PART I

1

The Plan

I’M GOING TO die. And it makes no sense. That wasn’t the plan, not my plan, anyway. I may have been heading this way all the time without realising. It wasn’t my plan. My plan was better. My plan made sense.

I’m staring down the muzzle of a gun and I know that’s where it will come from. The messenger of death. The ferryman. Time for a last laugh. If you can see light at the end of the tunnel, it may be a spit of flame. Time for a last tear. We could have turned this life into something good, you and I. If we had followed the plan. One last thought. Everyone asks what the meaning of life is, but no one asks about the meaning of death.

2

The Astronaut

THE OLD MAN reminded Harry of an astronaut. The comical short steps, the stiff movements, the dead, black eyes and the shoes shuffling along the parquet floor. As if he were frightened to lose contact with the ground and float away into space.

Harry looked at the clock on the white wall above the exit. 15.16. Outside the window, in Bogstadveien, the Friday crowds hurry past. The low October sun is reflected in the wing mirror of a car driving away in the rush hour.

Harry concentrated on the old man. Hat plus elegant grey overcoat in dire need of a clean. Beneath it: tweed jacket, tie and worn grey trousers with a needle-sharp crease. Polished shoes, down at the heel. One of those pensioners of whom Majorstuen seems to be full. This wasn’t conjecture. Harry knew that August Schulz was eighty-one years old and an ex-clothes retailer who had lived all his life in Majorstuen, apart from a period he spent in Auschwitz during the War. And the stiff knees were the result of a fall from a Ringveien footbridge which he used on his daily visits to his daughter. The impression of a mechanical doll was reinforced by the fact that his arms were bent perpendicularly at the elbow and thrust forward. A brown walking stick hung over his right forearm and his left hand gripped a bank giro he was holding out for the short-haired young man at position number 2. Harry couldn’t see the face of the cashier, but he knew he was staring at the old man with a mixture of sympathy and irritation.

It was 15.17 now, and finally it was August Schulz’s turn.

Stine Grette sat at position number 1, counting out 730 Norwegian kroner for a boy in a blue woollen hat who had just given her a money order. The diamond on the ring finger of her left hand glistened as she placed each note on the counter.

Harry couldn’t see, but he knew that in front of position number 3 there was a woman with a pram, which she was rocking, probably to distract herself, as the child was asleep. The woman was waiting to be served by fru Brænne, who was loudly explaining to a man on the telephone that he couldn’t charge someone else’s account unless the account holder had signed an agreement to that effect. She also informed him that she worked in the bank, and he didn’t, so on that note perhaps they should bring the discussion to a close.

At that moment the door opened and two men, one tall, the other short, wearing the same overalls, strode into the bank. Stine Grette looked up. Harry checked his watch and began to count. The men ran over to the corner where Stine was sitting. The tall man moved as if he were stepping over puddles, while the little one had the rolling gait of someone who has acquired more muscle than he can accommodate. The boy in the blue hat turned slowly and began to walk towards the exit, so preoccupied with counting money that he didn’t see the two men.

‘Hello,’ the tall man said to Stine, banging down a black case on the counter. The little one pushed his reflector sunglasses in place, walked forward and deposited an identical case beside it. ‘Money!’ he said in a high-pitched squeak. ‘Open the door!’

It was like pressing the pause button: all movement in the bank froze. The only indication that time hadn’t stood still was the traffic outside the window. And the second hand on the clock, which now showed that ten seconds had passed. Stine pressed a button under her desk. There was a hum of electronics, and the little man pressed the counter door against the wall with his knee.

‘Who’s got the key?’ he asked. ‘Quick, we haven’t got all day!’

‘Helge!’ Stine shouted over her shoulder.

‘What?’ The voice came from inside the open door of the only office in the bank.

‘We’ve got visitors, Helge!’

A man with a bow tie and reading glasses appeared.

‘These gentlemen want you to open the ATM, Helge,’ Stine said.

Helge Klementsen stared vacantly at the two men dressed in overalls, who were now on his side of the counter. The tall one glanced nervously at the front door while the little one had his eyes fixed on the branch manager.

‘Oh, right. Of course,’ Helge gasped, as if he had just remembered a missed appointment, and burst into a peal of frenetic laughter.

Harry didn’t move a muscle; he simply let his eyes absorb every detail of their movements and gestures. Twenty-five seconds. He continued to look at the clock above the door, but from the corner of his eye he could see the branch manager unlocking the ATM from the inside, taking out two oblong metal dispensers and handing them over to the two men. The whole thing took place at high speed and in silence. Fifty seconds.

‘These are for you, pop!’ The little man had taken two similar metal dispensers from his case and held them out for Helge. The branch manager swallowed, nodded, took them and slotted them into the ATM.

‘Have a good weekend!’ the little one said, straightening his back and grabbing the case. One and a half minutes.

‘Not so fast,’ Helge said.

The little one stiffened.

Harry sucked in his cheeks and tried to concentrate.

‘The receipt …’ Helge said.

