Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (141 page)

‘Shall we go out while there’s still some sun?’ Rakel asked.

‘Yes,’ Harry said, returning her smile. ‘Let’s do that.’

They walked up the road that coiled to the top of the ridge. The deciduous trees in the east were so red they looked as if they were on fire. The light played on the fjord making it resemble molten metal. But it was, as usual, the man-made features of the town below that fascinated Harry. The anthill perspective. The houses, parks, roads, cranes, boats in the harbour, lights that had begun to come on. The cars and trains hurrying hither and thither. The sum of our activities. And the question only the person with the time to stop and look down at the busy ants can allow himself to ask: Why?

‘I dream of peace and quiet,’ Rakel said. ‘No more than that. What about you? What do you dream about?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Finding myself in a narrow corridor and an avalanche coming and burying me.’

‘Wow.’

‘Well, you know me and my claustrophobia.’

‘We often dream about what we fear and desire. Disappearing, being buried. In a way it offers security, doesn’t it?’

Harry thrust his hands deeper in his pockets. ‘I was buried under an avalanche three years ago. Let’s say it’s as simple as that.’

‘So you didn’t escape your ghosts even though you went all the way to Hong Kong?’

‘Oh yes, I did,’ Harry said. ‘The trip thinned the ranks.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, it is in fact possible to put things behind you, Rakel. The art of dealing with ghosts is to dare to look at them long and hard until you know that is what they are. Ghosts. Lifeless, powerless ghosts.’

‘So,’ Rakel said in a tone that made him realise she didn’t like the topic of conversation. ‘Any women in your life?’ The question came easily, so easily that he didn’t believe it.

‘Well.’

‘Tell me.’

She had donned her sunglasses. It was hard to assess how much she wanted to hear. Harry decided on a swap. If he wanted to hear.

‘She was Chinese.’

‘Was? Is she dead?’ She sent him a playful smile. He thought she looked as if she could take the heat. But he would have preferred it if she had been a bit more sensitive.

‘A businesswoman in Shanghai. She nurses her
guanxi
, her network of useful connections. Plus her affluent, ancient Chinese husband. And – when it suits her – me.’

‘In other words, you exploit her caring nature.’

‘I wish I could say that.’

‘Oh?’

‘She makes fairly specific demands on where and when. And how. She likes—’

‘Enough!’ Rakel said.

Harry smiled wryly. ‘As you know, I’ve always had a weakness for women who know what they want.’

‘Enough, I said.’

‘Message received.’

They continued to walk in silence. Until Harry finally said the words hovering around them in bold.

‘What about this Hans Christian guy?’

‘Hans Christian Simonsen? He’s Oleg’s solicitor.’

‘I never heard of a Hans Christian Simonsen while I was doing murder cases.’

‘He’s from this area. We were in the same year at law school. He came and offered his services.’

‘Mm. Right.’

Rakel laughed. ‘I seem to remember he invited me out once or twice when we were students. And that he wanted us to do a jazz-dance course together.’

‘God forbid.’

Rakel laughed again. Christ, how he had longed for that laughter.

She nudged him. ‘As you know, I’ve always had a weakness for men who know what they want.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Harry said. ‘And what have they ever done for you?’

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Instead she formed the furrow between her broad, black eyebrows he had often stroked with his forefinger whenever he noticed it. ‘Sometimes it’s more important to have a lawyer who is dedicated rather than one who is so experienced he knows the outcome in advance.’

‘Mm. You mean someone who knows it’s a lost cause.’

‘You mean I should have used one of the tired old plodders?’

‘Well, the best
are
in fact pretty dedicated.’

‘This is a petty drugs murder, Harry. The best are busy with prestige cases.’

‘So, what has Oleg told his dedicated solicitor about what happened?’

Rakel sighed. ‘That he can’t remember anything. Beyond that, he doesn’t want to say anything about anything at all.’

‘And that’s what you’re basing your defence on?’

‘Listen, Hans Christian’s a brilliant solicitor in his field. He knows what’s involved. He’s taking advice from the best. And he’s working day and night, he really is.’

