Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (136 page)

His grandmother’s favourite bedtime story was about when a lunatic asylum – known locally as ‘The Madhouse’ – was built on the same site, and some of the inmates complained that hooded men were walking the corridors at night. And that when one of the hoods was ripped off, a pale face was seen, with rat bites and empty eye sockets. But the story Truls liked best was the one about Askild Øregod, Askild Good Ears. He lived and died more than a hundred years ago, at the time Kristiania, as Oslo was known then, became a proper town, and a church had long existed on the site. It was said that his ghost walked the cemetery, adjacent streets, the harbour district and Kvadraturen. But never further because he had only one leg and needed to get back to his grave before light, his grandmother said. Askild Øregod had lost his leg under the wheel of a fire wagon when he was three, but Truls’s grandmother said the fact that they gave him a
nickname based on his large ears instead was an example of Oslo East humour. They were hard times, and for a child with one leg the choice of occupation was fairly obvious. So Askild Øregod begged and became a familiar sight hobbling through the burgeoning town, always friendly and always ready for a chat. And in particular with those sitting in pubs during the day. Without a job. Yet sometimes they suddenly had money in their hands. Then the odd coin often came Askild’s way as well. But occasionally Askild needed a bit more, and then he would tell the police which of them had been extra generous of late. And who, well into the fourth glass, and – unsuspecting of the harmless beggar on the periphery – told others that they had been offered the chance to rob the goldsmith in Karl Johans gate, or a timber merchant in Drammen. Rumours began to spread that Askild’s ears were indeed good, and after a gang of robbers in Kampen were arrested, Askild disappeared. He was never seen again, but one winter’s morning, on the steps of Gamlebyen Church, a crutch and two severed ears appeared. Askild had been buried somewhere in the graveyard, but as no priest had pronounced his blessing, his spirit still walked abroad. And after the onset of night, in Kvadraturen or around the church, you could bump into a man, hobbling with his cap pulled well over his head, begging for two øre. And then it was bad luck not to give the beggar a coin.

That was what his grandmother had told him. Nevertheless, Truls Berntsen ignored the lean beggar with the foreign coat and tanned skin sitting by the cemetery gate, strode down the gravel between the gravestones as he counted, turned left when he got to seven, to the right when he got to three and stopped by the fourth gravestone.

The name carved into the gravestone meant nothing to him. A. C. Rud. He had died as Norway gained its independence in 1905, only twenty-nine years old, but apart from the name and the dates there was no text, no imperative to rest in peace, nor any other winged words. Perhaps because the coarse gravestone was so small. But the blank, rough surface of the stone meant it was perfect for chalking messages, which must have been why they chose it.

Truls deciphered the text, using the simple code they had developed so that casual passers-by wouldn’t understand. He began at the end, and read the letters in pairs, moving backwards along the line until he reached the final three letters.

Truls Berntsen didn’t write it down. Didn’t need to. He had a good memory for names that brought him closer to the leather seats in an Audi Q5 2.0 6-speed manual. He used his jacket sleeve to erase the letters.

The beggar looked up as Truls passed on his way out. Brown doggy eyes. There was probably a band of beggars and a big, fat car waiting somewhere. Mercedes, wasn’t that what they liked? The church bell rang. According to the price list, a Q5 cost 666,000 kroner. If there was a hidden message in those figures, it went way over Truls Berntsen’s head.

‘You look good,’ Beate said as she inserted the key into the lock. ‘Got a new finger, as well.’

‘Made in Hong Kong,’ Harry said, rubbing the short titanium stump.

He observed the small, pale woman as she unlocked the door. The short, thin, blonde hair held in a band. Her skin so fragile and transparent that he could see the fine network of veins in her temple. She reminded him of the hairless mice they used in experiments for cancer research.

‘As you wrote that Oleg was living at the crime scene I thought his keys would give me access.’

‘That lock was probably destroyed ages ago,’ Beate said, pushing the door open. ‘You just walked straight in. We had this lock fitted so that none of the addicts would come back and contaminate the scene.’

Harry nodded. It was typical of crack dens. No point having a lock, they were destroyed immediately. First of all, junkies broke into places where
they knew the occupants might have drugs. Second, even those who lived there stole from each other.

