Nemesis(5)

'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.'