Nemesis (19 page)

‘I don’t think it was a slip-up,’ Weber said, rinsing a coffee cup in the sink.

‘Oh?’

Weber mumbled.

‘What did you say, Weber?’

‘Nothing,’ he growled. ‘He must have had a reason. That’s all I’m saying.’

‘
Bolde.com
will be a server,’ Halvorsen said. ‘All I’m saying is that it isn’t registered anywhere. It might be in a cellar in Kiev for example and have anonymous clients who send specialised porn to each other. What do I know? We mere mortals won’t find people who don’t want to be found in that jungle. You’ll have to get hold of a bloodhound, a real specialist.’

The knock at the door was so feather-light Harry didn’t hear it, but Halvorsen shouted: ‘Come in.’

The door opened cautiously.

‘Hi,’ Halvorsen said with a smile. ‘Beate, isn’t it?’

She nodded and looked hastily across at Harry. ‘I was trying to get hold of you. That mobile number of yours on the list . . .’

‘He’s lost his mobile,’ Halvorsen said, getting up. ‘Take a seat and I’ll make you a Halvorsen espresso.’

She hesitated. ‘Thank you, but there’s something I have to show you in the House of Pain, Harry. Have you got time?’

‘All the time in the world,’ Harry said, leaning back in his chair. ‘Weber had only bad news. No matching fingerprints. And Raskol tricked Ivarsson good and proper today.’

‘Is that bad news?’ It slipped out before Beate could stop herself. She covered her mouth in alarm. Harry and Halvorsen laughed.

‘Nice to see you again, Beate,’ Halvorsen said before she and Harry left. He didn’t get an answer, just a searching look from Harry, and was left standing a little embarrassed in the middle of the floor.

Harry noticed a blanket rumpled up on the two-seater IKEA sofa in the House of Pain. ‘Did you sleep here last night?’

‘Just a nap,’ she said and started the video player. ‘Watch the Expeditor and Stine in this picture.’

She pointed to the screen where she had freeze-framed the robber with Stine leaning towards him. Harry could feel the hairs on his neck standing up.

‘There’s something about this, isn’t there?’ she said.

Harry scrutinised the robber. Then Stine. And he knew it was this still which had made him watch the video over and over again, searching all the time for something which was there but kept eluding him.

‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What is it you can see and I can’t.’

‘Try.’

‘I’ve already tried.’

‘Imprint the image on your retina, close your eyes and feel.’

‘Honestly . . .’

‘Come on, Harry.’ She smiled. ‘This is what investigating is, isn’t it.’

He looked at her in mild surprise. Then he shrugged his shoulders and did as she said.

‘What can you see, Harry?’

‘The inside of my eyelids.’

‘Concentrate. Tell me what jars.’

‘There’s something about him and her. Something . . . about the way they’re standing.’

‘Good. What about the way they’re standing?’

‘They’re standing . . . I don’t know. They’re standing wrong somehow.’

‘Wrong in what way?’

Harry had the same sinking feeling he’d had in Vigdis Albu’s house. He saw Stine Grette sitting forward. As if to catch the robber’s words. He was staring out of the holes of the balaclava and into the face of the person he was about to kill. What was he thinking? And what was she thinking? In this frozen moment in time, was she trying to discover who he was, this man under the balaclava?

‘Wrong in what way?’ Beate repeated.

‘They . . . they . . .’

Gun in hand, finger on trigger. Everyone around turned to marble. She is opening her mouth. He can see her eyes over the sights. The barrel nudging her teeth.

‘Wrong in what way?’

‘They . . . they’re too close.’

‘Bravo, Harry!’

He opened his eyes. Amoeba-like specks sparkled and floated across his field of vision.

‘Bravo?’ he mumbled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve put words to what we’ve seen the whole time. You’re absolutely correct, Harry. They’re standing too close to each other.’

‘Yes, I heard myself say that, but too close in relation to what?’

‘In relation to how close two people who have never met should stand.’

‘Eh?’

‘Have you heard of Edward Hall?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Anthropologist. He was the first to demonstrate the link between the distance people keep between each other and the relationship they have. It’s fairly well documented.’

‘Explain.’

