Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8) (45 page)

‘Yes. You were in the forensics team for the Mittet murder in Drammen, weren’t you? Did you find any black paint?’

‘Paint?’

‘Something that might come off a blunt instrument if you hit out like this . . .’ Bjørn demonstrated by beating his fist up and down as if playing rock-paper-scissors. ‘The skin tears, the cheekbone cracks and sticks out, but you keep hitting the jagged end of the bone with the blunt instrument, removing paint from whatever it is you’re holding.’

‘No.’

‘OK. Thank you.’

Bjørn Holm took the lid off the second box, the one with the Mittet case material, but noticed the young forensics officer was still standing in the doorway.

‘Yes?’ Bjørn said without looking up.

‘It was navy blue.’

‘What was?’

‘The paint. And it wasn’t the cheekbone. It was the jawbone, the fracture. We analysed it. It’s pretty standard paint, used on iron tools. Sticks well and prevents rust.’

‘Any suggestions for what kind of tool it might have been?’

Bjørn could see Kim Erik veritably swelling in the doorway. He had personally trained him, and now the master was asking the apprentice if he had ‘any suggestions’.

‘Impossible to say. It can be used on anything.’

‘OK, that’s all.’

‘But I’ve got a suggestion.’

Bjørn could see his colleague was bursting to tell him. He was going to go a long way.

‘Out with it.’

‘Carjack. All cars are supplied with a jack, but there wasn’t a jack in the boot.’

Bjørn nodded. Hardly had the heart to say it. ‘The car was a VW Sharan, 2010 model, Kim Erik. If you check it out you’ll find it’s one of the few cars that doesn’t come with a jack.’

‘Oh.’ The young man’s face crumpled like a punctured beach ball.

‘Thanks for your help, though, Kim Erik.’

He would go a long way all right. But in a few years of course.

Bjørn systematically went through the Mittet box.

There was another thing that set his mind whirring.

He put the lid back on and walked to the office at the end of the corridor. Knocked at the open door. Blinked first, a little confused, at the polished head, before realising who it was sitting there: Roar Midtstuen, the oldest and most experienced forensics officer of them all. Once upon a time Midtstuen had struggled with the idea of working for a boss who was not only younger but also a woman. But the situation had eased as he’d seen that Beate Lønn was one of the best things that had ever happened to their department.

He had just returned to work after being off sick for some months, ever since his daughter had been killed in a collision. She was returning from top-rope climbing a mountain face to the east of Oslo. Her bike had been found in a ditch. The driver still hadn’t been found.

‘How do, Midtstuen.’

‘How do, Holm.’ Midtstuen spun round in the swivel chair, shrugged, smiled and tried to exude energy, but it wasn’t there. Bjørn had barely recognised the bloated face when he’d reappeared for work. Apparently it was a normal side effect of antidepressants.

‘Have police batons always been black?’

As forensics officers, they were used to somewhat bizarre questions about detail, so Midtstuen didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

‘They’ve definitely been dark.’ Midtstuen had grown up in Østre Toten, like Holm, but it was only when the two of them spoke that their childhood dialect resurfaced. ‘But there was a period in the nineties when they were blue, I seem to remember. Bloody irritating that is.’

‘What is?’

‘That we’re always changing the colour, that we can’t stick to one. First of all, patrol cars are black and white, then they’re white with red-and-blue stripes, and now they’re going to be white with black-and-yellow stripes. This fiddling about just weakens the brand. Like the Drammen cordon tape.’

‘What cordon tape?’

‘Kim Erik was at the Mittet crime scene and found bits of police tape and thought it had to be from the old murder. He . . . we were both on the case of course, but I always forget the name of that homo . . .’

‘René Kalsnes.’

‘But young folk like Kim Erik don’t remember that police tape at that time was light blue and white,’ Midtstuen hastened to add as though afraid he’d put his foot in it: ‘But Kim Erik is going to be good.’

‘I reckon so, too.’

‘Good.’ Midtstuen’s jaw muscles churned as he chewed. ‘Then we agree.’

Bjørn rang Katrine as soon as he was back in his office, asked her to drop by the police station, on the first floor, scrape a bit of paint off one of their batons and send it to Bryn with a message.

