Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

warmth. There was a smell of rotten hair and hair lotion.
    ‘Trim?’ said the young man with the glistening black hairstyle Truls was fairly confident he had acquired in a different salon.
    ‘Two hundred?’ Truls asked, brushing snow off his shoulders. March, the month of broken promises. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to make sure the board outside was still accurate. Gentlemen 200. Children 85. Pensioners 75. Truls had seen people bring their dogs in here.
    ‘Same as always, pal,’ the hairdresser said in a Pakistani accent, ushering him into one of the salon’s two free chairs. In the third sat a man Truls immediately categorised as an Arab. Dark terrorist eyes beneath a fringe plastered to his forehead. Eyes that darted away in fear after meeting Truls’s in the mirror. Perhaps the man could smell bacon, or recognised the police look. In which case perhaps he was one of those selling drugs down by Brugata. Just hash. The Arabs were cautious with harder drugs. Maybe the Koran equated speed and heroin with a pork chop? Pimp maybe – the gold chain suggested as much. Small-time one, if so. Truls knew the faces of all the big-timers.
    On with the babies’ bib.
    ‘Hair’s got long, pal.’
    Truls didn’t like being called ‘pal’ by Pakis, especially not Paki poofs and extra-especially not Paki poofs who would soon be touching you. But the advantage of these powder-puffs was that at least they didn’t rest their hips against your shoulder, tilt their heads, run a hand through your hair, look into your eyes in the mirror and ask whether you want it like this or like that. They just got down to it. They didn’t ask if you wanted your greasy hair washed, they just sprayed it with water, ignored any instructions you might have and went for it with scissors and comb as if it were the Australian sheep-shearing championships.
    Truls looked at the front page of the newspaper lying on the shelf below the mirror. It was the same refrain: what was the so-called cop killer’s motive? Most of the speculation centred on a crazy police-hater or an extreme anarchist. Some mentioned foreign terrorism, but terrorists usually claimed the honour of a successful action, and no one had come forward. No one doubted that the two murders were connected – the dates and the crime scenes saw to that – and for a while the police had searched for a criminal both Vennesla and Nilsen had arrested, questioned or offended in some way. But no such connection could be found. So in the interim they had worked on a theory that Vennesla’s murder was one individual’s revenge after an arrest, a bout of jealousy, an inheritance or any of the standard motives. And Nilsen’s murder was another individual with a different motive, but he had been clever enough to copy Vennesla’s murder to fool the police into thinking a serial killer was at work and stop them looking in the obvious places. But then the police had done exactly that, searched in the obvious places as though these were two separate murders. And they didn’t find anything there either.
    So the police had gone back to square one. A police murderer. And the press had done the same and kept nagging: why can’t the police catch the person who has killed two of their own?
    Truls felt both satisfaction and anger when he saw these headlines. Mikael had probably been hoping that by Christmas and New Year the press would have forgotten the murders and started focusing on other things, allowing them to work in peace. Letting him continue to be the sexy new sheriff in town, the whizz-kid, the town’s guardian. And not someone who failed, who messed up, who sat in front of the flashing cameras with a loser’s face radiating dejected Norwegian Rail-style incompetence.
    Truls didn’t need to look at the papers, he had read them at home. He had laughed out loud at Mikael’s feeble statement about where the investigation stood. ‘At this moment in time it’s not possible to say . . .’ and ‘There is no information regarding . . .’ They were sentences taken directly from the chapter about handling the press in Bjerknes and Hoff Johansen’s Investigative Methods , which had been a set text at Police College and in which it said police officers should use these generic quasi-sentences because journalists got so frustrated with ‘no comment’. And also that they should avoid adjectives.
    Truls had checked the photos for traces of desperation on Mikael’s face, the