Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

packet of Camel. Pushed it back down. He was sick of smoking.
    . . . or he could do precisely what the bastard wanted.
    It wasn’t until the break after the second patient that Ståle completed his train of thought.
    Or trains – there were two of them.
    The first was that no one had reported the girl’s disappearance. A girl aged from ten to fourteen years old. The parents should have missed her when she didn’t turn up in the evening. Should have reported her.
    The second was what connection the victim could possibly have to the police murders. So far the murderer had only targeted detectives and now perhaps the typical tendency of serial killers to step up their violence had reared its head: what more could you do to someone than kill them? Simple, kill their offspring. The child. So in that case the question was: whose turn was next? Obviously not Harry’s. He didn’t have any children.
    And that was when cold sweat without warning or restraint broke from all the pores of Ståle Aune’s voluminous body. He grabbed the phone in the open drawer, found Aurora’s name and called.
    It rang eight times before he went through to her voicemail.
    She didn’t answer of course, she was at school and, quite sensibly, they were not allowed to have their phones on.
    What’s was Emilie’s surname? He had heard it often enough, but this was Ingrid’s domain. He considered ringing, but decided not to worry her unnecessarily and instead looked for ‘school camp’ in his inbox. Sure enough, he found lots of emails from last year with the addresses of all the parents in Aurora’s class. He scanned through them hoping to find it and erupt with an ‘Aha!’ He didn’t have to wait long. Torunn Einersen. Emilie Einersen – it was even easy to remember. And, best of all, the parents’ telephone numbers were listed underneath. He noticed his fingers were trembling, it was hard to hit the right keys, he must have been drinking or he hadn’t had enough coffee.
    ‘Torunn Einersen.’
    ‘Oh, hello, this is Ståle Aune, Aurora’s father. I . . . er, just wanted to know if everything was OK last night.’
    Pause. Too long.
    ‘With the sleepover,’ he added. And to be absolutely sure: ‘With Emilie.’
    ‘Oh, I see. I’m afraid Aurora didn’t come for a sleepover. I know they were chatting about it, but—’
    ‘I must have misremembered,’ Ståle said, and could hear his voice was taut.
    ‘Yes, it’s not easy to keep track of who’s having a sleepover with whom these days,’ Torunn Einersen laughed, but her voice was uneasy on his behalf, for the father who didn’t know where his daughter had spent the night.
    Ståle rang off. His shirt was already well on the way to becoming wet.
    He called Ingrid. Got her voicemail. Left a message for her to ring. Then got up and dashed out of the door. The last patient, a middle-aged woman in therapy for reasons unfathomable to Ståle, looked up.
    ‘I’m afraid I have to cancel today’s session . . .’ He intended to say her name, but couldn’t remember it until he was downstairs, out of the door and running down Sporveisgata to his car.
    Harry sensed he was squeezing the paper cup of coffee too hard as the covered stretcher was carried past them into the waiting ambulance. He scowled at the flock of rubbernecks thronging nearby.
    Katrine had phoned. Still no one had been reported missing, and no one in the investigation team on the Kalsnes case had a daughter between eight and sixteen. So Harry had asked her to extend her search to the rest of the force.
    Bjørn came out of the bar. He pulled off the latex gloves and the hood of the white overall.
    ‘Still no news from the DNA team?’ Harry asked.
    ‘No.’
    The first thing Harry did when he arrived at the crime scene was to have a tissue sample taken and sent urgently to Forensics. A full DNA test took time, but getting the initial profile could happen quite quickly. And that was as much as they needed. All the murder investigators, plain clothes and forensics officers, had registered their DNA profiles in case they contaminated a crime site. Over the last year they had also registered officers who arrived first at the scene or who guarded crime scenes, even civilians who it was thought might conceivably be there. It was a simple probability calculation. With only the first three or four digits out of eleven they would already have eliminated the most relevant police officers. With five or six, all of them. That