Police: A Harry Hole thriller (Oslo Sequence 8) (50 page)

And that was when cold sweat without warning or restraint broke from all the pores of Ståle Aune’s voluminous body. He grabbed the phone in the open drawer, found Aurora’s name and called.

It rang eight times before he went through to her voicemail.

She didn’t answer of course, she was at school and, quite sensibly, they were not allowed to have their phones on.

What’s was Emilie’s surname? He had heard it often enough, but this was Ingrid’s domain. He considered ringing, but decided not to worry her unnecessarily and instead looked for ‘school camp’ in his inbox. Sure enough, he found lots of emails from last year with the addresses of all the parents in Aurora’s class. He scanned through them hoping to find it and erupt with an ‘Aha!’ He didn’t have to wait long. Torunn Einersen. Emilie Einersen – it was even easy to remember. And, best of all, the parents’ telephone numbers were listed underneath. He noticed his fingers were trembling, it was hard to hit the right keys, he must have been drinking or he hadn’t had enough coffee.

‘Torunn Einersen.’

‘Oh, hello, this is Ståle Aune, Aurora’s father. I . . . er, just wanted to know if everything was OK last night.’

Pause. Too long.

‘With the sleepover,’ he added. And to be absolutely sure: ‘With Emilie.’

‘Oh, I see. I’m afraid Aurora didn’t come for a sleepover. I know they were chatting about it, but—’

‘I must have misremembered,’ Ståle said, and could hear his voice was taut.

‘Yes, it’s not easy to keep track of who’s having a sleepover with whom these days,’ Torunn Einersen laughed, but her voice was uneasy on his behalf, for the father who didn’t know where his daughter had spent the night.

Ståle rang off. His shirt was already well on the way to becoming wet.

He called Ingrid. Got her voicemail. Left a message for her to ring. Then got up and dashed out of the door. The last patient, a middle-aged woman in therapy for reasons unfathomable to Ståle, looked up.

‘I’m afraid I have to cancel today’s session . . .’ He intended to say her name, but couldn’t remember it until he was downstairs, out of the door and running down Sporveisgata to his car.

Harry sensed he was squeezing the paper cup of coffee too hard as the covered stretcher was carried past them into the waiting ambulance. He scowled at the flock of rubbernecks thronging nearby.

Katrine had phoned. Still no one had been reported missing, and no one in the investigation team on the Kalsnes case had a daughter between eight and sixteen. So Harry had asked her to extend her search to the rest of the force.

Bjørn came out of the bar. He pulled off the latex gloves and the hood of the white overall.

‘Still no news from the DNA team?’ Harry asked.

‘No.’

The first thing Harry did when he arrived at the crime scene was to have a tissue sample taken and sent urgently to Forensics. A full DNA test took time, but getting the initial profile could happen quite quickly. And that was as much as they needed. All the murder investigators, plain clothes and forensics officers, had registered their DNA profiles in case they contaminated a crime site. Over the last year they had also registered officers who arrived first at the scene or who guarded crime scenes, even civilians who it was thought might conceivably be there. It was a simple probability calculation. With only the first three or four digits out of eleven they would already have eliminated the most relevant police officers. With five or six, all of them. That is, if he was correct, minus one.

Harry looked at his watch. He didn’t know why, didn’t know what they were trying to do, only knew they didn’t have a lot of time.
He
didn’t have a lot of time.

Ståle Aune parked his car in front of the school gates and switched on the hazard lights. He heard the echo of his running feet resound between the buildings around the playground. The lonely sound of childhood. The sound of arriving late for lessons. Or the sound of summer holidays when everyone had left town, of being abandoned. He tore open the heavy door, sprinted down the corridor, no echo now, just his own panting. That was the door to her classroom. Wasn’t it? Group or class? He knew so little about her everyday life. He hadn’t seen much of her over the last six months. There was so much he wanted to know. He would spend so much time with her from now on. So long as, so long as . . .

Harry looked around the bar.

‘The lock on the back door was picked,’ the officer behind him said.

Harry nodded. He had seen the scratch marks around the lock.

Lock picking. Police handiwork. That was why the alarm hadn’t gone off.