Beate pulled the tape to the side, and Harry squeezed in. Clothes and plastic bags hung from hooks in the hall. Harry peered into one of the bags. Paper towel rolls, empty beer cans, a wet bloodstained T-shirt, bits of aluminium foil, a cigarette packet. Against one wall was a stack of Grandiosa boxes, a leaning tower of pizza that rose halfway to the ceiling. Four identical white coat stands. Harry was puzzled until he realised they were probably stolen goods they had been unable to convert into cash. He remembered that in junkie flats they were forever coming across things someone had thought they could sell at some point. In one place they had found sixty hopelessly out-of-date mobile phones in a bag, in another a partly dismantled moped parked in the kitchen.

Harry stepped into the sitting room. It smelt of a mixture of sweat, beer-soaked wood, wet ash and something sweet which Harry was unable to identify. The room had no furniture in any conventional sense. Four mattresses lay on the floor as if round a campfire. From one protruded a piece of wire bent at ninety degrees, shaped into a Y at the end. The square of wood floor between the mattresses was black with scorch marks around an empty ashtray. Harry assumed the SOC unit had emptied it.

‘Gusto was by the kitchen wall, here,’ Beate said. She had stopped in the doorway between the sitting room and kitchen, and was pointing.

Instead of going into the kitchen Harry stayed by the door and looked around. This was a habit. Not the habit of forensics officers, who worked the scene from the outside, started the fine-combing on the periphery and then made their way bit by bit towards the body. Nor was it the habit of a uniformed officer or a patrol car cop, the first police on the scene, who were aware they might contaminate the evidence with their own prints or, worse, destroy the ones there were. Beate’s people had done what had to be done ages ago. This was the habit of the investigating detective. Who knows he has only one chance to let his sensory impressions, the almost imperceptible details, do their own talking, leave their prints before the cement sets. It had to happen now, before the analytical part of the brain
resumed its functioning, the part that demanded fully formulated facts. Harry used to define intuition as simple, logical conclusions drawn from normal impressions that the brain was unable, or too slow, to convert into something comprehensible.

This crime scene, however, did not tell Harry much about the murder that had taken place.

All he saw, heard and smelt was a place with floating tenants who gathered, took drugs, slept, on the rare occasion ate and, after a while, drifted off. To another squat, to a room in a hostel, a park, a container, a cheap down sleeping bag under a bridge or a white wooden resting place beneath a gravestone.

‘Of course we had to do a fair bit of clearing up here,’ Beate said in answer to a question he had not needed to ask. ‘There was rubbish everywhere.’

‘Dope?’

‘A plastic bag containing unboiled wads of cotton wool.’

Harry nodded. The most tortured or destitute junkies would save the cotton wool they used to cleanse the impurities from the dope as they drew it into the syringe. Then, on rainy days, the cotton wool could be boiled and the brew injected. ‘Plus a condom filled with semen and heroin.’

‘Oh?’ Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Any good?’

Harry saw her blush, an echo of the shy policewoman fresh out of college he still remembered.

‘Remains of heroin, to be precise. We assume the condom was used to store it, and then after it was consumed, the condom was used for its primary purpose.’

‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘Junkies who worry about contraception. Not bad. Did you find out who …?’

‘The DNA from inside and outside the condom match two old acquaintances. A Swedish girl and Ivar Torsteinsen, better known to undercover men as Hivar.’

‘Hivar?’

‘Used to threaten police with infected needles, claimed he had HIV.’

‘Mm, explains the condom. Any violence on his record?’

‘No. Just hundreds of burglaries, possession and dealing. Plus a bit of smuggling.’

‘But threatened murder with a syringe?’

Beate sighed and stepped into the sitting room, her back to him. ‘Sorry, Harry, but there are no loose threads in this case.’

‘Oleg has never hurt a fly, Beate. He simply doesn’t have it in him. While this Hivar—’

‘Hivar and the Swedish girl are … well, they have been eliminated from inquiries, you might say.’

Harry looked at her back. ‘Dead?’

‘OD’d. A week before the murder. Impure heroin mixed with fentanyl. I suppose they couldn’t afford violin.’

