Harry smiled, but didn't answer.
'I thought that now you had family obligations you'd given up the solitary lifestyle.'
Harry sent his younger colleague an admonitory grimace. 'Don't know if I see it like that,' he said slowly. 'We don't even live together, you know.'
'No, but Rakel has a little boy and that makes things different, doesn't it?'
'Oleg,' Harry said, edging his way towards the filing cabinet. 'They flew to Moscow on Friday.'
'Oh?'
'Court case. Father wants custody.'
'Ah, that's right. What's he like?'
'Hm.' Harry straightened the crooked picture above the coffee machine. 'He's a professor Rakel met and married while she was working there. He comes from a wealthy, traditional family with loads of political influence, Rakel says.'
'So they know a few judges, eh?'
'Bound to, but we think it'll be alright. The father's a wacko, and everyone knows that. Bright alcoholic with poor self-control, you know the type.'
'I think I do.'
Harry looked up smartly, just in time to see Halvorsen wipe away a smile.
At Police HQ it was fairly well known that Harry had alcohol problems. Nowadays, alcoholism is not in itself grounds for dismissing a civil servant, but to be drunk during working hours is. The last time Harry had had a relapse, there were people higher up in the building who had advocated having him removed from the force, but Politiavdelingssjef, PAS for short, Bjarne Mřller, head of Crime Squad, had spread a protective wing over Harry pleading extenuating circumstances. The circumstances had been the woman in the picture above the espresso machine–Ellen Gjelten, Harry's partner and close friend–who had been beaten to death with a baseball bat on a path down by the river Akerselva. Harry had struggled to his feet again, but the wound still stung. Particularly because, in Harry's opinion, the case had never been cleared up satisfactorily. When Harry and Halvorsen had found forensic evidence incriminating the neo-Nazi Sverre Olsen, Inspector Tom Waaler had wasted no time in going to Olsen's home to arrest him. Olsen had apparently fired a shot at Waaler, who had returned fire in self-defence and killed him. According to Waaler's report, that is. Neither the investigations at the scene of the shooting, nor the inquiry by SEFO, the independent police authority, suggested otherwise. On the other hand, Olsen's motive for killing Ellen had never been explained, beyond indications that he had been involved in the illegal arms trafficking which had caused Oslo to be flooded with handguns over recent years, and Ellen had stumbled onto his trail. Olsen was just an errand boy, though; the police still didn't have any leads on those behind the liquidation.
After a brief guest appearance with Politiets Overvĺkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, on the top floor, Harry had applied to rejoin Crime Squad to work on the Ellen Gjelten case. They had been all too happy to get rid of him. Mřller was pleased to have him back on the sixth floor.
'I'll just nip upstairs to give Ivarsson this,' Harry muttered, waving the VHS cassette. 'He wanted to take a look with a new wunderkind they have up there.'
'Oh? Who's that?'
'Someone who left Police College this summer and has apparently solved three robberies simply by studying the videos.'
'Wow. Good-looking?'
Harry sighed. 'You young ones are so boringly predictable. I hope she's competent. I don't care about the rest.'
'Sure it's a woman?'
'Herr and fru Lřnn might have called their son Beate for a joke, I suppose.'
'I have an inkling she's good-looking.'
'Hope not,' Harry said, ducking, out of ingrained habit, to allow his 192 centimetres to pass under the door frame.
'Oh?'
The answer was shouted from the corridor: 'Good police officers are ugly.'
* * *
At first sight, Beate Lřnn's appearance didn't give any firm indicators either way. She wasn't ugly; some would even call her doll-like. But that might have been mostly because she was small: her face, nose, ears–and her body. Her most prominent feature was her pallor. Her skin and hair were so colourless that she reminded Harry of a corpse Ellen and he had once fished out of Bunnefjord. Unlike with the woman's body, however, Harry had a feeling that if he just turned away for a second he would forget what Beate Lřnn looked like. Which, it seemed, she wouldn't have minded as she mumbled her name and allowed Harry to shake her small, moist hand before she quickly retrieved it.
'Inspector Hole is a kind of legend here in the building, you know,' PAS Rune Ivarsson said, standing with his back to them and fiddling with a bunch of keys. At the top of the grey iron door in front of them a sign said, in Gothic letters: THE HOUSE OF PAIN. And underneath: CONFERENCE ROOM 508. 'Isn't that right, Hole?'