Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

raid Folkestad’s home address.’
    ‘You think he’s at home?’
    ‘No. But we—’
    ‘—start searching where there is light,’ Bjørn completed.
    Harry hung up again. Closed his eyes. The whistling in his ears had almost gone. Instead there was another noise. Ticking. The seconds being counted down. Shit! He pressed his knuckles against his eyes.
    Could anyone else have received an anonymous call today? Who? And where from? From a pay-as-you-go phone. Or a payphone. Or a large switchboard where the number didn’t come up.
    Harry sat still for a few seconds.
    Then he took his hands away.
    Looked at the big black telephone on the desk. Hesitated. Then he lifted the receiver. Got the switchboard’s dialling tone. Hit the redial key and with small, excited beeps the phone started ringing the last number that had been dialled. He heard the number ringing. The call being answered.
    The same gentle, melodic voice.
    ‘Bellman.’
    ‘Sorry, wrong number,’ Harry said, cradling the receiver. Closed his eyes. Shit, shit, shit!

49
    NOT HOW OR why.
    Harry tried to purge his brain of all the redundant information. To concentrate on the only issue that was important now. Where.
    Where the hell could Arnold Folkestad be?
    At a crime scene.
    With surgical equipment.
    When Harry understood, there was one thing and one thing alone that surprised him: that he hadn’t clicked before. It was so obvious that even a first-year student with a mediocre imagination would have managed to crunch the data and follow the perpetrator’s train of thought. Crime scene. A scene where a man dressed and masked like a surgeon would not attract much attention.
    It was two minutes by car from PHS to the Rikshospital.
    He could do it. Delta couldn’t.
    It took Harry twenty-five seconds to get out of the building.
    Thirty to reach his car, start it and turn into Slemdalsveien, which would take him almost straight to where he was heading.
    One minute and forty-five seconds after that he pulled up in front of the entrance to the Rikshospital.
    Ten seconds after that he had pushed through the swing door and passed reception. He heard a ‘Hey, you there!’ but steamed ahead. His footsteps resounded against the walls and ceiling of the corridor. As he ran he fumbled behind his back. Got hold of the Odessa he had stuffed inside his belt. Felt his pulse counting down, faster and faster.
    He passed the coffee machine. Slowed down so as not to make too much noise. Stopped by the chair outside the door that led to the crime scene. Many people knew a dope baron had died in there, but not many knew he had been murdered. And that the crime was unsolved. However, Arnold Folkestad did.
    Harry stepped up to the door. Listened.
    Checked the safety catch was off.
    His pulse had counted down and was calm.
    Along the corridor he heard running footsteps. They were on their way to stop him. And before Harry Hole silently opened the door and stepped inside, he had time for one more thought: this was a very bad dream where everything recurred, time after time, and it had to stop here. He had to wake up. To blink into the sun one morning, wrapped in a cold, white duvet, with her arms holding him tight. Refusing to let go, refusing to let him be anywhere except with her.
    Harry closed the door quietly behind him. Stared at a man in green bent over a bed containing a man he knew. Mikael Bellman.
    Harry raised his gun. Cocked the trigger. Already imagining the salvo ripping up the green material, severing the nerves, smashing the marrow, the back arching and falling forward. But Harry didn’t want that. He didn’t want to shoot this man in the back and kill him. He wanted to shoot him in the face and kill him.
    ‘Arnold,’ Harry said in a husky voice, ‘turn around.’
    There was a clatter on the metal table as the man in green dropped something shiny, a scalpel. He turned slowly. Pulled down the green mask. Looked at Harry.
    Harry stared back. His finger tightened around the trigger.
    The footsteps outside were getting closer. There were a lot of them. He would have to hurry if he was going to do this without witnesses. He felt the resistance on the trigger ceding; he had reached the trigger’s eye of the storm, where all is still. The silence before the explosion. Now. Not now. He had let his finger slip back a tiny fraction. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t Arnold Folkestad. Had he been mistaken? Had he been mistaken again? The face before him was smooth, the