Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

leaning against the door frame, he smiled.
    ‘No, I haven’t either, Harry.’
    ‘It’s after nine and you’re still here.’
    Arnold chuckled and stacked his papers together. ‘I’m on my way home anyway. You’ve just come and how long are you going to stay?’
    ‘Not long.’ Harry took one long stride to the spindle-back chair and sat down. ‘And I’ve got a woman I can be with at weekends.’
    ‘Oh yes? I’ve got an ex-wife I can avoid at weekends.’
    ‘Have you? I didn’t know that.’
    ‘Ex-cohabitant anyway.’
    ‘Coffee? What happened?’
    ‘Run out of coffee. One of us had the terrible idea of thinking a marriage proposal was the next step. Things went downhill from there. I called it off after all the invitations had been sent out, and so she left. Couldn’t live with it, she said. Best thing that’s ever happened to me, Harry.’
    ‘Mm.’ Harry used his thumb and middle finger to clear his eyes.
    Arnold stood up and took his jacket from the hook on the wall. ‘Slow going in the Boiler Room?’
    ‘Well, we had a setback today. Valentin Gjertsen . . .’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘We think he’s the Saw Man. But he’s not the one who’s been murdering all the officers.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘At least, not on his own.’
    ‘Could there be several?’
    ‘Katrine’s suggestion. But the fact is that in ninety-eight point six per cent of sexually motivated murders there’s only one perpetrator.’
    ‘So . . .’
    ‘She wouldn’t give in. Pointed out that in all likelihood there were two men involved in the murder of the girl at Tryvann.’
    ‘Is that where the body was found scattered over several kilometres?’
    ‘Yep. She thought Valentin might have been working with someone. To confuse the police.’
    ‘Taking turns to kill and thereby securing an alibi?’
    ‘Yes. And in fact that’s been done before. Two ex-cons, violent crim-inals, in Michigan, got together sometime in the sixties. They made it look like classic serial killings by setting a pattern they followed every time. The murders were copies. Like crimes both of them had committed before. They each had their own sick predilections and ended up attracting the attention of the FBI. But when first one and then the other had watertight alibis for several of the murders they were, naturally enough, eliminated from inquiries.’
    ‘Smart. So why don’t you think something similar happened here?’
    ‘Ninety-eight—’
    ‘—point six per cent. Isn’t that thinking a bit rigid?’
    ‘It was thanks to your percentage of key witnesses dying of unnatural causes that I found out Asayev didn’t die of natural ones.’
    ‘But you still haven’t done anything about that case?’
    ‘No. But drop that one now, Arnold. This one’s more urgent.’ Harry rested his head against the wall behind him. Closed his eyes. ‘We think along the same lines, you and I, and I’m bloody knackered. So I came straight here to ask you to help me to think.’
    ‘Me?’
    ‘We’re back to square one, Arnold. And your brain’s got a couple of neurons mine obviously hasn’t.’
    Folkestad took off his jacket again, hung it neatly across the back of the chair and sat down.
    ‘Harry?’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘You have no idea how good this feels.’
    Harry pulled a wry smile. ‘Good. Motive.’
    ‘Motive. Yes, that’s square one.’
    ‘That’s where we are. What could this murderer’s motive be?’
    ‘I’ll go and see if I can rustle up some coffee after all, Harry.’
    Harry talked his way through the first cup and was well down the second before Arnold spoke up.
    ‘I think the murder of René Kalsnes is important because it’s an exception, because it doesn’t fit in. That is to say, it does and it doesn’t. It doesn’t fit in with the original murders, the sex, sadism and use of knives. It fits in with the police murders because of the violence to the head and face with a blunt object.’
    ‘Go on,’ Harry said, putting down the cup.
    ‘I remember the Kalsnes murder well,’ Arnold said. ‘I was in San Francisco on a course when it happened, staying at a hotel where everyone had the Gayzette delivered to the door.’
    ‘The gay newspaper?’
    ‘They ran the story of this murder in little Norway on the front page, calling it yet another hate crime against a homosexual man. The interesting bit was that none of the Norwegian papers I read later carried any suggestion of a hate crime. I wondered how this American paper could