The Redbreast (24 page)

When the air-raid siren sounded, signalling that the bombing was over for this time, they were lying entwined in the bloody sheets, and she wept and wept.

Afterwards everything merged into a maelstrom of bodies, sleep and dreams. When they had been making love and when she had only dreamed that they were making love, she didn’t know. She had awoken in the middle of the night to the sound of rain, and knew instinctively that he was not by her side; she had gone to the window and stared down at the streets below being washed clean of the ash and soil. The water was already running over the edges of the pavement and an opened, ownerless umbrella sailed down the street towards the Danube. Then she had gone back to bed. When she awoke again it was light outside, the streets were dry and he was lying beside her, holding his breath. She looked at the clock on the bedside table. Two hours until the train left. She stroked his forehead.

‘Why aren’t you breathing?’ she whispered. ‘I’ve just woken up. You aren’t breathing, either.’

She snuggled up to him. He was naked, but hot and sweaty.

‘So we must be dead.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You went somewhere.’

‘Yes.’

She could feel him trembling.

‘But you’re back now,’ she said.

Part Four
PURGATORY

35
Container Port, Bjørvika. 29 February 2000.

H
ARRY PARKED BESIDE A WORKMEN’S HUT ON TOP OF THE
only hill he could find in the flat quay area of Bjørvika. A sudden spell of mild weather had started to melt the snow, the snow was shining and it was simply a wonderful day. He walked between the containers piled up like gigantic Lego bricks in the sun, casting jagged shadows on the tarmac. The letters and symbols declared that they came from such distant climes as Taiwan, Buenos Aires and Cape Town. Harry stood on the edge of the quay, closed his eyes and imagined himself there as he sniffed in the mixture of sea water, sun-warmed tar and diesel. When he opened his eyes again, the ferry to Denmark slipped into his field of vision. It looked like a refrigerator. A fridge transporting the same people to and fro in a recreational shuttle service.

He knew it was too late to pick up on any leads from the meeting between Hochner and Uriah. It wasn’t even certain that this was the container port where they had met; it could equally as well have been Filipstad. Nevertheless, he had still had hopes that the place would be able to tell him something, give his imagination the necessary prod.

He kicked a tyre that was protruding over the edge of the quay. Perhaps he should buy a boat so that he could take Dad and Sis out to sea in the summer? Dad needed to get out. The man who had once been so sociable had become a loner since Mum died eight years ago. And though Sis didn’t get far under her own steam, you could often forget that she had Down’s syndrome.

A bird dived with glee between the containers. The blue tit can reach a speed of twenty-eight kilometres an hour. Ellen had told him that. A mallard can reach sixty-two kilometres an hour. They both managed equally well. No, Sis wasn’t a problem; he was more concerned about his father.

Harry tried to concentrate. Everything Hochner had said, he had written in his report, word for word, but now he focused on the man’s face to try and remember what he hadn’t said. What did Uriah look like? Hochner hadn’t managed to say a great deal, but when you have to describe someone you usually begin with the most striking features, whatever stands out. And the first thing Hochner had said about Uriah was that he had blue eyes. Unless Hochner thought having blue eyes was particularly unusual, it would suggest that Uriah did not have any visible handicap or walked or talked in a particular way. He spoke both German and English, and had been to somewhere in Germany called Sennheim. Harry followed the Denmark ferry, which was making for Drøbak. Well-travelled. Had Uriah been to sea? he wondered. Harry had looked it up in an atlas, even a German one, but he hadn’t found anywhere called Sennheim. Hochner might have been making it up. Probably of no significance.

Hochner said that Uriah nurtured a hatred. So perhaps what he had guessed was right – that the person they were looking for had a personal motive. But what did he hate?

The sun disappeared behind the island of Hovedøya and there was an instant bite in the breeze off the Oslo fjord. Harry wrapped his coat tighter round him and walked back to his car. And the half a million? Had Uriah received it from a Mr Big or was this a solo job with his own funds?

