Nemesis (48 page)

A chalet fire in Tryvann had also found space in a tiny paragraph because an empty petrol canister had been found close to the scene of the totally destroyed house, and therefore police could not rule out the possibility of arson. What didn’t appear in print were attempts by journalists to contact Birger Gunnerud to ask him how it felt to lose his son and chalet in the same night.

It got dark early and by three o’ clock streetlights were already on.

A freeze-frame of the Grensen robbery quivered on the screen in the House of Pain when Harry walked in.

‘Got anywhere?’ he asked with a nod to the picture showing the Expeditor in full swing.

Beate shook her head. ‘We’re waiting.’

‘For him to strike again?’

‘He’s sitting somewhere and planning another hold-up right now. It’ll be some time next week, I reckon.’

‘You seem sure.’

She shrugged. ‘Experience.’

‘Yours?’

She smiled but didn’t answer.

Harry sat down. ‘Hope you weren’t put out that I didn’t do what I said on the phone.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I said I wasn’t going to search his flat until today.’

Harry studied her. She looked totally, and genuinely, perplexed. Well, Harry didn’t work for the Secret Service. He was about to speak, but then changed his mind. Instead Beate said: ‘There’s something I have to ask you, Harry.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Did you know about Raskol and my father?’

‘What about them?’

‘That Raskol was . . . in the bank that time. He shot my father.’

Harry lowered his gaze. Examined his hands. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t.’

‘But you had guessed?’

He raised his head and met Beate’s eyes. ‘The thought had occurred to me. That’s all.’

‘What made you think it?’

‘Penance.’

‘Penance?’

Harry took a deep breath. ‘Sometimes a crime is so monstrous it clouds your vision. Externally or internally.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Everyone has a need to do penance, Beate. You, too. God knows I do. And Raskol does. It’s a basic need, like washing. It’s about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It’s the balance we call morality.’

Harry saw Beate blanch. Then blush. She opened her mouth.

‘No one knows why Raskol gave himself up,’ Harry said. ‘I’m convinced, though, that it was in order to do penance. For someone whose only freedom is the freedom to wander, prison is the ultimate self-punishment. Taking a life is different from taking money. Suppose he had committed a crime that caused him to lose his balance. So he chooses to do secret penance, for himself and God – if he has one.’

Beate finally stammered out the words: ‘A . . . moral . . . murderer?’

Harry waited. But nothing was forthcoming.

‘A moral person is someone who accepts the consequences of their own morality,’ he said softly. ‘Not those of others.’

‘And what if I strapped this on?’ Beate said bitterly, opening the drawer in front of her and taking out a shoulder holster. ‘What if I locked myself in one of the visitors’ rooms with Raskol and said
afterwards he attacked me and I shot in self-defence? To avenge my father the same way you deal with vermin. Is that moral enough for you?’ She slammed the shoulder holster on the table.

Harry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes until he heard her accelerated breathing calm down. ‘The question is what is moral enough for you, Beate. I don’t know why you have your gun with you, and I have no intention of preventing you from doing whatever you want.’

He stood up. ‘Make your father proud, Beate.’

As he grabbed the door handle he heard Beate sobbing. He turned.

‘You don’t understand!’ she sobbed. ‘I thought I could . . . I thought it was a kind of . . . a score to settle.’

Harry remained motionless. Then he pushed a chair close to her, sat down and placed a hand against her cheek. Her tears were hot and rolled over his rough hand as she spoke. ‘You join the police because you have some idea that there has to be order, a balance to things, don’t you. A reckoning, justice and all that. And then one day you have the chance you have always dreamed of, to even the scores. Only to find out that’s not what you want after all.’ She sniffled. ‘My mother once said there’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And that is not to feel any desire. Hatred – it’s sort of all you have left when you’ve lost everything else. And then it’s taken from you.’

She swept the shoulder holster off the table with her arm. It thudded against the wall.

