Harry Hole Mysteries 3-Book Bundle (6 page)

The boy shook his head.

‘But they do,’ Harry said. ‘If you had to guess, where do you think your mother would be now?’

The boy shrugged. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘I know you don’t know, Jonas. None of us does right now. But what’s the first place that would occur to you if she wasn’t here or at work? Don’t think about whether it’s likely or not.’

The boy didn’t answer, just stared at the wolf desperately trying to throw away the stick of dynamite that had got stuck to his hand.

‘Is there a cabin or something like that where you go?’

Jonas shook his head.

‘A special place where she likes to go if she wants to be on her own?’

‘She doesn’t want to be on her own,’ Jonas said. ‘She wants to be with me.’

‘Just with you?’

The boy turned and looked at Harry. Jonas had brown eyes, like Oleg. And in the brown Harry saw the horror he had been expecting and the anger he had not.

‘Why did they go?’ the boy asked. ‘The ones who come back?’

Same eyes, Harry thought. Same questions. The important ones.

‘For all sorts of reasons,’ Harry said. ‘Some got lost. There are various ways of getting lost. And some only needed a break and went off to get some peace.’

The front door slammed and Harry saw the boy start.

At that moment the dynamite exploded in the wolf’s hand, and behind them the living-room door opened.

‘Hello,’ a voice said. Sharp and controlled at the same time. ‘What’s the latest?’

Harry turned in time to see a man of around fifty wearing a suit stride towards the coffee table and pick up the remote control. The next moment the TV picture imploded to a white dot as the set hissed in protest.

‘You know what I’ve said about watching TV during the day, Jonas,’ he said with a resigned tone, as if to tell the others in the room what a hopeless job raising children was nowadays.

Harry stood up and introduced himself, Magnus Skarre and Katrine Bratt, who until now had merely stood by the door observing.

‘Filip Becker,’ the man said, pushing his glasses although they were already high up his nose. Harry tried to catch his eye, to form the crucial first impression of a potential suspect, should it ever come to that. But his eyes were hidden behind the reflection from his glasses.

‘I’ve spent my time ringing everyone who might conceivably have been in contact, but no one knows anything,’ Filip Becker said. ‘What do you know?’

‘Nothing,’ said Harry. ‘But the first thing you can do to help us is to find out if any suitcases, rucksacks or clothes are missing, so that we can formulate a theory.’ Harry studied Becker before continuing. ‘As to whether this disappearance is spontaneous or planned.’

Becker returned Harry’s searching gaze before nodding and going upstairs to the first floor.

Harry crouched down beside Jonas who was still staring at the black TV screen.

‘So you like roadrunners, do you?’ Harry asked.

The boy shook his head mutely.

‘Why not?’

Jonas’s whisper was barely audible: ‘I feel sorry for Wile E. Coyote.’

Five minutes later Becker came back down and said that nothing was missing, neither travel bags nor clothing, apart from what she was wearing when he left, plus her coat, boots and a scarf.

‘Mm.’ Harry scratched his unshaven chin and glanced across at Ebba Bendiksen. ‘Can you and I go into the kitchen, herr Becker?’

Becker led the way, and Harry signalled to Katrine to join them. In the kitchen the professor immediately began to spoon coffee into a filter and pour water into the machine. Katrine stood by the door while Harry went over to the window and looked out. The snowman’s head had sunk between its shoulders.

‘When did you leave last night and which flight did you take to Bergen?’ Harry asked.

‘I left at around half past nine,’ Becker said without hesitation. ‘The plane went at five minutes past eleven.’

‘Did you have any contact with Birte after leaving home?’

‘No.’

‘What do you think could have happened?’

‘I have no idea, Inspector. I really don’t.’

‘Mm.’ Harry glanced out into the street. Since they had been there, he hadn’t heard a single car pass. A really quiet neighbourhood. The peace and quiet alone probably cost half a million in this area of town. ‘What sort of marriage do you and your wife have?’

Harry heard Filip Becker stop what he was doing, and he added, ‘I have to ask because spouses do simply up sticks and leave.’

Filip Becker cleared his throat. ‘I can assure you that my wife and I have a perfectly good marriage.’

‘Have you considered that she may be having an affair unbeknown to you?’

‘That’s out of the question.’

‘Out of the question is pretty strong, herr Becker. And extramarital relationships are pretty common.’