He took out his mobile phone. A Nokia, a tiny thing, only two weeks old. He had fought against it for a long time, but in the end Ellen had persuaded him to buy one. He tapped in her number.

‘Hi, Ellen. Harry here. Are you alone? OK. I want you to concentrate. Yes, it’s a little game. Are you ready?’

They had played often enough before. The ‘game’ started with him giving her verbal cues. No background information, no clues as to where he was stuck, just scraps of information – of five words maximum – in any order. It had taken them time to work out the method. The most important rule was that there had to be at least five scraps of information, but no more than ten. Harry had got the idea when he bet Ellen a shift that she couldn’t remember the order of the cards in a pack after seeing them for two minutes, two seconds per card. He had lost three times before he gave in. Afterwards she had told him the method she used. She didn’t think of the cards as cards, but associated a person or action with every card and made up a story as they were turned over. Afterwards he had tried to use her association skills on the job. Sometimes the results were amazing.

‘Man, seventy,’ Harry said slowly. ‘Norwegian. Half a million kroner. Bitter. Blue eyes. Märklin rifle. Speaks German. Able-bodied. Arms smuggling at container port. Shooting practice in Skien. That’s it.’

He got into the car.

‘Nothing? Thought so. OK. Reckoned it was worth a try. Thanks, anyway. Take care.’

Harry was on the raised intersection – known locally as the traffic machine – in front of the Post House when he suddenly had a thought and called Ellen back.

‘Ellen? It’s me again. There was one thing I forgot. Still with me?
Hasn’t held a weapon for more than fifty years
. Repeat.
Hasn’t held a . . .
Yes, I know it’s more than five words. Still nothing? Damn, now I’ve missed my turning! Catch you later, Ellen.’

He put his phone on the passenger seat and concentrated on driving. He had just turned off the roundabout when his mobile bleeped.

‘Harry here. What? What on earth made you think of that? Right, right, now don’t get angry, Ellen. Now and then I forget that you don’t know what goes on in your own noodle. Brain. In your great big, beautiful, bouffant brain, Ellen. And yes, now you say it, it’s obvious. Thanks very much.’

He put down the phone and at that moment remembered he owed her three night shifts. Now that he was no longer in Crime Squad, he would have to find something else. He considered what he could do, for approximately three seconds.

36
Irisveien. 1 March 2000

T
HE DOOR OPENED AND
H
ARRY PEERED INTO A PAIR OF
piercing blue eyes in a lined face.

‘Harry Hole, police,’ he said. ‘I rang this morning.’

‘Right.’

The old man’s grey-white hair was brushed smoothly across his high forehead, and he was wearing a tie under a knitted cardigan. It had said
EVEN
&
SIGNE JUUL
on the postbox outside the entrance to this red duplex house in the quietly affluent suburb in north Oslo.

‘Please, come in, Inspector Hole.’

His voice was calm and firm, and there was something about his bearing that made Professor Even Juul look younger than, by rights, he had to be. Harry had done his research and knew that the history professor had been in the Resistance movement. Although Even Juul was retired, he was still considered to be Norway’s foremost expert on the history of the German Occupation and the
Nasjonal Samling
.

Harry bent down to take off his shoes. On the wall directly in front of him hung old, slightly faded black and white photographs in small frames. One of them showed a young lady in nurse’s uniform. Another, a young man in a white coat.

They went into the sitting room where a greying Airedale stopped barking and instead dutifully sniffed Harry’s crotch before walking over and lying down beside Juul’s armchair.

‘I’ve been reading some of your articles about Fascism and National Socialism in
Dagsavisen
,’ Harry said after they had sat down.

‘My goodness, so
Dagsavisen
readers do exist then?’ Juul smiled.

‘You seem keen to warn us against today’s neo-Nazism?’

‘Not to warn, I am merely pointing out some historical parallels. It’s an historian’s duty to uncover, not to judge.’ He lit his pipe. ‘Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils – the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.’

A blue column of smoke rose into the air. ‘But this isn’t what you came here to ask, I imagine?’

‘We’re wondering if you can help us to find a man.’

