Nemesis (24 page)

‘Could you please put the back of your seat into an upright position?’

‘The back of my seat?’ I ask, perplexed.

‘We’ll be landing shortly, sir.’ She smiles again and disappears.

I rub the sleep out of my eyes and everything comes back to me. The hold-up. The escape. The suitcase with the plane ticket ready at the chalet. The text message from the Prince that the coast was clear. But still the little prickles of nervousness as I showed my passport while checking in at Gardemoen. Take-off. Everything had gone according to plan.

I look out of the window. I am obviously still not quite out of dreamland. For a brief moment I seem to be flying above the stars. Then I realise it is the lights from the town and start thinking about the hire car I have booked. Should I sleep in a hotel in the huge, steaming, stinking town and drive south tomorrow? No, tomorrow I will be just as tired, from jet lag. Best to get there as soon as possible. The place I’m going is better than its reputation. There are even a couple of Norwegians there to talk to. Waking up to sun, sea and a better life. That’s the plan. My plan anyway.

I hold onto the drink I managed to save before the stewardess folded my table. So why don’t I trust the plan?

The drone of the engine rises and falls. I can feel I’m on the way down now. I close my eyes and instinctively breathe in, knowing what is to come. Her. She is wearing the same dress as when I first saw her. My God, I already long for her. The fact that the longing could not have been satisfied, even if she had lived, changes nothing. Everything about her was impossible. Virtue and passion. Hair which seemed to absorb all light, but instead shone like gold. The defiant laughter as tears rolled down her cheeks. The hate-filled eyes when I entered her. Her false declarations of love and her genuine pleasure when I went to her with threadbare excuses after broken agreements. Which were repeated as I lay beside her in bed with my head in the imprint of another. That’s a long time ago now. Millions of years. I squeeze my eyes shut so as not to see the continuation. The shot I fired into her. Her pupils which widened slowly like a black rose; the blood trickling out, falling and landing with a weary sigh; the breaking of her neck and her head tipping back. And now the woman I love is dead. As simple as that. But it still doesn’t make sense. That’s what is so beautiful. So simple and beautiful you can hardly live with it. The pressure in the cabin falls and tensions increase. From the inside. An invisible force pressing on my eardrums and the soft brain. Something tells me this is how it will happen. No one will find me, no one will wrest my secret from me, but the plan will explode anyway. From inside.

H
ARRY WAS AWOKEN BY THE RADIO ALARM CLOCK AND THE
news. The bombing had been intensified. It sounded like a reprise.

He tried to find a reason for getting up.

The voice on the radio said that since 1975 the average weight of a Norwegian man and woman had increased by thirteen and nine kilos respectively. Harry closed his eyes and was reminded of something Aune had said. Escapism has an undeservedly bad reputation. Sleep came. The same warm, sweet feeling as when he was small and lay in bed with the door open, listening to his father walking around the house switching off all the lights – one by one – and for every light that was switched off the darkness outside his door deepened.

‘After the violent robberies in Oslo over recent weeks bank employees have called for armed guards in the city centre’s most vulnerable banks. Yesterday’s hold-up of the Den norske Bank branch in Grønlandsleiret is the latest in a series of armed robberies, for which police suspect the man dubbed the Expeditor to be responsible. It is the same person who shot and killed . . .’

Harry placed his feet on the cold linoleum. The face in the bathroom mirror was late Picasso.

Beate was talking on the telephone. She shook her head when she saw Harry in the office doorway. He nodded and was about to go, but she waved him back.

‘Thank you for your help anyway,’ she said and put down the receiver.

‘Am I disturbing?’ Harry asked, putting a cup of coffee in front of her.

‘No, I shook my head to say there was no luck with Focus. He was the last name on the list. Of all the men we know were at Focus at the time in question, only one vaguely remembers seeing a man in a boiler suit. And he wasn’t even sure whether he had seen him in the changing room or not.’

‘Mm.’ Harry took a seat and looked around. Her office was just as tidy as he had expected. Apart from a familiar potted plant he couldn’t name on the windowsill, her room was as free of ornaments as his own. On her desk he noticed the back of a framed photograph. He had an idea who it might be.

‘Have you only talked to men?’ he asked.

