need to, he had seen as much as he wanted. She had a few wrinkles around the eyes, a couple of grey strands in her raven-black hair; otherwise she was exactly the same. The same black eyes with the slightly hunted expression under the fused eyebrows, the same high, narrow nose above the indecently full lips and the hollow cheeks which tended to
give her a hungry look. She might not have qualified for the epithet ‘beautiful’ – for that her features were too hard and stark – but her slim body was curvaceous enough for Harry to spot at least two men at tables in the dining area lose their thread as she passed.
Harry lit another cigarette. After Grette, they had paid a visit to Helge Klementsen, the branch manager, but that hadn’t given them much to work on, either. He was still in a state of shock, sitting in a chair in his duplex in Kjelsåsveien and staring alternately at the poodle scurrying between his legs and his wife scurrying between kitchen and sitting room with coffee and the driest cream horn Harry had ever tasted. Beate’s choice of clothes had suited the Klementsen family’s bourgeois home better than Harry’s faded Levi’s and Doc Martens. Nevertheless, it was mostly Harry who maintained conversation with the nervously tripping fru Klementsen about the unusually high precipitation this autumn and the art of making cream horns, to the interruptions above of stamping feet and loud sobbing. Fru Klementsen explained that her daughter Ina, the poor thing, was seven months pregnant to a man who had just given her the heave-ho. Well, in fact, he
was
a sailor and had set sail for the Mediterranean. Harry had almost spattered the cream horn across the table. It was then that Beate took charge and asked Helge, who had given up pursuing the dog with his eyes as it had padded out through the living-room door, ‘How tall would you say the robber was?’
Helge had observed her, then picked up the coffee cup and lifted it to his mouth where, of necessity, it had to wait because he couldn’t drink and talk at the same time: ‘Tall? Two metres perhaps. She was always so accurate, Stine was.’
‘He wasn’t that tall, herr Klementsen.’
‘Alright, one ninety. And always so well turned out.’
‘What was he wearing?’
‘Something black, like rubber. This summer she took a proper holiday for the first time. In Greece.’
Fru Klementsen sniffled.
‘Like rubber?’ Beate asked.
‘Yes. And a balaclava.’
‘What colour, herr Klementsen?’
‘Red.’
At this point Beate had stopped taking notes and soon after they were in the car on their way back to town.
‘If judges and juries only knew how little of what witnesses said about bank robberies was reliable, they would refuse to let us use it as evidence,’ Beate had said. ‘What people’s brains recreate is almost fascinatingly wrong. As if fear gives them glasses which make all robbers grow in stature and blackness, makes guns proliferate and seconds become longer. The robber took a little over one minute, but fru Brænne, the cashier nearest the entrance, said he had been there for close on five minutes. And he isn’t two metres tall, but 1.79. Unless he wore insoles, which is not so unusual for professionals.’
‘How can you be so precise about his height?’
‘The video. You measure the height against the door frame where the robber enters. I was in the bank this morning chalking up, taking new photos and measuring.’
‘Mm. In Crime Squad we leave that kind of measuring job to the Crime Scene Unit.’
‘Measuring height from a video is a bit more complicated than it sounds. The Crime Scene Unit’s measurements were out by three centimetres, for example, in the case of the Den norske Bank robber in Kaldbakken in 1989. So I prefer to use my own.’
Harry had squinted at her and wondered whether he should ask her why she had joined the police. Instead, he had asked her if she could drop him off outside the locksmith’s in Vibes gate. Before getting out, he had also asked her if she had noticed that Helge hadn’t spilt a drop of coffee from the brimming cup he had been holding during their questioning. She hadn’t.
‘Do you like this place?’ Anna asked, sinking back on her stool.
‘Well.’ Harry cast his eyes around. ‘It’s not my taste.’
‘Not mine, either,’ Anna said, grabbing her bag and standing up. ‘Let’s go to my flat.’
‘I’ve just bought you a beer.’ Harry nodded towards the frothy glass.
‘It’s so boring drinking alone,’ she said and pulled a face. ‘Relax, Harry. Come on.’
It had stopped raining outside and the cold, freshly washed air tasted good.
‘Do you remember the day, one autumn, we drove to Maridalen?’ Anna asked, slipping her hand inside his arm and starting to walk.
‘No,’ Harry said.
‘Of course you do! In that dreadful Ford Escort of yours, with the seats that don’t fold down.’