Nemesis(15)

'Harry…'





'I have to go,' he said.





* * *





He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop's screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother's bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: 'Mine for ever?'





'Not bloody likely,' he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him.





'Mine for ever?'





'Yes,' he groaned and came.





When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.





'After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,' she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.





The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS Elenora. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother's first lover–though not her first ever–in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.





Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn't matter.





That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna's grandmother's bed.





Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer on the white sheets of her grandmother's bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt cliché: 'You deserve someone better than me.'





At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.





That was seven years ago, and the relationship had only lasted six weeks. After that he had only met her twice. Once in a bar when she had gone over to him with tears in her eyes and asked him to go somewhere else, which he had done. And once at an exhibition where Harry had taken his younger sister. He had promised to call her, but he never did.





Harry rolled over to look at the clock again. 3.22. He had kissed her. At the end of the evening. Once he was safely outside the door of her flat with the wavy glass, he had leaned over to give her a goodnight hug and it had become a kiss. Easy and great. Easy, at any rate. 3.33. Christ, when had he become so sensitive that he felt pangs of guilt for giving an old flame a goodnight kiss? Harry tried to take deep, regular breaths to concentrate his mind on possible escape routes from Bogstadveien via Industrigata. In. Out. In again. He could still smell her fragrance. Feel the sweet pressure of her body. The rough insistence of her tongue.





6

Chilli





THE DAY'S FIRST RAYS HAD JUST RISEN OVER THE EDGE OF Ekeberg Ridge, peeped under the half-drawn blind in the Crime Squad conference room and wedged themselves between the folds of skin around Harry's pinched eyes. Rune Ivarsson stood at the end of the long table, legs apart, rocking up and down on the soles of his feet, his hands behind his back. A flip chart with WELCOME in big red letters at his rear. Harry presumed this was something Ivarsson had picked up at a seminar on presentations and made a half-hearted attempt to stifle a yawn as the Head of the Robberies Unit began to speak.





'Good morning, everyone. The eight of us sitting around the table constitute the team assembled to investigate the bank robbery committed in Bogstadveien on Friday.'





'Murder,' Harry mumbled.





'I beg your pardon?'





Harry straightened up in his chair. The damned sun was blinding him whichever way he turned. 'I suppose it would be correct to base the investigation on the fact that it was a murder.'