The Redbreast (20 page)

She stared at his back. The doctor’s coat was a size too big for his narrow, sloping shoulders. She was reminded of the Christopher she had known as a child. He’d had delicate black curls and a real suit even though he was only twelve. One summer she had even been in love with him. Hadn’t she?

He released a long, trembling breath. She took a pace towards him, then changed her mind. Why should she feel sympathy for this man? Yes, she knew why. Because her own heart was overflowing with happiness although she had done little to come by it. Yet Christopher Brockhard, who tried every day of his life to gain happiness, would always be a lonely man.

‘Christopher, I have to go now.’

‘Yes, of course. You have to do what you have to do, Helena.’

She stood up and walked to the door.

‘And I have to do what I have to do,’ he said.

30
Police HQ. 24 February 2000.

W
RIGHT SWORE
. H
E HAD TRIED ALL THE KNOBS ON THE
overhead projector to focus the picture, without any luck.

Someone coughed.

‘I think perhaps the picture itself is unclear, Lieutenant. It’s not the projector, I mean.’

‘Well, at any rate, this is Andreas Hochner,’ Wright said, shielding his eyes with his hand so that he could see those present. The room had no windows, so when, as now, the lights were switched off it was pitch black. According to what Wright had been told, it was bug-proof too, whatever that meant.

Besides himself, Andreas Wright, a lieutenant in the Military Intelligence Service, there were only three others present: Major Bård Ovesen from Military Intelligence, Harry Hole, the new man from POT, and Kurt Meirik, the head of POT. It was Hole who had faxed him the name of the arms dealer in Johannesburg. And had nagged him for information every day since. There was no doubt that a great number of people in POT seemed to think that Military Intelligence was merely a subsection of POT, but they obviously hadn’t read the regulations, where it stated that they were equally ranked organisations working in partnership. But Wright had. So, in the end he had explained to the new man that low priority cases had to wait. Half an hour later Meirik had rung to say that this case was top priority. Why couldn’t they have said that at the outset?

The blurred black and white image on the screen showed a man leaving a restaurant; it seemed to have been taken from a car window. The man had a broad, coarse face with dark eyes and a large, ill-defined nose with a thick, black, droopy moustache beneath.

‘Andreas Hochner, born in 1954 in Zimbabwe, German parents,’ Wright read from the print-outs he had brought with him. ‘Ex-mercenary in the Congo and South Africa, probably involved with arms smuggling since the mid-eighties. At nineteen he was one of seven men accused of murdering a black boy in Kinshasa, but was acquitted for lack of evidence. Married and divorced twice. His employer in Johannesburg is suspected of being behind the smuggling of anti-air missiles to Syria and the purchase of chemical weapons from Iraq. Alleged to have supplied special rifles to Karadzic during the Bosnian war and to have trained snipers during the siege of Sarajevo. The last has not as yet been confirmed.’

‘Please skip the details,’ Meirik said, glancing at his watch. It was always slow, but there was a wonderful inscription from the Military High Command on the back.

‘Alright,’ Wright said, flicking through the rest of the papers. ‘Yes, here. Andreas Hochner was one of four held during a raid on an arms dealer in Johannesburg in December. On that occasion a coded order list was found. One of the ordered items was a Märklin rifle, bound for Oslo. And a date: 21 December. That’s all.’

There was silence, only the whirring of the overhead-projector fan could be heard. Someone in the dark coughed. It sounded like Bård Ovesen. Wright shaded his eyes.

‘How can we be sure that Hochner is the key person in our case?’ Ovesen asked.

Harry Hole’s voice came out of the dark.

‘I talked to an Inspector Isaiah Burne in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. He was able to tell me that after the arrests they searched the flats of those involved and found an interesting passport in Hochner’s. The photo was of himself, but the name was completely different.’

‘An arms dealer with a false name is not exactly ...dynamite,’ Ovesen said.

‘I was thinking more of one of the stamps they found in it. Oslo, Norway, 10 December.’

‘So he’s been to Oslo,’ Meirik said. ‘There’s a Norwegian on the company’s list of customers, and we’ve found spent cartridges from this super-rifle. So Andreas Hochner came to Norway and we can assume a deal went ahead. But who is the Norwegian on the list?’

