‘Hello?’
Harry picked up the visitor’s pass. At the top was OSLO POLITIDISTRIKT. Beneath it was TORD SCHULTZ and a date. He had visited a police HQ or a station two days ago. And now he was dead.
‘Hello?’
Harry rang off.
Sat down.
Pondered.
He spent ninety minutes searching the house. Afterwards he wiped all the places where he might have left prints and removed the plastic bag he had put around his head with an elastic band so as not to drop hairs. It was an established rule that all detectives and other officers who might conceivably enter a crime scene should register their fingerprints and DNA. If he left any clues it would take the police five minutes to find out that Harry Hole had been there. The fruits of his labours were three small packages of cocaine and four bottles of what he assumed was contraband booze. Otherwise there was exactly what he presumed: nothing.
He closed the door, got in the car and drove off.
Oslo Politidistrikt.
Shit, shit, shit.
When he reached the city centre, he parked and sat staring out of the windscreen. Then he rang Beate’s number.
‘Hi, Harry.’
‘Two things. I’d like to ask you a favour. And give you an anonymous tip-off that there is another man dead in this case.’
‘I’ve just been told.’
‘So you know?’ Harry said in surprise. ‘The method is called Zjuk. Russian for “beetle”.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The brick.’
‘Which brick?’
Harry breathed in. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Gojke Tošić.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘The guy who attacked Oleg.’
‘And?’
‘He’s been found dead in his cell.’
Harry looked straight into a pair of headlights coming towards him. ‘How …?’
‘They’re checking now. Looks like he hanged himself.’
‘Delete himself. They killed the pilot as well.’
‘What?’
‘Tord Schultz is lying on the living-room floor of his house by Gardermoen.’
Two seconds passed before Beate answered. ‘I’ll inform the Ops Room.’
‘OK.’
‘What was the second thing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you wanted to ask me for a favour?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Harry pulled the visitor’s pass from his pocket. ‘I wonder whether you could check the visitors’ register in reception at Police HQ. See who Tord Schultz visited two days ago.’
Silence again.
‘Beate?’
‘Are you sure this is something I’ll want to be mixed up in, Harry?’
‘I’m sure this is something you won’t want to be mixed up in.’
‘Sod you.’
Harry rang off.
Harry left his vehicle in the multi-storey car park at the bottom of Kvadraturen and headed for Hotel Leon. He passed a bar, and the music floating through the open door reminded him of the evening he arrived: Nirvana’s inviting ‘Come As You Are’. He was not aware that he had entered the bar until he was standing in front of the counter in the winding intestine of a room.
Three customers sat hunched on bar stools. It looked like a month-old wake no one had broken up. There was a smell of corpses and creaking flesh. The barman sent Harry an order-now-or-go-to-hell look while slowly removing a cork from a bottle opener. He had three large Gothic letters tattooed across a broad neck. EAT.
‘What’s it to be?’ he shouted, managing to drown out Kurt Cobain, who was asking Harry to come as a friend.
Harry moistened his lips, which had suddenly gone dry. Looked at the barman’s hands twisting. It was a corkscrew of the simplest kind, one that requires a firm, trained hand, but only a couple of turns to penetrate, followed by a quick pull. The cork was pierced right through. This however was not a wine bar. So what else did they serve? He saw the distorted image of himself in the mirror behind the barman. The disfigured face. But it was not only his face; all of their faces, all the ghosts, were there. And Tord Schultz was the latest to join. His gaze scanned the bottles on the mirror shelf and like a heat-seeking rocket found its target. The old enemy. Jim Beam.
Kurt Cobain didn’t have a gun.
Harry coughed. Just one.
No gun.
He gave his order.
‘Eh?’ shouted the bartender, leaning forward.
‘Jim Beam.’
There is no gun.
‘Gin what?’
Harry swallowed. Cobain repeated the word ‘memoria’. Harry had heard the song a hundred times before, but he realised he had always thought Cobain sang ‘The more’ followed by something else.
In memoriam. Where had he seen it? On a gravestone?
He saw a movement in the mirror. At that moment the phone in his pocket began to vibrate.