For one protracted moment the two men stared at the small, grey-haired branch manager. Then the little one began to laugh. Loud, reedy laughter with a piercing, hysterical overtone, the way people on speed laugh. ‘You don’t think we were going to leave here without a signature, do you? Hand over two million without a receipt!’

‘Well,’ Helge said. ‘One of you almost forgot last week.’

‘There are so many new bods on deliveries at the moment,’ the little one said, as he and Helge signed and exchanged yellow and pink forms.

Harry waited for the front door to close again before looking at the clock once more. Two minutes and ten seconds.

Through the glass in the door he could see the white Nordea security van drive away.

Conversations between the people in the bank resumed. Harry didn’t need to count, but he still did. Seven. Three behind the counter and four in front, including the baby and the man in overalls who had just come in and was standing by the table in the middle of the room, writing his account number on a payment slip. Harry knew it was for Sunshine Tours.

‘Good afternoon,’ August Schulz said and began to shuffle in the direction of the front door.

The time was exactly 15.21.10, and that was the moment the whole thing started.

When the door opened, Harry saw Stine Grette’s head bob up from her papers and drop down. Then she raised her head again, slowly this time. Harry’s attention moved to the front door. The man who had come in had already pulled down the zip of his boiler suit and whipped out a black-and-olive-green AG3. A navy blue balaclava completely covered his face, apart from his eyes. Harry started to count from zero.

The balaclava began to move where the mouth would have been, like a Bigfoot doll: ‘This is a hold-up. Nobody move!’

He hadn’t raised his voice, but in the small, compact bank building it was as if a cannon had gone off. Harry studied Stine. Above the distant drone of traffic he could hear the smooth click of greased metal as the man cocked the gun. Her left shoulder sank, almost imperceptibly.

Brave girl, Harry thought. Or maybe just frightened out of her wits. Aune, the psychology lecturer at Oslo Police College, had told them that when people are frightened enough they stop thinking and act the way they have been programmed. Most bank employees press the silent robbery alarm almost in shock, Aune maintained, citing post-robbery debriefings where many could not remember whether they had activated the alarm or not. They had been on autopilot. In just the same way as a bank robber has programmed himself to shoot anyone trying to stop him, Aune said. The more frightened the bank robber is, the less chance anyone has of making him change his mind. Harry was rigid as he tried to fix on the bank robber’s eyes. Blue.

The robber unhitched a black holdall and threw it over the counter. The man in black took six paces to the counter door, perched on the top edge and swung his legs over to stand directly behind Stine, who was sitting still with a vacant expression. Good, Harry thought. She knows her instructions; she is not provoking a reaction by staring at the robber.

The man pointed the barrel of the gun at Stine’s neck, leaned forward and whispered in her ear.

She hadn’t panicked yet, but Harry could see Stine’s chest heaving; her fragile frame seemed to be struggling for air under the now very taut white blouse. Fifteen seconds.

She cleared her throat. Once. Twice. Finally her vocal cords came to life:

‘Helge. Keys for the ATM.’ The voice was low and hoarse, completely unrecognisable from the one which had articulated almost the same words three minutes earlier.

Harry couldn’t see him, but he knew that Helge had heard what the robber had said and was already standing in the office doorway.

‘Quick, or else …’ Her voice was hardly audible and in the following pause all that could be heard in the bank were the soles of August Schulz’s shoes on the parquet flooring, like a couple of brushes swishing against the drum skin in an immeasurably slow shuffle.

‘… he’ll shoot me.’

Harry looked out of the window. There was often a car outside, engine running, but he couldn’t see one. Only a blur of passing cars and people.

‘Helge …’ Her voice was imploring.

Come on, Helge, Harry urged. He knew quite a bit about the ageing bank manager, too. Harry knew that he had two standard poodles, a wife and a recently jilted pregnant daughter waiting for him at home. They had packed and were ready to drive to their mountain chalet as soon as Helge returned. At precisely this moment Helge felt he was submerged in water, in the kind of dream where all your movements slow down however much you try to hurry. Then he came into Harry’s field of vision. The bank robber had swung Stine’s chair round so that he was behind her, but now faced Helge. Like a frightened child who has to feed a horse, Helge stood back and held out the bunch of keys, his arm stretched to the limit. The masked man whispered in Stine’s ear as he turned the machine gun on Helge, who took two unsteady steps backwards.

Stine cleared her throat: ‘He says open the ATM and put the money in the black holdall.’

In a daze, Helge stared at the gun pointing at him.

‘You’ve got twenty-five seconds before he shoots. Not you. Me.’

Helge’s mouth opened and closed as though he wanted to say something.

‘Now, Helge,’ Stine said.

Thirty seconds had passed since the hold-up began. August Schulz had almost reached the front door. The branch manager fell to his knees in front of the ATM and contemplated the bunch of keys. There were four of them.

‘Twenty seconds left,’ Stine’s voice rang out.

Majorstuen police station, Harry thought. The patrol cars are on their way. Eight blocks away. Friday rush hour.

