Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

And he felt, yes he did, this could be the beginning of something good. He would buy some flowers for . . . He deliberated. For Laura.
    Katrine stared out of the window as she tapped in the number. Her flat was on what Norwegians called the high ground floor. It was high enough for her not to see people passing outside, low enough to see the tops of their opened umbrellas. And behind the raindrops trembling on the windowpane in the gusting wind she could see Puddefjord Bridge linking the town with a hole in the mountain on the Laksevåg side. But right now she was looking at the fifty-inch TV screen, where a chemistry teacher and cancer victim was cooking up methamphetamine. Which she found strangely entertaining. She had bought the TV under her personal slogan, why should single men have the biggest TVs? And had her DVDs arranged and categorised according to highly subjective criteria under the Marantz player. The first and second places, furthest to the left on the classics shelf, were taken by Sunset Boulevard and Singin’ in the Rain while more recent films on the shelf beneath had a surprising new leader: Toy Story 3 . Shelf number three was devoted to the CDs that for sentimental reasons she hadn’t given to the Salvation Army even though she had copied them onto her hard drive. She had narrow taste in music: exclusively glam rock and progressive pop, preferably British and often of the androgynous variety: David Bowie, Sparks, Mott the Hoople, Steve Harley, Marc Bolan, Small Faces, Roxy Music, with Suede as a contemporary bookend.
    The chemistry teacher was having one of the recurrent arguing-with-the-wife scenes. Katrine put the DVD player on fast forward while ringing Beate.
    ‘Lønn.’ The voice was high-pitched, girlish almost. And the response revealed no more than was necessary. In Norway, didn’t answering with the surname imply there was a bigger family, that you had to specify which Lønn you wanted? However, in this case, Lønn was just Beate Lønn, the widow, and her son.
    ‘Katrine here.’
    ‘Katrine! It’s been a long time. What are you doing?’
    ‘Watching TV. And you?’
    ‘Being beaten at Monopoly by this young man. Comfort eating. Pizza.’
    Katrine racked her brain. How old was her son now? Old enough to beat his mum at Monopoly anyway. Another reminder how terrifyingly fast time went. Katrine was about to add she was comfort eating as well. Cod heads. But remembered it had become a cliché among women, a kind of ironic, quasi-depressed phrase single girls were expected to use rather than telling it like it was: that she didn’t think she could live without total freedom. Over the years she had sometimes thought she should contact Beate just for a chat. Chat the way she used to do with Harry. She and Beate were both unattached police officers in their thirties, they had grown up with policemen as fathers, they were of above-average intelligence, realists without illusions or even the desire for a prince on a white charger. Well, maybe the horse, if it would take them where they wanted to go.
    They could have had so much to talk about.
    But she had never got round to ringing. Unless it was about work, of course.
    They were similar in that respect as well.
    ‘I’m ringing about one Valentin Gjertsen,’ Katrine said. ‘Deceased sex offender. Do you know anything about him?’
    ‘Hang on,’ Beate said.
    Katrine could hear a flurry of fingers on a keyboard and noted another thing they had in common. They were always online.
    ‘Ah, him,’ Beate said. ‘I’ve seen him a few times.’
    Katrine realised that Beate had his picture on the screen. They said that Beate Lønn’s fusiform gyrus, the part of the brain that recognises faces, contained all the people she had ever met. In her case, the line ‘I never forget a face’ was quite literally true. It was said she had been examined by brain researchers as she was one of the thirty-odd people in the world who were known to have this ability.
    ‘He was questioned about the Tryvann and Maridalen cases,’ Katrine said.
    ‘Yes, I can recall that vaguely,’ Beate said. ‘But I seem to remember he had alibis for both.’
    ‘One of the people in the house where he lived swore he’d been at home on the nights in question. What I’m wondering is if you took his DNA?’
    ‘I can’t imagine we would do that if he had an alibi. In those days, analysing DNA was a complicated and expensive process. At most it would have been done