Nemesis (49 page)

Harry switched on the Grimmer lamp and light fell on the three pictures. ‘It reminds me of something in my law studies, the Gulathing Law of 1100. It states that everyone who dies should be buried in holy ground except for men of dishonour, traitors and murderers. They should be buried where the sea meets land. The place where Albu was buried doesn’t suggest a jealousy killing, as it would have been if Gunnerud had killed him. Someone wanted to show that Albu was a criminal.’

‘Interesting,’ said Aune. ‘Why should we look at these pictures again? They’re terrible.’

‘You’re really sure you can’t see anything in them?’

‘I certainly can. I can see a pretentious young artist with an exaggerated sense of drama and no sense of art.’

‘I have a colleague called Beate Lønn. She couldn’t be here today because she’s giving a talk at a police conference in Germany, about how it is possible to recognise masked criminals with the help of computer manipulation of images and the
fusiform gyrus
. She has a special innate talent: she can recognise all the faces she has seen in the whole of her life.’

Aune nodded. ‘I am aware of this phenomenon.’

‘When I showed her these pictures she recognised the people.’

‘Oh?’ Aune raised an eyebrow. ‘Tell me more.’

Harry pointed. ‘The one on the left is Arne Albu, the one in the middle is me and the last is Alf Gunnerud.’

Aune squinted, straightened his glasses and tried looking at the pictures from a variety of distances. ‘Interesting,’ he mumbled. ‘Extremely interesting. I can only see the shapes of heads.’

‘I only wanted to know if you, as an expert witness, can vouchsafe that this kind of recognition is possible. It would help us to make further links between Gunnerud and Anna.’

Aune waved his hand. ‘If what you say about frøken Lønn is
true, she could have recognised a face with minimal information.’

Outside again, Aune said that he would be keen to meet this Beate Lønn professionally. ‘She is a detective, I take it?’

‘In the Robberies Unit. I worked with her on the Expeditor case.’

‘Oh, yes. How’s it going?’

‘Well, there are not many leads. They had been expecting him to strike again soon, but nothing has happened. Odd, actually.’

In Bogstadveien, Harry noticed the first snowflakes swirling in the wind.

‘Winter!’ Ali shouted across the street to Harry, pointing up at the sky. He said something in Urdu to his brother, who immediately took over the job of carrying the fruit crates back inside the shop. Then Ali padded across the road to Harry. ‘Isn’t it wonderful it’s over?’ He smiled.

‘Yes, it is,’ Harry said.

‘Autumn’s bloody awful. Finally, a bit of snow.’

‘Oh, yes. I thought you meant the case.’

‘Of the laptop in your storeroom? Is it over?’

‘Hasn’t anyone told you? They’ve found the man who put it there.’

‘Aha. That must be why my wife was told I didn’t need to go to the police station for questioning today after all. What was it about, anyway?’

‘To cut a long story short, a guy was trying to make out I was involved in a serious crime. Invite me to a meal one day and I’ll give you all the details.’

‘I’ve already invited you, Harry!’

‘You didn’t say when.’

Ali rolled his eyes. ‘Why do you have to have a date and a time before you dare to drop by? Knock on the door and I’ll open up. We’ve always got food.’

‘Thanks, Ali. I’ll knock loud and clear.’ Harry opened the door.

‘Did you find out who the lady was? Was she an assistant?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The mysterious lady I saw in front of the cellar door that day. I told Tom somebody-or-other about it.’

Harry stood with his hand on the door handle. ‘Exactly what did you say to him, Ali?’

‘He asked if I had seen anything unusual in or around the cellar and then I remembered I’d seen the back of a lady I didn’t recognise by the cellar door as I came in the building. I remembered because I was going to ask who she was, but then I heard the lock click so I assumed if she had a key, she had to be OK.’

‘When was this and what did she look like?’

Ali opened his palms in apology. ‘I was busy and only glimpsed her back. Three weeks ago? Five weeks? Blonde hair? Dark hair? No idea.’

‘But you’re sure it was a woman?’

‘I must have thought it was a woman, anyway.’

‘Alf Gunnerud was medium height, narrow-shouldered with dark, shoulder-length hair. Is that what made you think it was a woman?’

Ali pondered. ‘Yes, it might have been. And it could also have been fru Melkersen’s daughter visiting. For instance.’

