Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

the bend where he had found it. The baton. It had been the fourth day after the murder of René Kalsnes and Anton had finally had a day off, but he had got restless and had gone for a walk in the forest on his own to continue the search. After all, murder wasn’t the kind of crime they had every day – or every year – in Søndre Buskerud Police District. He had left the area the search party had gone over with a fine-tooth comb. And that was where it had been, under the spruce trees behind the bend. That was where Anton had taken the decision, the stupid decision that had ruined everything. He decided not to report it. Why? First of all, it was such a long way up to the crime scene in Eikersaga that the baton could hardly have had anything to do with the murder. Later they had asked him why he had been searching there if he had really thought it was too far away to be of any relevance. But at the time he had just thought that a standard police baton would only lead to unnecessary and negative attention for the force. The injuries inflicted on René Kalsnes could have been caused by any heavy instrument or by being tossed around in the car when it had fallen off the precipice into the river forty metres below. And it wasn’t the murder weapon anyway. René Kalsnes had been shot in the face with a 9mm calibre handgun, and that had been the end of the story.
    But Anton had told Laura about the baton a couple of weeks later. And it was her who ultimately persuaded him it should be reported and that it wasn’t up to him to assess how important the find was. So he had done it. He had gone to his boss and told him what he had found. ‘A serious miscalculation,’ the Chief of Police had called it. And the thanks he had received for spending his day off trying to help a murder investigation had been that they dropped him from active service and put him in an office answering a phone. In one fell swoop he had lost everything. For what? No one said it aloud, but René was generally known as a cold, unscrupulous bastard who had cheated friends and strangers alike, a person most considered the world was better off without. But the most mortifying part of the whole business had been that Krimteknisk hadn’t found any traces on the baton to link it with the murder. After three months of being incarcerated in the office Anton had the choice of going insane, resigning or getting himself moved. So he rang his old friend and colleague Gunnar Hagen, and he got him a job with Oslo Police. Professionally, what Gunnar offered him was a step backwards, but at least Anton was among people, and villains, in Oslo, and anything was better than the stale air of Drammen, where they tried to copy Oslo, calling their little station ‘Police HQ’, and even the address sounded plagiarised: Grønland 36 as compared with Oslo’s Grønlandsleiret.
    Anton came over the brow of the hill, and his right foot automatically jumped on the brake when he saw the light. The tyres chewed gravel. Then the car came to a standstill. Rain was hammering down on the car, almost drowning the sound of the engine. A torch twenty metres ahead was lowered. The headlights picked up the reflectors on the orange-and-white tape and the yellow police vest of the person who had just lowered the torch. He waved him closer, and Anton drove on. This was where, behind the barrier, René’s car had driven off. They had used a breakdown truck with a crane and steel cables to drag the wreck up the river to the disused sawmill, where they’d managed to haul it onto land. They’d had to wriggle the body of René Kalsnes free as the engine had been knocked through into the car at hip height.
    Anton pressed the button to open the window. Damp, chilly night air. Great, heavy raindrops hit the edge of the window, sending a fine spray over his neck.
    ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Where . . .?’
    Anton blinked. He wasn’t sure if he had completed the sentence. It was like a tiny jump in time, a bad edit in a film, he didn’t know what had happened, just that he was absent. He looked down at his lap, at the fragments of glass there. He looked up again and discovered that the top part of the window was smashed. Opened his mouth, was about to ask what was going on. Heard something whistle through the air, sensed what it was, wanted to raise his arm, but was too slow. Heard a crunch. Realised it came from his own head, something breaking into pieces. Raised his arm, screamed. Got his