‘The theory is that he went into the men’s changing room to change, isn’t it?’

‘Then he walked the streets of Morristown like any normal person, yes. Anything new on yesterday’s hold-up in Grønlandsleiret?’

‘Depends on what you mean by new. It’s more a carbon copy, I would say. Same clothes and AG3. Used a hostage to speak. Took money from the ATM, all over in one minute and fifty seconds. No clues. In short . . .’

‘The Expeditor,’ Harry said.

‘What’s this?’ Beate raised the cup and peered into it.

‘Cappuccino. Regards from Halvorsen.’

‘Coffee with milk?’ She wrinkled her nose.

‘Let me guess. Your dad said he never trusted anyone who didn’t drink black coffee?’

He regretted it immediately he saw Beate’s expression of surprise.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to . . . that was stupid of me.’

‘So what do we do now?’ Beate hastened to ask while fidgeting with the coffee-cup handle. ‘We’re back to square one.’

Harry collapsed in the chair and contemplated the toes of his boots. ‘Go to prison.’

‘What?’

‘Go straight to prison.’ He sat up. ‘Do not pass GO. Do not collect two thousand kroner.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Monopoly cards. That’s what we have left. Trying our luck. In prison. Have you got the number of Botsen prison?’

‘This is a waste of time,’ Beate said.

Her voice echoed between the walls of the Culvert as she jogged along beside Harry.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Like ninety per cent of all investigation work.’

‘I’ve read all the reports and the interview tapescripts that have ever been done. He never says anything. Except for a load of irrelevant philosophical rubbish.’

Harry pressed the intercom button beside the grey iron door at the end of the tunnel.

‘Have you heard the old adage about looking for what you’ve lost in the light? I suppose it is meant to illustrate human foolishness. To me it makes good sense.’

‘Hold your IDs up to the camera,’ said the loudspeaker.

‘What’s the point of me coming if you’re going to talk to him on your own?’ Beate asked, nipping in behind Harry.

‘It’s a method Ellen and I used when we questioned suspects. One of us always ran the interview while the other just sat listening. If the interview was getting into a rut, we had a break. If I had done the talking, I would go out and Ellen would start up about other mundane things. Like giving up smoking or everything on TV was crap nowadays. Or she noticed how much she paid in rent since she
had split up with her bloke. After they had chatted for a while, I would poke my head in and say something had cropped up and she would have to take over.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Every time.’

They went up the stairs to the barrier in front of the prison concourse. The prison officer behind the thick bulletproof glass nodded to them and pressed a button. ‘Warder will be along in a minute,’ came the nasal voice.

The prison warder was squat with bulging muscles and a dwarf’s waddle. He led them to the cell block. A three-storey-high gallery with rows of light blue cell doors encircling a rectangular hall. Wire netting towered up between the floors. There was no one to be seen and the silence was only broken by a door being slammed shut somewhere.

Harry had been here many times before, but it always seemed absurd to him to think that behind all these doors were the people whom society thought fit to keep locked up against their will. He didn’t quite know why he found the thought so monstrous, but it was something to do with seeing the physical manifestation of publicly institutionalised retribution for crime. The scales and the sword.

The warder’s bunch of keys jangled as he unlocked a door inscribed with VISITORS in black letters. ‘Here you are. Just knock when you’re ready to leave.’

They stepped in and the door banged to behind them. In the ensuing silence Harry’s attention was caught by the low intermittent hum of a neon tube and the plastic flowers on the wall, which cast pale shadows across the washed-out watercolours. A man was sitting erectly on a chair, placed exactly in the middle of the yellow wall behind a table. His forearms rested on the table on either side of a chessboard; his hair was drawn back tightly behind his ears. He was wearing a smooth overall-like uniform. The well-defined eyebrows and the shadow which fell on the straight nose formed a clear T every time the neon tube blinked. It was predominantly his expression, however, that Harry remembered from the funeral, the conflicting
combination of suffering and a poker face which reminded Harry of someone.

Harry motioned to Beate to sit by the door. He took a chair to the table and sat down opposite Raskol. ‘Thank you for taking the time to meet us.’

‘Time is cheap here,’ Raskol said in a surprisingly bright and gentle voice. He talked like an Eastern European with strong ‘r’s and clear diction.