With trembling fingers, Helge took one key and inserted it in the lock. It got stuck halfway. He pressed harder.

‘Seventeen.’

‘But …’ he began.

‘Fifteen.’

Helge pulled out the key and tried one of the others. It went in, but wouldn’t turn.

‘My God …’

‘Thirteen. Use the one with the bit of green tape, Helge.’

Klementsen stared at the bunch of keys as though seeing them for the first time.

‘Eleven.’

The third key went in. And round. He pulled open the door and turned towards Stine and the man.

‘There is one more lock to open …’

‘Nine!’ Stine yelled.

Helge sobbed as he ran his fingers across the jagged edges of the keys, no longer able to see, using the edges as Braille to tell him which key was the right one.

‘Seven.’

Harry listened carefully. No police sirens yet. August Schulz grasped the handle of the front door.

There was a metallic clunk as the bunch of keys hit the floor.

‘Five,’ Stine whispered.

The door opened and the sounds from the street flooded into the bank. Harry thought he could hear the familiar dying lament in the distance. It rose again. Police sirens. Then the door closed.

‘Two, Helge!’

Harry closed his eyes and counted to two.

‘There we are!’ It was Helge shouting. He had opened the second lock and now he was half-standing, pulling at the jammed dispensers. ‘Let me just get the money out! I—’

He was interrupted by a piercing shriek. Harry peered towards the other end of the bank where a woman stood staring in horror at the motionless bank robber pressing the gun into Stine’s neck. She blinked twice and mutely nodded her head in the direction of the pram as the child’s scream rose in pitch.

Helge almost fell backwards as the first dispenser came free. He pulled over the black holdall. Within six seconds all the money was in. Klementsen zipped up the holdall as instructed and stood by the counter. Everything had been communicated via Stine; her voice sounded surprisingly steady and calm now.

One minute and three seconds. The robbery was complete. The money was in a holdall. In a few moments the first police car will arrive. In four minutes other police cars will close off the immediate escape routes around the bank. Every cell in the robber’s body must have been screaming it was time to get the hell out. And then something happened which Harry didn’t understand. It simply didn’t make any sense. Instead of running, the robber spun Stine’s chair round until she was facing him. He leaned forward and whispered something to her. Harry squinted. He would have to go and get his eyes checked one of these days. But he saw what he saw. She was focused on her faceless tormentor; her own face went through a slow, gradual transformation as the significance of the words he whispered to her appeared to sink in. Her thin, well-tended eyebrows formed two ‘s’s above eyes which now seemed to be popping out of her head; her top lip twisted upwards and the corners of her mouth were drawn down into a grotesque grin. The child stopped crying as suddenly as it had begun. Harry inhaled sharply. Because he knew. It was a freeze-frame, a masterly image. Two people caught for a split-second as one informed the other of the death sentence; the masked face two hands’ widths away from its helpless counterpart. The Expeditor and his victim. The gun is pointed at her throat and a small golden heart hanging from a thin chain. Harry cannot see, but nevertheless he can sense her pulse pounding beneath the thin skin.

A muffled wail. Harry pricks up his ears. It is not police sirens, though, just the telephone ringing in the next room.

The masked man turns and peers up at the surveillance camera hanging from the ceiling behind the counters. He holds up one hand and shows five black gloved fingers, then closes his hand and extends his forefinger. Six fingers. Six seconds too long. He turns towards Stine again, grasps the gun with both hands, holds it at hip height and raises the muzzle towards her head, standing with his legs slightly apart to withstand the recoil. The telephone keeps ringing. One minute and twelve seconds. The diamond ring flashes as Stine half-raises her hand, as though waving goodbye to someone.

It is exactly 15.22.22 when he pulls the trigger. The report is sharp and hollow. Stine’s chair is forced backwards as her head dances on her neck like a mangled rag doll. Then the chair topples backwards. There is a thud as her head hits the edge of a desk and Harry can no longer see her. Nor can he see the poster advertising Nordea’s new pension scheme glued to the outside of the glass partition above the counter, which now has a red background. All he can hear is the angry, insistent ringing of the telephone. The masked robber picks up the holdall. Harry has to make up his mind. The robber vaults the counter. Harry makes up his mind. In one quick movement he is out of the chair. Six strides. He is there. And picks up the phone:

‘Speak!’

In the pause which follows he can hear the sound of the police siren on the TV in the sitting room, a Pakistani pop song from the neighbours and heavy steps up the stairwell sounding like fru Madsen’s. Then there is a gentle laugh at the other end of the line. It is laughter from a long-distant encounter. Not in time, but just as distant. Like seventy per cent of Harry’s past, which returns to him now and again in the form of vague rumours or total fabrications. But this was a story he could confirm.

‘Do you really still use that macho line, Harry?’

‘Anna?’

‘Gosh, well done, Harry.’

