Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

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    And as he set off, skiing in long, lazy curves, it struck him how strangely still it was up here at night. It was as if the first hour after they closed was still filled with the echoes of screams of pleasure, girls’ exaggerated whines of terror, boys’ testosterone-filled cries for attention, steel edges cutting into hard-packed snow and ice. Even when they switched off the floodlights the light seemed to hang in the air for a while. But then, gradually, it became quieter. And darker. And even quieter. Until the silence filled all the hollows in the terrain, and the darkness crept out from the forest. And it was as though Tryvann became a different place, a place which even for Stian, who knew it like the back of his hand, was so unfamiliar it might as well have been another planet. A cold, dark and uninhabited planet.
    The lack of light meant he had to ski by feeling and try to predict how the snow and the ground would roll and pitch beneath the skis. But that was his special talent, which meant he always did best when there was bad visibility, heavy snow, mist, flat light: he could feel what he couldn’t see, he had that kind of clairvoyance some skiers just have and others – most of them – don’t. He caressed the snow, moving slowly to prolong the enjoyment. Then he was down and pulled up in front of the ski-lift hut.
    The door had been smashed in.
    There were splinters in the snow, and the door gaped wide open. It was only then that Stian realised he was alone. That it was the middle of the night, that at this moment he was in a deserted area where a crime had just been committed. Probably only a prank, but nevertheless. He could not be entirely sure. Sure it was only a prank. Sure he was on his own.
    ‘Hello!’ Stian shouted above the hum of the engine and rattle of the T-bars coming and going on the buzzing wire above him. And regretted it at once. The echo returned from the mountainside with the sound of his own fear. He was afraid. Because the brain had not stopped churning at ‘alone’ and ‘crime’, it had carried on. Back to the old story. It wasn’t something he thought about during the day, but now and then when he was on the evening shift and there was hardly anyone on the slopes occasionally the story did creep out of the forest with the darkness. It had been late one night, a mild snowless December. The girl must have been drugged somewhere in the city centre and been driven up here. Handcuffs and hood. She had been transported from the car park to where the door had been smashed in and she was raped inside. Stian had heard that the fifteen-year-old girl was so small and slim that if she had been unconscious the rapist or rapists could easily have carried her from the car park. You could only hope she had been unconscious throughout. But Stian had also heard that the girl had been attached to the wall by two big nails, one under each collarbone, so that he or they could rape her standing up with minimal physical contact with the walls, floor or girl. That was why the police hadn’t found any DNA, fingerprints or clothing fibres. But perhaps that wasn’t true. What he knew was true was that they had found the girl in three places. At the bottom of Lake Tryvann they had found the torso and head. In the forest down from the Wyller slalom course half of her lower body. On the banks of Lake Aurtjern the other half. And it was because the two last parts were found so far apart and so far from where she had been raped that the police had speculated that there might have been two rapists. But that was all they had, speculation. The men – if they were men; there was no sperm to prove it – were never found. But the chairman and other jokers liked to tell younger club members doing their first evening shift that on still nights people said they had heard sounds from the hut. Screams. Nails being hammered into the wall.
    Stian released his boots from the bindings and walked to the door. Bent his knees and tensed his calves, trying to ignore his racing pulse.
    Jesus, what was he expecting to see? Blood and guts? Ghosts?
    He reached inside the door, found the switch with his hand and twisted.
    Stared into the lit room.
    On the unpainted pine wall, hanging from a nail, was a girl. She was almost naked, only a yellow bikini covering the so-called strategic parts of her suntanned body. The month was December, and the calendar was last year’s. One very quiet evening, a few weeks before,