‘The DNA from inside and outside the condom match two old acquaintances. A Swedish girl and Ivar Torsteinsen, better known to undercover men as Hivar.’
‘Hivar?’
‘Used to threaten police with infected needles, claimed he had HIV.’
‘Mm, explains the condom. Any violence on his record?’
‘No. Just hundreds of burglaries, possession and dealing. Plus a bit of smuggling.’
‘But threatened murder with a syringe?’
Beate sighed and stepped into the sitting room, her back to him. ‘Sorry, Harry, but there are no loose threads in this case.’
‘Oleg has never hurt a fly, Beate. He simply doesn’t have it in him. While this Hivar-’
‘Hivar and the Swedish girl are… well, they have been eliminated from inquiries, you might say.’
Harry looked at her back. ‘Dead?’
‘OD’d. A week before the murder. Impure heroin mixed with fentanyl. I suppose they couldn’t afford violin.’
Harry let his gaze run around the walls. Most serious addicts without a fixed abode had a stash or two, a secret place where they could hide or lock up a reserve supply of drugs. Sometimes money. Possibly other priceless possessions. Carrying these things around with you was out of the question, a homeless junkie had to shoot up in public places and the moment the dope kicked in, he was prey to vultures. For that reason stashes were sacred. An otherwise lifeless addict could invest so much energy and imagination in hiding his gear that even veteran searchers and sniffer dogs failed to find it. Addicts never revealed hiding places to anyone, not even to best friends. Because they knew, knew from experience, that no one could ever be closer than codeine, morphine or heroin.
‘Have you looked for a stash here?’
Beate shook her head.
‘Why not?’ Harry asked, knowing it was a stupid question.
‘Because I presume we would have had to rip the flat apart to find anything, and it wouldn’t have been relevant to the investigation anyway,’ Beate said patiently. ‘Because we have to prioritise limited resources. And because we had the evidence we needed.’
Harry nodded. The answer he deserved.
‘And the evidence?’ he asked in a soft voice.
‘We believe the killer fired from where I’m standing now.’ It was a custom among forensics officers not to use names. She stretched out her arm in front of her. ‘At close quarters. Less than a metre. Soot in and around the entry wounds.’
‘Plural?’
‘Two shots.’
She eyed him with a sympathetic expression that said she knew what he was thinking: there went the defence counsel’s chance to maintain the gun had gone off by accident.
‘Both shots entered his chest.’ Beate spread the first and middle fingers of her right hand and placed them against the left side of her blouse, as though using sign language. ‘Assuming that both victim and killer were standing and the killer fired the weapon on instinct, the first exit wound reveals that he was between one eighty and one eighty-five. The suspect is one eighty-three.’
Jesus. He thought of the boy he had seen by the Visitors’ Room door. It seemed like only yesterday when they used to wrestle each other and Oleg had barely reached up to Harry’s chest.
She walked back into the kitchen. Pointed to the wall beside a greasy stove.
‘The bullets went in here and here, as you can see. Which is consistent with the second shot following the first quite quickly as the victim fell. The initial bullet punctured a lung, the second passed through the top of his chest nicking a shoulder blade. The victim-’
‘Gusto Hanssen,’ Harry said.
Beate stopped. Looked at him. Nodded. ‘Gusto Hanssen did not die at once. His fingerprints were in the pool of blood and there was blood on his clothes, showing that he moved after he fell. But it can’t have taken long.’
‘I see. And what…?’ Harry ran a hand over his face. He would have to try to get a few hours’ sleep. ‘What ties Oleg to the murder?’
‘Two people rang the switchboard at three minutes to nine saying they had heard what might have been gunshots coming from the block. One lived in Mollergata, over the crossing, the other just opposite here.’
Harry squinted through the grimy window looking out onto Hausmanns gate. ‘Not bad going, being able to hear from one block to another in the very centre of the city.’
‘Don’t forget it was July. Warm evening. All the windows are open, Summer holidays, barely any traffic. The neighbours had been trying to get the police to close this nest, so the threshold for reporting noise was low, one might say. The officer in the Ops Room told them to stay calm and asked them to keep an eye on the block until patrol cars arrived. The uniforms were alerted at once. Two cars arrived at twenty past nine and took up position while waiting for the cavalry.’
‘Delta?’
‘Always takes the boys a bit of time to don helmets and armour. Then the patrol cars were informed by Ops that the neighbours had seen a boy leaving by the front door and walking round the block, down towards the Akerselva. So two officers went down to the river, and there they found…’
She paused until she received an almost imperceptible nod from Harry.
‘… Oleg. He didn’t resist, he was so doped up he hardly knew what he was doing. We found gunshot residue on his right hand and arm.’
‘Murder weapon?’
‘Since it’s an unusual calibre, a nine-by-eighteen-millimetre Makarov, there are not many alternatives.’
‘Well, the Makarov is the favourite gun for organised crime in former Soviet countries. And the Fort 12, which is used by the police in Ukraine. Plus a couple more.’
‘True. We found the empty cartridges on the floor with powder residue. The Makarov powder has a different mix of saltpetre and sulphur, and they also use a bit of spirit, like in sulphurless powder. The chemical compound of the powder on the empty cartridge and around the entry wound matches the residue on Oleg’s hand.’
‘Mm. And the weapon?’
‘Hasn’t been recovered. We had divers and teams searching in and around the river, with no success. That doesn’t mean the gun isn’t there, with all the mud and sludge… well, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Two of the guys who lived here said that Oleg was flashing a pistol and boasting it was the type the Russian mafia used. Neither of them is gun-savvy, but after being shown pictures of about a hundred guns both are supposed to have picked out an Odessa. And it uses, as you probably know…’
Harry nodded. Makarov, nine by eighteen millimetre. It was unmistakable. The first time he had seen an Odessa, he had been reminded of the old futuristic-looking pistol on the cover of Foo Fighters, one of many CDs that had ended up with Rakel and Oleg.
‘And I assume they’re rock-solid witnesses with only a tiny little drug problem?’
Beate didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Harry knew she knew what he was doing, grasping at straws.
‘And Oleg’s blood and urine samples,’ Harry said, straightening his jacket sleeves, as if it were important, here and now, that they didn’t ride up. ‘What did they reveal?’
‘Violin was an active ingredient. Being high might be seen as a mitigating circumstance of course.’
‘Mm. That presupposes he was high before he shot Gusto Hanssen. But what about the motive then?’
Beate sent Harry a vacant stare. ‘The motive?’
He knew what she was thinking: is it possible to imagine one addict killing another for anything other than dope? ‘If Oleg was already high why would he kill anyone?’ he asked. ‘Drug-related murders like this one are as a rule a spontaneous, desperate act, motivated by a craving for drugs or the start of withdrawal symptoms.’
‘Motive’s your department,’ Beate said. ‘I’m in Forensics.’
Harry breathed in. ‘OK. Anything else?’
‘I imagined you would want to see the photos,’ Beate said, opening a slim leather case.
Harry took the pile of photographs. The first thing to strike him was Gusto’s beauty. There was no other expression for it. Handsome, attractive didn’t cover it. Even dead, with closed eyes and his shirt soaked in blood,