Harry could feel the sweet warmth surging through his stomach, almost like whisky. Almost. In the mirror he saw a picture he had pinned up on the opposite wall. Of himself and Sis one summer holiday a long time ago in Hvitsten when they were small. They were smiling in the way that children do when they still believe nothing nasty can happen to them.

‘And what do you do of a Sunday evening then, Harry?’

‘Well.’ Harry could hear his voice automatically mimicking hers. Slightly too deep, slightly too lingering. He didn’t mean to do that. Not now. He coughed and found a more neutral pitch: ‘What people usually do.’

‘And that is?’

‘Watch videos.’

3

The House of Pain

‘SEEN THE VIDEO?’

The battered office chair screamed in protest as Police Officer Halvorsen leaned back and looked at his nine-years-senior colleague, Inspector Harry Hole, with an expression of disbelief on his innocent young face.

‘Absolutely,’ Harry said, running thumb and first finger down the bridge of his nose to show the bags under his bloodshot eyes.

‘The whole weekend?’

‘From Saturday morning to Sunday evening.’

‘Well, at least you had a good time on Friday night,’ Halvorsen said.

‘Yes.’ Harry took a blue folder out of his coat pocket and placed it on the desk facing Halvorsen’s. ‘I read the transcripts of the interviews.’

From the other pocket Harry took a grey packet of French Colonial coffee. He and Halvorsen shared an office at almost the furthest end of the corridor in the red zone on the sixth floor of Police Headquarters in Grønland. Two months ago they had gone to buy a Rancilio Silvia espresso coffee machine, which had taken pride of place on the filing cabinet beneath a framed photograph of a girl sitting with her legs up on a desk. Her freckled face seemed to be grimacing, but in fact she was helpless with laughter. The background was the same office wall on which the picture was hanging.

‘Did you know that three out of four policemen can’t spell “uninteresting” properly?’ Harry said, hanging his coat on the stand. ‘They either leave out the “e” between the “t” and the “r”, or—’

‘Interesting.’

‘What did you do at the weekend?’

‘On Friday, thanks to some anonymous nutter’s phone call warning us about a car bomb, I sat in a car outside the American ambassador’s residence. False alarm, of course, but things are so sensitive right now that we had to sit there all evening. On Saturday, I made another attempt to find the woman of my life. On Sunday, I concluded that she doesn’t exist. What did you get on the robber from the interviews?’ Halvorsen measured the coffee into a double-cup filter.

‘Nada,’ Harry said, taking off his sweater. Underneath, he was wearing a charcoal-grey T-shirt – it had once been black and now bore the faded letters Violent Femmes. He collapsed into the office chair with a groan. ‘No one has reported seeing the wanted man near the bank before the robbery. Someone came out of a 7-Eleven on the other side of Bogstadveien and saw the man running up Industrigata. It was the balaclava that caught his attention. The surveillance camera outside the bank shows both of them as the robber passes the witness in front of a skip outside the 7-Eleven. The only interesting thing he could tell us which wasn’t on the video was that the robber crossed the road twice further up Industrigata.’

‘Someone who can’t make up his mind which pavement to walk on. That sounds pretty uninteresting to me.’ Halvorsen put the double-cup filter in the portafilter handle. ‘With two “e”s, one “r” and one “s”.’

‘You don’t know much about bank robberies, do you, Halvorsen.’

‘Why should I? We’re supposed to catch murderers. The guys from Hedmark can take care of the robbers.’

‘Hedmark?’

‘Haven’t you noticed as you walk around the Robberies Unit? The rural dialect, the knitted cardigans. But what’s the point you’re making?’

‘The point is Victor.’

‘The dog handler?’

‘As a rule, the dogs are the first on the scene, and an experienced bank robber knows that. A good dog can follow a robber on foot, but if he crosses the street and cars pass, the dog loses the scent.’

‘So?’ Halvorsen compressed the coffee with the tamper and finished off by smoothing the surface with a twist, which he maintained was what distinguished the professionals from the amateurs.

‘It corroborates the suspicion that we are dealing with an experienced bank robber. And that fact alone means we can concentrate on a dramatically smaller number of people than we might otherwise have done. The Head of Robberies told me—’

‘Ivarsson? Thought you weren’t exactly on speaking terms?’

‘We aren’t. He was talking to the whole of the investigation team. He said there are under a hundred bank robbers in Oslo. Fifty of them are so stupid, doped up or mental that we nail them almost every time. Half of them are in prison, so we can ignore them. Forty are skilled craftsmen who manage to slip through so long as someone helps them with the planning. And then there are ten pros, the ones who attack security vans and cash-processing centres. To get them we need a lucky break, and we try to keep tabs on them at all times. They’re being asked to give alibis right now.’ Harry cast a glance at Silvia, who was gurgling away on the filing cabinet. ‘And I had a word with Weber from Forensics on Saturday.’

‘Thought Weber was retiring this month.’

‘Someone slipped up. He won’t be stopping until the summer.’

Halvorsen chuckled. ‘He must be even grumpier than usual then.’

