Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

missing after no one had seen her for more than two weeks. The reason no one reacted earlier was that she had texted several friends that she was off on a cheap flight to the sun and needed some time and space. A few friends answered her text but didn’t get a reply, so they concluded that getting away from it all included her phone. When she was reported missing the police checked all the airlines, but she hadn’t been on any of them. In short, she vanished without a trace.’
    ‘The phone?’ Bjørn Holm asked.
    ‘Last signal to the base station was in Oslo city centre, then it stopped. The battery may have died.’
    ‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘The text. Leaving a message that she’s ill . . .’
    Bjørn and Katrine nodded slowly.
    Ståle Aune sighed. ‘Possible to have this spelt out?’
    ‘He means the same thing happened to Beate,’ Katrine said. ‘I got a text saying she was ill.’
    ‘Of course,’ Hagen said.
    Harry nodded slowly. ‘He might for example check the recent calls and then send a short message to those contacts to delay the chase.’
    ‘Which means it’s harder to find clues at the crime scene,’ Bjørn added. ‘He’s in the loop.’
    ‘What date was the message sent?’
    ‘The twenty-fifth of March,’ Katrine said.
    ‘That’s today,’ Bjørn said.
    ‘Mm.’ Harry rubbed his chin. ‘We have a possible sexually motivated murder and a date, but no location. Which detectives were involved?’
    ‘No investigation was set up as it remained a missing persons case and was never upgraded to murder.’ Katrine looked at her notes. ‘But in the end it was sent to Crime Squad and put on the list of one of the inspectors. You, in fact.’
    ‘Me?’ Harry frowned. ‘I usually remember my cases.’
    ‘This was straight after the Snowman. You’d buggered off to Hong Kong and never reappeared. You ended up on the missing persons list yourself.’
    Harry shrugged. ‘Fine. Bjørn, you check with the Missing Persons Unit afterwards to see what they have on this case. And alert them to the danger of someone ringing their doorbell or receiving mysterious call-outs during the day, OK? I think we should follow this one up, despite the fact that we don’t have a body or a crime scene.’ Harry clapped his hands. ‘So, who makes the coffee round here?’
    ‘Mm,’ Katrine said in a deeper, hoarse voice, slumped in her chair, legs stretched out, eyes closed and rubbing her chin. ‘I reckon that has to be the new consultant.’
    Harry pursed his lips, nodded, jumped up, and for the first time since they found Beate there was the sound of laughter in the Boiler Room.
    The gravity of the occasion hung heavy in the chamber at City Hall.
    Mikael Bellman sat at the far end of the table, the chairman at the top. Mikael knew the names of most of the councillors; it was one of the first things he did as the Chief of Police, learn names. And faces. ‘You can’t play chess without knowing the pieces,’ the outgoing Police Chief had told him. ‘You have to know what they can and can’t do.’
    It had been a well-meant piece of advice from an experienced Chief. But why was this retired officer sitting here now, in this room? Had he been brought in as a kind of consultant? Whatever his experience with chess, he doubted he’d played with pieces like the tall blonde sitting two places from the chairman. The person who was speaking at this moment. The queen. The Councillor for Social Affairs. Isabelle Skøyen. The leavee. Her voice had that cold administrative timbre of someone who knows that minutes are being taken.
    ‘With increasing unease we have seen how Oslo Police appear to be unable to stop these murders on their own. For some time the media have naturally been applying considerable pressure for us to do something drastic, but it is of greater significance that the city’s inhabitants have also lost their patience. We simply cannot have this growing lack of trust in our institutions, in this case the police and the City Council. And since this is my area of responsibility I have initiated this informal hearing so that the council can react to the Chief of Police’s solution, which we have to assume exists, and thereafter evaluate the alternatives.’
    Mikael Bellman was sweating. He hated sweating in his uniform. In vain he had tried to catch the eye of his predecessor. What the hell was he doing here?
    ‘And I think we should be as open and innovative as possible with regard to