‘I understand. I’m Harry Hole and my colleague is—’

‘Beate Lønn. You’re like your father, Beate.’

Harry heard Beate’s gasp and half-turned. Her face had not reddened; on the contrary, her pale skin was even whiter and her mouth had frozen into a grimace, as if she had been slapped.

Looking down at the table, Harry coughed, and noticed for the first time that the almost eerie symmetry either side of the axis dividing him from Raskol was broken by one minor detail: the king and the queen on the chessboard.

‘Where have I seen you before, Hole?’

‘I’m mostly to be seen in the vicinity of dead people,’ Harry said.

‘Aha. The funeral. You were one of Ivarsson’s guard dogs.’

‘No.’

‘So you didn’t like that, eh? Being called his guard dog. Is there bad blood between you?’

‘No,’ Harry reflected. ‘We just don’t like each other. You didn’t either, I understand.’

Raskol smiled gently and the neon tube flickered into life. ‘I hope he didn’t take it personally. It looked like a very expensive suit.’

‘I think his suit suffered most.’

‘He wanted me to tell him something. So I told him something.’

‘That snitches are marked for life?’

‘Not bad, Inspector. But the ink will fade with time. Do you play chess?’

Harry tried not to show that Raskol had used the correct rank. He might have guessed.

‘How did you manage to hide the transmitter afterwards?’ Harry asked. ‘I heard they turned the whole block upside down.’

‘Who said I hid anything? Black or white?’

‘They say you’re still the brains behind most of the big bank robberies in Norway, that this is your base and your part of the proceeds is paid into a foreign account. Is that why you made sure you were put in A-Wing in Botsen? Because you can meet the short-termers who are soon out and can execute the plans you hatch here? And how do you communicate with them on the outside? Have you got mobile phones here, too? Computers?’

Raskol sighed. ‘A promising start, Inspector, but you’re beginning to bore me already. Shall we play or not?’

‘A boring game,’ Harry said. ‘Unless there’s something in the pot.’

‘Fine by me. What shall we play for?’

‘This.’ Harry held up a keyring with one single key and a brass nameplate.

‘And what’s that?’ Raskol asked.

‘No one knows. Occasionally you have to take a risk that what’s in the pot has some value.’

‘Why should I?’

Harry leaned forward. ‘Because you trust me.’

Raskol laughed out loud. ‘Give me one reason why I should trust you,
Spiuni
.’

‘Beate,’ Harry said without taking his eyes off Raskol. ‘Would you mind leaving us on our own?’

He heard the banging on the door and the rattle of keys behind him. The door was opened and there was a smooth click as the lock fell into place.

‘Have a look.’ Harry put the key on the table.

Without removing his eyes from Harry’s, Raskol asked: ‘AA?’

Harry picked up the white king from the board. It was hand-carved and a handsome piece. ‘Those are the initials of a man with a delicate problem. He was rich. He had a wife and children. House and chalet. Dog and lover. Everything in the garden seemed rosy.’
Harry turned the piece on its head. ‘But as time passed, the rich man changed. Events made him realise that the family was the most important thing in his life. So he sold his company, got rid of the lover and promised himself and his family that now they would live for each other. The problem was that the lover began to threaten the man with exposing their relationship. She may have blackmailed him, too. Not because she was greedy, but because she was poor. And because she was finishing off a piece of art which she thought would crown her life’s work, and she needed money to launch it. She pressed him harder and harder, and one night he decided to pay her a visit. Not just any evening, but this special evening, because she had told him an old flame was coming round. Why did she tell him? Perhaps to make him jealous? Or to show there were other men who wanted her? He wasn’t jealous. He was excited. This was a wonderful opportunity.’ Harry looked at Raskol. He had crossed his arms and was watching Harry. ‘He waited outside. Waited and waited, watching the lights in her flat. Just before midnight the visitor left. An arbitrary man who – should it ever come to that – would not have an alibi, who others presumably would confirm had spent the whole evening with Anna. Her watchful neighbour, if no one else, would have heard this man ring earlier in the evening. Our man didn’t ring, though. Our man let himself in with a key. Crept up the stairs and unlocked the door to her flat.’