‘He is, but that’s not the reason,’ Harry said. ‘His lot found sod all.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Not one fingerprint. Not one strand of hair. Not even clothing fibres. And, of course, you could see from the footprint that he was wearing brand new shoes.’

‘So they can’t check the patterns of wear against other shoes?’

‘Cor-rect,’ Harry said, with a long ‘o’.

‘And the bank robber’s weapon?’ said Halvorsen, taking one of the cups of coffee over to Harry’s desk. On looking up, he noticed that Harry’s left eyebrow was almost into his cropped blond hair. ‘Sorry. The murder weapon.’

‘Thank you. It wasn’t found.’

Halvorsen sat on his side of the two desks sipping at his coffee. ‘So, in a nutshell, a man walked into a crowded bank in broad daylight, took two million kroner, murdered a woman, strolled out, up a relatively unpopulated but heavily trafficked street in the centre of the capital of Norway, a few hundred metres from a police station and we, the salaried police professionals, do not have a thing to go on?’

Harry nodded slowly. ‘Almost nothing. We have the video.’

‘Which you can visualise every second of, if I know you.’

‘No, every tenth of a second, I would say.’

‘And you can quote the witnesses’ statements verbatim?’

‘Only August Schulz’s. He told me a lot of interesting things about the War. Reeled off the names of competitors in the clothing industry; so-called good Norwegians who had supported the confiscation of his family’s property during the War. He knew precisely what these people are doing nowadays. Yet he didn’t realise that a bank robbery had been committed.’

They drank their coffee in silence. The rain beat against the window.

‘You like this life, don’t you,’ Halvorsen said suddenly. ‘Sitting alone all weekend chasing ghosts.’

Harry smiled, but didn’t answer.

‘I thought that now you had family obligations you’d given up the solitary lifestyle.’

Harry sent his younger colleague an admonitory grimace. ‘Don’t know if I see it like that,’ he said slowly. ‘We don’t even live together, you know.’

‘No, but Rakel has a little boy and that makes things different, doesn’t it?’

‘Oleg,’ Harry said, edging his way towards the filing cabinet. ‘They flew to Moscow on Friday.’

‘Oh?’

‘Court case. Father wants custody.’

‘Ah, that’s right. What’s he like?’

‘Hm.’ Harry straightened the crooked picture above the coffee machine. ‘He’s a professor Rakel met and married while she was working there. He comes from a wealthy, traditional family with loads of political influence, Rakel says.’

‘So they know a few judges, eh?’

‘Bound to, but we think it’ll be alright. The father’s a wacko, and everyone knows that. Bright alcoholic with poor self-control, you know the type.’

‘I think I do.’

Harry looked up smartly, just in time to see Halvorsen wipe away a smile.

At Police HQ it was fairly well known that Harry had alcohol problems. Nowadays, alcoholism is not in itself grounds for dismissing a civil servant, but to be drunk during working hours is. The last time Harry had had a relapse, there were people higher up in the building who had advocated having him removed from the force, but Politiavdelingssjef, PAS for short, Bjarne Møller, head of Crime Squad, had spread a protective wing over Harry pleading extenuating circumstances. The circumstances had been the woman in the picture above the espresso machine – Ellen Gjelten, Harry’s partner and close friend – who had been beaten to death with a baseball bat on a path down by the river Akerselva. Harry had struggled to his feet again, but the wound still stung. Particularly because, in Harry’s opinion, the case had never been cleared up satisfactorily. When Harry and Halvorsen had found forensic evidence incriminating the neo-Nazi Sverre Olsen, Inspector Tom Waaler had wasted no time in going to Olsen’s home to arrest him. Olsen had apparently fired a shot at Waaler, who had returned fire in self-defence and killed him. According to Waaler’s report, that is. Neither the investigations at the scene of the shooting, nor the inquiry by SEFO, the independent police authority, suggested otherwise. On the other hand, Olsen’s motive for killing Ellen had never been explained, beyond indications that he had been involved in the illegal arms trafficking which had caused Oslo to be flooded with handguns over recent years, and Ellen had stumbled onto his trail. Olsen was just an errand boy, though; the police still didn’t have any leads on those behind the liquidation.

After a brief guest appearance with Politiets Overvåkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, on the top floor, Harry had applied to rejoin Crime Squad to work on the Ellen Gjelten case. They had been all too happy to get rid of him. Møller was pleased to have him back on the sixth floor.

‘I’ll just nip upstairs to give Ivarsson this,’ Harry muttered, waving the VHS cassette. ‘He wanted to take a look with a new wunderkind they have up there.’

‘Oh? Who’s that?’

‘Someone who left Police College this summer and has apparently solved three robberies simply by studying the videos.’

‘Wow. Good-looking?’

Harry sighed. ‘You young ones are so boringly predictable. I hope she’s competent. I don’t care about the rest.’

‘Sure it’s a woman?’

‘Herr and fru Lønn might have called their son Beate for a joke, I suppose.’

‘I have an inkling she’s good-looking.’

