Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

ceiling there was an inset hatch fan. But as it was only inset it was unlikely it could have caused on its own what she was fairly certain was a movement in the air.
    She listened.
    Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just the throbbing of blood in her ears.
    She concentrated on the hard piece of chewing gum again. Cut off a tiny piece with the Swiss army knife she had brought along. And froze.
    It came from somewhere by the door, so far away the ear hadn’t been able to identify what it was. The rattle of a key? The banging of a counter? It was probably nothing; perhaps you just get strange sounds in a large building.
    Katrine switched off the torch and held her breath. Blinked into the darkness as though that might help her to see. It was quiet. As quiet as the . . .
    She tried not to continue that train of thought.
    Instead she tried another train of thought, one that would slow her heart down: what was actually the worst that could happen? She was caught exceeding the call of duty and they were all reprimanded? Perhaps she would be sent home to Bergen? Tedious, but not exactly a reason for her heart to pound like a pneumatic drill inside her chest.
    She waited, listening.
    Nothing.
    Still nothing.
    And that was when she realised. Pitch black. If someone had really been there they would of course have switched on the light. She grinned at her own stupidity, felt her heart slowing down. Switched the torch on, put the evidence back in the box and replaced it. Made sure it was exactly in line with the other boxes, and walked towards the exit. A thought flashed through her mind. A stray thought that caught her by surprise. She was looking forward to ringing him. Because that was what she was going to do. Ring him and tell him what she had done. She came to an abrupt halt.
    The torch beam had caught something.
    Her first instinct was to keep walking; a small, cowardly voice that told her to get out as fast as she could.
    But she shone the light back.
    An unevenness.
    One of the boxes wasn’t in line.
    She went closer. Shone the torch on the label.
    Harry thought he heard a door slam. He pulled out his earphones on the sound of Bon Iver’s new recording, which so far had lived up to the hype. Listened. Nothing.
    ‘Arnold?’ he called.
    No answer. He was used to having this wing of PHS to himself so late in the evening. Of course it could have been a member of the cleaning staff who had forgotten something. But a quick look at his watch confirmed it was not evening but night. Harry glanced to the left of the pile of uncorrected assignments on his desk. Most students had printed them on the rough recycled paper they used at the library, and it was so dusty that Harry went home with nicotine-yellow fingertips, which Rakel told him to wash before he was allowed to touch her.
    He looked out of the window. The moon hung in the sky, big and round, reflecting on the windows and the roofs of the blocks towards Kirkeveien and Majorstuen. To the south he saw the green, shimmering silhouette of the KPMG financial services building beside the Colosseum cinema. It wasn’t magnificent, beautiful or even picturesque. But it was the town he had lived and worked in almost all his life. There were some mornings in Hong Kong when he had put a bit of opium in a cigarette and gone up onto the roof of Chungking to see the day break. Sitting there in the darkness wishing the town, which would soon come to life, were his. A modest town with low, self-effacing buildings instead of these intimidating steel steeples. Wishing he could see Oslo’s soft, green ridges instead of Hong Kong’s brutally steep, black mountainsides. Hear the sound of a tram clanking and braking or the Denmark ferry entering the fjord and whistling, elated that today too it had succeeded in crossing the sea between Frederikshavn and Oslo.
    Harry looked down at the paper centred in the beam from the reading lamp, the only light in the room. He could, of course, have taken everything with him to Holmenkollveien. Coffee, a babbling radio, the fragrance of fresh trees through an open window. But he had decided not to mull over why he preferred to sit here alone instead of there alone. Presumably because he had an inkling what the response would be. That there he wasn’t alone. Not quite. The black timber fortress with three locks on the door and sprinklers in front of all the windows still couldn’t keep the monsters out. The ghosts were sitting in the dark corners watching