Harry let his gaze run around the walls. Most serious addicts without a fixed abode had a stash or two, a secret place where they could hide or lock up a reserve supply of drugs. Sometimes money. Possibly other priceless possessions. Carrying these things around with you was out of the question, a homeless junkie had to shoot up in public places and the moment the dope kicked in, he was prey to vultures. For that reason stashes were sacred. An otherwise lifeless addict could invest so much energy and imagination in hiding his gear that even veteran searchers and sniffer dogs failed to find it. Addicts never revealed hiding places to anyone, not even to best friends. Because they knew, knew from experience, that no one could ever be closer than codeine, morphine or heroin.

‘Have you looked for a stash here?’

Beate shook her head.

‘Why not?’ Harry asked, knowing it was a stupid question.

‘Because I presume we would have had to rip the flat apart to find anything, and it wouldn’t have been relevant to the investigation anyway,’ Beate said patiently. ‘Because we have to prioritise limited resources. And because we had the evidence we needed.’

Harry nodded. The answer he deserved.

‘And the evidence?’ he asked in a soft voice.

‘We believe the killer fired from where I’m standing now.’ It was a custom among forensics officers not to use names. She stretched out her arm in front of her. ‘At close quarters. Less than a metre. Soot in and around the entry wounds.’

‘Plural?’

‘Two shots.’

She eyed him with a sympathetic expression that said she knew what he was thinking: there went the defence counsel’s chance to maintain the gun had gone off by accident.

‘Both shots entered his chest.’ Beate spread the first and middle fingers of her right hand and placed them against the left side of her blouse, as though using sign language. ‘Assuming that both victim and killer were standing and the killer fired the weapon on instinct, the first exit wound reveals that he was between one eighty and one eighty-five. The suspect is one eighty-three.’

Jesus. He thought of the boy he had seen by the Visitors’ Room door. It seemed like only yesterday when they used to wrestle each other and Oleg had barely reached up to Harry’s chest.

She walked back into the kitchen. Pointed to the wall beside a greasy stove.

‘The bullets went in here and here, as you can see. Which is consistent with the second shot following the first quite quickly as the victim fell. The initial bullet punctured a lung, the second passed through the top of his chest nicking a shoulder blade. The victim—’

‘Gusto Hanssen,’ Harry said.

Beate stopped. Looked at him. Nodded. ‘Gusto Hanssen did not die at once. His fingerprints were in the pool of blood and there was blood on his clothes, showing that he moved after he fell. But it can’t have taken long.’

‘I see. And what …?’ Harry ran a hand over his face. He would have to try to get a few hours’ sleep. ‘What ties Oleg to the murder?’

‘Two people rang the switchboard at three minutes to nine saying they had heard what might have been gunshots coming from the block. One lived in Møllergata, over the crossing, the other just opposite here.’

Harry squinted through the grimy window looking out onto Hausmanns gate. ‘Not bad going, being able to hear from one block to another in the very centre of the city.’

‘Don’t forget it was July. Warm evening. All the windows are open, Summer holidays, barely any traffic. The neighbours had been trying to get the police to close this nest, so the threshold for reporting noise was low, one might say. The officer in the Ops Room told them to stay calm and asked them to keep an eye on the block until patrol cars arrived. The uniforms were alerted at once. Two cars arrived at twenty past nine and took up position while waiting for the cavalry.’

‘Delta?’

‘Always takes the boys a bit of time to don helmets and armour. Then the patrol cars were informed by Ops that the neighbours had seen a boy leaving by the front door and walking round the block, down towards the Akerselva. So two officers went down to the river, and there they found …’

She paused until she received an almost imperceptible nod from Harry.

‘… Oleg. He didn’t resist, he was so doped up he hardly knew what he was doing. We found gunshot residue on his right hand and arm.’

‘Murder weapon?’

‘Since it’s an unusual calibre, a nine-by-eighteen-millimetre Makarov, there are not many alternatives.’

‘Well, the Makarov is the favourite gun for organised crime in former Soviet countries. And the Fort 12, which is used by the police in Ukraine. Plus a couple more.’

‘True. We found the empty cartridges on the floor with powder residue. The Makarov powder has a different mix of saltpetre and sulphur, and they also use a bit of spirit, like in sulphurless powder. The chemical compound of the powder on the empty cartridge and around the entry wound matches the residue on Oleg’s hand.’