Phantom(108)

Back in Oslo, Oleg was terrified about what would happen. As for myself I was quite cool, strangely enough. It was as if I knew the old boy wouldn’t touch us. We were two harmless junkies on our way down. Broke, unemployed and after a while out of violin. Oleg had found out that the expression ‘junkie’ was more than a hundred years old, from the time when the first heroin addicts stole junk metal from the harbour in Philadelphia and sold it to finance their consumption. And that was precisely what Oleg and I did. We began to sneak into building sites down by the harbour in Bjørvika and stole whatever we came across. Copper and tools were gold. We sold the copper to a scrap merchant in Kalbakken, the tools to a couple of Lithuanian tradesmen.

But as more people latched onto the scam, the fences grew in height, more nightwatchmen were employed, the cops showed up and the buyers went AWOL. So there we sat, our cravings lashing us like rabid slave drivers round the clock. And I knew I would have to come up with a decent idea, an Endlösung. So I did.

Of course I said nothing to Oleg.

I prepared the speech for a whole day. Then I rang her.

Irene had just returned home from training. She sounded almost happy to hear my voice. I talked without stopping for an hour. She was crying by the time I’d finished.

The following evening I went down to Oslo Central Station and was standing on the platform when the Trondheim train trundled in.

Her tears were flowing as she hugged me.

So young. So caring. So precious.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve never really loved anyone. But I must have been close to it, because I was almost crying myself.





33

THROUGH THE NARROW opening of the window in room 301 Harry heard a church bell strike eleven somewhere in the darkness. His aching chin and throat had one advantage: they kept him awake. He got out of bed and sat in the chair, tilted it back against the wall beside the window so that he was facing the door with the rifle in his lap.

He had stopped at reception and asked for a strong light bulb to replace the one that had gone in his room and a hammer to knock in a couple of nails sticking up from the door sill. Said he would fix them himself. Afterwards he had changed the weak bulb in the corridor outside and used the hammer to loosen and remove the door sill.

From where he was sitting he would be able to see the shadow in the gap beneath the door when they came.

Harry lit another cigarette. Checked the rifle. Finished the rest of the pack. Outside in the darkness the church bell chimed twelve times.

The phone rang. It was Beate. She said she had been given copies of four of the five lists from patrol cars trawling the Blindern district.

‘The last patrol car had already delivered its list to Orgkrim,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ Harry said. ‘Did you get the bags from Rita at Schrøder’s?’

‘Yes, I did. I’ve told Pathology to make it a priority. They’re analysing the blood now.’

Pause.

‘And?’ Harry asked.

‘And what?’

‘I know that intonation, Beate. There’s something else.’

‘DNA tests take more than a few hours, Harry. It—’

‘—can take days before we have a final result.’

‘Yes, so for the time being it’s incomplete.’

‘How incomplete?’ Harry heard footsteps in the corridor.

‘Well, there’s at least a five per cent chance there’s no match.’

‘You’ve been given an interim DNA profile and have a match on the DNA register, haven’t you?’

‘We use incomplete tests only to say who we can eliminate.’

‘Who’s the match for?’

‘I don’t want to say anything until—’

‘Come on.’

‘No. But I can say it’s not Gusto’s own blood.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s not Oleg’s. Alright?’

‘Very alright,’ Harry said, suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath.

A shadow under the door.

‘Harry?’

Harry rang off. Pointed the rifle at the door. Waited. Three short knocks. Waited. Listened. The shadow didn’t move. He tiptoed along the wall towards the door, out of any possible firing line. Put his eye to the peephole in the middle of the door.

He saw a man’s back.

The jacket hung straight and was so short he could see the trouser waistband. A black piece of cloth hung from his back pocket, a cap perhaps. But he wasn’t wearing a belt. His arms hung close to his sides. If the man was carrying a weapon it had to be in a holster, either on his chest or on the inside of his calf. Neither very common.

The man turned to the door and knocked twice, harder this time. Harry held his breath while studying the distorted image of a face. Distorted, and yet there was something unmistakable about it. A pronounced underbite. And he was scratching himself under the chin with a card he had hanging from his neck. The way police officers sometimes carried ID cards when they were going to make an arrest. Shit! The police had been quicker than Dubai.