‘Hope not,’ Harry said, ducking, out of ingrained habit, to allow his 192 centimetres to pass under the door frame.

‘Oh?’

The answer was shouted from the corridor: ‘Good police officers are ugly.’

*

At first sight, Beate Lønn’s appearance didn’t give any firm indicators either way. She wasn’t ugly; some would even call her doll-like. But that might have been mostly because she was small: her face, nose, ears – and her body. Her most prominent feature was her pallor. Her skin and hair were so colourless that she reminded Harry of a corpse Ellen and he had once fished out of Bunnefjord. Unlike with the woman’s body, however, Harry had a feeling that if he just turned away for a second he would forget what Beate Lønn looked like. Which, it seemed, she wouldn’t have minded as she mumbled her name and allowed Harry to shake her small, moist hand before she quickly retrieved it.

‘Inspector Hole is a kind of legend here in the building, you know,’ PAS Rune Ivarsson said, standing with his back to them and fiddling with a bunch of keys. At the top of the grey iron door in front of them a sign said, in Gothic letters: THE HOUSE OF PAIN. And underneath: CONFERENCE ROOM 508. ‘Isn’t that right, Hole?’

Harry didn’t answer. He had absolutely no doubt about the kind of legendary status Ivarsson had in mind; he had never made the slightest attempt to hide his view that Harry was a blot on the force and should have been removed years ago.

Ivarsson finally unlocked the door and they went in. The House of Pain was the Robberies Unit’s dedicated room for studying, editing and copying video recordings. There was a large table in the middle with three workplaces; no windows. The walls were covered with shelving packed with video tapes, a dozen posters of wanted robbers, a large screen on one wall, a map of Oslo and various trophies from successful arrests: for example beside the door, where two cut-off woollen sleeves with holes for eyes and mouth hung from the wall. Otherwise the room contained grey PCs, black TV monitors, video and DVD players as well as a number of other machines which Harry could not have identified.

‘What has Crime Squad got out of the video?’ Ivarsson asked, flopping down onto one of the chairs. He drawled the diphthong in an exaggerated fashion.

‘Something,’ Harry said, walking over to a shelf of video cassettes.

‘Something?’

‘Not very much.’

‘Shame you lot didn’t come to the lecture I gave in the canteen last September. All the units were represented except yours, if I’m not very much mistaken.’

Ivarsson was tall, long-limbed, with a fringe of undulating blond hair above two blue eyes. His face had those masculine characteristics which models for German brands like Boss tend to have, and was still tanned after many summer afternoons on the tennis court and perhaps the odd solarium session in a fitness centre. In short, Rune Ivarsson was what most would regard as a good-looking man, and as such he underpinned Harry’s theory about the link between looks and competence in police work. However, what Rune Ivarsson lacked in investigative talent, he made up for with a nose for politics and the ability to form alliances within the Police HQ hierarchy. Furthermore, Ivarsson had the natural self-confidence that many misinterpret as a leadership quality. In his case, this confidence was based solely on being blessed with a total blindness to his own shortcomings, a quality which would inevitably take him to the top and one day make him – in one way or another – Harry’s superior. Initially, Harry saw no reason to complain about mediocrity being kicked upwards, out of the way of investigations, but the danger with people like Ivarsson was that they could easily get it into their heads that they should intervene and dictate to those who really understood detection work.

‘Did we miss anything?’ Harry asked, running a finger along the small handwritten labels on the videos.

‘Maybe not,’ Ivarsson said. ‘Unless you’re interested in those minute details which solve crime cases.’

Harry successfully resisted the temptation to say he hadn’t gone to the lecture because he had been told by others, who had attended earlier talks, that the sole purpose of his grandstanding was to announce to all and sundry that after he had taken over as Head of the Robberies Unit the clear-up rate for bank robberies rose from thirty-five per cent to fifty per cent. Not a word about the fact that his appointment coincided with a doubling of manpower in his unit, a general extension of their investigative powers and the simultaneous departure of their worst investigator – Rune Ivarsson.

‘I regard myself as reasonably interested,’ Harry said. ‘So, tell me how you solved this one.’ He took out one of the cassettes and read aloud what was written on the label: ‘20.11.94, NOR Savings Bank, Manglerud.’

Ivarsson laughed. ‘Gladly. We caught them the old-fashioned way. They switched getaway cars at a waste site in Alnabru and set fire to the one they dumped. But it didn’t burn out. We found the gloves of one of the robbers and traces of DNA. We matched them with those of known robbers our investigators had highlighted as potential suspects after having seen the video, and one of them fitted the bill. The idiot had fired a shot into a ceiling and got four years. Anything else you were wondering about, Hole?’

‘Mm.’ Harry fidgeted with the cassette. ‘What sort of DNA was it?’

‘I told you, DNA that matched.’ The corner of Ivarsson’s left eye began to twitch.

‘Right, but what was it? Dead skin? A nail? Blood?’

‘Is that important?’ Ivarsson’s voice had become sharp and impatient.

