Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

thought came too fast for Rakel to reject: music that he and this girl had listened to together?
    The girl sat down at the big table. Laid her palms on the surface and stroked the wood. Rakel eyed her movements. She stroked it as if she already knew how the rough, untreated wood felt against her skin, pleasant, alive. Her gaze was fixed on Harry’s coffee cup. Had she . . .?
    ‘What did you want to tell me, Silje?’
    The girl smiled a sad, almost painful smile, without taking her eyes off the cup.
    ‘Has he really not said anything about me, fru Fauke?’
    Rakel closed her eyes for an instant. This wasn’t happening. She trusted him. She opened her eyes again.
    ‘Say what you want to say as if he hasn’t, Silje.’
    ‘As you wish, fru Fauke.’ The girl looked up from the cup and at her. It was an almost unnaturally blue-eyed gaze, as innocent and unknowing as a child’s. And, Rakel thought, as cruel as a child’s.
    ‘I want to talk to you about rape,’ Silje said.
    Rakel suddenly noticed she had difficulty breathing, as though someone had sucked the air from the room, like vacuum-packing.
    ‘What rape?’ she managed to ask.
    Darkness was beginning to descend when Bjørn Holm finally found the car.
    He had turned off by Klemetsrud and continued eastwards on the B155, but had obviously passed the sign for Fjell. It was on his way back, after he’d realised he’d gone too far and had had to turn, that he’d seen it. The side road was even less busy than the B-road, and now, in the darkness, it seemed like total wasteland. The dense forest on both sides seemed to be creeping closer when he saw the rear lights of the car beside the road.
    He slowed down and glanced in his mirror. Only darkness behind him, only a couple of solitary red lights in front of him. Bjørn pulled in behind the car. Got out. A bird hooted from somewhere in the forest, a hollow, melancholy sound. Roar Midtstuen was crouching in the ditch in the light from the headlamps.
    ‘You came,’ Roar said.
    Bjørn grabbed his belt and hitched up his trousers. This was something he’d started doing – he had no idea where he’d got it from. Oh, yes, in fact, he did. His father had always hitched up his trousers by way of an introduction, a preface to something weighty that had to be said or done. He’d started behaving like his father. Except that he seldom had anything weighty to say.
    ‘So this is where it happened?’ Bjørn said.
    Roar nodded. Then looked down at the bouquet of flowers he had laid on the tarmac. ‘She’d been climbing here with friends. On her way home she stopped to have a pee in the woods. Told the others to go on ahead. They think it must have happened when she ran back out and jumped on her bike. Keen to catch up with the others, right? She was that kind of girl, enthusiastic, you see . . .’ He was already fighting to keep his voice under control. ‘And then she probably veered into the road, her bike was still wobbling, and so . . .’ Roar lifted his head to show where the car had come from. ‘. . . and there were no skid marks. No one remembered what the car looked like, even though it must have passed Fia’s friends straight afterwards. But they were busy talking about the climbs they’d tried and they said lots of cars must have passed them. They were well on their way to Klemetsrud before it struck them that Fia should have caught them up long ago and that something must have happened.’
    Bjørn nodded. Cleared his throat. Wanted to get it over and done with. But Roar wouldn’t let him get a word in.
    ‘I wasn’t allowed to investigate, Bjørn. Because I was the father, they said. Instead they put novices on the case. And when at last they realised this case wasn’t going to be child’s play, that the driver wouldn’t turn himself in or give any clues, it was too late to trundle in the big guns. The trail was cold and people’s memories were blank.’
    ‘Roar . . .’
    ‘Bad police work, Bjørn. Nothing less. We spend our whole lives working for the force, we give it everything we’ve got and then – when we lose the dearest thing we have – what have we got left? Nothing. It’s a dreadful betrayal, Bjørn.’ Bjørn watched his colleague’s jaws moving in a regular ellipse as he tightened and slackened, tightened and slackened the muscles. Must be giving the chewing gum a right hammering, he thought. ‘Makes me ashamed to be a police officer,’ Midtstuen said. ‘Just like with