Filip Becker gave a weak smile. ‘I’m not naive, Inspector. Birte’s an attractive woman and a good deal younger than me. And she comes from a relatively liberal family, it has to be said. But she’s not the type.
And I have a relatively good perspective on her activities, if I may put it like that.’

The coffee machine rumbled ominously as Harry opened his mouth to pursue the point. He changed his mind.

‘Have you noticed any mood changes in your wife?’

‘Birte is not depressed, Inspector. She has not gone into the forest and hung herself or thrown herself into the lake. She’s out there somewhere, and she’s alive. I’ve read that people go missing all the time, and then they turn up again with a natural and fairly banal explanation. Isn’t that so?’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘Would you mind if I had a look around the house?’

‘Why’s that?’

There was a brusqueness to Filip Becker’s question that made Harry think he was a man who was used to being in control. To being kept informed. And that argued against his wife having left without a word. Which, for that matter, Harry had already excluded in his mind. Well-adjusted, healthy mothers do not abandon ten-year-old sons in the middle of the night. And then there was all the rest. Usually they used minimal resources at such an early stage of a missing persons case, unless there were indications which suggested something criminal or dramatic. It was ‘all the rest’ that had made him drive up to Hoff himself.

‘Sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it,’ Harry answered. ‘It’s a methodology.’

He caught Becker’s eyes behind the glasses now. They were, unlike his son’s, light blue and shone with an intense, clear gleam.

‘By all means,’ Becker said. ‘Go ahead.’

The bedroom was chilly, aroma-free and tidy. On the double bed was a crocheted quilt. On one bedside table a photograph of an elderly woman. The similarity led Harry to assume this side of the bed was Filip Becker’s. On the other bedside table was a photograph of Jonas.
There was a faint scent of perfume in the wardrobe containing ladies’ clothing. Harry checked that the corners of the clothes hangers hung with equal distance from each other, as they would if they had been allowed to hang undisturbed for a while. Black dresses with slits, short jumpers with pink motifs and glitter. At the bottom of the wardrobe there was a drawer section. He pulled out the top drawer. Underwear. Black and red. Next drawer. Suspender belts and stockings. Third drawer. Jewellery placed in holes in bright red felt. He noticed a large gaudy ring with precious stones that glittered and sparkled. Everything here was a bit Vegas. There were no empty gaps in the felt.

The bedroom had a door leading into a newly decorated bathroom with a steam shower and two steel washstands.

In Jonas’s room, Harry sat down on a small chair by a small desk. On the desk there was a calculator with a series of advanced mathematical functions. It looked new and unused. Above the desk there was a poster with a picture of seven dolphins inside a wave and a calendar for the whole year. Several of the dates were ringed and had tiny reminders added. Harry noted birthdays for Mummy and Grandpa, holiday in Denmark, dentist at 10 a.m. and two July dates with ‘Doctor’ above. But Harry couldn’t see any football matches, cinema trips or birthday parties. He caught sight of a pink scarf lying on the bed. A colour no boy of Jonas’s age would be seen dead wearing. Harry lifted the scarf. It was damp, but he could still smell the distinctive fragrance of skin, hair and feminine perfume. The same perfume as in the wardrobe.

He went back downstairs. Stopped outside the kitchen and listened to Skarre holding forth on procedures regarding missing persons cases. There was a clink of coffee cups inside. The sofa in the living room seemed enormous, perhaps because of the slight figure sitting there reading a book. Harry went closer and saw a photo of Charlie Chaplin in full regalia. Harry sat down beside Jonas.

‘Did you know that Chaplin was a sir?’ Harry asked. ‘Sir Charlie Chaplin.’

Jonas nodded. ‘But they chucked him out of the USA.’

Jonas flicked through the book.

‘Were you ill this summer, Jonas?’

‘No.’

‘But you went to the doctor’s. Twice.’

‘Mum wanted to have me examined. Mum …’ His voice suddenly failed him.

‘She’ll be back soon, you’ll see,’ Harry said, putting a hand on his narrow shoulders. She didn’t take her scarf with her, did she. The pink one on your bed.’

‘Someone hung it round the snowman’s neck,’ Jonas said. ‘I brought it in.’

‘Your mother didn’t want the snowman to freeze then.’

‘She would never have given her favourite scarf to the snowman.’

