Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

‘Kim Erik!’
    Six seconds later a head appeared in the doorway. ‘Did you call?’
    ‘Yes. You were in the forensics team for the Mittet murder in Drammen, weren’t you? Did you find any black paint?’
    ‘Paint?’
    ‘Something that might come off a blunt instrument if you hit out like this . . .’ Bjørn demonstrated by beating his fist up and down as if playing rock-paper-scissors. ‘The skin tears, the cheekbone cracks and sticks out, but you keep hitting the jagged end of the bone with the blunt instrument, removing paint from whatever it is you’re holding.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘OK. Thank you.’
    Bjørn Holm took the lid off the second box, the one with the Mittet case material, but noticed the young forensics officer was still standing in the doorway.
    ‘Yes?’ Bjørn said without looking up.
    ‘It was navy blue.’
    ‘What was?’
    ‘The paint. And it wasn’t the cheekbone. It was the jawbone, the fracture. We analysed it. It’s pretty standard paint, used on iron tools. Sticks well and prevents rust.’
    ‘Any suggestions for what kind of tool it might have been?’
    Bjørn could see Kim Erik veritably swelling in the doorway. He had personally trained him, and now the master was asking the apprentice if he had ‘any suggestions’.
    ‘Impossible to say. It can be used on anything.’
    ‘OK, that’s all.’
    ‘But I’ve got a suggestion.’
    Bjørn could see his colleague was bursting to tell him. He was going to go a long way.
    ‘Out with it.’
    ‘Carjack. All cars are supplied with a jack, but there wasn’t a jack in the boot.’
    Bjørn nodded. Hardly had the heart to say it. ‘The car was a VW Sharan, 2010 model, Kim Erik. If you check it out you’ll find it’s one of the few cars that doesn’t come with a jack.’
    ‘Oh.’ The young man’s face crumpled like a punctured beach ball.
    ‘Thanks for your help, though, Kim Erik.’
    He would go a long way all right. But in a few years of course.
    Bjørn systematically went through the Mittet box.
    There was another thing that set his mind whirring.
    He put the lid back on and walked to the office at the end of the corridor. Knocked at the open door. Blinked first, a little confused, at the polished head, before realising who it was sitting there: Roar Midtstuen, the oldest and most experienced forensics officer of them all. Once upon a time Midtstuen had struggled with the idea of working for a boss who was not only younger but also a woman. But the situation had eased as he’d seen that Beate Lønn was one of the best things that had ever happened to their department.
    He had just returned to work after being off sick for some months, ever since his daughter had been killed in a collision. She was returning from top-rope climbing a mountain face to the east of Oslo. Her bike had been found in a ditch. The driver still hadn’t been found.
    ‘How do, Midtstuen.’
    ‘How do, Holm.’ Midtstuen spun round in the swivel chair, shrugged, smiled and tried to exude energy, but it wasn’t there. Bjørn had barely recognised the bloated face when he’d reappeared for work. Apparently it was a normal side effect of antidepressants.
    ‘Have police batons always been black?’
    As forensics officers, they were used to somewhat bizarre questions about detail, so Midtstuen didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
    ‘They’ve definitely been dark.’ Midtstuen had grown up in Østre Toten, like Holm, but it was only when the two of them spoke that their childhood dialect resurfaced. ‘But there was a period in the nineties when they were blue, I seem to remember. Bloody irritating that is.’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘That we’re always changing the colour, that we can’t stick to one. First of all, patrol cars are black and white, then they’re white with red-and-blue stripes, and now they’re going to be white with black-and-yellow stripes. This fiddling about just weakens the brand. Like the Drammen cordon tape.’
    ‘What cordon tape?’
    ‘Kim Erik was at the Mittet crime scene and found bits of police tape and thought it had to be from the old murder. He . . . we were both on the case of course, but I always forget the name of that homo . . .’
    ‘René Kalsnes.’
    ‘But young folk like Kim Erik don’t remember that police tape at that time was light blue and white,’ Midtstuen hastened to add as though afraid he’d put his foot in it: ‘But Kim Erik is going to be good.’
    ‘I reckon so, too.’
    ‘Good.’