Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

what?’
    She raised one foot and sent Bjørn a narrow-eyed look. ‘The crunching noise.’
    Beate laughed her surprisingly light laugh while, with a deep sigh, the Skreia native took out his notebook and crouched down again.
    ‘Well, I’ll be . . .’
    ‘What?’
    ‘It’s not crumbs,’ he said, leaning forward and peering under the table. ‘Old chewing gum. The rest is stuck under here. It’s probably so desiccated that bits crumble off.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s the murderer’s?’ Ståle suggested with a yawn. ‘People stick chewing gum under their seats in cinemas and on buses, but not under their own dining-room table.’
    ‘Interesting theory,’ Bjørn said, holding up a piece to the window. ‘I reckon for months we could have found DNA in the spit of a lump like that. But this is all dried out.’
    ‘Come on, Sherlock,’ Katrine grinned. ‘Chew it and tell us what brand—’
    ‘That’s enough, you lot,’ Beate interrupted. ‘Out now.’
    Arnold Folkestad set down his teacup and looked at Harry. He scratched his red beard. Harry had seen him plucking spruce needles from it when he came to work, after cycling from the little house he had somewhere in the forest that was still so bizarrely close to the city centre. But Arnold had made it clear that colleagues who pigeonholed him as a progressive environmental activist because of his long beard, bicycle and house in the forest were wrong. He was only a tight-fisted weirdo who liked the silence.
    ‘You’d better tell her to rein herself in,’ Harry said. ‘It would seem more . . .’ He couldn’t find the word. Didn’t know if it existed. If so, it was somewhere between ‘correct’ and ‘less embarrassing for all concerned’.
    ‘Is Harry Hole frightened of a little girl in the front row who’s got a bit of a crush on her lecturer?’ Arnold Folkestad chuckled.
    ‘More correct and less embarrassing for all concerned.’
    ‘You’re going to have to sort this out yourself, Harry. Look, there she is . . .’ Arnold nodded towards the square outside the canteen window. Silje Gravseng was standing on her own a few metres from a throng of students chatting and laughing. She looked up at the sky, followed something with her eyes.
    Harry sighed. ‘Perhaps I should wait a bit. Statistically speaking, I suppose these teacher infatuations are short-lived in a hundred per cent of cases.’
    ‘Speaking of stats,’ Folkestad said, ‘I’ve heard they’re claiming that that patient Hagen had under guard at the Rikshospital died of natural causes.’
    ‘So they say.’
    ‘The FBI ran some statistics on that. They examined all the cases where the prosecution’s key witness had died in the period between the official summons as a witness and the start of the trial. In serious trials, where the accused faced more than ten years’ prison, witnesses died of so-called unnatural causes in seventy-eight per cent of cases. The stats led to several witnesses being given a second post-mortem, after which the figure rose to ninety-four.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘Ninety-four is high, don’t you think?’
    Harry stared out at the square. Silje was still looking at the sky. The sun was shining on her upturned face.
    He cursed under his breath and drank the rest of his coffee.
    Gunnar Hagen, balancing on one of the spindle-back chairs in Bellman’s office, looked up in surprise at the Chief of Police. Hagen had just told him about the small working group he had set up, in direct conflict with the Chief’s instructions, and the plan to set a trap in Berg. The surprise was caused by the fact that the Chief’s unusually good mood had not appeared to be upset by the news.
    ‘Excellent,’ Bellman exclaimed, clapping his hands. ‘Finally something proactive. May I pass on the plan and the map, so that we can get cracking?’
    ‘We? Do you mean that you personally—?’
    ‘Yes, I think it would be only natural for me to lead this, Gunnar. Such a big operation involves top-level decisions—’
    ‘There’s just one house and one man who—’
    ‘Then it’s right that I, as the most senior ranking officer, involve myself when there is so much at stake. And it is of paramount importance that the operation is kept secret. Do you understand?’
    Hagen nodded. Secret if it doesn’t bear fruit, he thought. If, on the other hand, it leads to success and an arrest, publicity will be of paramount importance, and Mikael Bellman can take the credit and tell the press