It was pitch black as Harry stood in Sofies gate searching a more familiar jacket pocket for his keys. One of the first things he had done that morning at Police HQ had been to collect his clothes from
Krimteknisk
, where they had been taken from Vigdis Albu’s house. But the very first thing had been to make an appearance in Bjarne Møller’s office. The Head of Crime Squad had said that as far as Harry was concerned almost everything looked fine, but they would
have to wait to see if anyone reported a break-in at Harelabben 16. Over the course of the day consideration would be given to whether there would be any response to Harry’s withholding of information regarding his presence in Anna Bethsen’s flat on the night of the murder. Harry replied that, in the event of an investigation into the case, he would be obliged to mention the free rein the Chief Superintendent and Møller had given him in the search for the Expeditor, plus their sanctioning of a trip to Brazil without informing the Brazilian police.

Bjarne Møller had grinned wryly and said he assumed they would conclude that no investigation was necessary, or indeed any response.

The entrance hall was quiet. Harry tore down the police tape in front of the door of his flat. A piece of chipboard had been fitted over the broken pane.

He stood surveying the sitting room. Weber explained that they had taken photographs of the flat before they started the search so that everything could be put back properly. Nevertheless, he couldn’t escape the knowledge that alien hands and eyes had been there. It wasn’t that there was so much to hide – some passionate but dated love letters, an open pack of condoms well past their sell-by date and an envelope containing photographs of Ellen Gjelten’s dead body. Having them at home might possibly be considered as perverted. Apart from that: one pornographic magazine, one Bonnie Tyler record and a book by Linn Ullmann.

Harry regarded the flashing red light on the answer machine for a long time before pressing. The familiar voice of a boy filled the estranged room. ‘Hi, this is us. They decided today. Mummy is crying, so she told me to say . . .’

Harry steeled himself and breathed in.

‘We’re leaving tomorrow.’

Harry held his breath. Had he heard correctly?
We
’re leaving?

‘We won. You should have seen their faces. Mummy said everyone thought we would lose. Mummy, do you want . . . no, she’s just
crying. Now we’re going to McDonald’s to celebrate. Mummy says, will you pick us up? Bye.’

He heard Oleg breathing into the phone and someone blowing their nose and laughing in the background. Then Oleg’s voice again, quieter: ‘Great if you would, Harry.’

Harry slumped into the chair. A lump grew in his throat and the tears flowed.

T
HERE WASN’T A CLOUD IN THE SKY, BUT THE WIND WAS
bitingly cold and the pale sun didn’t give much warmth. Harry and Aune had turned up the collars of their jackets and walked next to each other down the avenue of birch trees, which had already divested themselves of their leaves for winter.

‘I told my wife how happy you sounded when you told me Rakel and Oleg were coming back home,’ Aune said. ‘She asked if that meant you three would soon live together.’

Harry answered with a smile.

‘At least she has enough room in that house of hers,’ Aune prodded.

‘There’s enough room in the house,’ Harry said. ‘Say hi to Karoline and quote Ola Bauer.’

‘ “I moved to Carefree Street”?’

‘ “But that didn’t help much, either.” ’

They both laughed.

‘Anyway, my mind is pretty much on the case at the moment,’ Harry said.

‘The case, yes,’ Aune said. ‘I’ve read all the reports, as you asked.
Bizarre. Truly bizarre. You wake up in your flat, can’t remember a thing and bang
,
you’re caught up in this game of Alf Gunnerud’s. Naturally, it is a bit tricky to establish a psychological diagnosis postmortem, but he is truly an interesting case. Doubtless a very intelligent, creative soul. Almost artistic, even. It’s a masterly plan he hatched. There are a couple of things I wondered about. I read the copies of the e-mails he sent you. He referred to the fact that you had had a blackout. That must mean he saw you leave the flat in an inebriated state and speculated that you wouldn’t remember anything the following day?’

‘That’s how it is when a man has to be helped into a taxi. I would guess he was standing in the street outside, spying on me, just as he wrote in his e-mail Arne Albu was doing. Presumably he had been in touch with Anna and knew I would be coming that evening. My leaving the house so drunk must have been an unexpected bonus.’

‘So then he unlocked the flat with a key he got from the manufacturer via Låsesmeden AS. And shot her. Using his own gun?’