‘You mentioned that on the telephone. Who is this man?’

‘We don’t know. But we have deduced that he has blue eyes, he’s Norwegian and is seventy years old. And he speaks German.’

‘And?’

‘That’s it.’

Juul laughed. ‘Well, there are a few to choose from then.’

‘Right. There are 158,000 men in this country over seventy, and I would guess around 100,000 of them have blue eyes and can speak German.’

Juul raised an eyebrow. Harry gave a sheepish smile.

‘Office for National Statistics. I checked, for fun.’

‘So how do you think I can help?’

‘I’m coming to that. This person reportedly said that he hasn’t handled a weapon in over fifty years. I thought, that is, my colleague thought, that over fifty is more than fifty, but less than sixty.’

‘Logical.’

‘Yes, she’s very . . . er, logical. So, let’s assume it was fifty-five years ago. Then we’d be smack in the middle of the Second World War. He’s around twenty and uses a weapon. All Norwegians privately owning a gun had to hand them over to the Germans. So where is he?’

Harry counted on three fingers: ‘Either he’s in the Resistance, or he’s fled to England, or he’s at the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans. He speaks better German than English. Accordingly . . .’

‘So this colleague of yours came to the conclusion that he must have been fighting at the front, did she?’ Juul asked.

‘She did.’

Juul sucked on his pipe. ‘Many of the Resistance people had to learn German,’ he said, ‘in order to infiltrate, monitor and so on. And you’re forgetting the Norwegians in the Swedish police force.’

‘So the conclusion doesn’t stand up?’

‘Well, let me think aloud a bit,’ Juul said. ‘Roughly fifteen thousand Norwegians volunteered for service at the front, of whom seven thousand were called up and were thus allowed to use a weapon. That’s a lot more than those who escaped to England and joined up there. And even though there were more men in the Resistance at the end of the war, very few of them ever held a weapon.’

Juul smiled.

‘For the time being, let’s assume you’re right. Now obviously these men fighting at the front are not listed in the telephone directory as ex-Waffen SS, but I imagine you have found out where to search?’

Harry nodded.

‘The Traitors’ Archives. Filed according to name, along with all the data from the court cases. I’ve been through it in the course of the last few days. I was hoping that enough of them would be dead to make it a manageable total, but I was wrong.’

‘Yes, they’re tough old birds,’ Juul laughed.

‘And so I come to why we called you. You know the background of these soldiers better than anyone. I would like you to help me to understand how men like that think, to understand what makes them tick.’

‘Thank you for your confidence, Inspector, but I’m a historian and know no more than anyone else about individual motivation. As you perhaps know, I was in the Resistance, in
Milorg
, and that doesn’t exactly qualify me to get into the head of someone who volunteers for the Eastern Front.’

‘I think you know a great deal, anyway, herr Juul.’

‘Is that right?’

‘I think you know what I mean. My research has been very thorough.’

Juul sucked on his pipe and looked at Harry. In the silence that followed Harry became aware that someone was standing in the sitting-room doorway. He turned and saw an elderly woman. Her gentle, calm eyes were looking at Harry.

‘We’re just having a chat, Signe,’ Even Juul said.

She gave Harry a cheery nod, opened her mouth as if to say something, but stopped when her eyes met Even Juul’s. She nodded again, quietly closed the door and was gone.

‘So you know?’ Juul asked.

‘Yes. She was a nurse on the Eastern Front, wasn’t she?’

‘By Leningrad. From 1942 to the retreat in March of 1944.’ He put down his pipe. ‘Why are you hunting this man?’

‘To be honest, we don’t know that, either. But there might be an assassination brewing.’

‘Hm.’

‘So what should we look for? An oddball? A man who’s still a committed Nazi? A criminal?’

Juul shook his head.

‘Most of the men at the front served their sentence and then slipped back into society. Many of them made out surprisingly well, even after being branded traitors. Not so surprising maybe. It often turns out that the gifted ones are those who make decisions in critical situations like war.’

‘So the person we’re looking for may well be one of those who did alright for himself.’