Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8) (11 page)

‘OK,’ Beate said. ‘I’ll check with our undercover guys.’

‘Thanks.’

‘OK.’

Pause.

‘Anything else?’

‘No. Yes. What do you think of
Singin’ in the Rain
?’

‘I don’t like musicals. Why?’

‘Soulmates are hard to find, don’t you think?’

Beate chuckled. ‘True. Let’s talk about that sometime.’

They hung up.

Anton was sitting with his arms crossed. Listening to the silence. He looked down the corridor.

Mona was in with the patient now, and soon she would be coming out. And giving him that mischievous smile. Perhaps laying a hand on his shoulder. Caressing his hair. Maybe a fleeting kiss, letting him feel her tongue, which always tasted of mint, and then she would be off down the corridor. Wiggling her voluptuous bottom in that teasing way. Perhaps she didn’t mean to do it, but he liked to think she did. That she tightened her muscles, rolled her hips, strutted her stuff for him, for Anton Mittet. Yes, he had a lot to be grateful for, as they said.

He looked at his watch. Soon be change of shift. Was about to yawn when he heard a cry.

That was enough for him to jump to his feet. He tore open the door. Scanned the room from left to right, confirmed that Mona and the patient were the only two there.

Mona was standing beside the bed with her mouth open. She hadn’t looked up from the patient.

‘Is he . . .?’ Anton started to say, but he didn’t complete the sentence when he heard it was still there. The sound of the heart monitor was so piercing – and the silence was otherwise so total – he could hear the short, regular beeps from the corridor.

Mona’s fingertips rested on the point where the collarbone meets the sternum, what Laura called the ‘jewel pit’ because that was where it lay, the gold heart he had given Laura on one of the wedding anniversaries they had marked in their own way. Perhaps that was also where women’s real hearts rose when they were scared, worked up or out of breath, for Laura put her fingers in exactly the same place. And it was as though this spot, so like Laura’s, held his full attention. Even when Mona beamed at him and whispered, as if frightened to wake the patient, the words seemed to come from somewhere else.

‘He spoke.
He spoke
.’

It took Katrine no more than three minutes to slip through the familiar back alleys into the Oslo Police District system, but it was harder to find the interview tapes of the rape case at the Otta Hotel. The imposed digitalisation of all sound and film recordings was already well under way but it was a different matter with the indexing. Katrine had tried all the search words she could think of – Valentin Gjertsen, Otta Hotel, rape and so on – with no luck, and had almost given up when a man’s high-pitched voice filled the room.

‘She was asking for it, wasn’t she?’

Katrine felt an electric shock go through her body, like when she and her father had been sitting in the boat and he calmly announced he had a bite. She didn’t know why, she only knew this was the voice. This was him.

‘Interesting,’ said another voice. Low, almost ingratiating. The voice of a policeman pushing for a result. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘They do ask for it, don’t they? In some way or another. And afterwards they’re ashamed and report you to the police. But you know all that.’

‘So this girl at the Otta Hotel, she was asking for it, is that what you’re saying?’

‘She would have been.’

‘If you hadn’t raped her before she had a chance?’

‘If I’d been there.’

‘You admitted just now that you’d been there that night, Valentin.’

‘To get you to describe the rape in a bit more detail. It’s pretty boring sitting in a cell, you know. You have to . . . spice up the day as best you can.’

Silence.

Then Valentin’s high-pitched laughter. Katrine shuddered and pulled her cardigan tighter around her.

‘You look like someone’s pissed . . . what is that expression, Officer?’

Katrine closed her eyes and recalled his face.

‘Let’s put the Otta case to one side for a moment. What about the girl in Maridalen, Valentin?’

‘What about her?’

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

Loud laughter this time. ‘You’ll have to practise that one a bit harder, Officer. The confrontation stage of the interview has to have a punch like a piledriver, not a pat on the head.’

Katrine could hear that Valentin’s vocabulary extended beyond that of most inmates.

