Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (5 page)

Yes, thought Harry. I allowed the disease to enter your house as well.

He cleared his throat. ‘But your doctor is driven by … the right things then?’

‘Mathias still does the night shift at A&E. Voluntarily. At the same time as lecturing full-time at the Anatomy Department.’

‘And he’s a blood donor and a member of Amnesty International.’

She sighed. ‘B negative is a rare blood group, Harry. And you also support Amnesty, I know that for a fact.’

She stirred her drink with an orange plastic stick that had a horse on top. The red mixture swirled round the ice cubes. Cochineal.

‘Harry?’ she said.

Something in her inflection made him tense up.

‘Mathias is going to move in with me. Over Christmas.’

‘So soon?’ Harry ran his tongue over his palate in an attempt to find moisture. ‘You haven’t known each other for long.’

‘Long enough. We’re planning to get married in the summer.’

Magnus Skarre studied the hot water running over his hands and into the sink. Where it disappeared. No. Nothing disappeared, it was just somewhere else. Like these people about whom he had spent the past few weeks collecting information. Because Harry had asked him. Because Harry had said there might be something in it. And he had wanted Magnus’s report before the weekend. Which meant that Magnus had been obliged to work overtime. Even though he knew that Harry gave them jobs like this to keep them busy in these feet-on-desk times. The uniformed division’s tiny Missing Persons Unit of three refused to delve into old cases; they had more than enough to do with the new ones.

In the deserted corridor on his way back to his office Magnus noticed that the door was ajar. He knew he had closed it, and it was past nine, so the cleaners had finished long before. Two years ago they had had problems with thieving from the offices. Magnus Skarre pulled the door open with a vengeance.

Katrine Bratt was standing in the middle of the room and glanced at him with a furrowed brow, as if it was he who had burst into her office. She turned her back on him.

‘I just wanted to see,’ she said, casting her eye over the walls.

‘See what?’ Skarre looked around. His office was like all the others except that it didn’t have a window.

‘This was his office? Wasn’t it?’

Skarre frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Hole’s. This was his office for all those years. Even while he was investigating the serial killings in Australia?’

Skarre shrugged. ‘I think so. Why?’

Katrine Bratt ran a hand over the desk top. ‘Why did he change offices?’

Magnus walked around her and plopped down on the swivel chair. ‘It hasn’t got any windows.’

‘And he shared the office, first with Ellen Gjelten and then Jack Halvorsen,’ Katrine Bratt said. ‘And both were killed.’

Magnus Skarre put his hands behind his head. This new officer had class. A league or two above him. He bet her husband was the boss of something or other and had money. Her suit seemed expensive. But when he looked at her a bit closer, there was a little flaw somewhere. A slight blemish he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘Do you think he heard their voices? Was that why he moved?’ Bratt asked, scrutinising a wall map of Norway on which Skarre had circled the home towns of all the missing persons in Østland, eastern Norway, since 1980.

Skarre laughed but didn’t answer. Her waist was slim and her back willowy. He knew she knew he was ogling her.

‘What’s he like actually?’ she asked.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I suppose everyone with a new boss does, don’t they?’

She was right. It was just that he had never thought of Harry Hole as a boss, not in that way. OK, he gave them jobs to do and led investi gations, but beyond that all he asked was that they kept out of his way.

‘He is, as you probably know, somewhat infamous,’ Skarre said.

She shrugged. ‘I’ve heard about his alcoholism, yes. And that he has reported colleagues. And that all the heads wanted him booted out, but the previous POB held a protective wing over him.’

‘His name was Bjarne Møller,’ Skarre said, looking at the map, at the ring around Bergen. That was where Møller had been seen last, before he disappeared.

‘And that people at HQ don’t like the media turning him into a kind of pop idol.’

Skarre chewed his lower lip. ‘He’s a bloody good detective. That’s enough for me.’

‘You like him?’ Bratt asked.

Skarre grinned. He turned and looked straight into her eyes.

‘Like, dislike,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could say one or the other.’

He pushed back his chair, put his feet on the desk, stretched and gave a sort-of-yawn. ‘What are you working on so late at night?’

