Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

All you have to do is sign it and send it. As you can see, it even has a stamp. By the way, you can have this recording for keeps when I’ve received a satisfactory response from the council regarding their decision.’ Bellman nodded to the kettle. ‘How’s it doing? Any chance of that coffee?’
    Harry took a swig of coffee and surveyed his town.
    The Police HQ canteen was on the top floor and had a view of Ekeberg, the fjord and the new part of town that was emerging in Bjørvika. First, though, he looked for the old landmarks. How often had he sat here in his lunch break trying to see cases from other angles, with other eyes, with new and different perspectives, while the urge for a cigarette and alcohol tore at him and he told himself he wasn’t allowed to go onto the terrace for a cigarette until he had at least one new testable hypothesis?
    He had yearned for that, he thought.
    A hypothesis. One which wasn’t just a figment of the imagination but anchored in something that could be tested, responded to.
    He raised his coffee cup. Put it down again. No more swigs until his brain had found something. A motive. They had been banging their heads against the wall for so long that perhaps it was time to start somewhere else. Somewhere where there was light.
    A chair scraped. Harry looked up. Bjørn Holm. He put his coffee down on the table without spilling it, removed his Rasta hat and rumpled his red hair. Harry watched him absent-mindedly. Did he do this to air his scalp? Or to avoid the familiar hair-plastered-to-scalp look his generation feared, but which Oleg appeared to like? Fringe stuck to a sweaty forehead above a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. The well-read nerd, the webwanker, the self-conscious urbanite who embraced the loser image, the fake outsider role. Was that what he looked like, the man they were after? Or was he a red-cheeked country boy in the big city with light blue jeans, practical shoes, a haircut from the most convenient hairdresser’s, the type who cleaned the stairs when it was his turn, was polite and helpful and no one had a bad word to say about him? Non-testable hypotheses. No swig of coffee.
    ‘Well?’ Bjørn said, treating himself to a huge swig.
    ‘Well . . .’ Harry said. He had never asked Bjørn why a country boy would walk around wearing a reggae hat and not a Stetson. ‘I think we should take a closer look at René Kalsnes. And forget the motive, just look at the forensic facts. We have the bullet that he was killed with. Nine mil. The world’s most common calibre. Who would use it?’
    ‘Everyone. Absolutely everyone. Even we would.’
    ‘Mm. Did you know that in peacetime policemen are responsible for four per cent of all murders worldwide? In the Third World the figure is nine per cent. And that makes us the world’s most lethal occupational group.’
    ‘Wow,’ Bjørn said.
    ‘He’s kidding,’ Katrine said. She pulled up a chair and placed a large cup of steaming tea on the table in front of her. ‘When people use statistics, in seventy-two per cent of cases, they’ve made them up on the spur of the moment.’
    Harry laughed.
    ‘Is that funny?’ Bjørn asked.
    ‘It’s a joke,’ Harry said.
    ‘How?’ Bjørn said.
    ‘Ask her.’
    Bjørn looked at Katrine. She smiled as she stirred her tea.
    ‘I don’t get it!’ Bjørn said, glaring at Harry.
    ‘It proves the point. She made the seventy-two per cent up herself, didn’t she?’
    Bjørn shook his head, bemused.
    ‘Like a paradox,’ Harry said. ‘Like the Greek who says all Greeks lie.’
    ‘But it doesn’t mean it isn’t true,’ Katrine said. ‘The seventy-two per cent, that is. So you think the murderer is a policeman, do you, Harry?’
    ‘I didn’t say that,’ Harry smiled, folding his hands behind his head. ‘I just said—’
    He stopped. Felt his hair standing on end. The good old hairs on the back of the neck. The hypothesis. He gazed down into his cup. He really felt like a swig now.
    ‘Police,’ he repeated, looked up and saw the other two staring at him. ‘René Kalsnes was killed by a policeman.’
    ‘What?’ Katrine said.
    ‘There’s our hypothesis. The bullet was a nine mil, used in Heckler & Koch service pistols. A police baton was found not far from the crime scene. It’s also the only one of the original murders that has a common link with each of the police murders. Their faces were smashed in. Most of the original murders were sexually motivated, but this is a