‘Maybe she had more than one,’ shouted one of the female detectives, a short, buxom number Bellman reckoned was sufficiently lesbian for him to have toyed with the idea of inviting her to Kaja’s one night. No more than a passing thought of course. ‘Perhaps there was a whole fucking orgy going on up there.’
Laughter all round. Good, that lightened the atmosphere.
‘He may not have seen who she was having sex with, didn’t even know if it was a woman or a man, just that someone was under the covers with her,’ another voice said. ‘And so he hedged his bets.’
More laughter.
‘Come on, we can’t waste time on this rubbish,’ said Eskildsen, a veteran, though no one knew exactly how long he had been a detective. The room fell silent. ‘Any of you young ’uns remember the case they solved at Crime Squad a few years back when everyone thought there was a serial killer on the loose?’ Eskildsen continued. ‘When they got the killer it turned out he only had a motive for murdering number three. But because he knew he would come under suspicion if she was the only victim, he killed the others to camouflage it as an insane rampage.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ shouted a young officer. ‘Did the Crime Squad actually manage to solve a case? Must have been a fluke.’
The young man looked around with a grin and his face slowly coloured as no response was forthcoming. Everyone with any investigative experience at all remembered the case. It was on the syllabus of all police colleges throughout Scandinavia. It was a legend. As indeed was the man who cracked it.
* * *
‘Harry Hole.’
‘G’day, Holy, mate. Neil McCormack here. How are you? And where are you?’
McCormack thought he heard Harry answer ‘in a coma’, but assumed he must have been saying the name of some Norwegian town.
‘I talked to Iska Peller. She didn’t have a lot to say about the night at the cabin. However, the following evening . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘She and her friend Charlotte were picked up from the cabin by a cop from the outback and taken to his place. Turned out that while Miss Peller was trying to sleep off her flu, the policeman and her friend were having a glass of grog in the sitting room and he tried to seduce Charlotte. Got pretty physical, so physical that she shouted for help, Miss Peller woke up, and rushed into the room where the policeman had already pulled her friend’s ski pants down to her knees. He stopped, and Miss Peller and her friend decided to go to the station and stay at a hotel somewhere I’m afraid I can’t . . .’
‘Geilo.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You say “tried to seduce”, Neil, but you mean rape, I suppose?’
‘No, I had to do the rounds with Miss Peller before we landed on a precise formulation. She said her friend’s description was that the policeman had pulled down her trousers against her will, but he hadn’t touched her intimate parts.’
‘But . . .’
‘We can perhaps assume it was his intention, but we don’t know. The point is that nothing punishable by law had happened yet. Miss Peller accepted that. After all, they hadn’t bothered to report the matter, they just skedaddled. The cop had even found a village wacko to run all three of them to the station and he had helped them board the train. According to Miss Peller, the man seemed relatively unfazed by the whole business; he was more interested in getting the girlfriend’s phone number than apologising. As if it were just perfectly normal bloke-meets-sheila stuff.’
‘Mm. Anything else?’
‘No, Harry. Except that we’ve given her police protection as you suggested. Twenty-four-hour service, tucker and necessities brought to the door. She can just enjoy the sun. If the sun shines in Bristol, that is.’
‘Thanks, Neil. If anything—’
‘—should crop up, I’ll ring. And vice versa.’
‘Of course. Take care.’
Says you, McCormack thought, ringing off and peering out at the blue afternoon sky. The days were a bit longer now in the summer, he could still get in an hour and a half’s sailing before it was dark.
Harry got out of bed and went for a shower. Stood motionless, letting the boiling hot water run down his body for twenty minutes. Then he came out, dried his sensitive, red-flecked skin and dressed. Saw from his mobile phone that he had received eighteen calls while he had been asleep. So they had managed to get hold of his number. He recognised the first numbers as those of Norway’s three biggest newspapers and the two most important TV channels since they all had switchboard numbers beginning with the same prefixes. The remainder were more arbitrary and probably belonged to comment-hungry journalists. But his gaze paused at one of the numbers, although he couldn’t say why. Because there were some bytes up in his brain that had fun memorising numbers perhaps. Or because the dialling code told him it was Stavanger. He flicked back through his call log and found the number from two days earlier. Colbjørnsen.