‘The list does not, unfortunately, give a full name and address.’ Harry’s voice. ‘The customer in Oslo is listed as Uriah. Bound to be a code name. And, according to Burne in Johannesburg, Hochner is not that interested in talking.’

‘I thought the police in Johannesburg had effective methods of interrogation,’ Ovesen said.

‘Possibly, but Hochner probably risks more by talking than by keeping his mouth shut. It’s a long list of customers . . .’

‘I’ve heard they use electricity in South Africa,’ Wright said. ‘Under the feet, on nipples and . . . well. Bloody painful. Could someone switch on the light please?’

Harry: ‘In a case which involves the purchase of chemical weapons from Saddam, a business trip to Oslo with a rifle is fairly trivial. I think, unfortunately, the South Africans are saving their electricity for more important issues, let’s put it that way. Apart from that, it’s not certain that Hochner knows who this Uriah is. And in the absence of any information about Uriah, we have to wonder: what are his plans? Assassination? Terrorism?’

‘Or robbery,’ Meirik said.

‘With a Märklin rifle?’ Ovesen said. ‘That would be like shooting sparrows with a cannon.’

‘A drugs killing maybe?’ Wright suggested.

‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘A handgun was all that was needed to kill the most protected person in Sweden. And the Olaf Palme assassin was never caught. So why a gun costing over half a million kroner to shoot someone here?’

‘What do you suggest, Harry?’

‘Perhaps the target isn’t a Norwegian, but someone from outside. Someone who is a constant target for terrorists, but is too strongly protected in their home country for an assassination to succeed there. Someone they think they can kill more easily in a small, peaceful country where they reckon the security measures will be proportionate.’

‘But who?’ Ovesen asked. ‘There’s no one in the country who fits that profile.’

‘And there’s no one coming,’ Meirik added.

‘Perhaps it’s longer term,’ Harry said.

‘But the weapon arrived two months ago,’ Ovesen said. ‘It doesn’t make sense that foreign terrorists would come to Norway two months before they’re due to carry out a mission.’

‘Perhaps it’s not foreigners, but a Norwegian.’

‘There’s no one in Norway capable of doing what you’re suggesting,’ Wright said, groping for a switch on the wall.

‘Exactly,’ Harry said. ‘That’s the point.’

‘The point?’

‘Imagine a high-profile foreign terrorist who wants to take the life of a person in his own country, and this person is going to Norway. The secret services in the country where he lives follow his every move, so instead of taking the risk himself he contacts a group of like-minded people in Norway. The fact that they may be amateurs is actually an advantage as the terrorist then knows the group in question will not be enjoying the attentions of the police.’

Meirik: ‘The discarded cartridges would suggest they’re amateurs, yes.’

‘The terrorist and the amateur agree that the terrorist finances the purchase of an expensive weapon and afterwards all links are cut. There is nothing to be traced back to the terrorist. In this way he has set a process in motion, risking little more than some cash.’

‘But what if this amateur is not capable of carrying out the job?’ Ovesen asked. ‘Or decides to sell the gun and run off with the money?’

‘There is of course a certain risk involved, but we have to assume that the terrorist considers the amateur to be highly motivated. He may also have a personal motive that compels him to put his own life on the line in order to execute the mission.’

‘Amusing hypothesis,’ Ovesen said. ‘How were you going to test it out?’

‘You can’t. I’m talking about a man we know nothing about. We don’t know how he thinks; we can’t rely on him acting rationally.’

‘Nice,’ Meirik said. ‘Do we have any other theories as to how this weapon could have ended up in Norway?’

‘Tons of them,’ Harry said. ‘But this is the worst possible scenario.’

‘Hmmm,’ Meirik sighed. ‘Our job is to chase ghosts after all, so we’d better see if we can have a chat with this Hochner. I’ll make a couple of calls to . . . aaahhh!’

Wright had found the switch and the room was filled with harsh white light.

31
The Lang Family’s Summer Residence, Vienna. 25 June 1944.

H
ELENA WAS STUDYING HERSELF IN THE BEDROOM MIRROR
. She would have preferred to have the window open so that she could listen for footsteps on the gravel drive, but Mother was very precise about the blackout. She contemplated the photograph of Father on the dresser. It always struck her how young and innocent he looked in the picture.