It was an attempt to gain the upper hand. After all, she was only a low-ranking detective. And new.

But Katrine Bratt just smiled as if he had said something funny, walked out of the door and was gone.

Disappeared. Speaking of which. Skarre cursed, sat up in the chair and went back to his computer.

Harry woke up and lay on his back staring at the ceiling. How long had he been asleep? He turned and looked at the clock on his bedside table. A quarter to four. The dinner had been an ordeal. He had watched Rakel’s mouth speaking, drinking wine, chewing meat and devouring him as she told him about how she and Mathias were going to Botswana for a couple of years where the government had a good set-up in place to fight HIV but were short of doctors. She had asked whether he had met anyone. And he had answered that he had met his childhood pals, Øystein and Tresko. The former was an alkie, taxi-driving computer freak; the latter an alkie gambler who would have been the world poker champion if he had been as good at maintaining his own poker face as he was at reading others’. He had even begun to tell her about Tresko’s fatal defeat in the world championships in Las Vegas before he realised
he had told her before. And it wasn’t true that he had met them. He hadn’t met anyone.

He had seen the waiter pouring booze into the glasses on the adjacent table and for one crazy moment he had been on the point of tearing the bottle out of his hands and putting it to his mouth. Instead he had agreed to take Oleg to a concert he had begged Rakel to let him see. Slipknot. Harry had omitted to tell her what kind of band she was letting loose on her son, since he fancied seeing Slipknot himself. Even though bands with the obligatory death rattle, satanic symbols and speeded-up bass drum usually made him laugh, Slipknot was in fact interesting.

Harry threw off the duvet and went into the kitchen, let the water from the tap run cold, cupped his hands and drank. He had always thought water tasted better like that, drunk from his own hands, off his own skin. Then he suddenly let the water run into the sink again and stared at the black wall. Had he seen anything? Something moving? No, not a thing, just movement itself, like the invisible waves underwater that caress the seagrass. Over dead fibres, fingers so thin that they can’t be seen, spores that rise at the smallest movement of air and settle in new areas and begin to eat and suck. Harry switched on the radio in the sitting room. It had been decided. George W. Bush had been given another term in the White House.

Harry went back to bed and pulled the duvet over his head.

Jonas was awoken by a sound and lifted the duvet off his face. At least he thought it had been a sound. A crunching sound, like sticky snow underfoot in the silence between the houses on a Sunday morning. He must have been dreaming. But sleep would not return even when he closed his eyes. Instead fragments of the dream came back to him. Dad had been standing motionless and silent in front of him with a reflection in his glasses that lent them an impenetrable ice-like surface.

It must have been a nightmare, because Jonas was scared. He opened
his eyes again and saw that the chimes hanging from the ceiling were moving. Then he jumped out of bed, opened the door and ran across the corridor. By the stairs to the ground floor he managed to stop himself looking down into the darkness and didn’t pause until he was in front of his parents’ bedroom and pressing down the handle with infinite caution. Then he remembered that his dad was away, and he would wake his mum whatever he did. He slipped inside. A white square of moonlight extended across the floor to the undisturbed double bed. The numbers on the digital alarm clock were lit up: 01.11. For a moment Jonas stood there, bewildered.

Then he went out into the corridor. He walked towards the staircase. The darkness of the stairs lay there waiting for him, like a vast open void. Not a sound could be heard from down below.

‘Mummy!’

He regretted shouting the moment he heard his own terror in the brief, harsh echo. For now
it
knew, too. The darkness.

There was no answer.

Jonas swallowed. Then he began to tiptoe down the stairs.

On the third step he felt something wet under his feet. The same on the sixth. And the eighth. As if someone had been walking with wet shoes. Or wet feet.

In the living room the light was on, but there was no Mummy. He went to the window to look at the Bendiksens’ house. Mummy occasionally went over to see Ebba. But all the windows were dark.

He walked into the kitchen and over to the telephone, successfully keeping his thoughts at bay, not letting the darkness in. He dialled his mother’s mobile phone number. And was jubilant to hear her soft voice. But it was a message asking him to leave his name and wishing him a nice day.

And it wasn’t day, it was night.