‘You’re exploiting his caring nature in other words?’

This time Rakel did not laugh. ‘I’m a mother. It’s simple. I’m willing to do whatever it takes.’

They stopped where the forest began and sat on separate spruce trunks. The sun sank to the treetops in the west like a weary Independence Day balloon.

‘I know why you’ve come of course,’ Rakel said. ‘But what exactly have you got planned?’

‘To find out if Oleg’s guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.’

‘Because?’

Harry shrugged. ‘Because I’m a detective. Because this is the way we’ve organised this anthill. No one can be convicted until we’re sure.’

‘And you’re not sure?’

‘No, I’m not sure.’

‘And that’s the only reason you’re here?’

The shadows from the spruce trees crept over them. Harry shivered in his linen suit; his thermostat had evidently not adjusted to 59.9 degrees north yet.

‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘But I have trouble remembering anything except fragmented moments of all the time we were together. When I look at a photograph that’s how I remember it. The way we were in the photo. Even if I know it’s not true.’

He looked at her. She was sitting with her chin in one hand. The sun glittered on her narrowed eyes.

‘But perhaps that’s why we take snaps,’ Harry continued. ‘To provide false evidence to underpin the false claim that we were happy. Because the thought that we weren’t happy at least for some time during our lives is unbearable. Adults order children to smile in the photos, involve them in the lie, so we smile, we feign happiness. But Oleg could never smile unless he meant it, could not lie, he didn’t have the gift.’ Harry turned back to the
sun, caught the last rays, extended like yellow fingers between the highest branches on the crest of the ridge. ‘I found a photo of the three of us on his locker door in Valle Hovin. And do you know what, Rakel? He was smiling in that photo.’

Harry focused on the spruce trees. The little colour remaining was quickly sucked out of them, and now they stood like ranks of black uniformed silhouette-guardsmen. Then he heard her come over, felt her hand under his arm, her head against his shoulder, her hot cheek through his linen suit, and breathed in the perfume of her hair. ‘I don’t need any photograph to remember how happy we were, Harry.’

‘Mm.’

‘Perhaps he taught himself to lie. It happens to us all.’

Harry nodded. A gust of wind made him shiver. When was it he had taught himself to lie? Was it when Sis asked if their mother could see them from heaven? Had he learned so early? Was that why he found it so easy to lie when he pretended he didn’t know what Oleg had been doing? Oleg’s lost innocence was not that he had learned to lie, not that he had learned to inject heroin or steal his mother’s jewels. It was that he had learned, in a risk-free and effective way, how to sell drugs that consume the soul, cause the body to disintegrate and send the buyer into dependency’s cold, dripping hell. If Oleg was innocent of Gusto’s murder he would still be guilty. He had sent them by plane. To Dubai.

Fly Emirates.

Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates.

There are no Arabs, only pushers in Arsenal shirts selling violin. Shirts they had been given along with instructions on how to sell dope in the right way: one money man, one dope man. A conspicuous and yet run-of-the-mill shirt showing what they sold and to which organisation they belonged. Not one of the standard ephemeral gangs who were always brought down by their own greed, stupidity, torpor and foolhardiness, but an organisation that took no unnecessary risks, did not expose its backers and still seemed to have a monopoly on the junkies’ favourite new drug. And Oleg was one of them. Harry didn’t know a great deal about football,
but he was pretty sure that Van Persie and Fàbregas were Arsenal players. And absolutely sure that no Spurs supporter would have considered owning an Arsenal shirt if it hadn’t been for a special reason. Oleg had managed to teach him that much.

There was a good reason for Oleg talking to neither him nor the police. He was working for someone or something no one knew anything about. Someone or something that made everyone stay shtum. That was where Harry had to begin.

Rakel had started crying and buried her face in his neck. The tears warmed his skin as they ran down inside his shirt, over his chest, over his heart.

Darkness fell quickly.

Sergey was lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

The seconds passed, one by one.

This was the slowest part: the waiting. And he did not even know for sure if it was going to happen. If it was going to be necessary. He had slept badly. Dreamed badly. He had to know. So he had rung Andrey, asked if he could talk to Uncle. But Andrey had answered that
ataman
was not available. No more than that.