‘So you deny it?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Katrine could hear the quivering excitement as the policeman took a deep breath and said with hard-won composure: ‘Does that mean . . . that you admit committing the rape and murder in Maridalen in September?’ At least he was experienced enough to specify what he hoped Valentin would answer yes to, so that the defence counsel couldn’t claim afterwards that the accused had misunderstood which case they were actually talking about. But she also heard the merriment in the interviewee’s voice as he answered:

‘It means I don’t need to deny it.’

‘What the h—’

‘It starts with an “a” and finishes in an “i”.’

Short pause.

‘How can you tell me off the top of your head that you’ve definitely got an alibi for that night, Valentin? It’s quite a long time ago.’

‘Because I was thinking about it when he told me. What I was doing at that very moment.’

‘Who told you what?’

‘The guy who raped the girl.’

Long pause.

‘Are you messing us about, Valentin?’

‘What do you think, Officer Zachrisson?’

‘What makes you think that’s my name?’

‘Snarliveien 41. Am I right?’

Another pause. More laughter and Valentin’s voice. ‘In your porridge, that’s what it is. You look like someone’s pissed in your porridge.’

‘Where did you find out about the rape?’

‘This is a prison for pervs, Officer. What do you think we talk about? Thank you for sharing that with me, as we say. He didn’t think he was giving that much away, but I read the papers, and I remember the case well.’

‘So who was it, Valentin?’

‘So when will it be, Zachrisson?’

‘When?’

‘When can I count on being let out if I grass?’

Katrine felt an urge to fast-forward, past the repeated pauses.

‘I’ll be back in a while.’

A chair scraped. A door was closed gently.

Katrine waited. She heard the man inhaling and exhaling. And felt something strange. She was having difficulty breathing. It was as if his breathing in the speakers was sucking the life out of her sitting room.

The policeman could hardly have been away for more than a couple of minutes, but it felt like half an hour.

‘OK,’ he said with a scrape of the chair again.

‘That was quick. And my sentence will be commuted as well?’

‘You know we’re not responsible for sentencing, Valentin. But we’ll talk to a judge, all right? So who’s your alibi and who raped the girl?’

‘I was at home all night. I was with my landlady and unless she’s suffering from Alzheimer’s she’ll confirm that.’

‘How come you can remember just like that?’

‘I have a thing about noting dates of rapes. If you don’t find the lucky man at once I know that sooner or later you’ll come asking me where I was.’

‘I see. And now for the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Who did it?’

The answer was articulated slowly and with overly precise diction. ‘Ju-das Jo-hansen. An old acquaintance of the police, as they say.’

‘Judas Johansen?’

‘You work in Vice and you don’t recognise the name of a notorious rapist, Zachrisson?’

The sound of shuffling feet. ‘What makes you think I don’t recognise the name?’

‘Your expression is as blank as outer space, Zachrisson. Johansen is the greatest rapist talent since . . . well, since me. And there’s a murderer inside him. He doesn’t know that yet himself, but it’s just a question of time before the murderer wakes up, believe me.’

Katrine imagined she heard the clunk of the salivating policeman’s jaw as it fell. She listened to the crackling silence. She thought she could hear the officer’s pulse racing, the sweat springing from his brow as he tried to rein in the excitement and the nerves now that he knew he was close to the moment, the great breakthrough, the feather in the detective’s cap.

‘How, how—’ Zachrisson stammered, but was interrupted by a howl which was distorted in the speakers and which Katrine eventually realised was laughter. Valentin’s laughter. The shrill howls mutated gradually into long, gasping sobs.

‘I’m pulling your leg, Zachrisson. Judas Johansen is a homo. He’s in the cell next to me.’

‘What?’

‘Do you want to hear a story that’s much more interesting than the one you came up with? Judas fucked a young lad and they were caught red-handed, so to speak, by the mother. Unfortunately for Judas the boy was still in the closet and the family was of the rich, conservative variety. So they reported Judas for rape. Judas! Who’d never hurt a fly. Or is it a flea? Fly, flea. Fly. Flea. Anyway, what do you think about taking up that case if you get a tip-off? I can tell you a thing or two about what the lad’s been up to since then. I take it the offer of time off is still on the table?’

Chair legs scraped on the floor. The bang of a chair falling backwards. A click and silence. The tape recorder had been switched off.

