Nemesis (6 page)

Harry smiled wryly.

‘You’re blushing,’ she exclaimed with glee. ‘Well, I’m sure you also remember that we parked and went for a walk in the forest. With all the yellow leaves it was like . . .’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Like a bed, an enormous bed of gold.’ She laughed and nudged him. ‘And afterwards I had to help you push-start that wreck of a car. I hope you’ve got rid of it by now?’

‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘it’s at the garage. We’ll have to see.’

‘Dear, oh dear. Now you make it sound like an old friend who’s been taken to hospital with a tumour or something.’ And she added – softly: ‘You shouldn’t have been so quick to let go, Harry.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘You can’t have forgotten that, anyway, can you?’ They had stopped outside a blue door in Sorgenfrigata.

Harry gently detached himself. ‘Listen, Anna,’ he began and tried to ignore her warning stare. ‘I’ve got a meeting with Crime Squad investigators at the crack of dawn tomorrow.’

‘I didn’t say a word,’ she said, opening the door.

Harry suddenly remembered something. He put his hand inside his coat and passed her a yellow envelope. ‘From the locksmith.’

‘Ah, the key. Was everything alright?’

‘The person behind the counter scrutinised my ID very closely.
And I had to sign. Odd person.’ Harry glanced at his watch and yawned.

‘They’re strict about handing out system keys,’ Anna said hastily. ‘It fits the whole block, the main entrance, the cellar, flat, everything.’ She gave a nervous, perfunctory laugh. ‘They have to have a written application from our housing co-op just to make this one spare key.’

‘I understand,’ Harry said, rocking on his heels. He drew breath to say goodnight.

She beat him to it. Her voice was almost imploring: ‘Just a cup of coffee, Harry.’

There was the same chandelier hanging from the ceiling high above the same table and chairs in the large sitting room. Harry thought the walls had been light – white or maybe yellow – but he wasn’t sure. Now they were blue and the room seemed smaller. Perhaps Anna had wanted to reduce the space. It is not easy for one person living alone to fill a flat with three reception rooms, two big bedrooms and a ceiling height of three and a half metres. Harry remembered that Anna had told him her grandmother had also lived in the flat on her own, but she hadn’t spent so much time here, as she had been a famous soprano and had travelled the world for as long as she was able to sing.

Anna disappeared into the kitchen and Harry looked around the sitting room. It was bare, empty, apart from a vaulting horse the size of an Icelandic pony, which stood in the middle on four splayed wooden legs with two rings protruding from its back. Harry went over and stroked the smooth, brown leather.

‘Have you taken up gymnastics?’ Harry called out.

‘You mean the horse?’ Anna shouted back from the kitchen.

‘It’s for men, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Sure you won’t have a beer, Harry?’

‘Quite sure,’ he shouted. ‘Seriously, though, why have you got it here?’

Harry jumped when he heard her voice behind his back: ‘Because I like to do things that men do.’

Harry turned. She had taken off her sweater and was standing in the doorway. One hand resting on her hip, the other up against the door frame. At the very last minute Harry resisted the temptation to let his eyes wander from top to toe.

‘I bought it from Oslo Gym Club. It’s going to be a work of art. An installation. Much like “Contact”, which I am sure you haven’t forgotten.’

‘You mean the box on the table with the curtain you could stick your hand in? And inside there were loads of false hands you could shake?’

‘Or stroke. Or flirt with. Or reject. They had heating elements in so they could maintain body temperature and were such a great hit, weren’t they. People thought there was someone hiding under the table. Come with me and I’ll show you something else.’

He followed her to the furthest room, where she opened sliding doors. Then she took his hand and pulled him into the dark with her. When the light was switched on, at first Harry stood staring at the lamp. It was a gilt standard lamp formed into the shape of a woman holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other. Three bulbs were located on the outside edge of the sword, the scales and the woman’s head, and when Harry turned, he could see each illuminated its own oil painting. Two of them were hanging on the wall while the third, which clearly wasn’t finished yet, was on an easel with a yellow-and-brown-stained palette fastened to the left-hand corner.

‘What sort of pictures are they?’ Harry asked.

‘They’re portraits. Can’t you see that?’

‘Right. Those are eyes?’ He pointed. ‘And that’s a mouth?’

Anna tilted her head. ‘If you like. There are three men.’

‘Anyone I know?’

Anna gazed at Harry pensively for a long time before answering. ‘No. I don’t think you know any of them, Harry, but you could get to know them if you really wanted.’

Harry studied the pictures more closely.

‘Tell me what you can see.’

‘I can see my neighbour with a kicksled. I can see a man coming out of the backroom at the locksmith’s as I’m leaving. And I can see the waiter in M. And that TV celeb, Per Ståle Lønning.’

She laughed. ‘Did you know that the retina reverses everything so your brain receives a mirror image first? If you want to see things as they really are, you have to see them in a mirror. Then you would have seen some quite different people in the pictures.’ Her eyes were radiant and Harry couldn’t bring himself to object that the retina didn’t reverse images, it turned them upside down. ‘This will be my final masterpiece, Harry. This is what I will be remembered for.’

‘These portraits?’

‘No, they’re merely a part of the whole work of art. It’s not finished yet. Just wait.’

‘Mm, has it got a name?’

‘ “Nemesis”,’ she said in a low voice.

He gazed enquiringly at her and their eyes locked.

