Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police
and pressed the light switch. Counted to seven. Thrust his head out. Back in. Empty.
Slid down to the floor with his back to the wall. Only now feeling how hard his heart had been pounding against his ribs.
He sat like that for some seconds. Recovering.
Then he walked over to the body on the chair. Crouched down and examined the red mass behind the plastic film. No face, but a prominent forehead, underbite and the cheap haircut left Harry in no doubt: it was Truls Berntsen.
Harry’s brain had already started processing the fact that he had been wrong. Truls Berntsen was not the cop killer.
The next thought came hard on its heels. It was definitely not alone.
Could that be what he was witnessing here: the murder of an accessory, a murderer covering his tracks? Could Truls ‘Beavis’ Berntsen have been working with someone as sick as himself, who committed this atrocity? Could Valentin have been deliberately sitting in front of the CCTV at Ullevål Stadium while Berntsen performed the murder in Maridalen? And, if so, how had they divvied the murders between them? Which murders did Berntsen have alibis for?
Harry straightened up and cast his eyes around. And why had he been summoned here? They would have found the body soon enough. And there were several things that didn’t tally. Truls Berntsen had never been involved in the investigation into Gusto Hanssen’s murder. It had been a small investigative unit consisting of Beate and a couple of other forensics officers who hadn’t had much to do because Oleg had been arrested as the presumed perpetrator minutes after they’d arrived and the evidence had supported the presumption. The only . . .
In the silence Harry could still hear the low ticking. Regular, unchanging, like clockwork. He completed his thought.
The only other person bothered enough to investigate this trivial, sordid drug murder was here in the room. Himself.
He had been – like the other policemen – summoned to die at the crime scene for the unsolved murder.
The next second he was by the door pressing down the handle. And it was as he feared: it gave easily, no resistance, without opening. It was like a hotel-room door. Except that he didn’t have a key card.
Harry scanned the room again.
The thick windows with the steel bars on the inside. The iron door that had slammed shut by itself. He had walked straight into the trap like the crazed idiot he had always been, caught up in the thrill of the chase.
The ticking hadn’t got louder; it just seemed like it.
Harry stared at the portable TV. At the seconds ticking away. It wasn’t the wrong time. It wasn’t telling the time; clocks don’t go backwards.
It had been 00.06.10 when he came in, now it was 00.03.51.
It was a countdown.
Harry walked over, grabbed the TV and tried to lift it. In vain. It must have been screwed to the floor. He aimed a hard kick at the top of the TV, and the plastic casing cracked with a bang. He looked inside. Metal pipes, glass tubes, leads. Harry was definitely no expert, but he had seen the innards of enough TVs to know there was too much in this one. And enough pictures of improvised explosives to recognise a pipe bomb.
He assessed the leads and dismissed the idea at once. One of the bomb blokes in Delta had explained to him that cutting the blue or red wires and being home and dry was the good old days; now it was digital hell, with Bluetooth signals, codes and safeguards that sent the counter to zero if you fiddled with anything.
Harry took a run-up and threw himself against the door. The door frame may have had frailties of its own.
It didn’t.
Nor the bars on the windows.
His shoulders and ribs ached as he got to his feet again. He screamed at the window.
No sounds came in, no sounds went out.
Harry took out his mobile phone. Ops Room. Delta. They could use explosives. He looked at the clock on the TV. 00.03.04. They would hardly have time to transmit the address. 00.02.59. He stared at the contact list. R.
Rakel.
Ring her. Say farewell. To her and Oleg. Tell them he loved them. That they had to go on living. Living better than he had done. Be with them for the last two minutes. So as not to die alone. Have company, share a last traumatic experience with them, let them have a taste of death, give them a final nightmare to accompany them on their way.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’
Harry slipped the phone back in his pocket. Looked around. The doors had been removed. So that there was
Weitere Kostenlose Bücher