‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘But I was also wondering
one thing, Aud Hilde.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If you’ve seen the hotel room we have at our
disposal here.’
Aud Hilde smiled again and said she hadn’t.
38
Focus Fitness Centre, Ila. 2 March
2000.
HARRY WAS PEDALLING AND SWEATING. THE
CARDIO-vascular room was equipped with eighteen
hyper-modern ergometric exercise bikes, all
occupied by ‘urban’, generally speaking, attractive
people staring at the mute TV monitor hanging from
the ceiling. Harry was watching Elisa in The
Robinson Expedition mouthing that she couldn’t
stand Poppe. Harry knew. It was a repeat.
That don’t impress me much! rang out from the
loudspeakers.
No, well, there’s a surprise, Harry thought, who
liked neither the loud music nor the rasping sounds
that could be heard coming from somewhere in his
lungs. He could have worked out for nothing in the
gym at Police HQ, but Ellen had persuaded him to
join the Focus centre. He had gone along with that,
but drew the line when she tried to get him to join
an aerobics class. Moving in time to canned music
with a troupe of people who all liked canned
music while an instructor with a rictus smile
encouraged greater exertion with such verbal wit
as ‘no pain, no gain’ was for Harry an
incomprehensible form of voluntary self-
abasement. The way he saw it, the biggest
advantage of Focus was that he could work out and
watch The Robinson Expedition without having to
be in the same room as Tom Waaler, who
appeared to spend most of his free time in the
police gym. Harry cast a quick glance around and
confirmed that tonight, as usual, he was the oldest
person there. Most people in the room were girls,
with Walkmans plugged into their ears, sneaking a
look in his direction at regular intervals. Not
because they were looking at him, but because
Norway’s most popular stand-up comic sat next to
him in a grey hoodie without a drop of sweat
beneath his jaunty forelock. A message flashed up
on Harry’s speedometer console: You’re training
well.
But dressing badly, Harry thought, looking down
at his limp, faded jogging bottoms, which he had to
keep hitching up because of the mobile phone
hanging on the waistband. And his tired Adidas
trainers were neither new enough to be modern or
old enough to be trendy again. The Joy Division T-
shirt which had once held some kind of street cred
just sent out the signal that he hadn’t been
following what was happening on the music scene
for a number of years. But Harry didn’t feel
completely – completely – in the cold until his
phone began to bleep and he noticed that seventeen
reproachful pairs of eyes, including the stand-up
comic’s, were directed at him. He unhooked the
tiny black devil’s machine from his waistband.
‘Hole.’
That don’t impress me much! again.
‘It’s Juul. Am I disturbing?’
‘No, it’s just music.’
‘You’re wheezing like a walrus. Ring me back
when it’s more convenient.’
‘It’s convenient now. I’m at the gym.’
‘Alright. I have good news. I’ve read your report
from Johannesburg. Why didn’t you say he’d been
to Sennheim?’
‘Uriah? Is that important? I wasn’t even sure I had
the name right. I looked for it on a map of Germany
but I couldn’t find any Sennheim.’
‘The answer to your question is yes, it is
important. If you’ve been in any doubt as to
whether he fought at the front, you can be reassured
now. It’s one hundred per cent certain. Sennheim is
a little place and the only Norwegians I’ve heard
of who have been there went during the war. To
the training camp before leaving for the Eastern
Front. The reason you didn’t find Sennheim on a
map of Germany is because it isn’t in Germany, but
in French Alsace.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘Alsace has alternated between being French and
German throughout its history, that’s why they
speak German there. The fact that our man has been
to Sennheim reduces the number of potential
candidates drastically. You see, only men from the
Nordland and Norge regiments received their training there. And even better – I can give you the
name of a person who was in Sennheim and would
almost certainly be willing to help.’
‘Really?’
‘A soldier from the Nordland regiment who
fought at the front. He joined us in the Resistance
as a volunteer in 1944.’
‘Wow.’
‘He grew up on a remote farm with his parents