‘After the goddess, you know.’

The shadow fell over one side of her face. Harry looked away. He had seen enough. The curve of her back begging for a dancing partner, one foot in front of the other as if unsure whether to move forwards or backwards, her heaving bosom and the slim neck with the veins he imagined he could see throbbing. He felt hot and a tiny bit faint. What was it she said? ‘You shouldn’t have been so quick to let go.’ Had he been?

‘Harry . . .’

‘I have to go,’ he said.

He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop’s screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from
the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother’s bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: ‘Mine for ever?’

‘Not bloody likely,’ he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him.

‘Mine for ever?’

‘Yes,’ he groaned and came.

When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.

‘After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,’ she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.

The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS
Elenora
. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother’s first lover – though not her first ever – in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.

Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn’t matter.

That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna’s grandmother’s bed.

Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer
on the white sheets of her grandmother’s bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt cliché: ‘You deserve someone better than me.’

At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.

That was seven years ago, and the relationship had only lasted six weeks. After that he had only met her twice. Once in a bar when she had gone over to him with tears in her eyes and asked him to go somewhere else, which he had done. And once at an exhibition where Harry had taken his younger sister. He had promised to call her, but he never did.

Harry rolled over to look at the clock again. 3.22. He had kissed her. At the end of the evening. Once he was safely outside the door of her flat with the wavy glass, he had leaned over to give her a goodnight hug and it had become a kiss. Easy and great. Easy, at any rate. 3.33. Christ, when had he become so sensitive that he felt pangs of guilt for giving an old flame a goodnight kiss? Harry tried to take deep, regular breaths to concentrate his mind on possible escape routes from Bogstadveien via Industrigata. In. Out. In again. He could still smell her fragrance. Feel the sweet pressure of her body. The rough insistence of her tongue.

T
HE DAY’S FIRST RAYS HAD JUST RISEN OVER THE EDGE OF
Ekeberg Ridge, peeped under the half-drawn blind in the Crime Squad conference room and wedged themselves between the folds of skin around Harry’s pinched eyes. Rune Ivarsson stood at the end of the long table, legs apart, rocking up and down on the soles of his feet, his hands behind his back. A flip chart with
WELCOME
in big red letters at his rear. Harry presumed this was something Ivarsson had picked up at a seminar on presentations and made a half-hearted attempt to stifle a yawn as the Head of the Robberies Unit began to speak.

‘Good morning, everyone. The eight of us sitting around the table constitute the team assembled to investigate the bank robbery committed in Bogstadveien on Friday.’

‘Murder,’ Harry mumbled.

‘I beg your pardon?’

Harry straightened up in his chair. The damned sun was blinding him whichever way he turned. ‘I suppose it would be correct to base the investigation on the fact that it was a murder.’

Ivarsson gave a wry smile. Not to Harry, but to the others sitting
around the table whom he took in with one fleeting glance. ‘I thought I should start by introducing you to each other, but our friend from Crime Squad has already made a start. Inspector Harry Hole has been kindly loaned by his superior, Bjarne Møller, as his speciality is murder.’

‘Serious Crime,’ Harry said.

‘Serious Crime. On the left of Hole, we have Torleif Weber from Forensics who led the inquiry at the crime scene. As many of you know, Weber is our most experienced forensic investigator. Famous for his analytical powers and unerring intuition. The Chief Superintendent once said that he would have liked to have Weber with him as a tracker dog in his hunting parties.’

Laughter around the table. Harry didn’t need to look at Weber to know that he wasn’t smiling. Weber almost never smiled, at least not for people he didn’t like, and he liked almost no one. Especially among the younger stratum of bosses which, in Weber’s opinion, was comprised exclusively of incompetent careerists with no feeling for the profession or the force, but who had stronger instincts for the administrative power and influence which could be attained through brief appearances at Police HQ.

Ivarsson smiled and swayed up and down like the skipper of a seagoing vessel as he waited for the laughter to die down.

‘Beate Lønn is quite new in this context and our video recording specialist.’

Beate’s face went as red as a beetroot.

‘Beate is the daughter of Jørgen Lønn who served for over twenty years in what was then called the Robberies and Serious Crime Unit. So far she seems to be following in her legendary father’s footsteps. She has already contributed vital evidence which has helped solve a number of cases. I don’t know if I have mentioned it before, but over the last year in the Robberies Unit we have had a conviction rate bordering on fifty per cent, which in an international context is reckoned to be—’

‘You have mentioned it before, Ivarsson.’

‘Thank you.’

This time Ivarsson eyed Harry directly when he smiled. A stiff, reptilian smile baring his teeth far beyond the jawbone on both sides. And he continued to smile that smile for the rest of the introductions. Harry knew two of them. Magnus Rian, a young detective from Tomrefjord who had been in Crime Squad for six months and made a solid impression. The other was Didrik Gudmundson, the most experienced investigator around the table and the second-in-command of the Robberies Unit. A quiet, methodical policeman with whom Harry had never had any problems. The last two were also from the Robberies Unit, both with Li as a surname, but Harry immediately established that they were not identical twins. Toril Li was a tall blonde woman with a narrow mouth and a closed face, while Ola Li was a squat, red-haired man with a rounded face and laughing eyes. Harry had seen them enough times in the corridor for many to think it would be natural to say hello, but it had never occurred to him.