Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

Folkestad late at night. The acoustics. He’d been outside, not inside.
    ‘Are you in the gym or what?’
    ‘Gym?’ She queried the word as though unfamiliar with the concept.
    ‘I was wondering if that was why you didn’t answer my calls.’
    ‘No, I’m at home. What’s up?’
    ‘OK, get your pulse down now. I’m at PHS. I’ve just seen someone’s search history. And I can’t get any further.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Arnold Folkestad has been on medical supply websites. I want to know why.’
    ‘Arnold Folkestad? What’s this got to do with him?’
    ‘I think he’s our man.’
    ‘Arnold Folkestad is the cop killer?’
    As Katrine spoke he heard a sound which he immediately identified as Bjørn Holm’s smoker’s cough. And what might have been the creaking of a mattress.
    ‘Are you and Bjørn in the Boiler Room?’
    ‘No, I told you . . . we . . . yes, we’re in the Boiler Room.’
    Harry mused. And concluded that in all his years as a policeman he had never heard worse lying.
    ‘If you’re near a computer, try to find out if Arnold has been buying medical equipment. And if his name turns up in connection with any old crime scenes or murder investigations. And then ring me back. And now give me Bjørn.’
    He heard her hand over the phone, say something and then Bjørn’s somewhat thick voice.
    ‘Yuh?’
    ‘Get your threads on and hotfoot it to the Boiler Room. Find a police lawyer and get a warrant to tap Arnold Folkestad’s mobile phone. And then check who rang Truls Berntsen this evening, OK? In the meantime, I’ll tell Bellman to deploy Delta. OK?’
    ‘Yes. I . . . we . . . well, you know . . .’
    ‘Is this important, Bjørn?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Right.’
    Harry rang off, and at that moment Karsten Kaspersen came in through the door.
    ‘I found some iodine and cotton. And tweezers as well. So we can pull out the splinters.’
    ‘Thanks, Kaspersen, but the splinters are more or less holding me together, so just leave the stuff on the table.’
    ‘But, heck, you—’
    Harry waved the protesting Kaspersen out while calling Bellman. Was put through to his voicemail. Swore. Searched for Ulla Bellman, found a landline number in Høyenhall. And then heard a gentle, melodic voice articulate the surname.
    ‘Harry Hole here. Is your husband there?’
    ‘No, he just went out.’
    ‘This is pretty important. Where is he?’
    ‘He didn’t say.’
    ‘When—?’
    ‘He didn’t say.’
    ‘If—’
    ‘—he turns up I’ll tell him to call you, Harry Hole.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    He hung up.
    Forced himself to wait. Wait while sitting with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, listening to blood dripping onto unmarked tests. Counted the drips as if they were ticking seconds.
    The forest. The forest. There’s no metro in the forest. And the acoustics. He had sounded as if he was outside, not inside.
    When Harry had called Arnold that night Arnold had claimed he was at home.
    Yet Harry had heard the metro in the background.
    There could of course have been relatively innocent reasons for Arnold Folkestad lying about where he was. A female acquaintance he wanted to keep quiet, for example. And it could have been a coincidence that when Harry rang, the young girl was being dug up in Vestre Cemetery. Close to where the metro passes by. Coincidences. But enough to cause other things to surface. The statistic.
    Harry glanced at his watch again.
    Thought about Rakel and Oleg. They were at home.
    Home. Where he would have been. Where he should have been. Where he would never be. Not completely, not fully, not the way he wanted to be. Because it was true, he didn’t have it in him. Instead he had this otherness in him, like a flesh-eating bacterium, which consumed everything else in his life, which not even alcohol could keep down and which he still, after all these years, didn’t completely understand. Only that in some way or other it had to be similar to what Arnold Folkestad had. An imperative so strong and all-encompassing that it could almost justify all it destroyed. Then – at long last – she rang.
    ‘He ordered quite a few surgical instruments and items of clothing some weeks ago. You don’t need any kind of special authorisation to do that.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘No, he doesn’t seem to have been online much. Seems to have been quite cautious in fact.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘I checked whether he’d had any physical injuries or anything like