The second thing that struck him was the sense that he was not alone. And since Harry’s experience was that such feelings were almost always accompanied by quite tangible sensory impressions he concentrated on what they could be, and repressed his own natural reaction: a faster pulse rate and the need to go back the same way he had come. He listened, but all he could hear was a clock ticking somewhere, probably in an adjacent room. He sniffed. A pungent, stale smell, but there was something else, distant, but familiar. He closed his eyes. As a rule he could see them before they came. Over the years he had developed coping strategies to ward them off. But now they were on him before he could bolt the door. The ghosts. It smelt of a crime scene.
He opened his eyes and was dazzled. The light. It swept across the living-room floor. Then came the sound of the plane, and in the next second the room was plunged into darkness again. But he had seen. And it was no longer possible to repress the faster pulse and the urge to get out.
It was the Beetle. Zjuk. It hovered in the air in front of his face.
21
The face was a mess.
Harry had switched on the living-room light and was looking down at the dead man.
His right ear had been nailed to the parquet floor and his face displayed six black, bloody craters. He didn’t need to search for the murder weapon: it hung at head height right in front of him. At the end of a rope suspended from a beam was a brick. From the brick protruded six blood-covered nails.
Harry crouched down and stretched out his hand. The man was cold, and rigor mortis had definitely set in, despite the heat of the room. The same applied to livor mortis; the combination of gravity and the absence of blood pressure had allowed the blood to settle at the body’s lowest points and lent the underside of the arms a slightly reddish colour. The man had been dead for more then twelve hours, Harry guessed. The white, ironed shirt had rucked up and some of the stomach could be seen. It did not yet have the green hue which showed that bacteria had started to consume him, a feast which generally started after forty-eight hours and spread outwards from the stomach.
In addition to the shirt, he was wearing a tie, which had been loosened, black suit trousers and polished shoes. As though he had come straight from a funeral or a job with a dress code, Harry thought.
He took out his phone and wondered whether to ring the Ops Room or Crime Squad directly. He tapped in the number for the Ops Room while looking around. He hadn’t noticed any signs of a break-in, and there was no evidence of a struggle in this room. Apart from the brick and the corpse there was no evidence of any kind, and Harry knew that when the SOC people came they would not find a shred. No fingerprints, no shoe prints, no DNA. And the detectives would be none the wiser; no neighbours who had seen anything, no surveillance cameras at nearby petrol stations with shots of familiar faces, no revealing telephone conversations to or from Schultz’s line. Nothing. While Harry waited for an answer he went into the kitchen. Instinctively he trod with care and avoided touching anything. His glance fell on the kitchen table and a plate with a half-eaten piece of bread and cervelat. Over the back of the chair was a suit jacket matching the trousers on the corpse. Harry searched the pockets and found four hundred kroner, a visitor’s pass, a train ticket and an airline ID card. Tord Schultz. The professional smile on the face in the picture resembled the remains of the one he had seen in the living room.
‘Switchboard.’
‘I have a body here. The address is-’
Harry noticed the visitor’s pass.
‘Yes?’
There was something familiar about it.
‘Hello?’
Harry picked up the visitor’s pass. At the top was OSLO POLITIDISTRIKT. Beneath it was TORD SCHULTZ and a date. He had visited a police HQ or a station two days ago. And now he was dead.
‘Hello?’
Harry rang off.
Sat down.
Pondered.
He spent ninety minutes searching the house. Afterwards he wiped all the places where he might have left prints and removed the plastic bag he had put around his head with an elastic band so as not to drop hairs. It was an established rule that all detectives and other officers who might conceivably enter a crime scene should register their fingerprints and DNA. If he left any clues it would take the police five minutes to find out that Harry Hole had been there. The fruits of his labours were three small packages of cocaine and four bottles of what he assumed was contraband booze. Otherwise there was exactly what he presumed: nothing.
He closed the door, got in the car and drove off.
Oslo Politidistrikt.
Shit, shit, shit.
When he reached the city centre, he parked and sat staring out of the windscreen. Then he rang Beate’s number.
‘Hi, Harry.’
‘Two things. I’d like to ask you a favour. And give you an anonymous tip-off that there is another man dead in this case.’
‘I’ve just been told.’
‘So you know?’ Harry said in surprise. ‘The method is called Zjuk. Russian for “beetle”.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘The brick.’
‘Which brick?’
Harry breathed in. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Gojke Tosic.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘The guy who attacked Oleg.’
‘And?’
‘He’s been found dead in his cell.’
Harry looked straight into a pair of headlights coming towards him. ‘How…?’
‘They’re checking now. Looks like he hanged himself.’
‘Delete himself. They killed the pilot as well.’
‘What?’
‘Tord Schultz is lying on the living-room floor of his house by Gardermoen.’
Two seconds passed before Beate answered. ‘I’ll inform the Ops Room.’
‘OK.’
‘What was the second thing?’
‘What?’
‘You said you wanted to ask me for a favour?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Harry pulled the visitor’s pass from his pocket. ‘I wonder whether you could check the visitors’ register in reception at Police HQ. See who Tord Schultz visited two days ago.’
Silence again.
‘Beate?’
‘Are you sure this is something I’ll want to be mixed up in, Harry?’
‘I’m sure this is something you won’t want to be mixed up in.’
‘Sod you.’
Harry rang off.
Harry left his vehicle in the multi-storey car park at the bottom of Kvadraturen and headed for Hotel Leon. He passed a bar, and the music floating through the open door reminded him of the evening he arrived: Nirvana’s inviting ‘Come As You Are’. He was not aware that he had entered the bar until he was standing in front of the
