Harry Hole Oslo Sequence 10 - Police

murder of Gusto Hanssen or anyone else.’
    ‘What do you mean? Oleg has been acquitted of that murder. Are you saying he had something to do with it after all?’
    ‘No, Rakel.’
    ‘So what are you telling me, Harry?’
    ‘Are you sure you want to know, Rakel? Really?’
    She looked at Harry hard without answering.
    Harry waited. Stared out of the window. Saw the silhouette of the ridge surrounding this quiet, secure town where nothing happened. Which was actually the edge of a dormant volcano, where the town had been built. Depending on how you looked at it. Depending on what you knew.
    ‘No,’ she whispered in the darkness. Taking his hand and putting it to her cheek.
    It was easy to live a happy life of ignorance, Harry thought. It was just a question of repression. Repressing an Odessa lying, or not lying, locked in a cupboard. Repressing three murders that were not your responsibility. Repressing the image of the hate-filled eyes of a rejected student with a red dress pulled up over her waist. Wasn’t it?
    Harry stubbed out his cigarette.
    ‘Shall we go to bed?’
    At three o’clock in the morning Harry woke with a start.
    He had dreamt about her again. He had gone into a room and found her there. She was lying on a filthy mattress on the floor, cutting up the red dress she was wearing with a big pair of scissors. Beside her was a portable TV broadcasting her and what she was doing with a two-second delay. Harry looked around, but he couldn’t see a camera anywhere. Then she placed one shiny blade against the inside of her white thigh, opened her legs and whispered:
    ‘Don’t do it.’
    And Harry fumbled behind him and found the handle of the door that had closed after him, but it was locked. Then he discovered that he was naked and was moving towards her.
    ‘Don’t do it.’
    It sounded like an echo from the TV. A two-second delay.
    ‘I just have to get the key,’ he said, but it sounded like he was talking underwater, and he knew she hadn’t heard. Then she put two, three, four fingers inside her vagina, and he stared as the whole of the slim hand slipped inside. He took another step towards her. Then the hand came back out holding a gun. Pointed at him. A shiny, dripping gun with a cable leading back inside her like an umbilical cord. ‘Don’t do it,’ she had said, but he was already kneeling in front of her, leaning forward. Felt the gun, cool and pleasant, against his forehead. And then he whispered:
    ‘Do it.’

24
    THE TENNIS COURTS were unoccupied as Bjørn Holm’s Volvo Amazon pulled up in front of Frogner Park and the police car by the main gate.
    Beate jumped out, wide awake despite having slept hardly a wink. It was hard to sleep in a stranger’s bed. Yes, she still thought of him as a stranger. She knew his body, but his mind, habits and thinking were still a mystery she wondered whether she had enough patience or interest to explore. So every morning she woke in his bed, she asked herself the question: are you going to carry on?
    Two plain-clothes policemen leaning back against the car straightened and came to meet her. She saw two uniformed officers sitting in the front seats of the car and another man in the back.
    ‘Is that him?’ she asked, feeling her heart beat wonderfully fast.
    ‘Yes,’ said one of the plain-clothes men. ‘Great police sketch. He’s the spitting image.’
    ‘And the tram?’
    ‘We sent it on, it was packed to the brim. But we took one woman’s details as there was a bit of drama.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘He tried to make a run for it when we showed our ID and said he had to come along with us. He leapt into the aisle and grabbed a pram to block our way. Yelled for the tram to stop.’
    ‘A pram?’
    ‘Yes, you can’t believe it, can you? Bloody criminal.’
    ‘I’m afraid he’s committed worse.’
    ‘I mean, taking a pram on the tram during the morning rush hour.’
    ‘OK. But then you arrested him?’
    ‘The baby’s mother screamed and held onto his arm so that I could get a punch in.’ The policeman showed the bleeding knuckles on his right fist. ‘No point brandishing a shooter when this works, is there?’
    ‘Good,’ Beate said, trying to sound as if she meant it. She bent down and looked into the back of the car, but all she could see was a silhouette beneath the reflection of herself in the morning sun. ‘Can someone lower the window?’
    She tried to breathe calmly as the window slid soundlessly down.
    She recognised him at