Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

murders of their officers.
    ‘And why can’t we leave it to Oslo Police to do this themselves?’ the head of the Crime Squad in Bergen, Knut Müller-Nilsen, asked her.
    ‘Because they have a crime clearance rate of twenty point eight per cent and we have one of forty point one.’
    Müller-Nilsen had laughed out loud, and Katrine knew the plane ticket was hers.
    The train started with a jolt and the carriage resounded with sighs: of relief, irritation and desperation. She got out at Sandvika and caught a taxi to Eiksmarka.
    It stopped outside Jøssingveien 33. She stepped into the grey slush. Apart from the high fence around the red-brick building there was little about Ila Prison and Detention Centre to betray the fact that it housed some of the country’s worst killers, drug profiteers and sex offenders. Among others. The prison statutes said it was a national institution for male prisoners who . . . ‘needed special help’.
    Help, so that they wouldn’t escape. Help, so that they wouldn’t mutilate others. Help with what sociologists and criminologists for some reason believe is a wish the species as a whole shares: to be good human beings, to make a contribution in the flock, to function in society.
    Katrine had spent enough time in the psychiatric ward in Bergen to know that as a rule even non-criminal deviants had no interest in society’s welfare, and no experience of any company other than their own and their demons, they just wanted to be left in peace. Which did not necessarily imply they wanted to leave others in peace.
    She went through the security channels, showed her ID card and the permit she had received by email and was ushered into the reception room.
    A prison officer waiting for her stood with legs apart, arms crossed and keys rattling. More swagger and feigned self-assurance because the visitor was police, the Brahmin caste in law and order, who receive special treatment from prison officers, security guards and even parking wardens.
    Katrine behaved as she always did in such cases: she was politer and friendlier than her true nature craved.
    ‘Welcome to the sewer,’ the prison warder said, a phrase Katrine was fairly sure he didn’t use with his standard clientele, but which he had prepared carefully in advance, one that signalled the right mixture of black humour and realistic cynicism towards his job.
    But the image was in a sense not inappropriate, Katrine thought, as they walked through the prison corridors. Or perhaps they ought to be called the bowels of the system. The place where the law’s digestive tracts broke down individuals found guilty into a stinking brown mass, which at some point would have to be released. All the doors were closed, the corridors empty.
    ‘Pervs unit,’ the warder said, unlocking an iron door at the end of the corridor.
    ‘So they have their own unit?’
    ‘Yes. If all the sex offenders are in one section there’s less chance of their neighbours doing them in.’
    ‘Doing them in?’ Katrine said, shamming surprise.
    ‘Yes, sex offenders are hated as much here as in the rest of society. If not more. And we have killers here with less self-control than you or me. So on a bad day . . .’ He drew a key across his throat in a dramatic gesture.
    ‘They’re killed ?’ Katrine exclaimed with horror in her voice, wondering for a moment if she had gone too far. But the warden didn’t appear to notice.
    ‘Well, maybe not killed. But they pay. There’s a constant stream of pervs with broken arms and legs. Saying they fell down the stairs or slipped in the shower. Can’t blow the whistle, can they?’ He locked the door behind them and breathed in. ‘Can you smell that? It’s sperm on hot radiators. Dries at once. The smell seems to eat into the metal and it’s impossible to get rid of. Reeks like burnt flesh, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Homunculus,’ Katrine said, inhaling. All she could smell was fresh paint on the walls.
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘In the 1600s people believed sperm contained tiny people, homunculi,’ she said. Seeing the officer’s glower, she guessed that had been a blunder, she should have pretended to be shocked.
    ‘So,’ she hastened to add, ‘Valentin was safely banged up here with others of his ilk?’
    The warder shook his head. ‘Someone started a rumour that he’d raped the girls in Maridalen and Tryvann. And it’s different for inmates who’ve molested underage kids. Even a notorious rapist hates a