Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (2 page)

‘No, you don’t,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘But you want to. You don’t dare any longer.’

‘This has nothing to do with you and me.’

She could hear the irritation creeping into his voice at the same time as his hand, the strong but gentle hand, slid down over her spine and inside the waistband of her skirt and tights. They were like a pair of practised dancers who knew their partner’s every move, step, breath, rhythm. First, the white lovemaking. The good one. Then the black one. The pain.

His hand caressed her coat, searching for her nipple under the thick material. He was eternally fascinated by her nipples; he always returned to them. Perhaps it was because he didn’t have any himself.

‘Did you park in front of the garage?’ he asked with a firm tweak.

She nodded and felt the pain shoot into her head like a dart of pleasure. Her sex had already opened for the fingers which would soon be there. ‘My son’s waiting in the car.’

His hand came to an abrupt halt.

‘He knows nothing,’ she groaned, sensing his hand falter.

‘And your husband? Where’s he now?’

‘Where do you think? At work of course.’

Now it was she who sounded irritated. Both because he had brought her husband into the conversation and it was difficult for her to say anything at all about him without getting irritated, and because her body needed him, quickly. Sara Kvinesland opened his flies.

‘Don’t …’ he began, grabbing her around the wrist. She slapped him hard with her other hand. He looked at her in amazement as a red flush spread across his cheek. She smiled, grabbed his thick black hair and pulled his face down to hers.

‘You can go,’ she hissed. ‘But first you have to shag me. Is that understood?’

She felt his breath against her face. It was coming in hefty gasps now. Again she slapped him with her free hand, and his dick was growing in her other.

He thrust, a bit harder each time, but it was over now. She was numb, the magic was gone, the tension had dissolved and all that was left was despair. She was losing him. Now, as she lay there, she had lost him. All the years she had yearned, all the tears she had cried, the desperate things he had made her do. Without giving anything back. Except for one thing.

He was standing at the foot of the bed and taking her with closed eyes. Sara stared at his chest. To begin with, she had thought it strange, but after a while she had begun to like the sight of unbroken white skin over his pectoral muscles. It reminded her of old statues where the nipples had been omitted out of consideration for public modesty.

His groans were getting louder. She knew that soon he would let out a furious roar. She had loved that roar. The ever-surprised, ecstatic, almost pained expression as though the orgasm surpassed his wildest expectation each and every time. Now she was waiting for the final roar, a bellowing farewell to his freezing box of a bedroom divested of pictures,
curtains and carpets. Then he would get dressed and travel to a different part of the country where he said he had been offered a job he couldn’t say no to. But he could say no to this. This. And still he would roar with pleasure.

She closed her eyes. But the roar didn’t come. He had stopped.

‘What’s up?’ she asked, opening her eyes. His features were distorted alright. But not with pleasure.

‘A face,’ he whispered.

She flinched. ‘Where?’

‘Outside the window.’

The window was at the other end of the bed, right above her head. She heaved herself round, felt him slip out, already limp. From where she was lying, the window above her head was set too high in the wall for her to see out. And too high for anyone to stand outside and peer in. Because of the already dwindling daylight all she could see was the double-exposed reflection of the ceiling lamp.

‘You saw yourself,’ she said, almost pleading.

‘That was what I thought at first,’ he said, still staring at the window.

Sara pulled herself up onto her knees. Got up and looked into the garden. And there, there was the face.

She laughed out loud with relief. The face was white, with eyes and a mouth made with black pebbles, probably from the drive. And arms made from twigs off the apple trees.

‘Heavens,’ she gasped. ‘It’s only a snowman.’

Then her laugh turned into tears; she sobbed helplessly until she felt his arms around her.

‘I have to go now,’ she sobbed.

‘Stay for a little while longer,’ he said.

She stayed for a little while longer.

As Sara approached the garage she saw that almost forty minutes had passed.

He had promised to ring now and then. He had always been a good liar, and for once she was glad. Even before she got to the car she saw her son’s pale face staring at her from the back seat. She pulled at the
door and found to her astonishment that it was locked. She peered in at him through steamed-up windows. He only opened it when she knocked on the glass.

