Phantom(137)

41

IT WAS LIKE standing between two oncoming trains. The wall of water in front hit him first. Threw him backwards, and he felt his head strike the ground. Then he was picked up and whirled onwards. He flailed desperately, his fingers and knees scraping against the wall, trying to catch hold of something, but he had no chance against the forces around him. Then, as quickly as it had started it stopped. He could feel the currents as the two cascades of water neutralised each other. And saw something by his back. Two white arms with a shimmer of green embraced Harry from behind, pale fingers reached up to his face. Harry kicked, twisted round and saw the body with the bandage round its stomach revolving in the dark water like a weightless, naked astronaut. Open mouth, slowly flapping hair and beard. Harry put his feet on the floor and stretched up to the ceiling. There was water to the very top. He crouched down, glimpsed the MP5 and the white line on the floor beneath him as he took his first swimming strokes. He had lost his bearings until the body told him which way he had to go to get back to where he had come from. Harry swam with his body at a diagonal to the walls, so that he had maximum arm span, shoved off, forcing himself not to think the other thought. Buoyancy wasn’t a problem, quite the contrary, the bullet-proof vest was dragging him down too far. Harry considered whether to spend time removing his coat; it kept drifting up above him and creating greater resistance. He tried to concentrate on what he had to do, swim back to the shaft, not count seconds, not count metres. But he could already feel the pressure in his head, as though it was going to explode. And then the thought came after all. Summer, fifty-metre outdoor pool. Early morning, almost no one around, sunshine, Rakel in a yellow bikini. Oleg and Harry were to settle who could swim furthest underwater. Oleg was on form after the ice-skating season, but Harry had a better swimming technique. Rakel cheered and laughed her wonderful laugh as they warmed up. They both strutted about for her – she was the queen of Frogner Lido and Oleg and Harry her subjects seeking the favour of her gaze. Then they started. And it was a dead heat. After forty metres they both broke the surface, panting and certain they had won. Forty metres. Ten metres to the end. With the pool wall to kick off from and unrestricted arm movement. Bit more than half the distance to the end of the shaft. He didn’t have a hope. He would die here. He would die now, soon. His eyeballs felt as if they were being squeezed out of his head. The plane left at midnight. Yellow bikini. Ten metres to the end. He took another stroke. Would manage one more. But then, then he would die.

It was half past three in the morning. Truls Berntsen was driving round the streets of Oslo in drizzle that whispered and murmured against the windscreen. He had been doing it for two hours. Not because he was searching for something, but because it brought him calm. Calm to think and calm not to think.

Someone had deleted an address from the list Harry Hole had been given. And it had not been him.

Perhaps not everything was as cut and dried as he had believed after all.

He replayed the night of the murder one more time.

Gusto had stopped by, so desperate for a fix that he was shaking, and threatened to grass him up unless Truls gave him some money for violin. For some reason there had been no violin for weeks, there had been panic in Needle Park, and a quarter cost three thousand, at least. Truls had said they would drive to an ATM, he’d just have to fetch his car keys. He had taken his Steyr pistol along; there was no doubt what would have to be done. Gusto would use the same threat again and again. Dopeheads are pretty predictable like that. But when he went back to the front door the boy had hopped it. Presumably because he had smelt blood. Fair enough, Truls had thought. Gusto wouldn’t do any snitching as long as he had nothing to gain by it, and after all he’d been in on the burglary as well. It was Saturday, and Truls was on what was known as reserve duty, which meant he was on call, so he had gone to the Watchtower, read a bit, watched Martine Eckhoff and drunk coffee. Then he had heard the sirens and a few seconds later his mobile had rung. It was the Ops Room. Someone had called in to say there was shooting at Hausmanns gate 92, and they had no one from Crime Squad on duty. Truls had run there, it was only a few hundred metres from the Watchtower. All his police instincts were on alert, he had observed the people he passed on the way, in the full knowledge that his observations could be important. One person he saw was a young man with a woollen hat, leaning against a house. The youngster’s attention was caught by the police car parked by the gate of the crime scene address. Truls had noticed the boy because he didn’t like the way his hands were buried in the pockets of his North Face jacket. It was too big and too thick for the time of year, and the pockets could have concealed all manner of things. The boy’d had a serious expression on his face, but didn’t look like a dope seller. When the police had accompanied Oleg Fauke from the river and into the patrol car the boy had turned his back and gone down Hausmanns gate.