‘Bye, Ali.’

Harry decided to take a quick shower before changing and going to see Rakel and Oleg, who had invited him to pancakes and Tetris. On their return from Moscow, Rakel had brought back an attractive chess set with carved pieces and a board made of wood and mother-of-pearl. Unfortunately, Rakel hadn’t liked the Namco G-Con 45 gun Harry had bought for Oleg and had immediately confiscated it. She had explained that she had told Oleg many times that he was not to play with firearms until he was twelve, at least. Harry and Oleg had both rather shamefacedly accepted this without any discussion. But they knew Rakel would take advantage of the opportunity to go jogging while Harry looked after Oleg. And Oleg had whispered to Harry that he knew where she had hidden the Namco G-Con 45 gun.

The burning-hot jets of water drove the cold out of his body as he tried to forget what Ali had said. There would always be room for
doubts in any case, however cut and dried it seemed. And Harry was a born doubter. At some point, though, you had to have some faith, if life was to have any shape or make sense.

He dried himself down, shaved and put on a clean shirt. Checked himself over in the mirror and grinned. Oleg had said he had yellow teeth, and Rakel had laughed a bit too loudly. In the mirror he saw the printout of the first e-mail from S
²
MN pinned to the opposite wall. Tomorrow he would take it down and put up the photograph of Sis and himself. Tomorrow. He studied the e-mail in the mirror. Strange he hadn’t realised the evening he had been standing in front of the mirror and felt something was missing. Harry and his little sister. Must have been because when you see something so often you tend to develop a blindness to it. Blind to it. He scrutinised the e-mail in the mirror. Then he ordered a taxi, put on his shoes and waited. Looked at his watch. The taxi must have arrived by now. Should get going. He realised he had picked up the receiver again and was dialling a number.

‘Aune.’

‘I want you to read the e-mails one more time and tell me if you think they were written by a man or a woman.’

T
HE SNOW MELTED OVERNIGHT.
A
STRID
M
ONSEN HAD JUST
come out of the apartment building and was making her way across the wet, black tarmac towards Bogstadveien when she saw the blond policeman on the opposite pavement. Her pulse, like her walking speed, leapt. She stared rigidly ahead, hoping he wouldn’t see her. There had been photographs of Alf Gunnerud in the papers and for days detectives had been trudging up and down the stairs disrupting her quiet working routine. But now it was over, she had told herself.

She scuttled towards the pedestrian crossing. To Hansen’s bakery. If she got there, she would be safe. A cup of tea and a doughnut at the table behind the counter, at the far end of the long, thin café. Every day at precisely 10.30.

‘Tea and a doughnut?’ ‘Yes, please.’ ‘That’ll be 38 kroner.’ ‘Here you are.’ ‘Thank you.’

Most days that was the longest conversation she had with anyone.

For the last weeks an elderly man had been sitting at her table when she arrived, and even though there were several unoccupied tables, this was the only table she could sit at because . . . no, she didn’t want to think about these things now. Nevertheless, she had
been forced to arrive a quarter of an hour earlier to get to the table first. Today that was perfect because otherwise she would have been at home when he rang. And she would have had to open the door. She had promised Mother. Ever since the time she had refused to answer the telephone or the doorbell for two months, and in the end the police had come and her mother had threatened to have her readmitted.

She didn’t lie to Mother.

To others, yes. She lied to them all the time. On the telephone to the publishers, in shops and on Internet chat sites. Especially there. She could pretend to be someone else, one of the characters in the books she translated, or Ramona, the decadent, promiscuous but fearless woman she had been in an earlier life. Astrid had discovered Ramona when she was small. She was a dancer, had long black hair and brown almond-shaped eyes. Astrid used to draw Ramona, especially her eyes, but she had to do it clandestinely because Mother tore the drawings to shreds and said she didn’t want to see hussies like her in the house. Ramona had been gone for many years, but she had returned, and Astrid had noticed how Ramona had begun to take over, in particular when she wrote to the male writers she translated. After the preamble about language and cultural references, she liked to write more informal e-mails, and after a couple of those, the French writers would beg to meet her. When they were in Oslo to launch the book. Besides, she alone was reason enough to make the trip. She would always refuse although that did not seem to deter the suitors, more the opposite. This was what constituted her writerly activities now, after waking up from the dream of publishing her own books several years ago. A publishing consultant had finally cracked on the telephone and hissed that he could no longer put up with her ‘hysterical fussing’; no reader would ever pay to share her thoughts, but, for a fee, a psychologist might.