‘Probably. The serial number had been filed off. As was the number on the gun we found in Gunnerud’s hand in the container terminal. Weber says the filing patterns suggest they come from the same supplier. Looks like someone is running an illegal arms-import business on a grand scale. The Glock we found at Sverre Olsen’s – Ellen’s killer – had exactly the same file marks.’

‘So he puts the gun in her right hand. Even though she was left-handed.’

‘Bait,’ Harry said. ‘Naturally enough, he knew I would get involved in the case at some point, if for no other reason than to make sure my position wouldn’t be compromised. And he knew that, unlike the other officers, I would realise it was the wrong hand.’

‘And then there was the photograph of fru Albu and the children.’

‘To lead me to Arne Albu, her last lover.’

‘And before he leaves, he takes Anna’s laptop and the mobile telephone you dropped in the flat during the evening.’

‘Another unexpected bonus.’

‘So this brain concocted an intricate, watertight plan for how he was going to punish his faithless lover, the man with whom she deceived him while he was in prison and her resurrected mission, the blond-haired policeman. In addition, he begins to improvise. Once again he uses his job at Låsesmeden AS to gain access to your flat and cellar. He plants Anna’s laptop there, connected to your mobile phone, and sets up an e-mail account via an untraceable server.’

‘Almost untraceable.’

‘Ah, yes, this anonymous computer nerd of yours found that out. But what he didn’t find out was that the e-mails you received had been written in advance and were sent on pre-determined dates from the computer in your storeroom. In other words, the sender had set everything up well before the laptop was put in position. Correct?’

‘Mm. Did you read the e-mails?’

‘Indeed.’ Aune nodded. ‘In retrospect, you can see that while they factored in a certain unfolding of events, they were also vague. But it wouldn’t seem like that to the person caught up in events; the sender would appear permanently well-informed and online. But he could do that because in many ways he was running the whole show.’

‘Well, we don’t know yet if it was Gunnerud who orchestrated the murder of Arne Albu. A colleague at the locksmith’s says he and Gunnerud were at Gamle Major drinking beer at the time of the murder.’

Aune rubbed his hands. Harry wasn’t sure if it was because of the cold wind or because he was enjoying the thought of so many logically possible or impossible outcomes. ‘Let’s assume Gunnerud didn’t kill Albu,’ the psychologist said. ‘What fate had he planned for him by pointing you in his direction? That Albu would be convicted? But then you would go free. And vice versa. Two men can’t be convicted of the same murder.’

‘Right,’ Harry said. ‘You have to ask yourself what the most important thing in Albu’s life was?’

‘Excellent,’ Aune said. ‘A father of three who voluntarily, or not, scales down his professional ambitions. The family, I assume.’

‘And what had Gunnerud achieved by revealing, or rather allowing me to find out, that Arne Albu was continuing to meet Anna?’

‘His wife took the children and left him.’

‘ “Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.” ’

‘Good quote.’ Aune gave him a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Who said that?’

‘Forgotten,’ Harry said.

‘But the next question you have to ask is what he wanted to take from you, Harry? What makes your life worth living?’

They had arrived at the house where Anna had lived. Harry fidgeted with the keys for a long time.

‘Well?’ Aune said.

‘All Gunnerud probably knew about me was what Anna had told him. And she knew me from the time when I didn’t have . . . much more than the job.’

‘The job?’

‘He wanted me behind bars. But, primarily, kicked out of the force.’

They talked as they went up the stairs.

Inside the flat Weber and his boys had finished the forensic examination. Weber was happy and said they had found Gunnerud’s prints in several places, including the bedhead.

‘He wasn’t exactly careful,’ Weber said.

‘He was here so many times you would have found prints even if he had been,’ Harry said. ‘Besides, he was convinced he would never come under suspicion.’

‘Incidentally, the way Albu was killed was interesting,’ Aune said as Harry opened the sliding door to the room with the portraits and the Grimmer lamp. ‘Buried upside down. On a beach. It looked like a rite, as if the murderer was trying to tell us something about himself. Have you given it any thought?’

‘Not my case.’

‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

‘OK. Maybe the murderer wanted to say something about the victim.’

‘What do you mean?’