Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

mentally completed the sentence: too tempting to sell as her dole money was no longer enough for her dope consumption.
    ‘There were too many bad memories.’
    ‘What sort of memories?’ Beate asked, and Katrine shivered. Beate was a forensics expert, not an expert in questioning techniques, and she was casting too wide a net, asking for the whole tragedy of her life. And no one painted it with more detail or more slowly than a self-pitying junkie.
    ‘Valentin.’
    Katrine sat up. Perhaps Beate knew what she was doing after all.
    ‘What did he do?’
    She shrugged her shoulders again. ‘He rented the basement flat. He . . . was there.’
    ‘Was there?’
    ‘You don’t know Valentin. He’s different. He . . .’
    She clicked the lighter, in vain. ‘He . . .’ She clicked again and again.
    ‘He was crazy?’ Katrine suggested impatiently.
    ‘No!’ Irja threw the cigarette and lighter down in a fury.
    Katrine cursed herself. Now she was the amateur asking leading questions.
    ‘Everyone says Valentin was crazy! He isn’t ! It’s just that he does something . . .’ She looked through the window down onto the street. Lowered her voice. ‘He does something to the air. It frightens people.’
    ‘Did he hit you?’ Beate asked.
    Also a leading question. Katrine tried to get eye contact with Beate.
    ‘No,’ Irja said. ‘He didn’t hit me. He strangled me. If I contradicted him. He was so strong, he could just put one hand round my throat and squeeze. Hold it there until everything started spinning. It was impossible to remove his hand.’
    Katrine presumed the smile that had spread over Irja’s face was a kind of gallows humour. Until she continued:
    ‘. . . and the strange thing was it made me high. And turned me on.’
    Katrine involuntarily pulled a face. She had read that a shortage of oxygen in the brain could have that effect on some people, but with a sex offender?
    ‘And then you had sex?’ Beate asked, bending down and picking the cigarette up from the floor. Lit it and passed it to Irja. Who quickly poked it between her lips, leaned forward and sucked at the unreliable flame. Let out the smoke again, sank back on the chair and seemed to implode, as though her body were a bag the cigarette had just burnt a hole in.
    ‘He didn’t always want a shag,’ Irja said. ‘Then he would go out. While I sat waiting, hoping he would be back soon.’
    Katrine had to pull herself together so as not to snort or show her contempt in some other way.
    ‘What did he do outside?’
    ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say anything, and I . . .’ Again this shrug of the shoulders. A shrug of the shoulders as an attitude to life, Katrine thought. Resignation as an analgesic. ‘. . . I probably didn’t want to know, I suppose.’
    Beate cleared her throat. ‘You gave him an alibi for the two nights the girls were killed. Maridalen and—’
    ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Irja interrupted.
    ‘But he wasn’t at home with you as you stated in the interviews, was he?’
    ‘I can’t bloody remember. I had my orders, didn’t I?’
    ‘To do what?’
    ‘Valentin told me the night we got together, sort of . . . well, you know, for the first time. The police would ask me these questions whenever anyone was raped, just because he’d been a suspect in a case they hadn’t managed to pin on him. And if he didn’t have an alibi in a new case they’d try and fit him up however innocent he was. He said the police usually do that with people they reckon have got away with other cases. So I had to swear he’d been at home, whatever time they asked about. Said he wanted to save us both loads of trouble and wasted time. Made sense to me.’
    ‘And you really thought he was innocent of all these rapes?’ Katrine asked. ‘Even though you knew he’d raped before.’
    ‘Did I hell!’ Irja shouted, and they heard low grunts coming from the sitting room. ‘I didn’t know anything!’
    Katrine was about to push her when she felt Beate’s hand squeeze her knee under the table.
    ‘Irja,’ Beate said gently, ‘if you didn’t know anything, why did you want to talk to us now?’
    Irja looked at Beate, picking imaginary threads of tobacco off the tip of her white tongue. Reflected. Made a decision.
    ‘He was convicted, wasn’t he? For attempted rape. And when I was cleaning the flat before renting it to someone else, I found these . . . these . . .’ All of a sudden, without any warning her voice seemed to meet a brick