‘Astrid Monsen!’

She felt her throat constrict and for a moment she panicked. She didn’t want to have respiratory problems here on the street. She was
about to cross when the lights changed to red. She could have made it, but she would never cross on red.

‘Hello, I was on my way to see you.’ Harry Hole caught up with her. He still had the same hunted expression, the same red eyes. ‘Let me first say I read Inspector Waaler’s report of the conversation he had with you. I understand you lied to me because you were frightened.’

She could feel she would start hyperventilating soon.

‘It was extremely inept of me not to tell you about my role in the whole business straight away,’ the police officer said.

She looked at him in surprise. He did sound genuinely sorry.

‘And I’ve read in the paper that the guilty party has been apprehended,’ she heard herself say.

They stood looking at each other.

‘Is dead, I mean,’ she added in a soft voice.

‘Well,’ he said with a tentative smile. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me with a couple of questions anyway?’

That was the first time she had not sat alone at her table in Hansen’s bakery. The girl behind the counter had sent her a kind of knowing girlfriend’s smile, as if the tall man with her were an escort. Since he looked as if he had just crawled out of bed, perhaps the girl even thought . . . no, she didn’t want to entertain that idea now.

They had sat down and he had given her printouts of several e-mails he wanted her to read through. Could she, as a writer, decipher whether they had been written by a man or a woman? She had examined them. As a writer, he had said. Should she tell him the truth? She raised her teacup so that he couldn’t see her smiling at the thought. Of course not. She would lie.

‘Hard to say,’ she said. ‘Is it fiction?’

‘Yes and no,’ Harry said. ‘We think the person who killed Anna Bethsen wrote them.’

‘So it must be a man.’

Harry studied the table and she shot a quick glance at him. He wasn’t good-looking, but he had something going for him. She had – as improbable as it sounded – noticed it as soon as she saw him lying on the landing outside her door. Perhaps because she had had one more Cointreau than usual, but she had thought he looked peaceful, almost handsome, as he lay there, like a sleeping prince someone had placed in front of her door. The contents of his pockets had been scattered over the staircase and she had picked them up one by one. She had even had a peep in his wallet and found his name and address.

Harry raised his eyes and hers quickly darted away. Could she have liked him? Certainly. The problem was he wouldn’t have liked her. Hysterical fuss. Groundless fears. The sobbing. He wouldn’t like that. He wanted women like Anna Bethsen. Like Ramona.

‘Are you sure you don’t recognise her?’ he asked slowly.

She gave him a horrified look. It was only then she noticed he was holding up a photograph. He had shown her this photograph before. A woman and two children on the beach.

‘On the night of the murder, for example.’

‘Never seen her in my whole life,’ Astrid Monsen said firmly.

Snow was beginning to fall again. Large, wet snowflakes, which were grey and dirty before they landed on the brown earth between Police HQ and Botsen. A message from Weber lay waiting in the office. It confirmed Harry’s suspicions, the same suspicions which had made him see the e-mails in a new light. Nevertheless, Weber’s concise message came as a shock. A kind of expected shock.

Harry was on the telephone for the rest of the day, between running to and from the fax machine. In the breaks, he brooded, placed one brick on top of another and tried not to think about what he was looking for. But it was all too clear. This roller coaster could climb, fall, twist and turn as much as it liked, but it was the same as all other roller coasters – it would end up where it started.

When Harry’s brooding was over and most of the picture was clear, he leaned back in the office chair. He didn’t feel any triumph, just a void.

Rakel didn’t ask any questions when he rang to say she shouldn’t wait for him. Afterwards he went up the stairs to the canteen and onto the terrace roof where some smokers were standing and shivering. The city lights twinkled beneath them in the early-afternoon gloom. Harry lit a cigarette, ran his hand along the wall and made a snowball. Rolled it up. Tighter and tighter, hit it with his palms, squeezed it until the melted ice ran between his fingers. Then he threw it down towards the city. He followed the shiny snowball with his eyes as it fell, faster and faster, until it disappeared into the grey-white background.