Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

happened. Know what I mean? I remember the thought crossing my mind, but didn’t take too much notice of it. But the guy left Kripos soon afterwards.’
    ‘What was his name?’
    ‘No idea. I can find out, but not now.’
    ‘Thanks, Arnold. And sleep well.’
    ‘Thanks. What’s happening?’
    ‘Not a lot, Arnold,’ Harry said, rang off and slipped the phone into his pocket.
    Opened his other hand.
    Stared at the CD shelf. The key was under W.
    ‘Not a lot,’ he repeated.
    He took off his T-shirt on the way to the bathroom. He knew the bedlinen was white, clean and cold. And the silence outside the open window would be total and the night air suitably crisp. And he wouldn’t be able to sleep for a second.
    In bed, he lay listening to the wind. It was whistling. Whistling through the keyhole of a very old, black corner cupboard.
    The duty officer on the switchboard received the message about a fire at 4.06 a.m. When she heard the fireman’s agitated voice she automatically assumed it had to be a major incident, one that might require the traffic to be redirected, personal possessions to be safeguarded or casualties and fatalities to be dealt with. She was therefore a little surprised when the fireman said that smoke had triggered an alarm in a bar in Oslo, which had been closed for the night, and that the fire had burnt itself out before they arrived. And even more surprised when the fireman told her to get some officers there right away. She could hear that what she had at first taken for agitation in the man’s voice was horror. The voice trembled, like the voice of someone who had probably seen a lot in his career but nothing that could have prepared him for what he was trying to communicate.
    ‘There’s a young girl. She must have been doused in something. There are empty bottles of spirits on the bar.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘She’s . . . she’s completely charred. And she’s been tied to a pipe.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘Round the neck. Looks like a bike lock. You’ve got to come, I’m telling you.’
    ‘Yes, but where—?’
    ‘Kvadraturen. The place is called Come As You Are. Jesus Christ, she’s only a young girl . . .’

40
    STÅLE AUNE WAS woken at 6.28 by a ringing sound. For some reason, he thought at first it was the phone, before realising it was his alarm clock. Must have been something in his dream. But since he didn’t believe in interpreting dreams any more than he believed in psychotherapy he made no attempt to trace his train of thought back. He brought his hand down hard on the clock and closed his eyes to enjoy the two minutes before a second alarm clock went off. As a rule, this was when he heard Aurora’s bare feet hit the floor and make a sprint for the bathroom to get in first.
    Silence.
    ‘Where’s Aurora?’
    ‘She’s got a sleepover at Emilie’s,’ Ingrid mumbled in a thick voice.
    Ståle Aune got up. Showered, shaved, had breakfast with his wife in companionable silence while she read the newspaper. Ståle had become pretty good at reading upside down. He skipped the police murders, no news there, only new speculation.
    ‘Isn’t she coming home before she goes to school?’ Ståle asked.
    ‘She had her school things with her.’
    ‘Oh, right. Is it OK to have a sleepover when you have school the next day?’
    ‘No, it’s bad for her. You should do something about it.’ She turned a page.
    ‘Do you know what lack of sleep does to the brain, Ingrid?’
    ‘The Norwegian state funded six years of research for you to find out, Ståle, so I would regard it as a waste of my taxes if I also knew.’
    Ståle had always felt a mixture of annoyance and admiration for Ingrid’s ability to be, cognitively, so alert at such an early hour. She wiped the floor with him before ten. He didn’t get a verbal jab in until closer to midday. Basically he didn’t have a hope of winning a round until about six.
    He was musing about this as he was reversing the car out of the garage and driving to his consulting room in Sporveisgata. He didn’t know if he could stand living with a woman who didn’t give him a daily trouncing. And if he hadn’t known so much about genetics it would have been a mystery how the two of them could have produced such an endearing, sensitive child as Aurora. Then he forgot about her. The traffic was slow, but no slower than usual. The most important thing was the predictability of it, not the time it took. There was a meeting at the