Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

that?’
    ‘No, Arnold, we don’t. But he could have been lured away from his post. Or doped.’
    ‘Or bribed. You’ll have to get the officer in for questioning!’
    Harry shook his head.
    ‘Why on earth not?’
    ‘First of all, I’m not a policeman any more. Secondly, the officer’s dead. He was the one killed in the car outside Drammen.’ Harry nodded as if to himself, raised his coffee cup and took a sip.
    ‘Damn!’ Arnold had leaned forward. ‘And thirdly?’
    Harry signalled to Rita for the bill. ‘Did I say there was a thirdly?’
    ‘You said “secondly”, not “and secondly”. As though you were in the middle of reeling off a list.’
    ‘Right. I’ll have to sharpen up my Norwegian.’
    Arnold tilted his head. And Harry saw the question in his colleague’s eyes. If this is a case you’re not going to follow up, why are you telling me about it?
    ‘Come on, eat up,’ Harry said. ‘I’ve got a lecture.’
    The sun slipped across a pale sky, made a gentle landing on the horizon and coloured the clouds orange.
    Truls Berntsen sat in his car half listening to the police radio while waiting for darkness to fall. Waiting for the lights in the house above him to be switched on. Waiting to see her. A fleeting glimpse would be enough.
    Something was brewing. He could hear it in the style of communication, something was happening alongside the usual, subdued, routine normality. Short, intense reports came sporadically, as though they had been told not to use the radio more than necessary. And it wasn’t what was said, more what wasn’t said. The way it wasn’t said. The staccato sentences on the surface about surveillance and transport, but without addresses, times or individual names being mentioned. People used to say the police frequency was the fourth most popular local radio in Oslo, but that was before it had been encrypted. Nevertheless, they were talking this evening as though they were terrified of revealing something.
    There they were again. Truls turned up the volume.
    ‘Zero one. Delta two zero. All quiet.’
    Delta, the elite force. An armed operation.
    Truls picked up his binoculars. Focused on the living-room window. It was harder to see her in the new house; the terrace in front of the living room was in the way. With the old house, he had been able to stand in the trees and see straight into the room. See her sitting on the sofa with her feet tucked up underneath her. Barefoot. Stroking the blonde curls away from her face. As though she knew she was being watched. So beautiful he could cry.
    The sky above Oslo Fjord changed from orange to red and then violet.
    It had been all black the night he had parked by the mosque in Åkebergveien. He had walked down to Police HQ, clipped on his ID card in case the duty officers saw him, unlocked the door to the atrium and sauntered downstairs to the Evidence Room. Unlocked the door with the copy he’d had for three years now. Put on his night-vision goggles. He’d started doing that after the time he’d switched on the lights and aroused the suspicions of a security guard during one of Asayev’s burner jobs. He had been quick, found the box by date, opened the bag containing the 9mm bullet taken from Kalsnes’s head and replaced it with the one he had in his jacket pocket.
    The only oddity had been that he hadn’t felt alone.
    He watched Ulla. Did she feel that too? Was that why she kept looking up from her book towards the window? As though there was something outside. Something waiting for her.
    They were talking on the radio again.
    He knew what they were talking about.
    Understood what they were planning.

25
    D-DAY WAS drawing to an end.
    The walkie-talkie crackled quietly.
    Katrine Bratt twisted on the thin ground sheet. Raised her binoculars again and focused on the house in Bergslia. Dark and silent. As it had been for almost twenty-four hours.
    Something had to happen soon. In three hours it would be another date. The wrong date.
    She shivered. But it could have been worse. About nine degrees during the day and no rain. But after the sun went down the temperature had plummeted and she had begun to feel cold, even with the full complement of winter underwear and the padded jacket which, according to the salesman, was ‘eight hundred on the American scale, not the European one, that is’. It had something to do with insulation. Or was it feathers? Right now she wished she had something warmer than eight hundred. Like a