the boss would get when he heard that Sverre
Olsen had walked yet again.
By the photocopier a young, rosy-cheeked girl
instantly raised her eyes and smiled as Harry
passed. He didn’t manage a return smile.
Presumably one of the office girls. Her perfume
was sweet and heavy, and simply irritated him. He
looked at the second hand on his watch.
So perfume had started irritating him now. What
had got into him? Ellen had said he lacked natural
buoyancy, or whatever it was that meant most
people could struggle to the surface again. After
his return from Bangkok he had been down for so
long that he had considered giving up ever
returning to the surface. Everything had been cold
and dark, and all his impressions were somehow
dulled. As if he were deeply immersed in water. It
had been so wonderfully quiet. When people
talked to him the words had been like bubbles of
air coming out of their mouths, hurrying upwards
and away. So that was what it was like to drown,
he had thought, and waited. But nothing happened.
It was only a vacuum. That was fine, though. He
had survived.
Thanks to Ellen.
She had stepped in for him in those first weeks
after his return when he’d had to throw in the towel
and go home. And she had made sure that he didn’t
go to bars, ordered him to breathe out when he was
late for work, after which she declared him fit or
unfit accordingly. Had sent him home a couple of
times and then kept quiet about it. It had taken time,
but Harry had nothing particular to do. And Ellen
had nodded with satisfaction on the first Friday
they could confirm that he had turned up sober for
work on five consecutive days.
In the end he had asked her straight out. Why,
with police college and a law degree behind her
and her whole life in front of her, had she
voluntarily put this millstone around her neck?
Didn’t she realise that it wouldn’t do her career
any good? Did she have a problem finding normal,
successful friends?
She had looked at him with a serious expression
and answered that she only did it to soak up his
experience. He was the best detective they had in
Crime Squad. Rubbish, of course, but he had
nonetheless felt flattered that she would bother to
say so. Besides, Ellen was such an enthusiastic,
ambitious detective that it was impossible not to
be infected. For the last six months Harry had even
begun to do good work again. Some of it even
excellent. Such as on the Sverre Olsen case.
Ahead of him was Møller’s door. Harry nodded
in passing to a uniformed officer who pretended
not to see him.
If he had been a contestant on Swedish TV’s The
Robinson Expedition, Harry thought, it would have
taken them no more than a day to notice his bad
karma and send him home. Send him home? My
God, he was beginning to think in the same
terminology as the shit TV3 programmes. That’s
what happened when you spent five hours every
night in front of the TV. The idea was that if he
was locked up in front of the goggle box in Sofies
gate, at least he wouldn’t be sitting in Schrøder’s
café.
He knocked twice immediately beneath the sign
on the door: Bjarne Møller, PAS.
‘Come in!’
Harry looked at his watch. Seventy-five seconds.
7
Møller’s Office. 9 October 1999.
INSPECTOR BJARNE MØLLER WAS LYING RATHER
THAN sitting in the chair, and a pair of long limbs
stuck out between the desk legs. He had his hands
folded behind his head – a beautiful specimen of
what early race researchers called ‘long skulls’ –
and a telephone gripped between ear and shoulder.
His hair was cut in a kind of close crop, which
Hole had recently compared with Kevin Costner’s
hairstyle in The Bodyguard. Møller hadn’t seen
The Bodyguard. He hadn’t been to the cinema in
fifteen years as fate had furnished him with an
oversized sense of responsibility, too few hours,
two children and a wife who only partly
understood him.
‘Let’s go for that then,’ Møller said, putting down
the phone and looking at Harry across a desk
weighed down with documents, overflowing
ashtrays and paper cups. On the desktop a
photograph of two boys dressed as Red Indians
marked a kind of logical centre amid the chaos.
‘There you are, Harry.’
‘Here I am, boss.’
‘I’ve been to a meeting at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in connection with the summit in November
here in Oslo. The US President is coming . . . well,
you read papers, don’t you. Coffee, Harry?’
Møller had stood up and a couple of seven-league
strides had already taken him to a filing cabinet on