Reading Online Novel

Nemesis(12)







'You grew up in East Oslo, too, I can hear,' Harry said as he and Beate walked towards where the woman had indicated. 'Or am I mistaken?'





'No,' Beate said, unwilling to expatiate.





The tennis court was positioned halfway between the blocks and the terraced houses. They could hear the dull thud of racquet strings on wet tennis ball. Inside the high wire-mesh fence they could make out a figure standing and serving in the quickly gathering autumn gloom.





'Hello!' Harry shouted when they reached the fence, but the man didn't answer. It was only now that they saw he was wearing a jacket, shirt and tie.





'Trond Grette?'





A ball hit a black puddle of water, bounced up, hit the fence and sprayed them with a fine shower of rainwater, which Beate fended off with her umbrella.





Beate pulled at the gate. 'He's locked himself in,' she whispered.





'Police! Officers Hole and Lřnn!' Harry yelled. 'We were due to meet. Can we…Christ!' Harry hadn't seen the ball until it lodged itself in the wire fence with a smack a few centimetres from his face. He wiped the water from his eyes and looked down: he had been spray-painted with dirty, reddish-brown water. Harry automatically turned his back when he saw the man toss up the next ball.





'Trond Grette!' Harry's shout echoed between the blocks. They watched a tennis ball curve in an arc towards the lights in the blocks before being swallowed by the dark and landing somewhere in the field. Harry faced the tennis court again, only to hear a wild roar and see a figure rushing towards him out of the dark. The metal fence squealed as it checked the charging tennis player. He fell onto the shale on all fours, picked himself up, took a run-up and charged the fence again. Fell, got up and charged.





'My God, he's gone nuts,' Harry mumbled. He instinctively took a step back as a white face with staring eyes loomed up in front of him. Beate had managed to switch on a torch and shone it at Grette, who was hanging on the fence. With wet, black hair stuck to his white forehead, he seemed to be searching for something to focus on as he slid down the fence like sleet on a car windscreen, until he lay lifeless on the ground.





'What do we do now?' Beate breathed.





Harry felt his teeth crunching and spat into his hand. From the light of the torch he saw red grit.





'You ring for an ambulance while I get the wirecutters from the car,' he said.





* * *





'Then he was given sedatives, was he?' Anna asked.





Harry nodded and sipped his Coke.





The young West End clientele perched on bar stools around them drinking wine, shiny drinks and Diet Coke. M was like most cafés in Oslo–urban in a provincial and naive but, as far as it went, pleasant way, which made Harry think about Kebab, the bright, well-behaved boy in his class at school who, they discovered, kept a book of all the slang expressions the 'in' kids used.





'They took the poor guy to hospital. Then we chatted to the neighbour again and she told us he had been out there hitting tennis balls every evening since his wife had been killed.'





'Goodness. Why?'





Harry hunched his shoulders. 'It's not so unusual for people to become psychotic when they lose someone in those circumstances. Some repress it and act as if the deceased were still alive. The neighbour said Stine and Trond Grette were a fantastic mixed-doubles pair, that they practised on the court almost every afternoon in the summer.'





'So he was kind of expecting his wife to return the serve?'





'Maybe.'





'Jeesus! Will you get me a beer while I go to the loo?'





Anna swung her legs off the stool and wiggled her way across the room. Harry tried not to follow her movements. He didn't need to, he had seen as much as he wanted. She had a few wrinkles around the eyes, a couple of grey strands in her raven-black hair; otherwise she was exactly the same. The same black eyes with the slightly hunted expression under the fused eyebrows, the same high, narrow nose above the indecently full lips and the hollow cheeks which tended to give her a hungry look. She might not have qualified for the epithet 'beautiful'–for that her features were too hard and stark–but her slim body was curvaceous enough for Harry to spot at least two men at tables in the dining area lose their thread as she passed.





Harry lit another cigarette. After Grette, they had paid a visit to Helge Klementsen, the branch manager, but that hadn't given them much to work on, either. He was still in a state of shock, sitting in a chair in his duplex in Kjelsĺsveien and staring alternately at the poodle scurrying between his legs and his wife scurrying between kitchen and sitting room with coffee and the driest cream horn Harry had ever tasted. Beate's choice of clothes had suited the Klementsen family's bourgeois home better than Harry's faded Levi's and Doc Martens. Nevertheless, it was mostly Harry who maintained conversation with the nervously tripping fru Klementsen about the unusually high precipitation this autumn and the art of making cream horns, to the interruptions above of stamping feet and loud sobbing. Fru Klementsen explained that her daughter Ina, the poor thing, was seven months pregnant to a man who had just given her the heave-ho. Well, in fact, he was a sailor and had set sail for the Mediterranean. Harry had almost spattered the cream horn across the table. It was then that Beate took charge and asked Helge, who had given up pursuing the dog with his eyes as it had padded out through the living-room door, 'How tall would you say the robber was?'