She sat in the driver’s seat. The radio was silent and it was ice-cold inside. The key was on the passenger seat. She turned to him. Her son was pale, and his lower lip was trembling.

‘Is there anything wrong?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I saw him.’

There was a thin, shrill tone of horror in his voice that she couldn’t recall hearing since he was a little boy jammed between them on the sofa in front of the TV with his hands over his eyes. And now his voice was changing, he had stopped giving her a goodnight hug and had started being interested in car engines and girls. And one day he would get in a car with one of them and also leave her.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, inserting the key in the ignition and turning.

‘The snowman …’

There was no response from the engine and panic gripped her without warning. Quite what she was afraid of, she didn’t know. She stared out of the windscreen and turned the key again. Had the battery died?

‘And what did the snowman look like?’ she asked, pressing the accelerator to the floor and desperately turning the key so hard it felt as though she would break it. He answered, but his answer was drowned by the roar of the engine.

Sara put the car in gear and let go of the clutch as if in a sudden hurry to get away. The wheels spun in the soft, slushy snow. She accelerated harder, but the rear of the car slid sideways. By then the tyres had spun their way down to the tarmac and they lurched forward and skidded into the road.

‘Dad’s waiting for us,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to get a move on.’

She switched on the radio and turned up the volume to fill the cold interior with sounds other than her own voice. A newsreader said for the hundredth time today that last night Ronald Reagan had beaten Jimmy Carter in the American election.

The boy said something again, and she glanced in the mirror.

‘What did you say?’ she said in a loud voice.

He repeated it, but still she couldn’t hear. She turned down the radio while heading towards the main road and the river, which ran through the countryside like two mournful black stripes. And gave a start when she realised he had leaned forward between the two front seats. His voice sounded like a dry whisper in her ear. As if it was important no one else heard them.

‘We’re going to die.’

H
ARRY
H
OLE
GAVE A START AND OPENED HIS EYES WIDE
. It was freezing cold, and from the dark came the sound of the voice that had awoken him. It announced that the American people would decide today whether their President for the next four years would again be George Walker Bush. November. Harry was thinking they were definitely heading for dark times. He threw off the duvet and placed his feet on the floor. The lino was so cold it stung. He left the news blaring from the radio alarm clock and went into the bathroom. Regarded himself in the mirror. November there, too: drawn, greyish pale and overcast. As usual his eyes were bloodshot, and the pores on his nose large, black craters. The bags under his eyes with their light blue, alcohol-washed irises would disappear after his face had been ministered to with hot water, a towel and breakfast. He assumed they would, that is. Harry was not sure exactly how his face would fare during the day now that he had turned forty. Whether the wrinkles would be ironed out and peace would fall over the hunted expression he woke with after nights of being ridden by nightmares. Which was most nights. For he avoided mirrors after he left his small, spartan flat in Sofies gate to become Inspector Hole of the Crime Squad at Oslo Police HQ. Then he stared into others’ faces to find their pain, their Achilles heels, their
nightmares, motives and reasons for self-deception, listening to their fatiguing lies and trying to find a meaning in what he did: imprisoning people who were already imprisoned inside themselves. Prisons of hatred and self-contempt he recognised all too well. He ran a hand over the shorn bristles of blond hair that grew precisely 192 centimetres above the frozen soles of his feet. His collarbone stood out under his skin like a clothes hanger. He had trained a lot since the last case. In a frenzy, some maintained. As well as cycling he had started to lift weights in the fitness room in the bowels of Police HQ. He liked the burning pain, and the repressed thoughts. Nevertheless, he just became leaner. The fat disappeared and his muscles were layered between skin and bone. And while before he had been broad-shouldered and what Rakel called a natural athlete, now he had begun to resemble the photograph he had once seen of a skinned polar bear: a muscular, but shockingly gaunt, predator. Quite simply, he was fading away. Not that it actually mattered. Harry sighed. November. It was going to get even darker.