Harry hadn’t seen any signs of resistance. No objects had been knocked over, nothing on the floor, no chairs or tables kicked out of a position it would be natural to leave them in overnight. The owner was being questioned. Harry had said he didn’t need to meet him. He hadn’t said he didn’t
want
to meet him. He hadn’t given any reason. Such as not wanting to risk being recognised.

Harry sat on a bar stool, reconstructing how he had sat there that night with an untouched glass of Jim Beam in front of him. The Russian had attacked from behind; he had tried to press the blade of the Siberian knife into his carotid artery. Harry’s titanium prosthesis had been in the way. The owner had stood behind the bar, paralysed with fear, as Harry had scrabbled for the corkscrew. The blood that had discoloured the floor beneath them, as if a full bottle of red wine had been knocked over.

‘Nothing in the way of clues so far,’ Bjørn said.

Harry nodded again. Of course not. Berntsen had had the place to himself, he was able to take his time. Clear up after him before he wet her, doused her . . . The word came to him without his wanting it to. Marinated her.

Then he had flicked the lighter.

Gram Parsons’ ‘She’ sounded and Bjørn lifted his phone to his ear.

‘Yes? . . . A match? Hang on . . .’

He took out a pencil and his ever-present Moleskine notebook. Harry suspected Bjørn liked the patina of the cover so much he erased the notes when the book was full and used it again.

‘No record, no, but he’s worked on murder investigations . . . Yes, I’m afraid we had a suspicion . . . And his name is?’

Bjørn had put his notebook down on the bar counter, ready to write. But the pencil tip stopped. ‘What did you say the father’s name was?’

Harry could hear from his colleague’s voice that something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

As Ståle Aune tore open the classroom door the following thoughts whirled through his head: he had been a bad father; he wasn’t sure if Aurora’s class had their own room; and if they did, if it was still this room.

It was two years since he had been here, during a school open day when all the classes had exhibited drawings, matchstick models, clay figures and other nonsense that had left him unimpressed. A better father would have been impressed of course.

The voices went quiet, and the class turned in his direction.

And in the silence he scoured the young, soft-skinned faces. The unscarred, undefiled faces that had not lived as long as they would, faces that were yet to be formed, yet to assume character and over the years stiffen into the mask which would become who they were inside. Which he had become. His girl.

His sweeping gaze found faces he had seen in class photos, at birthday parties, all too few handball games, last days of term. Some he could identify by name, most he couldn’t. Continued searching for the one face, as her name was formed, grew like a sob in his throat: Aurora. Aurora. Aurora.

Bjørn slipped the phone into his pocket. Stood by the counter with his back to Harry, motionless. Slowly shaking his head. Then he turned. His face looked as if it had been bled. Pale, bloodless.

‘It’s someone you know well,’ Harry said.

Bjørn nodded slowly, like a sleepwalker. Swallowed. ‘It just can’t be possible . . .’

‘Aurora.’

The wall of faces gawped up at Ståle Aune. Her name had crossed his lips like a sob. Like a prayer.

‘Aurora,’ he repeated.

At the margins of his field of vision he saw the teacher move towards him.

‘What isn’t possible?’ Harry asked.

‘His daughter,’ Bjørn said. ‘It . . . just can’t be possible.’

Ståle’s eyes were swimming with tears. He felt a hand on his shoulder. Then a figure rose, came towards him, the contours blurred like in a fairground mirror. Yet he thought the figure resembled her. Resembled Aurora. As a psychologist he of course knew that this was the brain’s escape, our way of tackling the intolerable, of lying. Of seeing what we want to see. Nevertheless he whispered her name.

‘Aurora.’

And he could even swear the voice was hers.

‘Is something the matter . . .?’

He also heard the last word at the end of the sentence, but wasn’t sure if it was her or his brain that had added it.

‘. . . Dad?’

‘Why isn’t it possible?’

‘Because . . .’ Bjørn said, staring at Harry as though he wasn’t there.

‘Yes?’

‘Because she’s already dead.’

41

IT WAS A
quiet morning in Vestre Cemetery. All that could be heard was the distant hum of traffic in Sørkedalsveien and the clatter of the trams conveying people to the city centre.

‘Roar Midtstuen, yes,’ Harry said, striding between the gravestones. ‘How many years has he actually been with you?’

