Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

Bloody Vennesla case. And bloody Truls Berntsen.
    Mikael had neither seen nor spoken to Truls since he had been forced to suspend his childhood friend and subordinate last October. Although he thought he’d glimpsed him outside the Grand Hotel last week in a parked car. It was the large injections of cash into Truls’s account that had led to his suspension. As he couldn’t – or didn’t want to – explain them, Mikael, as his boss, had had no choice. Of course Mikael knew where the money had come from: burner jobs – sabotaging evidence – which Truls had done for Rudolf Asayev’s drug cartel. Money the idiot had put straight into his account. The sole consolation was that neither the money nor Truls could point a finger at Mikael. There were only two people in the world who could expose Mikael’s cooperation with Asayev. One was the Councillor for Social Affairs and she was an accomplice, and the other lay in a coma in a closed wing of the Rikshospital.
    They drove through Kvadraturen. Bellman stared with fascination at the contrast between the prostitutes’ black skin and the white snow in their hair and on their shoulders. He also saw that new layers of dope dealers had moved into the vacuum left by Asayev.
    Truls Berntsen. He had followed Mikael through his childhood in Manglerud the way sucker fish follow sharks. Mikael with the brain, the leadership qualities, the eloquence, the appearance. Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen with the fearlessness, the fists and the almost childlike loyalty. Mikael, who made friends wherever he turned. Truls, who was so difficult to like that everyone actively avoided him. Yet it was precisely these two who hung out together, Bellman and Berntsen. Their names were called out one after the other in class and later at Police College, Bellman first, Berntsen tagging along afterwards. Mikael had got together with Ulla, but Truls was still there, two steps behind. As the years passed Truls had lagged further behind; he had none of Mikael’s natural buoyancy in his private life and career. As a rule Truls was an easy man to lead and to predict – when Mikael said jump, he jumped. But he could also get that blackness in his eyes, and then he seemed to become someone Mikael didn’t know. Like the time with the young guy they arrested, whom Truls blinded with his truncheon. Or the guy at Kripos who tried it on with Mikael. Colleagues had seen, so Mikael had to do something to avoid the impression he would let such matters go. He had tricked the guy into meeting in the Kripos boiler room, and there Truls had attacked the man with his baton. First of all, in a controlled way, then more and more savagely as the blackness in his eyes seemed to spread, until he appeared to be possessed, his eyes wide and dark, and Mikael had to stop him so that he didn’t kill the guy. Yes, Truls was loyal, but he was also a loose cannon, and that in particular worried Mikael Bellman. When Mikael had told him the Appointments Board had decided he was suspended until they were satisfied they knew where the money in Truls’s account came from, Truls had just shrugged as though it was of no significance and left. As if Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen had anything to go to, a life outside work. And Mikael had seen the blackness in his eyes. It had been like lighting a fuse, watching it burn in a mine gallery and then nothing happens. But you don’t know if the fuse is just long or if it has gone out, so you wait, on tenterhooks, because something tells you the longer it takes, the worse the explosion is going to be.
    The car parked behind City Hall. Mikael got out and walked up the steps to the entrance. Some claimed this was the real main entrance, the way the architects Arneberg and Poulsson had designed it in the 1920s, and that the drawing had been turned round by mistake. And when the error was discovered in the late 1940s the building was so far along that they hushed the matter up and went on as if nothing was wrong, hoping that people sailing up Oslo Fjord to Norway’s capital city wouldn’t realise the sight that met them was the kitchen entrance.
    Mikael Bellman’s Italian leather soles gently caressed the stone floor as he marched over to reception, where the woman behind the counter flashed him a dazzling smile.
    ‘Good morning, sir. You are expected. Ninth floor, end of the corridor on the left.’ Bellman studied himself in the lift mirror on his way up. And reflected that was exactly