‘If you begin down here, this officer and I will go upstairs with the bolt cutters,’ Harry said.
‘Oh?’
‘To open doors for you forensics boys. We promise not to spray semen anywhere.’
‘Very droll. Don’t—’
‘—touch anything.’
Harry and the officer, whom he called ‘officer’ for the simple reason that he had forgotten his name two seconds after hearing it, stomped up a winding staircase, making the iron steps sing. The doors they met were open, and inside, as Harry had envisaged, there were offices from which the furniture had been removed. A cloakroom with rows of iron lockers. A large communal shower. But no blue stains.
‘What do you think that is?’ Harry asked, standing in the lunch room. He pointed to a narrow padlocked door at the back.
‘Pantry,’ the officer said, already on his way out.
‘Wait!’
Harry went to the door. Scratched a nail on the apparently rusty lock. It was genuine rust. He turned it round, looked at the cylinder. No rust.
‘Cut it,’ Harry said.
The officer did as he was bidden. Then Harry opened the door.
The officer smacked his lips.
‘Just a secret door,’ Harry said.
Behind it was neither a pantry nor a room, but another door. Fitted with what looked like a solid lock.
The officer dropped the bolt cutter.
Harry scanned the area and found what he was looking for. A large red fire extinguisher, fairly conspicuous, hanging from the middle of the wall in the lunch room. Hadn’t Øystein mentioned something about that once? The materials they made where his father worked were so inflammable that they were instructed to smoke by the river. In to which the cigarette ends were to be thrown afterwards.
He lifted the extinguisher off the wall and carried it to the door. Took a run-up of two strides, aimed and smashed the metal cylinder into the door like a battering ram.
The door split around the lock, but still clung to the frame.
Harry repeated the attack. Splinters flew all around.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he heard Bjørn call from the factory floor.
At the third attempt the door gave with a despairing scream and swung open. They stared into a pitch-black void.
‘Can I borrow your torch?’ Harry asked the officer, putting down the fire extinguisher and wiping off the sweat. ‘Thanks. Wait here.’
Harry stepped into the room. There was a smell of ammonia. He shone the torch along the walls. The room – which he estimated was three metres square – had no windows. The beam swept across a black folding chair, a desk with a lamp and a Dell computer screen. The keyboard was relatively unworn. The desk was tidy and made of bare wood, no blue stains. In the litter bin there were strips of paper, as though someone had been cutting out pictures. And, sure enough, a Dagbladet with the front page cut up. Harry read the headline over the missing picture and knew they had come to the right place. They had arrived. This was it.
– DIED IN AVALANCHE –
Harry instinctively shone the torch upwards, on the wall above the desk, past some blue stains. And there they were.
All of them.
Marit Olsen, Charlotte Lolles, Borgny Stem-Myhre, Adele Vetlesen, Elias Skog, Jussi Kolkka. And Tony Leike.
Harry concentrated on breathing from his diaphragm. On absorbing the information piecemeal. The pictures had been cut out of news papers or were printouts, probably from news pages on the Internet. Apart from the picture of Adele. His heart felt like a bass drum, dull thuds as it tried to send more blood to his brain. The picture was on photographic paper and so grainy that Harry assumed it must have been taken with a telephoto lens and then blown up. It showed a car window, Adele’s profile in the front seat from which the plastic cover did not seem to have been removed, and there was something protruding from her neck. A large knife with a shiny, yellow handle. Harry forced his eyes to look further. Underneath the pictures hung a line of letters, also printed off a computer. Harry skimmed the introduction to one of them.
IT IS SO SIMPLE. I KNOW WHO YOU KILLED.
YOU DON’T KNOW WHO I AM, BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I
WANT.
MONEY. IF YOU DON’T PAY UP, THE COPS WILL BE ROUND.
SIMPLE, EH?
The text continued, but his eye was caught by the end of the letter. No name, no sign off. The police officer was standing in the doorway. Harry heard his hand fumbling along the wall as he muttered: ‘Must be a light switch here somewhere.’
Harry shone the torch at the blue ceiling, on four large neon tubes.
‘There must be,’ Harry said, illuminating the wall above several blue stains, before the cone of light found a sheet pinned to the right of the pictures. A tiny alarm bell had begun to go off in his brain. The sheet was torn at the side and covered in hand-drawn lines and columns. But there were different handwriting styles.