Katrine sat staring at the computer screen. Noticed that darkness had fallen outside. The cod heads had gone cold.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Anton Mittet said. ‘He
spoke
!’

Anton Mittet was standing in the corridor with the phone to his ear while checking the ID cards of two doctors who had arrived. Their faces showed a mixture of surprise and annoyance. Surely he could remember them?

Anton waved them through and they hurried in to the patient.

‘But what did he say?’ Gunnar Hagen asked on the phone.

‘She only heard him mumble something, not what he said.’

‘Is he awake now?’

‘No, there was just some mumbling and then he was gone again. But the doctors say he could wake up at any moment.’

‘I see,’ Hagen said. ‘Keep me posted, OK? Ring any time. Whenever.’

‘OK.’

‘Good. Good. The hospital has standing orders to contact me as well, as far as that goes, but . . . yes, well, they have their own things to think about.’

‘Of course.’

‘Yes, they do, don’t they?’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘Yes.’

Anton listened to the silence. Was there something Gunnar Hagen wanted to say?

The head of Crime Squad rang off.

9

KATRINE LANDED AT
gardermoen at half past nine, got on the airport express, let it take her right through Oslo. Or, to be precise, beneath Oslo. She had lived here, but the few glimpses she caught of the town didn’t evoke any sentimentality. A half-hearted skyline. Low, good-natured, soft, snowy ridges, tamed countryside. Inside the train, closed, expressionless faces, none of the spontaneous, casual communication between strangers she was used to in Bergen. Then there was a signal failure on one of the world’s most expensive lines and the train came to a standstill in the pitch-black tunnel.

She had justified her application for a trip to Oslo with the fact that there were three unsolved rape cases in their own police district – Hordaland – which bore some resemblance to the cases that Valentin could conceivably have been behind. She had argued that if they could nab Valentin for these cases that might indirectly help Kripos and Oslo Police District with the murders of their officers.

‘And why can’t we leave it to Oslo Police to do this themselves?’ the head of the Crime Squad in Bergen, Knut Müller-Nilsen, asked her.

‘Because they have a crime clearance rate of twenty point eight per cent and we have one of forty point one.’

Müller-Nilsen had laughed out loud, and Katrine knew the plane ticket was hers.

The train started with a jolt and the carriage resounded with sighs: of relief, irritation and desperation. She got out at Sandvika and caught a taxi to Eiksmarka.

It stopped outside Jøssingveien 33. She stepped into the grey slush. Apart from the high fence around the red-brick building there was little about Ila Prison and Detention Centre to betray the fact that it housed some of the country’s worst killers, drug profiteers and sex offenders. Among others. The prison statutes said it was a national institution for male prisoners who . . . ‘needed special help’.

Help, so that they wouldn’t escape. Help, so that they wouldn’t mutilate others. Help with what sociologists and criminologists for some reason believe is a wish the species as a whole shares: to be good human beings, to make a contribution in the flock, to function in society.

Katrine had spent enough time in the psychiatric ward in Bergen to know that as a rule even non-criminal deviants had no interest in society’s welfare, and no experience of any company other than their own and their demons, they just wanted to be left in peace. Which did not necessarily imply they wanted to leave others in peace.

She went through the security channels, showed her ID card and the permit she had received by email and was ushered into the reception room.

A prison officer waiting for her stood with legs apart, arms crossed and keys rattling. More swagger and feigned self-assurance because the visitor was police, the Brahmin caste in law and order, who receive special treatment from prison officers, security guards and even parking wardens.

Katrine behaved as she always did in such cases: she was politer and friendlier than her true nature craved.

‘Welcome to the sewer,’ the prison warder said, a phrase Katrine was fairly sure he didn’t use with his standard clientele, but which he had prepared carefully in advance, one that signalled the right mixture of black humour and realistic cynicism towards his job.

But the image was in a sense not inappropriate, Katrine thought, as they walked through the prison corridors. Or perhaps they ought to be called the bowels of the system. The place where the law’s digestive tracts broke down individuals found guilty into a stinking brown mass, which at some point would have to be released. All the doors were closed, the corridors empty.