Afterwards he sat thinking that he had automatically gone to the office at the end of the corridor, where he had always gone for advice. He had been so absorbed in his work that he had simply forgotten she wasn’t there any longer. That the office had been taken over by Roar Midtstuen. And for a brief instant he thought he could understand Midtstuen, how the loss of another person could suck the marrow out of you and make it impossible to get anything done, make it meaningless even to get out of bed. He dismissed the thought. Dismissed the sight of Midtstuen’s round, bloated face. Because they had something here, he could feel it.

Harry, Katrine and Bjørn sat on the roof of the Opera House looking across to the islands of Hovedøya and Gresholmen.

It had been Harry’s suggestion. He thought they needed fresh air. It was a warm, cloudy evening, the tourists had decamped ages ago, and they had the whole of the marble roof to themselves, even where it sloped down into Oslo Fjord, which glittered with lights from Ekeberg Ridge, Havnelageret and the Denmark ferry docked at Vippetangen.

‘I’ve gone through all the police murders again,’ Bjørn said. ‘And tiny bits of paint were found on Vennesla and Nilsen as well as on Mittet. It’s standard paint used everywhere, also on police batons.’

‘Well done, Bjørn,’ Harry said.

‘And then there were the remains of the cordon tape they found at the Mittet crime scene. It couldn’t have been from the investigation of the Kalsnes murder. They didn’t use that kind of tape then.’

‘It was tape from the day before,’ Harry said. ‘The murderer rang Mittet, told him to come to what Mittet thinks is a police murder committed at the old crime scene. So when Mittet gets there and sees the police tape he doesn’t smell a rat. Perhaps the murderer is even wearing his uniform.’

‘Shit,’ Katrine said. ‘I’ve spent the whole day cross-checking Kalsnes with police employees and didn’t find a thing. But I can see we’re on to something here.’

Excited, she looked at Harry, who was lighting a cigarette.

‘So what do we do now?’ Bjørn asked.

‘Now,’ Harry said, ‘we call in service pistols to see if they match our bullet.’

‘Which ones?’

‘All of them.’

They eyed Harry in silence.

‘What do you mean by “all”?’ Katrine asked.

‘All the service pistols in the police force. First in Oslo, then in Østland and, if necessary, in the whole country.’

Another silence as a gull screamed shrilly in the darkness above them.

‘You’re kidding?’ Bjørn tested.

The cigarette bobbed up and down between Harry’s lips as he answered. ‘Nope.’

‘It ain’t feasible. Forget it,’ Bjørn said. ‘People think it takes five minutes to run a ballistics test because it looks like that on
CSI
. Even officers think that. The fact is that to check one gun is almost a day’s work. All of them? In Oslo alone that’s . . . how many officers are there?’

‘One thousand eight hundred and seventy-two,’ Katrine said.

They gawped at her.

She shrugged. ‘Read it in the annual report for Oslo Police District.’

They were still gawping at her.

‘The TV doesn’t work, and I couldn’t sleep, OK?’

‘Anyway,’ Bjørn said, ‘we haven’t got the resources. It can’t be done.’

‘The crucial thing is what you said just now about even officers thinking it takes five minutes,’ Harry said, blowing cigarette smoke into the night sky.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s important they think an operation like this can be done. What happens when the murderer finds out his gun has to be checked?’

‘You crafty devil,’ Katrine said.

‘Eh?’ Bjørn said.

‘He’ll report his gun missing or stolen as quick as a flash,’ Katrine said.

‘And that’s where we start looking,’ Harry said. ‘But maybe he’s one step ahead, so we’ll start by making a list of all the service pistols that have been reported missing since the murder of Kalsnes.’

‘One problem,’ Katrine said.

‘Yup,’ Harry answered. ‘Will the Chief of Police agree to put out an order which in practice points a finger of suspicion at all his officers? He’ll imagine the papers having a field day.’ Harry drew a rectangle in the air with his thumb and forefinger: “P
OLICE
C
HIEF
S
USPECTS
O
WN
O
FFICERS
”. “P
OLICE
T
OP
B
RASS
L
OSING
I
T
”.’

‘Doesn’t sound very likely,’ Katrine said.