He went into the kitchen, drank a glass of water to relieve his headache and peered through the window in surprise. The roof of the block on the other side of Sofies gate was white and the bright reflected light made his eyes smart. The first snow had come in the night. He thought of the letter. He did occasionally get such letters, but this one had been special. It had mentioned Toowoomba.

On the radio a nature programme had started and an enthusiastic voice was waxing lyrical about seals. ‘Every summer Berhaus seals collect in the Bering Straits to mate. Since the males are in the majority, the competition for females is so fierce that those males which have managed to procure themselves a female will stick with her during the whole of the breeding period. The male will take care of his partner until the young have been born and can cope by themselves. Not out of love for the female, but out of love for his own genes and hereditary material. Darwinist theory would say that it is natural selection that makes the Berhaus seal monogamous, not morality.’

I wonder, thought Harry.

The voice on the radio was almost hitting falsetto with excitement.

‘But before the seals leave the Bering Straits to search for food in the open sea, the male will try to kill the female. Why? Because a female Berhaus seal will never mate twice with the same male! For her this is about spreading the biological risk of hereditary material, just like on the stock market. For her it makes biological sense to be promiscuous, and the male knows this. By taking her life he wants to stop the young of other seals competing with his own progeny for the same food.’

‘We’re entering Darwinian waters here, so why don’t humans think like the seal?’ another voice said.

‘But we do, don’t we! Our society is not as monogamous as it appears, and never has been. A Swedish study showed recently that between fifteen and twenty per cent of all children born have a different father from the one they – and for that matter the postulated fathers – think. Twenty per cent! That’s every fifth child! Living a lie. And ensuring biological diversity.’

Harry fiddled with the frequency dial to find some tolerable music. He stopped at an ageing Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Desperado’.

There was a firm knock on the door.

Harry went into the bedroom, put on his jeans, returned to the hall and opened up.

‘Harry Hole?’ The man outside was wearing a blue boiler suit and looking at Harry through thick lenses. His eyes were as clear as a child’s.

Harry nodded.

‘Have you got fungus?’ The man asked the question with a straight face. A long wisp of hair traversed his forehead and was stuck there. Under his arm he was holding a plastic clipboard with a densely printed sheet.

Harry waited for him to explain further, but nothing was forthcoming. Just this clear, open expression.

‘That,’ Harry said, ‘strictly speaking, is a private matter.’

The man gave the suggestion of a smile in response to a joke he was heartily sick of hearing. ‘Fungus in your flat. Mould.’

‘I have no reason to believe that I have,’ said Harry.

‘That’s the thing about mould. It seldom gives anyone any reason to
believe that it’s there.’ The man sucked at his teeth and rocked on his heels.

‘But?’ Harry said at length.

‘But it is.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Your neighbour’s got it.’

‘Uh-huh? And you think it may have spread?’

‘Mould doesn’t spread. Dry rot does.’

‘So then …?’

‘There’s a construction fault with the ventilation along the walls in this block. It allows dry rot to flourish. May I take a peep at your kitchen?’

Harry stepped to the side. The man powered into the kitchen where at once he pressed an orange hairdryer-like apparatus against the wall. It squeaked twice.

‘Damp detector,’ the man said, studying something that was obviously an indicator. ‘Just as I thought. Sure you haven’t seen or smelt anything suspicious?’

Harry didn’t have a clear perception of what that might be.

‘A coating like on stale bread,’ the man said. ‘Mouldy smell.’

Harry shook his head.

‘Have you had sore eyes?’ the man asked. ‘Felt tired? Had headaches?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Of course. For as long as I can remember.’

‘Do you mean for as long as you’ve lived here?’

‘Maybe. Listen …’

But the man wasn’t listening; he’d taken a knife from his belt. Harry stood back and watched the hand holding the knife being raised and thrust with great force. There was a sound like a groan as the knife went through the plasterboard behind the wallpaper. The man pulled out the knife, thrust it in again and bent back a powdery piece of plaster, leaving a large gap in the wall. Then he whipped out a small penlight and shone it into the cavity. A deep frown developed behind his oversized glasses. Then he stuck his nose deep into the cavity and sniffed.