Harry told himself he should keep his mouth shut. He should give up these Don Quixote-like offensives. People like Ivarsson would never learn, anyway.

‘Maybe not,’ Harry heard himself say. ‘Unless you’re interested in those minute details which solve crime cases.’

Ivarsson looked daggers at Harry. In the specially insulated room the silence felt like physical pressure on everyone’s ears. Ivarsson opened his mouth to speak.

‘Knuckle hair.’

Both men in the room turned to Beate Lønn. Harry had almost forgotten she was there. She looked from one to the other and repeated in a near-whisper: ‘Knuckle hair. The hair on your fingers … isn’t that what it’s called …?’

Ivarsson cleared his throat. ‘You’re right, it was a hair. But I think it was – although we don’t need to go into this any deeper – a hair from the back of the hand. Isn’t that right, Beate?’ Without waiting for an answer he tapped on the glass of his large wristwatch. ‘Have to be off. Enjoy the video.’

As the door slammed behind Ivarsson, Beate took the video cassette out of Harry’s hand and the next moment the video player sucked it in with a hum.

‘Two hairs,’ she said. ‘In the left-hand glove. From the knuckle. And the rubbish tip was in Karihaugen, not Alnabru. But the bit about four years is right.’

Harry gave her an astonished look. ‘Wasn’t that a little before your time?’

She shrugged as she pressed PLAY on the remote control. ‘It’s only a matter of reading reports.’

‘Mm,’ Harry said and studied her profile. Then he made himself comfortable in the chair. ‘Let’s see if this one left behind a few knuckle hairs.’

The video player groaned and Beate switched off the light. In the moments that followed, while the blue lead-in picture illuminated them, another film unravelled in Harry’s head. It was short, lasting barely a couple of seconds, a scene bathed in the blue strobe light from Waterfront, a long-defunct club in Aker Brygge. He didn’t know her name, the woman with the smiling brown eyes who was trying to shout something to him above the music. They were playing cow-punk. Green on Red. Jason and the Scorchers. He poured Jim Beam into his Coke and didn’t give a stuff what her name was. The next night, though, he knew. When they were in the bed adorned with a ship’s figurehead, a headless horse, had cast off all the moorings and set out on their maiden voyage. Harry felt the warmth in his belly from the evening before when he had heard her voice on the telephone.

Then the other film took over.

The old man had begun his trek across the floor towards the counter, filmed from a different camera every five seconds.

‘Thorkildsen at TV2,’ Beate Lønn said.

‘No, it’s August Schulz,’ Harry said.

‘I mean the editing,’ she said. ‘It looks like Thorkildsen’s handiwork at TV2. There are a few tenths missing here and there …’

‘Missing? How can you see …?’

‘Number of things. Follow the background. The red Mazda you can make out in the street outside was in the centre of the picture on two cameras when the picture shifted. An object can’t be in two places at the same time.’

‘Do you mean someone has bodged the recording?’

‘Not at all. Everything on the six cameras inside and the one outside is recorded on the same tape. On the original tape the picture jumps quickly from one camera to another and all you see is a flicker. So the film has to be edited to get longer coherent sequences. Occasionally we call in people from the TV stations when we don’t have the capacity. TV editors like Thorkildsen fiddle with the time code to improve the quality of the recording, not as jagged. Professional neurosis, I guess.’

‘Professional neurosis,’ Harry repeated. It struck him that was a strangely middle-aged thing for a young girl to say. Or perhaps she wasn’t as young as he had first thought? Something had happened to her as soon as the lights were off. The silhouetted body language was more relaxed, her voice firmer.

The robber entered the bank and shouted in English. His voice sounded distant and muffled, it seemed to be wrapped in a duvet.

‘What do you think about this?’ Harry asked.

‘Norwegian. He speaks English so that we won’t recognise his dialect, accent or any characteristic words we might be able to link to earlier robberies. He’s wearing smooth clothes which don’t leave fibres we might be able to trace in getaway cars, bolt-holes or his house.’

‘Mm. Any more?’

‘All the openings in his clothes are taped over so he won’t leave any traces of DNA. Like hair or sweat. You can see his trouser legs are taped round his boots, and the sleeves round his gloves. I would guess he has tape round his head and wax on his eyebrows.’

‘A pro then?’

She shrugged. ‘Eighty per cent of bank raids are planned less than a week in advance and are carried out by people under the influence of alcohol or drugs. This one was thought through and the robber doesn’t appear to be on anything.’

‘How can you make that out?’

‘If we’d had better light and cameras, we’d have been able to magnify the pictures and see his pupils. But we don’t, so I go by his body language. Calm, considered movements, can you see that? If he was on anything, it wasn’t speed or any kind of amphetamine. Rohypnol, perhaps. That’s the popular one.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Robbing a bank is an extreme experience. You don’t need speed, just the opposite. Last year someone went into Den norske Bank in Solli plass with an automatic weapon, peppered the ceiling and walls and ran out again without any money. He told the judge that he’d popped so much amphetamine that he just had to get it out of his system. I prefer criminals who take Rohypnol, if I may put it like that.’