‘Then it must have been your dad.’

‘No, someone did it after he’d left. Last night. The person who took Mum.’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘Who made the snowman, Jonas?’

‘I don’t know.’

Harry looked through the window to the garden. This was the reason he had come. An ice-cold draught seemed to run through the wall and the room.

Harry and Katrine drove down Sørkedalsveien towards Majorstuen.

‘What was the first thing that struck you when we went in?’ Harry asked.

‘That the couple living there were not exactly soulmates,’ Katrine said, steering through the toll booth without braking. ‘It may have been an unhappy marriage, and if so, she was the one who suffered more.’

‘Mm. What made you think that?’

‘It’s obvious,’ Katrine smiled, glancing in the mirror. ‘Clash of taste.’

‘Explain.’

‘Didn’t you see the dreadful sofa and the coffee table? Typical eighties
style bought by men in the nineties. While she chose a dining table in white oiled oak with aluminium legs. And Vitra.’

‘Vitra?’

‘Dining-room chairs. Swiss. Expensive. So expensive that with what she could have saved by buying slightly more reasonably priced copies, she could have changed all the bloody furniture.’

Harry noticed that ‘bloody’ didn’t sound like a regular swear word in Katrine Bratt’s mouth; it was a linguistic counterpoint that merely underlined her class affiliation.

‘Meaning?’

‘That big house, at that Oslo address, means it’s not money that’s the problem. She isn’t
allowed
to change his sofa and table. And when a man with no taste, or no apparent interest in interior design, does that kind of thing, it tells me something about who dominates whom.’

Harry nodded, mostly as a marker for himself. Her first impression had not been mistaken. Katrine Bratt was good.

‘Tell me what
you
think,’ she said. ‘It’s me who should be learning here.’

Harry looked out of the window, at the old, traditional, though never particularly venerable, licensed café, Lepsvik.

‘I don’t think Birte Becker left the house of her own free will,’ he said.

‘Why not? There were no signs of violence.’

‘Because it was well planned.’

‘And who’s the guilty party? The husband? It’s always the husband, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry, aware his mind was wandering. ‘It’s always the husband.’

‘Except that this one had gone to Bergen.’

‘Looks like it, yes.’

‘On the last plane, so he couldn’t have come back and still managed to catch the first lecture.’ Katrine accelerated and raced across the Majorstuen crossroads on amber. ‘Had Filip Becker been guilty he would have taken the bait you set for him anyway.’

‘Bait?’

‘Yes. The bit about her mood swings. You suggested to Becker that you suspected suicide.’

‘And so?’

She laughed. ‘Come on, Harry. Everyone, including Becker, knows that the police don’t commit resources to a case resembling suicide. In a nutshell, you gave him the chance to espouse a theory which, if he’d been guilty, would have solved most of his problems. However, he replied that she was as happy as a lark.’

‘Mm. So you think the question was a test?’

‘You test people all the time, Harry. Including me.’

Harry didn’t answer until they were well down Bogstadveien.

‘People are often smarter than you think,’ he said, and then said nothing until they were in the Police HQ car park.

‘I have to work on my own for the rest of the day.’

And he said that because he had been thinking about the pink scarf and come to a conclusion. That he urgently needed to go through Skarre’s missing persons report and he urgently needed to have his nagging suspicion confirmed. And if it was what he feared, he would have to go to POB Gunnar Hagen with the letter. That sodding letter.

W
HEN
W
ILLIAM
J
EFFERSON
BLYTHE
III
CAME INTO THE
world on 19 August 1946 in the little town of Hope, Arkansas, exactly three months had passed since the death of his father in a traffic accident. Four years later William’s mother remarried and William took his the new father’s surname. And on a November night forty-six years later, in 1992, white confetti fell like snow onto the streets of Hope in celebration of their own hope and home-town boy, William – or just Bill – Clinton, after he had been elected the USA’s forty-second President. The snow falling on Bergen that same night did not reach the streets but melted in the air, as usual, and turned to rain over the town, which had been happening since mid-September. But as the following morning unfolded there was a nice sprinkling of sugar on the top of the seven peaks guarding this beautiful town. And Inspector Gert Rafto had already arrived on the highest of them, Ulriken. He was breathing in the mountain air with a shiver, hunching up his shoulders around his broad head, his face so covered with folds of skin that it seemed to have been punctured.