The Redbreast(13)

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