Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

between them. A pair of cycling shoes poked out from under the blanket.
    ‘He knew him,’ Anton said. ‘That was why he was shaking like that, wasn’t it?’
    ‘He said they worked together in Økern before Vennesla started in Kripos,’ Rasta Hat said.
    ‘Have you got the date to hand?’ Lønn said on the phone.
    There was a scream.
    ‘What the . . .?’ Rasta Hat said.
    Anton turned. One of the stretcher-bearers had slipped into the ditch beside the path. The beam from his torch swept over the stretcher. Over the blanket that had fallen off. Over . . . over what? Anton stared. Was that a head? The thing on top of what was indubitably the human body, had it really been a head? In the years Anton had worked at Crime Squad, before the Great Mistake, he had seen a great many bodies, but nothing like this. The hourglass-shaped substance reminded Anton of the family’s Sunday breakfast, of Laura’s lightly boiled egg with the remains of the shell still hanging from it, cracked with the yellow yolk running out and drying on the outside of the stiff but still soft egg white. Could that really be a . . . head ?
    Anton stood blinking in the darkness as he watched the rear lights of the ambulance disappearing. And he realised that these were replays, he had seen all this before. The white figures, the Thermos, the feet protruding from under the blanket, he had just seen this at the Rikshospital. As though they all had been portents. The head . . .
    ‘Thanks, Katrine,’ Beate said.
    ‘What was that about?’ Rasta Hat asked.
    ‘I worked with Erlend on this very spot,’ Beate said.
    ‘Here?’ Rasta Hat queried.
    ‘Right here. He was in charge of the investigation. Must have been ten years ago. Sandra Tveten. Raped and killed. Just a child.’
    Anton swallowed. Child. Replays.
    ‘I remember that case,’ Rasta Hat said. ‘Fate’s a funny thing, dying at your own crime scene. Imagine. Wasn’t the Sandra Tveten case also in the autumn?’
    Beate nodded slowly.
    Anton blinked, and kept blinking. He had seen a body like it.
    ‘Goddamn!’ Rasta Hat cursed under his breath. ‘You don’t mean to say that . . .?’
    Beate Lønn took the cup of coffee from him. Took a sip. Passed it back. Nodded.
    ‘Oh shit,’ Rasta Hat said under his breath.

3
    ‘DÉJÀ VU,’ STÅLE Aune said, looking at the packed snowdrift across Sporveisgata where the December-morning gloom was receding to allow a short day. Then he turned back to the man in the chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Déjà vu is the feeling we’ve seen something before. We don’t know what it is.’
    By ‘we’ he meant psychologists in general, not only therapists.
    ‘Some psychologists believe that when we’re tired, information sent to the conscious part of the brain is delayed, so that when it surfaces it’s already been in the subconscious for a while. And that’s why we experience it as recognition. The tiredness explains why déjà vu usually occurs at the end of a working week. But that’s about all research has to contribute. Friday is déjà vu day.’
    Ståle Aune had perhaps been hoping for a smile. Not because smiling meant anything at all in his professional efforts to get people to repair themselves, but because the room required it.
    ‘I don’t mean déjà vu in that sense,’ the patient said. The client. The customer. The person who in roughly twenty minutes would be paying in reception and helping to cover the overheads of the five psychologists who each had their own practice in the featureless, yet old-fashioned four-storey building in Sporveisgata which ran through Oslo’s medium-elegant West End district. Ståle Aune sneaked a glimpse of the clock on the wall behind the man’s head. Eighteen minutes.
    ‘It’s more like a dream I have again and again.’
    ‘ Like a dream?’ Ståle Aune’s eyes scanned the newspaper he had lying open in a desk drawer so that it couldn’t be seen by the patient. Most therapists nowadays sat on a chair opposite the patient, and when the massive desk had been manoeuvred into Ståle’s office, grinning colleagues had confronted him with the modern therapy theory that it was best to have as few barriers as possible between themselves and the patient. Ståle’s retort had been swift: ‘Best for the patient maybe.’
    ‘It’s a dream. I dream.’
    ‘It’s common,’ Aune said, passing his hand over his mouth to conceal a yawn. He reflected longingly on the dear old sofa that