‘Could you ring my internal number when you’ve made up your mind?’ he said. ‘For the moment my office is quite a distance from the pigeon holes.’
‘Fine,’ she said graciously.
Harry was in the culvert, about fifty metres from the office, when he heard the door open. A figure came out, hastily locked up after himself, turned and began to hurry towards Harry. And stiffened when he caught sight of him.
‘Did I startle you, Bjørn?’ Harry asked gently.
The distance between them was still over twenty metres, but the walls cast the sound towards Bjørn Holm.
‘Bit,’ said the man from Toten, straightening the multicoloured Rasta hat covering his red hair. ‘You creep up on folk.’
‘Mm. And you?’
‘What about me?’
‘What are you doing here? I thought you had enough to do in Kripos. You’ve been given a wonderful new job, I hear.’ Harry stopped two metres from Holm, who was obviously taken aback.
‘Not sure about wonderful,’ Holm said. ‘I’m not allowed to work on what I like best.’
‘Which is?’
‘Forensics. You know me.’
‘Do I?’
‘Eh?’ Holm frowned. ‘Coordination of forensics and strategic planning, what’s that s’posed to be when it’s at home? Passing on messages, calling meetings, sending out reports.’
‘It’s a promotion,’ Harry said. ‘The start of something good, don’t you think?’
Holm snorted. ‘Know what I think? I think Bellman’s put me there to keep me out of the loop, to make sure I don’t get any first-hand info. Because he suspects that if I do, he’s not sure he’ll get it before you.’
‘But he’s mistaken there,’ Harry said, standing face to face with the forensics officer.
Bjørn Holm blinked twice. ‘What the fuck is this, Harry?’
‘Yes, what the fuck is it?’ Harry heard the anger making his voice tight, metallic. ‘What the fuck were you doing in the office, Bjørn? All your crap has gone now.’
‘Doing?’ Bjørn said. ‘Fetching this, wasn’t I.’ He held up his right hand. It was clutching a book. ‘You said you’d leave it in reception, remember?’
Hank Williams: The Biography.
Harry felt the shame flood into his cheeks.
‘Mm.’
‘Mm,’ Bjørn mimicked.
‘I had it with me when we moved out,’ Harry said. ‘But we did a Uturn halfway down the culvert and came back. Then I forgot all about it.’
‘OK. Can I go now?’
Harry stepped aside, and listened to Bjørn stomping down the culvert between curses.
He unlocked the office.
Flopped into the chair.
Looked around.
The notebook. He flicked through. He hadn’t taken any notes from the conversation, nothing that would pinpoint Tony Leike as a suspect. Harry opened the drawers in the desk to see if there were any signs of someone having rifled them. It all looked untouched. Could Harry have been wrong after all? Could he hope that Holm was not leaking information to Mikael Bellman?
Harry glanced at his watch. Praying the new police solicitor ate quickly. He struck an arbitrary key on the computer and the screen came to life. It was still showing the page with his last Google search. In the search box the name shone out at him: Tony Leike.
41
The Blue Chit
‘SO,’ SAID ASLAK KRONGLI, TWIRLING HIS COFFEE CUP. Kaja thought it looked like an egg cup in his large hand. She had taken a seat opposite him at the table closest to the window. The police canteen was situated on the top floor and was of standard Norwegian design, that is, light and clean, but not so cosy that people would be tempted to sit for longer than necessary. The great advantage of the room was its view of the town, but that didn’t seem to interest Krongli much.
‘I checked the guest books at the other self-service cabins in the area,’ he went on. ‘The only people who had written in the book that they were planning to spend the next night at Håvass cabin were Charlotte Lolles and Iska Peller, who were in Tunvegg the night before.’
‘And we already know about them,’ Kaja said.
‘Yes. So in fact I have only two things that might be of interest to you.’
‘And they are?’
‘I was speaking on the phone to an elderly couple who were at the Tunvegg cabin the same night as Lolles and Peller. They said that a man had turned up in the evening, had a bite to eat, changed his shirt, then went on his way heading south-west. Even though it was dark. And the only cabin in that direction is Håvass.’
‘And this person . . .’