her entire childhood in the 1970s travelling the
world and sending her letters. From the homeless
milieu in Paris, a kibbutz in Israel, a train journey
through India and the verge of despair in
Copenhagen. It had been made very simply. A few
film-clips, but mostly stills, a voiceover and a
strangely melancholic, sad story. He must have
dreamed about it because when he woke up the
characters and places were still playing on his
retina.
The sound that had woken him came from the coat
he had left hanging over the kitchen chair. The
high-pitched bleeps bounced off the walls of the
bare room. He had switched on the electric panel
radiator to full, but he was still freezing under the
thin duvet. He placed his feet on the cold lino and
took the mobile phone out of his inside coat
pocket.
‘Hello?’
No answer.
‘Hello?’
All he could hear at the other end was breathing.
‘Is that you, Sis?’
She was the only person he could immediately
think of who had his number and who might
conceivably ring him in the middle of the night.
‘Is something the matter? With Helge?’
He’d had doubts about giving the bird to Sis, but
she had seemed so happy and had promised she
would take good care of it. But it wasn’t Sis. She
didn’t breathe like that. And she would have
answered.
‘Who is it?’
Still no answer.
He was about to hang up when there was a little
whimper. The breathing began to quiver; it
sounded as if the person at the other end was going
to cry. Harry sat down on the sofa bed. In the gap
between the thin blue curtains he could see the
neon sign of the ICA supermarket.
Harry eased a cigarette out of the packet on the
coffee table beside the sofa, lit it and lay back. He
inhaled deeply as he heard the quivering breathing
change into low sobbing.
‘Don’t cry now,’ he said.
A car passed outside. Had to be a Volvo, Harry
thought. Harry covered his legs with the duvet.
Then he told the story about the girl and her elder
brother, more or less as he remembered it. When
he had finished she wasn’t crying any more and
right after he said goodnight, the line was cut.
When the mobile phone rang again it was past
8.00 and light outside. Harry found it under the
duvet, between his legs. It was Meirik. He sounded
stressed.
‘Come back to Oslo immediately,’ he said.
‘Looks like that Märklin rifle of yours has been
used.’
Part Seven
BLACK CLOAK
74
Rikshospital. 10 May 2000.
HARRY RECOGNISED BERNT BRANDHAUG AT ONCE.
HE HAD a broad smile on his face and was staring
at Harry with wide-open eyes.
‘Why’s he smiling?’ Harry asked.
‘Don’t ask me,’ Klemetsen said. ‘The facial
muscles go stiff and people have all sorts of weird
expressions. Now and then we have parents here
who can’t recognise their own children because
they’ve changed so much.’
The autopsy table stood in the middle of the
room. Klemetsen removed the sheet so they could
see the remains of the body. Halvorsen did a swift
about-turn. He had rejected Harry’s offer of
menthol cream before they went in. As the room
temperature in Autopsy Room No. 4 in the
forensics department at the Rikshospital was
twelve degrees, the smell wasn’t the worst thing.
Halvorsen couldn’t stop retching.
‘Agreed,’ Knut Klemetsen said. ‘He’s not a pretty
sight.’
Harry nodded. Klemetsen was a good pathologist
and a considerate man. He was aware that
Halvorsen was new and didn’t want to embarrass
him. Brandhaug looked no worse than most bodies.
In other words, he looked no worse than the twins
who had lain in water for a week, the eighteen-
year-old who had crashed at 200 kph escaping
from the police or the junkie who had set fire to
herself, sitting naked except for a quilted anorak.
Harry had seen most things and as far as his top ten
nasties were concerned, Bernt Brandhaug was
well out of the running. But one thing was clear:
for a bullet through the back Bernt Brandhaug
looked horrific. The gaping exit wound in his chest
was big enough for Harry to stick his fist in.
‘So the bullet entered through his back?’ Harry
said.
‘Right between his shoulder-blades, angled
downwards. It smashed the vertebral column on
entry and the sternum on its way out. As you can
see, parts of the sternum are missing. They found
traces of it on the car seat.’
‘On the car seat?’
‘Yes, he had just opened the garage door,
probably on his way to work, and the bullet went
through him at an angle, through the front and the
rear windscreens, and lodged in the wall at the