Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

at Truls, who responded by giving him the finger.
    The darkness felt as if it had become a touch denser. Truls leaned into the windscreen and looked up. Clouds were on their way in from the west. He stopped at the lights. Glanced back down at the seat. He had fooled them time after time and was about to fool them again. This was his town, no one could come here and take it away from him.
    He shifted the gun into the glove compartment. The murder weapon. It was so long ago, but he could still see his face. René Kalsnes. The weak lady-boy features. Truls smacked the wheel with his fist. Turn green, for Christ’s sake!
    He had hit him first with the baton.
    Then he had taken his gun.
    Even with his face bleeding, smashed to pieces, Truls had seen the pleading look, heard the begging wheeze, like a punctured cycle tyre. Wordless. Useless.
    He had put the gun in the guy’s nose, fired, seen the jerk, as if it were in a film. Then he had rolled the car over the cliff and driven off. Further down the road he had wiped the baton and thrown it into the forest. He had several more in the bedroom cupboard at home. Weapons, night-vision goggles, bulletproof vest, even a Märklin rifle which they thought was still in the Evidence Room.
    Truls drove down the tunnels and into Oslo’s belly. The car lobby, on the political right, had called the recently constructed tunnels the capital’s vital arteries. A representative of the environment lobby had responded by calling them the town’s bowels. They might be vital but they still carried shit.
    He manoeuvred his way through the spur roads and roundabouts, signposted in the Oslo tradition, so that you had to be a local not to fall foul of the Department of Transport’s practical jokes. Then he was high up. East Oslo. His part of town. On the radio they were rabbiting away. One of the voices was drowned out by a rattling sound. The metro. The idiots. Did they think he couldn’t work out their childish codes? They were in Bergslia. They were outside the yellow house.
    Harry lay on his back watching cigarette smoke slowly curling up to the bedroom ceiling. It formed figures and faces. He knew whose. He could mention them by name, one by one. The Dead Policemen’s Society. He blew on them and they disappeared. He had made a decision. He didn’t know exactly when he’d decided, he only knew it was going to change everything.
    For a while he had tried to convince himself that it didn’t have to be such a risk, that he was exaggerating, but he had been an alcoholic for too many years not to recognise the fool’s ill-judged disdain of the cost. After he’d said what he was going to say now, it would change everything in his relationship with the woman he was lying next to. He was dreading it. Rolled some of the phrases around in his mouth. It was now or never.
    He took a deep breath, but she intervened.
    ‘Can I have a drag?’ Rakel murmured, snuggling closer to him. Her naked skin had that tiled-stove glow he could begin to long for at the most astonishing times. It was warm underneath the duvet, cold on top. White bedlinen, always white bedlinen, nothing else got cold in the same, authentic way.
    He passed her the Camel. Watched her hold it in that clumsy manner of hers, her cheeks hollowing as she squinted at the cigarette, as though it was safest to keep an eye on it. He reflected on all he had.
    All he had to lose.
    ‘Shall I run you to the airport tomorrow?’ he asked.
    ‘You don’t need to.’
    ‘I know. But my first lecture isn’t until late.’
    ‘Drive me then.’ She kissed him on the cheek.
    ‘On two conditions.’
    Rakel rolled over onto her side and eyed him with a quizzical look.
    ‘The first is you never stop smoking like a teenager at a party.’
    She sniggered quietly. ‘I’ll try. And the second?’
    Harry swallowed. Knowing he could come to regard this as the last happy moment of his life.
    ‘I expect . . .’
    Oh, shit.
    ‘I’m considering breaking a promise,’ he said. ‘A promise I’d made primarily to myself, but I’m afraid it affects you as well.’
    He sensed rather than heard her breathing change in the darkness. Shorten, quicken. Fear.
    Katrine yawned. Looked at her watch. At the luminous second hand counting down the time. None of the detectives on the original case had reported receiving a call.
    She should have felt the tension mounting as the deadline approached, but instead it was the opposite, she had already started to work