Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

One of them caught fire last week. And we tried to give her advance warning before we entered, but Silje didn’t answer the intercom. Sound all right to you, Detective Bratt?’ Another grin. Wolfish grin, Katrine thought. Not without charm. If he’d taken the liberty of using her Christian name at the end of the sentence, it would of course have been over, but he did have a certain lilt. Her gaze sought his ring finger. The smooth gold was matt. The lift doors opened and she followed him down the narrow corridor until he stopped in front of one of the blue doors.
    He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited.
    ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, turning the key in the lock.
    ‘You’ve been very helpful, Rødbekk.’
    ‘Leif. And it’s a pleasure to be able to help. It’s not every day I run into such a . . .’ He opened the door for her but stood in such a way that if she wanted to go in she would have to squeeze past him. She sent him an admonitory glance. ‘. . . serious case,’ he said with laughter dancing in his eyes and stepped to the side.
    Katrine went in. The rooms hadn’t changed a lot. There was still a kitchenette and the bathroom door at one end and a curtain at the other, behind which Katrine remembered there was a bed. But the first thing that struck her was that she had entered a girl’s room and it couldn’t be a very mature girl living here. Silje Gravseng must long for something in the past. The sofa in the corner was covered with a motley collection of teddy bears, dolls and various cuddly toys. Her clothes, strewn across the table and chairs, were brightly coloured, predominantly pink. On the walls there were pictures, a human menagerie of fashion victims; Katrine guessed they were from boy bands or the Disney Channel.
    The second thing to strike her was the black-and-white newspaper cuttings between the lurid glamour shots. She walked round the room, but was drawn to the wall above the iMac on the desk.
    Katrine went closer although she had already recognised most of the cuttings. They had the same ones on the wall of the Boiler Room.
    The cuttings were fastened with drawing pins and bore no other notes than the date written in biro.
    She rejected her first thought and instead tested a second: that it was not so strange for a PHS student to be fascinated by such a high-profile ongoing murder case.
    Beside the keyboard lay the newspapers the cuttings had been taken from. And between the papers a postcard with a picture of a north Norwegian mountain peak she recognised: Svolværgeita in Lofoten. She picked up the card and turned it over, but there wasn’t a stamp, or an address or signature. She had already put the card down when her brain told her what her eyes had registered where they had automatically searched for a signature. A word in block capitals where the writing had finished. POLITI. She picked up the card again, holding it by the edges this time and read it from the start.
They think the officers have been killed because someone hates them. They still haven’t understood that it’s the other way round, that they were killed by someone who loves the police and the police’s sacred duty: catching and punishing anarchists, nihilists, atheists, the faithless and the creedless, all the destructive forces. They don’t know that what they’re hunting is an apostle of righteousness, someone who has to punish not only vandals but also those who betray their responsibilities, those who out of laziness and indifference do not live up to the standard, those who do not deserve to be called POLITI.
    ‘Do you know what, Leif?’ Katrine said, without moving her eyes from the microscopic, neat, almost childish letters written in blue ink. ‘I really wish I had a search warrant.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘I’ll get one, but you know how it is with these things. They can take time. And by then what I’m curious about may have disappeared.’
    Katrine looked up at him. Leif Rødbekk returned her gaze. Not flir-tatiously, but as if to find confirmation. That this was important.
    ‘And do you know what, Bratt?’ he said. ‘I’ve just remembered that I have to nip down to the basement. The electricians are changing cupboards there. Can you manage on your own for a while?’
    She smiled at him. And when he returned her smile too, she wasn’t sure what kind of smile it was.
    ‘I’ll do my best,’ she said.
    Katrine pressed the space bar on the iMac the second she heard the door close behind