Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

in fact, Stian had masturbated in front of that picture. She was sexy enough, but what had excited him most was the girls passing outside the window. Him sitting there, stiffy in hand, only a metre from them. Especially the girls who took the T-bar on their own, who with an experienced hand placed the erect pole between their thighs and squeezed them together. The T-bar lifting their buttocks. Their backs arched as the extended spring attached to the pole and the wire contracted and jerked them away from him, out of sight, along the aerial tramway.
    Stian entered the cabin. There was no doubt someone had been there. The power control was broken. The plastic knob lay in two sections on the floor, leaving the metal spindle sticking up from the console. He held the cold spindle between thumb and forefinger and tried to turn it, but it just slipped between his fingers. He walked over to the little fuse cupboard in the corner. The metal door was locked, and the key that used to hang from the string on the adjacent wall was gone. Strange. He went back to the console. Tried to pull the plastic covers off the controls for the floodlights and the music so he could swap one over, but realised he would destroy them as well; they were either glued or moulded. He needed something he could tighten round the spindle, a monkey wrench or something similar. As Stian pulled out a drawer from the table in front of the window he had a premonition. The same one he had when he was skiing blind. He could feel what he couldn’t see. Someone was standing outside in the darkness watching him.
    He looked up.
    And into a face staring at him with large, wide-open eyes.
    His own face, his own terrified eyes in the reflection in the windowpane, a double exposure.
    Stian breathed out with relief. Shit, he was so easily frightened.
    But then, as his heart began to beat again and he shifted his attention back to the drawer, it was as if his eye caught a movement outside, a face detaching itself from the reflection and vanishing to the right and out of sight. He looked up quickly again. There was still a reflection of himself. A double exposure as before. Or was it?
    He’d always had an overactive imagination. That was what Marius and Kjella had told him when he said thinking about the raped girl turned him on. Not her being raped and killed of course. Or rather, yes, the rape was . . . something he thought about, he had added. But mostly, that she was very nice, nice and pretty, kind of. And that she had been in the cabin, naked, with a dick in her slit, that . . . yes, that was a thought that could turn him on. Marius had said he was sick and Kjella, the bastard, had of course blabbed, and when Stian heard the story again Stian was supposed to have said he would have liked to have joined in the rape. That’s pals for you, Stian thought, rummaging through the drawer. Lift passes, stamp, stamp pad, pens, tape, scissors, sheath knife, invoice pad, screws, nuts. Bloody hell! He went on to the next drawer. No wrench, no keys. And then he realised he could just look for the emergency stop pole they usually kept rammed in the snow outside the cabin so that anyone could stop the lift by hitting the red button on top of the pole if something happened. And something was always happening: children banging their heads on the T-bar and beginners falling off backwards as the lift jerked into action, hanging on and being dragged up onto the cable. Or idiots who wanted to show off and wrapped a knee round the bar while leaning over the side to piss into the edge of the forest as they went past.
    He ransacked the cupboards. The pole should be easy enough to find, about a metre long, made of metal and shaped like a crowbar with a pointed end so that it could stick into packed snow and ice. Stian pushed aside forgotten mittens, hats and goggles. Next cupboard, firefighting equipment. A bucket and cloths. First-aid kit. A torch. But no pole.
    Of course they might have forgotten it when they locked up for the night.
    He grabbed the torch and went outside, did a circuit round the cabin.
    No pole there, either. Christ, had they stolen it or what? And left the lift passes? Stian thought he heard something and turned to the forest. Shone the torch on the trees.
    A bird? A squirrel? Elk did sometimes come down here, but they didn’t make much of an effort to hide. If he could only switch off the bloody lift, he would be able to hear better.
    Stian went back into the cabin