In the porch he stuffed his feet into a pair of his father’s large shoes, put on a padded jacket over his pyjamas and went outside. Mum had said the snow would be gone by tomorrow, but it was still cold, and a light wind whispered and mumbled in the oak tree by the gate. It was
no more than a hundred metres to the Bendiksens’ house, and fortunately there were two street lamps on the way. She had to be there. He glanced to the left and to the right to make sure there was no one who could stop him. Then he caught sight of the snowman. It stood there as before, immovable, facing the house, bathed in the cold moonlight. Yet there was something different about it, something almost human, something familiar. Jonas looked at the Bendiksens’ house. He decided to run. But he didn’t. Instead he stood feeling the tentative, ice-cold wind go right through him. He turned slowly back to the snowman. Now he realised what it was that had made the snowman so familiar. It was wearing a scarf. A pink scarf. The scarf Jonas had given his mother for Christmas.

B
Y THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY THE SNOW HAD MELTED IN
Oslo city centre. But in Hoff there were still patches in gardens on both sides of the road as Harry Hole and Katrine Bratt drove along. On the radio Michael Stipe was singing about a sinking feeling, about what was bringing it on, knowing that something had gone wrong and about the boy in the well. In the middle of a quiet estate in an even quieter street Harry pointed to a shiny silver Toyota Corolla parked by the fence.

‘Skarre’s car. Park behind him.’

The house was large and yellow. Too big for a family of three, Harry thought, as they walked up the shingle path. Everything around them dripped and sighed. In the garden stood a snowman with a slight list and poor future prospects.

Skarre opened the door. Harry bent and studied the lock.

‘No signs of a break-in anywhere,’ Skarre said.

He led them into the living room where a boy was sitting on the floor with his back to them watching a cartoon channel on TV. A woman got up off the sofa, shook hands with Harry and introduced herself as Ebba Bendiksen, a neighbour.

‘Birte has never done this type of thing before,’ she said. ‘Not as long as I’ve known her anyway.’

‘And how long’s that?’ Harry asked, looking around. In front of the TV were large pieces of heavy leather furniture and an octagonal coffee table of darkened glass. The tubular steel chairs around the dining table were light and elegant, the type Rakel liked. Two paintings hung on the walls, both portraits of bank-manager-like men staring down at him with solemn authority. Beside them, modernist abstract art of the kind that had succeeded in becoming un-modern and so very modern again.

‘Ten years,’ said Ebba Bendiksen. ‘We moved into our house over the road the day Jonas was born.’ She nodded towards the boy, who was still motionless, staring at careering birds and exploding wolves.

‘I understand it was you who rang the police last night?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘The boy rang the bell at about a quarter past one,’ Skarre said, looking down at his notes. ‘Police were phoned at one thirty.’

‘My husband and I went back with Jonas and searched the house first,’ Ebba Bendiksen explained.

‘Where did you look?’ Harry asked.

‘In the cellar. In the bathrooms. In the garage. Everywhere. It’s very odd that anyone would do a runner like that.’

‘Do a runner?’

‘Disappear. Go missing. The policeman I spoke to on the phone asked if we could take care of Jonas, and said we should ring everyone Birte knew and who she might be staying with. And then wait until early today to find out if Birte had gone to work. In eight out of ten cases, he explained, the missing person reappeared after a few hours. We tried to get hold of Filip –’

‘The husband,’ Skarre interjected. ‘He was in Bergen lecturing. He’s a professor of something or other.’

‘Physics,’ Ebba Bendiksen smiled. ‘However, his mobile was switched off. And we didn’t know the name of the hotel where he was staying.’

‘He was contacted in Bergen this morning,’ Skarre said. ‘He should be here soon.’

‘Yes, thank God,’ Ebba said. ‘So when we rang Birte’s workplace this morning and she hadn’t turned up at the customary time, we rang you back.’

Skarre nodded in confirmation. Harry signalled that Skarre could continue his conversation with Ebba Bendiksen, went over to the TV and sat down on the floor beside the boy. On the screen, a wolf was lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite.

‘Hello, Jonas. My name’s Harry. Did the other policeman tell you that things like this almost always turn out fine? People disappear and then they turn up of their own accord?’