‘The social space between people who don’t know each other is from one to three and a half metres. That’s the distance you would keep if the situation allowed, but look at bus queues and toilets. In Tokyo people stand closer to each and feel comfortable, but variations from culture to culture are in fact relatively minor.’

‘He can’t whisper to her from more than a metre away, can he.’

‘No, but he could easily have managed it within what is known as the personal space, which is from one metre to forty-five centimetres. That’s the distance people keep with strangers and so-called acquaintances. But as you see, the Expeditor and Stine Grette break this boundary. I’ve measured the distance. It’s twenty centimetres.
That means they’re well inside the intimate space. Then you’re so close to the other person you can’t keep the other person’s face in focus or avoid their aroma and body heat. It’s a space reserved for partners or close family.’

‘Mm,’ Harry said. ‘I’m impressed by your knowledge, but these two people are involved in high drama.’

‘Yes, but that’s what’s so fascinating!’ Beate burst out, holding on to the arm of the chair so that she wouldn’t take off. ‘If they’re not supposed to, people don’t cross the boundaries that Edward Hall talks about. And the Expeditor and Stine Grette are
not
supposed to.’

Harry rubbed his chin. ‘OK, let’s follow that line of thought.’

‘I think the Expeditor knew Stine Grette,’ Beate said. ‘Well.’

‘Good, good.’ Harry rested his face on his hands and spoke through his fingers. ‘So Stine knew a professional bank robber who performs a perfect heist before shooting her. You know where this reasoning is taking us, don’t you.’

Beate nodded. ‘I’ll see what we can find out about Stine Grette right away.’

‘Great. And afterwards let’s have a chat with someone who’s frequently been inside her intimate space.’

‘T
HIS PLACE GIVES ME THE CREEPS
,’ B
EATE SAID
.

‘They had a famous patient here called Arnold Juklerød,’ Harry said. ‘He said this place was the brain of the sick beast known as psychiatry. So you didn’t find anything about Stine Grette?’

‘No. Unblemished record, and her bank accounts don’t suggest financial irregularities. No shopping sprees in clothes shops or at restaurants. No payments to Bjerke trotting stadium or any other symptoms of gambling. The only extravagance I could turn up was a trip to São Paulo this summer.’

‘And her husband?’

‘Exactly the same. Solid and sober.’

They passed under the gateway to Gaustad hospital and came into a square surrounded by large red-brick buildings.

‘Reminiscent of a prison,’ Beate said.

‘Heinrich Schirmer,’ Harry said. ‘Nineteenth-century German architect. Also designed Botsen prison.’

A carer came to pick them up from reception. He had dyed black hair and looked as though he should be playing in a band or doing design work. Which, in fact, he did.

‘Trond Grette has mostly been sitting and staring out of the window,’ he said as they trotted down the corridor to section G2.

‘Is he ready to speak?’ Harry asked.

‘Yes, he can talk alright . . .’ The carer had paid six hundred kroner to have his black hair look unkempt, and now he was adjusting one of the tufts and blinking at Harry through a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses, which made him look like a nerd, in exactly the right way, that is, so that the cognoscenti could see he wasn’t a nerd but hip.

‘My colleague is wondering if Grette is well enough to talk about his wife,’ Beate said.

‘You’ll find out,’ said the carer and put the tuft of hair back in front of his glasses. ‘If he gets psychotic again, he’s not ready.’

Harry didn’t ask how they could tell when a person was psychotic. They came to the end of the corridor and the carer unlocked a door with a circular window.

‘Does he have to be locked in?’ Beate asked, looking around the bright reception room.

‘No,’ the carer said, without giving any further explanation, and pointed to the back of a white dressing gown on a chair which had been pulled over to the window. ‘I’m in the duty office on the left on your way out.’

They walked over to the man in the chair. He was staring out of the window and the only thing that stirred was his right hand, which was slowly moving a pen over a notepad, jerkily and mechanically like a robotic arm.

‘Trond Grette?’ Harry asked.

He didn’t recognise the person who turned round. Grette had cut off all his hair, his face was leaner and the wild expression in his eyes from the evening on the tennis court was replaced by a calm, vacant thousand-metre stare which went right through them. Harry had seen it before. They looked like that after the first weeks behind bars when they started doing their penance. Harry knew instinctively this man was doing the same. He was doing penance.