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘say what you like about Bellman, but he’s not stupid and he knows which side his bread is buttered. If we can make a case for the murderer being a policeman and sooner or later we catch him, whether Bellman’s with us or not, he knows it will look really bad if the Chief of Police is seen to have delayed the whole investigation out of sheer cowardice. So what we have to explain to him is that investigating his own officers shows the world that the police will leave no stone unturned in their efforts, whatever corruption it reveals. It shows courage, leadership, mental agility, all good things.’

‘And you reckon
you
can persuade him with that?’ Katrine snorted. ‘If my memory serves me correctly, Harry Hole is pretty high up his hate list.’

Harry shook his head. ‘I’ve put Gunnar Hagen on the case.’

‘And when will it happen?’ Bjørn asked.

‘It’s happening as we speak,’ Harry said, looking at the cigarette. It was almost down to the filter already. He felt an urge to throw it away, watch the sparks arcing into the darkness as it bounced down the shimmering marble slope. Until it landed in the black water and was immediately extinguished. What was stopping him? The thought that he was polluting the town or witnesses’ disapproval of his polluting the town? The act itself or the punishment? The Russian he had killed in Come As You Are was a simple matter; it had been self-defence: the Russian or him. But the so-called unsolved murder of Gusto Hanssen, that had been a choice. And yet, among all the ghosts that regularly haunted him, he had never seen the young man with the girlish good looks and the vampire teeth. An unsolved case, bollocks.

Harry flicked the cigarette. Glowing tobacco swept into the darkness and was gone.

37

THE MORNING LIGHT
filtered through the blinds over the surprisingly small windows in Oslo City Hall where the chairman coughed the cough that meant the meeting had started.

Around the table sat the nine councillors each with their own responsibility, as well as the ex-Chief of Police, who had been summoned to give a brief account of how he would tackle the case of the murdered police officers or ‘the cop killer’ case as the press was consistently referring to it. The formalities were dealt with in seconds, with brief minutes and nods of agreement, which the secretary acknowledged and noted.

The chairman then moved on to the business of the day.

The former Chief of Police looked up, caught an enthusiastic, encouraging nod from Isabelle Skøyen and began.

‘Thank you, Mr Chairman. I won’t take up much of the council’s time today.’

He glanced over at Skøyen, who appeared to be less enthusiastic about this unpromising opening.

‘I’ve gone through the case as requested. I have examined the police’s ongoing work and their progress, the leadership, the strategies that have been applied and their execution. Or to use Councillor Skøyen’s words, the strategies that may have been applied, but have definitely not been executed.’

Isabelle Skøyen’s laughter was rich and self-indulgent, but somewhat curtailed, perhaps because she discovered she was the only person laughing.

‘I have employed all my skills accumulated over many years as a police officer and reached an unambiguous conclusion about what has to be done.’

He saw Skøyen nod – the glint in her eye reminded him of an animal, though which, he couldn’t say.

‘Now the solving of a single crime doesn’t necessarily mean that the police are well managed. Just as an unsolved crime is not necessarily down to poor management. And having seen what the present incumbents, and Mikael Bellman in particular, have done I can’t see what I would have done differently. Or to make the point even clearer, I don’t think I could have done it as well.’

He noted that Skøyen’s jaw had dropped, and, feeling to his surprise a certain sadistic pleasure, he continued.

‘The craft of criminal investigation is evolving, as is everything else in society, and from what I can see, Bellman and his staff are cognisant with and adept at utilising new methods and technological advances in a way which I and my peers would probably not have managed. He enjoys the full confidence of his officers, he is an excellent motivator and he has organised his work in a manner which colleagues in other Scandinavian countries say is exemplary. I don’t know if Councillor Skøyen is aware, but Mikael Bellman has just been asked to give a lecture at the Interpol conference in Lyons about criminal investigation and management with reference to this particular case. Skøyen suggested that Bellman was not up to the job, and it does have to be said that he is young to be a Chief of Police. But he is not only a man for the future. He is a man for the present. He is, in sum, exactly the man you need in this situation, Mr Chairman. Which makes me surplus to requirements. This is my unequivocal conclusion.’

The former Chief of Police straightened his back, shuffled the two sheets of notes he had been holding and did up the top button of his jacket, a carefully selected capacious tweed jacket favoured by pensioners. Pushed back his chair with a scrape, as though he needed space to be able to stand up. Saw that Skøyen’s jaw had reached the nadir of its descent and that she was staring at him in disbelief.