She had fastened her hair with a slide, as she always did. Should she do it differently? Beatrice had taken in Mother’s red muslin dress so that it fitted Helena’s tall, slim figure. Mother had been wearing this dress when she met Father. The thought was curious, remote and in a way quite painful. That might have been because when Mother told her about that time it was as if she were talking about two different people – two attractive, happy people who thought they knew where they were going.

Helena loosened the hairslide and shook her brown hair until it was in front of her face. The doorbell rang. She could hear Beatrice’s footsteps in the hall. Helena fell backwards on to the bed and could feel the butterflies in her stomach. She couldn’t help it – it was like being a love-sick fourteen-year-old in a summer romance again! She heard the muffled sound of talking from below, Mother’s sharp, nasal voice, the clatter of coat-hangers as Beatrice hung his overcoat in the wardrobe. An overcoat! Helena thought. He had put on his overcoat even though it was one of these warm, sultry summer evenings they didn’t usually have before August.

She waited and waited, then she heard Mother’s voice calling: ‘Helena!’

She got up from the bed, fixed the slide into position, looked at her hands, repeated to herself:
I have not got big hands, I have not got big hands
. Then she cast a final glance at the mirror – she
was
attractive! – took a trembling breath and went out of the door.

‘Hele—’

Mother stopped calling as soon as Helena came into view at the top of the stairs. Helena cautiously placed one foot on the top step; the high heels she normally ran downstairs in suddenly seemed shaky and unsteady.

‘Your guest has arrived,’ Mother said.

Your
guest. In another context Helena would probably have been annoyed by Mother’s choice of expression to emphasise that she did not perceive the menial foreign soldier as a guest of the house. But these were exceptional times, and Helena could have kissed her mother for not being more difficult. At least she had gone to receive him before Helena herself made her entrance.

Helena looked across at Beatrice. The housekeeper smiled, but there was the same melancholic tinge to her eyes that her mother had. Helena shifted her gaze to Him. His eyes were shining and she seemed to feel the heat from them burning in her own cheeks. She had to lower her gaze to the brown, clean-shaven throat, the collar with the double ‘s’s and the green uniform which had been so creased on the train but was now freshly pressed. He held a bouquet of roses in his hand, which she knew Beatrice would already have offered to put into a vase, but he had thanked her and asked her to wait so that Helena would see them first.

She took another step. Her hand rested lightly on the banister. It was easier now. She raised her head and encompassed all three of them in one look. And suddenly she realised in an odd way that this was the most beautiful moment of her life. For she knew what they saw and how they were reflected in it.

Mother saw herself, her own lost youth and her dreams coming down the stairs; Beatrice saw the girl she had brought up as her own; and he saw the woman he loved so much that he could not hide it behind Scandinavian embarrassment and good manners.

‘You look wonderful,’ Beatrice mouthed. Helena winked in return. Then she was down.

‘So you found the way, even in the pitch dark?’ she smiled at Uriah. ‘Yes,’ he answered in a loud, clear voice, and in the high, tiled hall the answer resounded as in a church.

Mother talked in her sharp, slightly piercing voice while Beatrice floated in and out of the dining room like a friendly ghost. Helena couldn’t take her eyes off the diamond chain Mother wore around her neck, her most precious piece of jewellery which was only taken out on special occasions.

As an exception, Mother had left the door to the garden ajar. Cloud cover was so low that they might get away without any bombing tonight. The draught from the open door caused the flames of the stearin candles to flicker, and the shadows danced on the portraits of serious men and women bearing the surname of Lang. Mother had painstakingly explained to him who was who, what they had achieved and from which families they had selected their spouses. Uriah had listened with what Helena thought resembled a tiny sardonic smile, but it was difficult to be sure in the semi-darkness. Mother had explained that they felt a responsibility to save electricity with the war on. Naturally she didn’t mention the family’s present economic circumstances and that Beatrice was the last remaining servant of an original staff of four.

Uriah put down his fork and cleared his throat. Mother had placed them at the top of the long dining table. The young ones faced each other while she sat at the other end.