Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

He was wearing a thick coat, but the shivering had got worse. And it wasn’t that cold.
    ‘Were you the first on the scene?’
    The officer nodded without speaking, looked down. Stamped his feet hard on the ground.
    Bloody hell, thought Anton. A child. He swallowed.
    ‘Well, Anton, did 01 send you?’
    Anton looked up. He hadn’t heard the two of them coming, although they emerged from dense thickets. He had seen it before, how forensics officers moved at crime scenes, like somewhat ungainly dancers, bending and twisting, positioning their feet, as though they were astronauts on the moon. Or perhaps it was the white overalls drawing that association.
    ‘Yes, I had to take over from someone,’ Anton said to the woman. He knew who she was, everyone did. Beate Lønn, the head of Krimteknisk, who had a reputation as a kind of Rain Woman because of her ability to recognise faces, which was often employed to identify bank robbers on grainy disjointed CCTV footage. They said she could recognise even well-disguised robbers if they were ex-cons and she had a database of several thousand mugshots stored in her fair-haired little head. So this murder had to be special, otherwise they wouldn’t send out bosses in the middle of the night.
    Beside the petite woman’s pale, almost transparent face her colleague’s appeared to be flushed. His freckled cheeks were adorned with two bright red mutton-chop sideburns. His eyes bulged slightly, as though there was too much pressure inside, which lent him a somewhat gawping expression. But what attracted most attention was the hat which appeared when he removed his white hood: a big Rasta hat in Jamaican colours, green, yellow and black.
    Beate Lønn patted the shoulder of the trembling officer. ‘Off you go then, Simon. Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I suggest a strong drink and then bed.’
    The officer nodded, and three seconds later he was swallowed up by the darkness.
    ‘Is it gruesome?’ Anton asked.
    ‘No coffee?’ Rasta Hat asked, opening a Thermos. These two words told Anton he wasn’t from Oslo. From the provinces, that was clear, but like most Norwegians from Østland Anton had no idea about, and no particular interest in, dialects.
    ‘No,’ Anton said.
    ‘It’s always a good idea to take your own coffee to a crime scene,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘You never know how long you’ll have to stay.’
    ‘Come on, Bjørn. He’s worked on murder investigations before,’ said Beate Lønn. ‘Drammen, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Right,’ Anton said, rocking on his heels. Used to work on murder investigations, more accurately. And unfortunately he had a suspicion as to why Beate Lønn could remember him. He breathed in. ‘Who found the body?’
    ‘He did,’ said Beate Lønn, nodding in the direction of the police officer’s car. They could hear the engine revving.
    ‘I mean who tipped us off?’
    ‘The wife rang when he didn’t come back from a bike ride,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘Should have been away for an hour, and she was worried about his heart. He was using his satnav, which has a transmitter, so they found him quickly.’
    Anton nodded slowly, picturing it all. Two policemen ringing the doorbell, a man and a woman. The officers coughing, looking at the wife with that grave expression which is meant to tell her what they will soon repeat in words, impossible words. The wife’s face, resistant, not wanting to hear, but then it seems to turn inside out, shows her inner emotions, shows everything.
    The image of Laura, his wife, appeared.
    An ambulance drew up, without a siren or a blue light.
    It slowly dawned on Anton. The fast reaction to a missing-person message. The rapidly traced satnav signal. The big turnout. Overtime. The colleague who was so shaken he had to be sent home.
    ‘It’s a policeman,’ he whispered.
    ‘I’d guess the temperature here is one and a half degrees lower than in town,’ Beate Lønn said, pulling up a number on her mobile phone.
    ‘Agreed,’ Rasta Hat said, swigging a mouthful from the Thermos cup. ‘No skin discoloration yet. So somewhere between eight and ten?’
    ‘A policeman,’ Anton repeated. ‘That’s why they’re all here, isn’t it?’
    ‘Katrine?’ Beate said. ‘Can you check something for me? It’s about the Sandra Tveten case. Right.’
    ‘Goddamn!’ Rasta Hat exclaimed. ‘I asked them to wait until the body bags had come.’
    Anton turned and saw two men struggling through the forest with a stretcher