That was how it had always been with Uncle. And, for the majority of his life, Sergey had not even known that he existed. It was only after he – or his Armenian straw man – had appeared and created order that Sergey had begun to make enquiries. It was an eye-opener how little the others in the family knew about this relation. Sergey had established that Uncle had come from the west and married into the family in the 1950s. Some said he came from Lithuania, from a kulak family, the peasant landowning class that Stalin had actively deported, and that Uncle’s family had been sent to Siberia. Others said he was part of a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses that had been transported to Siberia from Moldavia in 1951. An ageing aunt said that although Uncle had been a well-read, linguistically talented and courteous man he had adapted immediately to their simple lifestyle and had espoused ancient Siberian urka traditions as if they were
his own. And that perhaps it was precisely his ability to adapt, along with his obvious business acumen, which soon enabled other urkas to accept him as a leader. Within a short time he was running one of the most profitable smuggling operations in the whole of southern Siberia. His enterprise in the eighties was so wide-ranging that in the end the authorities could no longer be bribed to turn a blind eye. When the police struck, while the Soviet Union was collapsing around them, it was with a raid so violent and so bloody, according to a neighbour who remembered Uncle, that it was more reminiscent of a blitzkrieg than the hand of the law. At first Uncle was reported killed. It was said he had been shot in the back and the police, fearing reprisals, had secretly disposed of the body in the River Lena. One of the officers had stolen his flick knife and had not been able to stop boasting about it. Nevertheless, a year later, Uncle gave a sign of life, and by then he was in France. He said he had gone into hiding, and the only thing he wanted to know was if his wife was pregnant or not. She was not, and with that no one in Tagil heard a word from him for several years. Not until Uncle’s wife died. Then he appeared for the funeral, Father said. He paid for everything, and a Russian Orthodox funeral does not come cheap. He also gave money to those of her relatives who needed a handout. Father was not among them, but it was him Uncle had gone to when he wanted a rundown on what family his wife had left in Tagil. And that was when his nephew, little Sergey, had been brought to his attention. The next morning Uncle was gone, as mysteriously and inexplicably as he had arrived. The years passed, Sergey became a teenager, an adult, and most people probably thought Uncle – whom they remembered as seeming old even when he went to Siberia – was long dead and buried. But then, when Sergey was arrested for smuggling hash, a man had made a sudden appearance, an Armenian who had presented himself as Uncle’s straw man, sorted out matters for Sergey and arranged Uncle’s invitation to Norway.

Sergey checked his watch. And confirmed that exactly twelve minutes had passed since he last checked. He closed his eyes and tried to visualise him. The policeman.

In fact, there was another detail about the story of his uncle’s alleged death. The officer who had stolen his knife had been found soon afterwards in the Taiga forest, what was left of him, that is – the rest had been eaten by a bear.

It was dark both outside and inside when the telephone rang.

It was Andrey.

TORD SCHULTZ UNLOCKED THE DOOR
to his house, stared into the darkness and listened to the dense silence for a while. Sat down on the sofa without switching on the light and waited for the reassuring roar of the next plane.

They had let him go.

A man who introduced himself as an inspector had entered his cell, crouched in front of him and asked why the hell he had hidden flour in his trolley bag.

‘Flour?’

‘That’s what the Kripos lab say they’ve found.’

Tord Schultz had repeated the same thing he said when he was arrested, the emergency procedure, he didn’t know how the plastic bag had come into his possession or what it contained.

‘You’re lying,’ the inspector had said. ‘And we’re going to keep an eye on you.’

Then he had held the cell door open and nodded as a signal that he should leave.

Tord gave a start as a piercing ring filled the bare, darkened room. He got up and groped his way to the telephone on a wooden chair beside the training bench.

It was the operations manager. He told Tord that he had been taken off international flights for the foreseeable future and moved to domestic flights.

Tord asked why.

His boss said there had been a management meeting to discuss his situation.

‘You must appreciate we cannot have you on foreign flights with this suspicion hanging over you.’