‘No one knows,’ Bjørn said, struggling to keep up. ‘Since the dawn of time.’

‘And his daughter died in a car accident?’

‘Last summer. It’s sick. It just can’t be right. They’ve only got the first part of the DNA code. There’s still a ten, fifteen per cent chance it’s someone else’s DNA, perhaps someone—’ He almost walked into Harry, who had come to a sudden halt.

‘Well,’ Harry said, sinking to his knees and sticking his fingers into the earth by the gravestone bearing Fia Midtstuen’s name, ‘that chance just plummeted to zero.’ He raised his hand and sprinkled freshly dug soil between his fingers. ‘He dug up the body, transported it to Come As You Are. And set fire to it.’

‘F . . .’

Harry heard the tears in his colleague’s voice. Avoided looking at him. Left him in peace. Waited. Closed his eyes, listened. A bird sang a – to human ears – meaningless song. The carefree, whistling wind nudged the clouds along. A metro train rattled westwards. Time went, but did it have anywhere to go any more? Harry opened his eyes again. Coughed.

‘We’d better ask them to dig up the coffin and have this confirmed before we contact the father.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Bjørn,’ Harry said, ‘this is better. This wasn’t a young girl burned alive. OK?’

‘Sorry, I’m just exhausted. And Roar was in a bad enough state before, so I . . .’ He threw up his arms in desperation.

‘That’s fine,’ Harry said, getting up.

‘Where are you going?’

Harry looked to the north, to the road and the metro. The clouds were drifting towards him. A northerly. And there it was again. The sensation that he knew something he didn’t know yet, something down there in the murky depths inside him, but it would not float to the surface.

‘I have to take care of something.’

‘Where?’

‘Just something I’ve put off for too long.’

‘Right. By the way, there was something I was wondering about.’

Harry glanced at his watch and nodded.

‘When you spoke to Bellman yesterday what did he think could have happened to the bullet?’

‘He had no idea.’

‘What about you? You usually have at least one hypothesis.’

‘Mm. I’ve got to be off.’

‘Harry?’

‘Yes?’

‘Don’t . . .’ Bjørn gave a sheepish smile. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’

Katrine Bratt leaned back in her chair and looked at the screen. Bjørn Holm had just rung to say they had found the father, a Midtstuen who had investigated the murder of Kalsnes, but the reason they hadn’t found him among the police officers with young daughters was that his daughter was already dead. And as that meant Katrine was temporarily unemployed she had looked at her search history from the day before. They hadn’t had any hits for Mikael Bellman and René Kalsnes. When she had looked for a list of the people most frequently connected with Mikael Bellman, three names stood out. First was Ulla Bellman. Then came Truls Berntsen. And in third place, Isabelle Skøyen. It was no surprise that his wife came first, nor was it strange that the Councillor for Social Affairs, his superior, should come third.

But she was taken aback by Truls Berntsen.

For the simple reason that there was an internal note directed from Fraud Squad to the Police Chief, written right there in Police HQ. There was a cash sum that Truls Berntsen refused to account for, and they had asked for permission to start an investigation into possible corruption.

She couldn’t find an answer, so she supposed that Bellman must have given a verbal response.

What she found strange was that the Chief of Police and an apparently corrupt policeman had rung and exchanged texts so often, used credit cards at the same places and at the same times, travelled at the same time by plane and train, checked into the same hotel on the same date and had been in the same firing range. When Harry had told her to run a thorough check on Bellman, she discovered that Bellman had been watching gay porn online. Could Truls Berntsen be his lover?

Katrine sat looking at the screen.

So what? It didn’t have to mean anything.

She knew Harry had met Bellman the previous night, in Valle Hovin. And confronted him with the discovery of his bullet. And before leaving Harry had mumbled something about a feeling he knew who had switched the bullet in the Evidence Room. To her enquiry, Harry had only answered ‘The Shadow’.

Katrine widened her search to include more of the past.

She read through the results.

Bellman and Berntsen were inseparable throughout their careers. Which had clearly started at Stovner Police Station after they had left Police College.

She got up a list of other employees during that period.

Her eyes ran down the screen. Stopped at one name. Dialled a number starting with 55.