‘Excuse me.’
They had passed the dog, and Tord kept walking.
‘Excuse me!’ The voice was sharper.
Tord looked ahead. The door to the flight crew centre was less than ten metres away. Safety. Ten paces. Home and dry.
‘Excuse me, sir!’
Seven paces.
‘I think she means you, Tord.’
‘What?’ Tord stopped. Had to stop. Looked back with what he hoped did not appear to be feigned surprise. The woman in the yellow vest was coming towards them.
‘The dog picked you out.’
‘Did it?’ Tord looked down at the dog. How? he was thinking.
The dog looked back, wagging its tail wildly, as though Tord was its new play pal.
How? Double layer of freezer bags and condom. How?
‘That means we have to check you. Could you come with us please.’
The gentleness was still there in her brown eyes, but there was no question mark behind her words. And at that moment he realised how. He almost fingered the ID card on his chest.
The cocaine.
He had forgotten to wipe down the card after chopping up the last line. That had to be it.
But it was only a few grains, which he could easily explain away by saying he had lent his ID card to someone at a party. That wasn’t his biggest problem now. The bag. It would be searched. As a pilot he had trained and practised emergency procedures so often it was almost automatic. That was the intention, of course, even when panic seized you this was what you would do, this brain kicked in for lack of other orders: the emergency procedures. How many times had he visualised this situation: the customs officials asking him to go with them? Thinking what he would do? Practising it in his mind? He turned to the flight attendant with a resigned smile, caught sight of her name tag. ‘I’ve been picked out, it seems, Kristin. Could you take my bag?’
‘The bag comes with us,’ the official said.
Tord Schultz turned back. ‘I thought you said the dog picked me out, not the bag.’
‘That’s true, but-’
‘There are flight documents inside which the crew needs to check. Unless you want to take responsibility for delaying a full Airbus 340 to Bangkok.’ He noticed that he — quite literally — had puffed himself up, filled his lungs and expanded his chest muscles in his captain’s jacket. ‘If we miss our slot that could mean a delay of several hours and a loss of hundreds of thousands of kroner for the airline.’
‘I’m afraid rules-’
‘Three hundred and forty-two passengers,’ Schultz interrupted. ‘Many of them children.’ He hoped she heard a captain’s grave concern, not the incipient panic of a dope smuggler.
The official patted the dog on the head and looked at him.
She looks like a housewife, he thought. A woman with children and responsibility. A woman who should understand his predicament.
‘The bag comes with us,’ she said.
Another official appeared in the background. Stood there, legs apart, arms crossed.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ Tord sighed.
The head of Oslo’s Crime Squad, Gunnar Hagen, leaned back in his swivel chair and studied the man in the linen suit. It was three years since the sewn-up gash in his face had been blood red and he had looked like a man on his last legs. But now his ex-subordinate looked healthy, had put on a few sorely needed kilos, and his shoulders filled out the suit. Suit. Hagen remembered the murder investigator in jeans
and boots, never anything else. The other difference was the sticker on his lapel saying he was not staff but a visitor: HARRY HOLE.
But the posture in the chair was the same, more horizontal than sitting.
‘You look better,’ Hagen said.
‘Your town does too,’ Harry said with an unlit cigarette bobbing between his teeth.
‘You think so?’
‘Wonderful opera house. Fewer junkies in the streets.’
Hagen got up and went to the window. From the sixth floor of Police HQ he could see Oslo’s new district, Bjorvika, bathed in sunshine. The clean-up was in full flow. The demolition work over.
‘There’s been a marked fall in the number of fatal ODs in the last year.’
‘Prices have gone up, consumption down. And the City Council got what it craved. Oslo no longer tops OD stats in Europe.’
‘Happy days are here again.’ Harry put his hands behind his head and looked as if he was going to slide out of the chair.
Hagen sighed. ‘You didn’t say what brings you to Oslo, Harry.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘No. Or, more specifically, to Crime Squad.’
‘Isn’t it normal to visit former colleagues?’
‘Yes, for other, normal, sociable people, it is.’
‘Well.’ Harry bit into the filter of the Camel cigarette. ‘My occupation is murder.’
‘ Was murder, don’t you mean?’
‘Let me reformulate that: my profession, my area of expertise, is murder. And it’s still the only field I know something about.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘To practise my occupation. To investigate murders.’
Hagen arched an eyebrow. ‘You’d like to work for me again?’
‘Why not? Unless I’m very much mistaken I was one of the best.’
‘Correction,’ Hagen said, turning back to the window. ‘You were the best.’ And repeated in a lower tone: ‘The best and the worst.’
‘I fancy one of the narco murders.’
Hagen gave a dry smile. ‘Which one? We’ve had four in the last six months. We haven’t made an ounce of headway with any of them.’
‘Gusto Hanssen.’
Hagen didn’t answer, continued to study the people sprawled over the grass. And the thoughts came unforced. Benefit cheats. Thieves. Terrorists. Why did he see that instead of hard-working employees enjoying a few well-earned hours in the September sunshine? The police look. The police blindness. He half listened to Harry’s voice behind him.
‘Gusto Hanssen, nineteen years old. Known to police, pushers and users. Found dead in a flat in Hausmanns gate on 12 July. Bled to death after a shot to the chest.’
Hagen burst out laughing. ‘Why do you want the only one that’s cleared up?’
‘I think you know.’
‘Yes, I do,’ Hagen sighed. ‘But if I were to employ you again I would put you on one of the others. On the undercover cop case.’
‘I want this one.’
‘There are, in round figures, about a hundred reasons why you will never be put on that case, Harry.’
‘Which are?’
Hagen turned to Harry. ‘Perhaps it’s enough to mention the first. The case has already been solved.’
‘And beyond that?’
‘We don’t have the case. Kripos does. I don’t have any vacancies. Quite the opposite, I’m trying to make cuts. You’re not eligible. Should I go on?’
‘Mm. Where is he?’
Hagen pointed out of the window. Across the lawn to the grey-stone building behind the yellow leaves of the linden trees.