‘We’re police,’ Harry said.

Grette shifted his stare towards them.

‘It’s about the bank raid and your wife.’

Grette half-closed his eyes, as if he had to concentrate to understand what Harry was saying.

‘We were wondering if we could ask you some questions,’ Beate said in a loud voice.

Grette nodded slowly. Beate pulled a chair closer and sat down.

‘Can you tell us about her?’ she asked.

‘Tell you?’ His voice creaked like a badly oiled door.

‘Yes,’ Beate said with a gentle smile. ‘We would like to know who Stine was. What she did. What she liked. What plans you had. That sort of thing.’

‘That sort of thing?’ Grette looked at Beate. Then he put down the pen. ‘We were going to have children. That was the plan. Test-tube babies. She hoped for twins. Two plus two, she always said. Two plus two. We were just about to start. Right now.’ Tears welled in his eyes.

‘You’d been married for a long time, hadn’t you?’

‘Ten years,’ Grette said. ‘If they hadn’t played tennis, I wouldn’t have minded. You can’t force children to like the same things as parents, can you. Perhaps they would have preferred horse riding. Horse riding is wonderful.’

‘What sort of person was she?’

‘Ten years,’ Grette repeated, facing the window again. ‘We met in 1988. I had started at Management School in Oslo and she was in her last year at Nissen High School. She was the best-looking girl I’d ever seen. I know everyone says the good-looking one is the one you never got and have perhaps forgotten, but with Stine it was true. And I never stopped thinking she was the best-looking. We moved in together after a month and were together for every single day and night for three years. Yet I still couldn’t believe that she had said yes to becoming Stine Grette. Isn’t it strange? When you love someone enough, you find it incomprehensible that they can love you. It should be the opposite, shouldn’t it?’

A tear fell on the arm of the chair.

‘She was kind. There are not so many people who value that quality any more. She was reliable, loyal and always gentle. And brave. If she thought she heard noises downstairs and I was asleep, she got up herself and went down. I said she should wake me because what if one day burglars really were downstairs? But she just laughed and said:
Then I’ll offer them waffles and the waffle smell will wake you up, because it always does
. The smell of waffles was supposed to wake me up when . . . yes.’

He snorted air through his nose. The bare branches of the birch trees outside waved to them in the gusting wind. ‘You should have made waffles,’ he whispered. Then he tried to laugh, but it sounded like crying.

‘What were her friends like?’ Beate asked.

Grette hadn’t finished laughing and she had to repeat the question.

‘She liked being on her own,’ he said. ‘Perhaps because she was an only child. She had a lot of contact with her parents. And then we had each other. We didn’t need anyone else.’

‘She could have had contact with others you didn’t know about, couldn’t she?’ Beate said.

Grette looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Beate’s cheeks went a flustered red and she gave a quick smile. ‘I mean that your wife may not necessarily have passed on the conversations she had with all the people she met.’

‘Why not? What are you trying to say?’

Beate swallowed and exchanged glances with Harry. He took over. ‘In our investigations we always have to examine all the possibilities, however unlikely they may seem. And one of them is that some of the bank employees may be in league with the robber. Sometimes there is inside help with both the planning and the execution of the job. There is little doubt, for example, that the robber knew when the ATM would be refilled.’ Harry studied Grette’s face for signs of how he took that. But his eyes told him that he had left them again. ‘We’ve been
through the same questions with all the other employees,’ he lied.

A magpie shrieked from the tree outside. Plaintive, lonely. Grette nodded. At first slowly, then faster.

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘I understand. You think that’s why Stine was shot. You think she knew the robber. And when he had finished using her, he shot her to remove any possible leads. Isn’t that right?’

‘Well, at least it’s a theoretical possibility,’ Harry said.

Grette shook his head and laughed again: sad, hollow laughter. ‘It’s clear you didn’t know my Stine. She could never do anything like that. And why should she? If she’d lived a little longer, she would have been a millionaire.’

‘Oh?’

‘Walle Bødtker, her grandfather. Eighty-five years old and owner of three blocks of flats in the city centre. He was diagnosed with lung cancer this summer and since then there has been only one way it was going to go. His grandchildren would have received a block each.’