Harry motioned with his head to the screen. ‘Look at Stine Grette’s shoulder at position number 1; she’s pressing the alarm. And the sound on the recording is suddenly much better. Why?’

‘The alarm is connected to the recording device, and when it is activated the film begins to run much faster. That gives us better pictures and better sound. Good enough for us to analyse the robber’s voice. And, then, speaking English doesn’t help him.’

‘Is it really as reliable as they say?’

‘The sound of our vocal cords is like a fingerprint. If we can give our voice analyst, at the university in Trondheim, ten words on tape, he can match two voices with ninety-five per cent reliability.’

‘Mm. But not with the sound quality we had before the alarm went, I take it?’

‘It’s less reliable.’

‘So that’s why he shouts in English first, and then when he reckons the alarm has been activated, he uses Stine Grette as his mouthpiece.’

‘Exactly.’

In silence they observed the black-clad man manoeuvring himself over the counter, putting the gun barrel to Stine Grette’s neck and whispering into her ear.

‘What do you think about her reaction?’ Harry asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Her facial expression. She seems relatively calm, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t think anything. Generally, you can’t get much information from a facial expression. I would think her pulse is close on 180.’

They watched Helge Klementsen floundering on the floor in front of the cash dispenser.

‘Hope he gets proper post-trauma treatment,’ Beate said sotto voce and shook her head. ‘I’ve seen people become psychological wrecks after being exposed to robberies like this one.’

Harry said nothing, but thought that statement had to be something she had picked up from older colleagues.

The robber turned and displayed six fingers.

‘Interesting,’ Beate mumbled and, without looking down, made a note on the pad in front of her. Harry followed the young policewoman out of the corner of his eye and watched her jump when the shot was fired. While the robber on the screen swept up the holdall, sprang over the counter, and ran out of the door, Beate’s little chin rose and her pen fell out of her hand.

‘We haven’t put the last part on the Net, or passed it on to any of the TV stations,’ Harry said. ‘Look, now he’s on the camera outside the bank.’

They watched the robber walk across the pedestrian crossing – on green – in Bogstadveien before making his way up Industrigata. Then he was outside the frame.

‘And the police?’ Beate asked.

‘The closest police station is in Sørkedalsveien just after the toll station, only eight hundred metres from the bank. Nevertheless, it took just over three minutes from the time the alarm went off until they arrived. So the robber had less than two minutes to make his escape.’

Beate looked at the screen thoughtfully, at the people and cars passing by as though nothing had happened.

‘The escape was as meticulously planned as the hold-up. The getaway car was probably parked around the corner so that it wouldn’t be caught by the cameras outside the bank. He’s been lucky.’

‘Perhaps,’ Harry said. ‘On the other hand, he doesn’t strike you as someone who relies on good fortune, does he?’

Beate shrugged. ‘Most bank robberies seem well planned if they’re successful.’

‘OK, but here it was odds on that the police would be delayed. On Friday at this time all the patrol cars in the area were busy somewhere else, at—’

‘—the American ambassador’s residence!’ Beate exclaimed, slapping her forehead. ‘The anonymous phone call about the car bomb. I had Friday off, but I saw it on the TV news. And if you think how hysterical people are nowadays, it’s obvious everyone there would have been.’

‘There was no bomb.’

‘Of course not. It’s the classic ruse to keep the police busy somewhere else before a hold-up.’

They sat watching the last part of the recording in thoughtful silence. August Schulz standing waiting at the pedestrian crossing. Green changes to red and back again without him moving. What’s he waiting for? Harry wondered. An irregularity? An extra-long sequence on green? A kind of hundred-year green wave? Alright. Should come soon. In the distance he heard the police sirens.

‘There’s something not quite right.’

Beate Lønn answered with the weary sigh of an old man: ‘There’s always something not quite right.’

Then the film was over and the snowstorm swept across the screen.

4

The Echo

‘SNOW?’

Harry shouted into his mobile phone as he hurried along the pavement.

‘Yes, really,’ Rakel said over a bad line from Moscow. This was followed by a hissy echo: ‘… eally.’

‘Hello?’

‘It’s freezing here … ere. Inside and outside … ide.’

‘And in the court?’

‘Well below freezing there, too. When we lived here, his mother even said I should take Oleg away. Now she’s sitting with the others and sending me such hateful scowls … owls.’

‘How’s the case going?’

‘How should I know?’

‘Well. First of all, you studied law. Secondly, you speak Russian.’

‘Harry. In common with 150 million Russians I don’t understand a thing about the legal system here, OK? … kay?’

‘OK. How’s Oleg taking it?’

Harry repeated his question without getting an answer and held up the display to see if he had lost the connection, but the seconds on the conversation timer were ticking away. He put the phone to his ear again.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, Harry, I can hear you … oooh. I miss you so … ohh. What’s with the ha ha? … aah.’