Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

her.
    ‘I’ll be at your place before you,’ Aurora said. ‘I promise.’
    Harry was sitting in the modest stand, head supported on his hands, looking at the track.
    There was rain in the air, it could pour down at any moment and there was no roof on Valle Hovin.
    He had the whole ugly little stadium to himself. Knew he would have, concerts here were few and far between now, and it was even longer to the ice-skating season when anyone who wanted could come and train. This was where he had sat watching Oleg taking his first tentative steps and slowly but surely developing into a promising skater in his age category. He hoped he would soon see Oleg here again. So that he could time his circuits without him realising. Note his progress and plateaus. Encourage him when things were sluggish, lie about the conditions and the state of his skates, and maintain a neutral tone when things were going well, not letting his internal jubilation come across. Be a kind of compressor to even out the peaks and troughs. Oleg needed that, otherwise his emotions would have free rein. Harry didn’t know much about skates, but he did know a lot about this. Affective control, Ståle called it. How to console yourself. It was one of the most important features of a child’s development, but not everyone developed it to the same degree. Ståle thought, for example, that Harry needed more affective control. He lacked the average person’s ability to flee from what hurt, to forget, to focus his mind on nicer, lighter topics. He had used alcohol to cope with his job. Oleg’s father was also an alcoholic, who drank his family fortune and life away in Moscow, Rakel had told him. Perhaps that was one of the reasons Harry felt such tenderness for the boy. They shared this lack of affective control.
    Harry heard footsteps on the concrete. Someone was coming through the darkness from the other side of the track. Harry took a full drag of the cigarette so that the glow would show him where he was sitting.
    The man swung a leg over the fence and walked with light, agile strides up the stand’s concrete steps.
    ‘Harry Hole,’ the man said, stopping two steps below.
    ‘Mikael Bellman,’ Harry said. In the night the white patches on Bellman’s face seemed to light up.
    ‘Two things, Harry. This had better be important. My wife and I had planned a cosy evening together.’
    ‘And the second?’
    ‘Stub that out. Cigarette smoke damages your health.’
    ‘Thank you for your concern.’
    ‘I was thinking about me, not you. Please put it out.’
    Harry rubbed the end on the concrete and dropped it back into the packet while Bellman took a seat beside him.
    ‘Unusual place to meet, Hole.’
    ‘Only hangout I have, besides Schrøder’s. And less populated.’
    ‘Too unpopulated, in my opinion. I wondered for a moment if you were the cop killer trying to lure me here. We still believe it’s a policeman, do we?’
    ‘Absolutely,’ Harry said, already craving the cigarette. ‘We’ve matched the gun.’
    ‘Already? That was damn quick. I didn’t even know you’d started calling in all—’
    ‘We don’t need to. The first gun matched.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Your gun, Bellman. It was fired and the result matched the bullet in the Kalsnes case.’
    Bellman burst out laughing. The echo carried between the stands. ‘Is this some kind of joke, Harry?’
    ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me, Mikael.’
    ‘To you I’m the Chief of Police or herr Bellman, Harry. And I don’t have to tell you anything. What’s going on?’
    ‘That’s what you’ll have to – sorry – is should better? . . . you should tell me, Police Chief Bellman. Otherwise we’ll have to – and I do mean have to here – summon you to an official interview. And I’m sure everyone would prefer to avoid that. Are we agreed?’
    ‘Get to the point, Harry. How could this have happened?’
    ‘I can see two possible explanations,’ Harry said. ‘The first and more obvious one is that you shot René Kalsnes, Police Chief Bellman.’
    ‘I . . . I . . .’
    Harry watched Mikael Bellman’s mouth moving as the light seemed to pulsate in the white patches, as though he were some kind of exotic deep-sea creature.
    ‘You’ve got an alibi,’ Harry completed for him.
    ‘Have I?’
    ‘When we got the result I put Katrine Bratt on the case. You were in Paris the night René Kalsnes was shot.’
    ‘Was I?’
    ‘Your name was on the Air France passenger list from