Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

Mittet filled up at his place late last night. He thought Mittet was alone. Does that mean . . .?’
    ‘No . . .’
    ‘. . . comment. I reckon your police chief will have to make you carry loaded guns from now on.’
    Beate raised an eyebrow. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘The gun in Mittet’s glove compartment.’ Gjendem bent down and cast a suspicious look at the others, to see if they really hadn’t got this basic information. ‘Empty, even though there was a box of ammo there. If he’d had his gun loaded it might have saved his life.’
    ‘Do you know what, Gjendem?’ Beate said. ‘You can just add ditto marks after the first answer you got. Actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t mention this little meeting to anyone.’
    ‘Why’s that?’
    The engine growled into life.
    ‘Have a nice day, Gjendem.’ Beate began to wind up the window. But not quickly enough to avoid the next question.
    ‘Are you missing you-know-who?’
    Holm let go of the clutch.
    Katrine watched Roger Gjendem shrinking in the mirror.
    But waited until they had passed Liertoppen before she said what everyone was thinking.
    ‘Gjendem’s right.’
    ‘Yes,’ Beate sighed. ‘But he’s no longer available, Katrine.’
    ‘I know, but we have to try!’
    ‘Try what?’ Bjørn Holm asked. ‘Digging up a man declared dead and buried?’
    Katrine stared out at the monotonous trees as they glided along the motorway. Thinking how once she had flown in a police helicopter above here, the most densely populated part of Norway, and how it had struck her that even here there was just so much forest and wilderness. Places people didn’t go. Places to hide. That even here houses were tiny dots in the night, the motorway a thin stripe through the impenetrable darkness. That it was impossible to see everything. That you had to be able to smell. To listen. To know.
    They had almost arrived in Asker, but they had travelled in a silence so impenetrable that when Katrine did answer no one had forgotten the question.
    ‘Yes,’ she said.

16
    KATRINE BRATT CROSSED the open square in front of Chateau Neuf, the headquarters of the Norwegian Student Society. Great parties, cool gigs, heated debates. That was how she remembered the place. And in between they had passed their exams.
    The dress code had changed surprisingly little since she was here: average T-shirts, sagging trousers, nerdy glasses, retro Puffa jackets and retro army jackets, security of style trying to camouflage insecurity, the avarege social climber signalling ‘smart slacker’, the fear of failing socially and professionally. At any rate, though, they were glad not to be the poor buggers on the other side of the square, which was where Katrine was heading.
    Some of them were coming towards her now from the prison-like gate in front of the college grounds: students in black police uniforms that always looked a bit too big however well they fitted. From afar she could pick out the first years; they looked as if they were standing in the middle of the uniform, and the peak of the cap came too far down their foreheads. Either to conceal their insecurity or to avoid meeting the slightly contemptuous or even sympathetic looks from students across the square, the proper students, the free, independent, socially critical, thinking intellectuals. Who were grinning behind long, greasy hair, lying on the steps in the sun, exalted in their supine states, inhaling what they knew the police trainee knew might be a reefer.
    For they were the real youth, the cream of society with a right to make mistakes, those who still had life choices ahead of them, not behind.
    Perhaps it was only Katrine who had felt like this when she was here, who felt the desire to shout that they didn’t know who she was, why she had chosen to become a police officer, what she had decided to do with the rest of her life.
    The old duty officer, Karsten Kaspersen, still stood in the office inside the door, but if he did remember Katrine Bratt, his face didn’t show it as he examined her ID card and gave a quick nod. She walked down the corridor to a lecture room. Passing the door of the crime-scene room which was furnished like a flat with partition walls and had a gallery from where they could watch one another practising searches, finding clues and interpreting the course of events. Then the door to the fitness room, with training mats and the smell of sweat, where they drilled the fine art of wrestling people to