Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

Arnold off. Shooting the closest person first. Oleg. Had Arnold known that Harry was armed? Had he known that he would take a gun with him to the meeting with Truls Berntsen?
    Maybe. Maybe not.
    It didn’t make any difference. Harry would never have time to draw a weapon now, however accessible it was.
    ‘Arnold, why—?’
    ‘Farewell, my friend.’
    Harry watched Arnold Folkestad’s finger tighten around the trigger.
    And he knew it wouldn’t be coming, the clarification, the one we think we will glimpse at our journey’s end. Neither the big revelation, why we are born and die, and what the point is of both, plus the bit in between. Nor the small one, what makes a person like Folkestad willing to sacrifice his life to destroy the lives of others. Instead, there would be this syncope, this swift cessation of life, this trivial but logically placed pause in the middle of a word. The where for.
    The powder burned with – literally – explosive speed, and the pressure created dispatched the bullet from the brass cartridge at a speed of approximately three hundred and sixty metres per second. The soft lead was shaped by the grooves in the barrel making the bullet rotate so that it would be more stable through the air. But in this case that wasn’t necessary. Because after only a few centimetres of air the chunk of lead penetrated the skin and was slowed in its encounter with the skull. And when the bullet reached the brain its speed was down to three hundred kilometres an hour. The projectile passed through and destroyed first the motor cortex, paralysing all movement, then it pierced the parietal lobe, smashed the functions in the right and front lobes, sliced the optical nerve and hit the inside of the cranium on the opposite side. The angle and reduced speed meant that the bullet, instead of continuing and exiting, ricocheted, hit other parts of the skull at slower and slower rates and finally came to a halt. By then it had already done so much damage the heart had stopped beating.

51
    KATRINE SHIVERED AND snuggled up under Bjørn’s arm. It was cold in the large church. Cold inside, cold outside, and she should have put on more clothes.
    They were waiting. Everyone in Oppsal Church was waiting. Coughing. Why was it that people started coughing as soon as they entered a church? Was it the room itself that provoked tight throats and pharynxes? Even in a modern church made of glass and concrete like this? Was it their anxiety not to make a sound which they knew would be amplified by the acoustics that created this compulsive action? Or was it just a human way of releasing pent-up emotion, coughing it out instead of bursting into tears or laughter?
    Katrine craned her head. There was a small turnout, only those closest. Few enough people to have only an initial in Harry’s contacts list. She saw Ståle Aune. Wearing a tie for once. His wife. Gunnar Hagen, also with wife.
    She sighed. She should have worn more. Even if Bjørn didn’t seem to be cold. Dark suit. She hadn’t known he would look so good in a dark suit. She brushed his lapel. Not that there was anything on it, it was just what you did. An intimate act of love. Monkeys picking lice from the coat of another monkey.
    The case was solved.
    For a while they had been afraid they’d lost him, that Arnold Folkestad – now also known as the Cop Killer – had managed to escape abroad or find a hidey-hole in Norway. It would have had to be a deep, dark hole, for during the twenty-four hours after the initial alert, his description and personal information had been broadcast on every media outlet in such detail that every person of sound mind in the country had grasped who Arnold Folkestad was and what he looked like. And Katrine had at that point come to her own conclusions about how close they had been earlier in the case when Harry had asked her to check the connections between René Kalsnes and other police officers. If she had only widened her search to include former officers they would have found Arnold Folkestad’s ties to the young man.
    She stopped brushing Bjørn’s lapel and he flashed her a smile of gratitude. A quick, forced smile. A little tremble around the chin. He was going to cry. She saw it now, for the first time she was going to see Bjørn Holm cry today. She coughed.
    Mikael Bellman slipped into the end of the row. Glanced at his watch.
    He had another interview in three-quarters of an hour. Stern . A million readers. Another