it would mean if I betrayed my identity to you?'
Sverre's mouth and throat were so dry he could no longer swallow. He was frightened. Frightened for his life.
'It would mean that I couldn't let you leave this room alive. Do you understand?'
'Yes.' Sverre's voice was hoarse. 'My m-money…'
The Prince put his hand inside his jacket and pulled out a pistol.
'Sit still.'
He walked over to the bed, sat beside Sverre and, holding the pistol in both hands, pointed it at the door.
'This is a Glock, the world's most reliable handgun. I was sent it from Germany yesterday. The manufacture number has been filed off. The street value is about eight thousand kroner. Look on it as the first instalment.'
Sverre jumped as it went off with a bang. He stared with large eyes at the little hole at the top of the door. The dust danced in the stripe of sunlight which ran like a laser beam from the hole through the room.
'Feel it,' the Prince said, dropping the gun in his lap. Then he stood up and went to the door. 'Hold it tight. Perfect balance, isn't it?'
Sverre reluctantly curled his fingers around the stock of the gun. He could feel he was sweating inside his T- shirt. There's a hole in the ceiling. That was all he could think. And that the bullet had made a new hole and they still hadn't got hold of a builder. Then what he had been expecting happened. He closed his eyes.
'Sverre!'
She sounds as if she's drowning. He gripped the gun. She always sounds as if she's drowning. Then he opened his eyes again and saw the Prince turn by the door, in slow motion. He swung up his arms; both hands were held round a shiny black Smith amp; Wesson revolver.
'Sverre!'
A yellow flame spat out of the muzzle of the gun. He could see her standing at the bottom of the stairs. Then the bullet hit him, bored through the top of his forehead, out through the back, taking the Heil from the Sieg Heil tattoo with it, into and through the wooden studwork in the wall, through the insulation before stopping behind the Eternit cladding panel on the outside wall. But by then Sverre Olsen was already dead.
64
Krokliveien. 2 May 2000.
Harry had scrounged a coffee off someone in the Crime Scene Unit with a thermos. He was standing in front of the ugly little house in Krokliveien in Bjerke, peering at a young officer up a ladder who was marking the hole in the roof where the bullet had exited. Curious onlookers had already begun to gather and for the sake of security the police had cordoned off the area around the house with yellow tape. The man on the ladder was bathed in the afternoon sunlight, but the house lay in a hollow in the ground and it was already cold where Harry stood.
'So you arrived immediately after it happened?' Harry heard a voice behind him ask. He turned round. It was Bjarne Moller. He had become an increasingly rare sight at crime scenes, but Harry had heard several people say he had been a good detective. Some even suggested that he should have been allowed to continue. Harry offered him the cup of coffee, but Moller shook his head.
'Yes, I must have arrived about four to five minutes afterwards,' Harry said. 'Who told you?'
'Central switchboard. They said you had rung and asked for reinforcements after Waaler reported the shooting.'
Harry motioned with his head towards the red sports car in front of the gateway.
'When I arrived I saw Waaler's Jap car. I knew he was coming here, so that was fine. But when I got out of my car I heard a terrible howling noise. At first I thought there was a dog somewhere in the neighbourhood. As I walked up the gravel path, however, I knew it was coming from inside the house and that it wasn't a dog. It was human. I didn't take any chances and rang for assistance from 0kern police district.'
'It was the mother?'
Harry nodded. 'She was completely hysterical. It took them almost half an hour before they had her in a calm enough state to say something sensible. Weber is still talking to her now, in the sitting room.'
'Good old sensitive Weber?'
'Weber's fine. He's a bit of an old sourpuss at work, but he's pretty good with people in this kind of situation.'
'I know. I was just joking. How's Waaler taking it?' Harry shrugged his shoulders.
'I know,' Moller said. 'He's a cold fish. Fair enough. Shall we go in and take a dekko?’
‘I've been in.'
'Well, give me a guided tour then.'
They made their way up to the first floor as Moller mumbled greetings to colleagues he hadn't seen for ages.
The bedroom was full of specialists from the Crime Scene Unit and cameras were flashing. Black plastic, on which the outline of a body had been drawn, covered the bed.
Moller let his gaze wander round the walls. 'Jesus Christ,' he mumbled.
'Sverre Olsen didn't vote for the Socialists,' Harry said.
'Don't touch anything, Bjarne,' shouted an inspector Harry recognised from Forensics. 'You know what happened last time.'
Apparently Moller did; at any rate he laughed good-naturedly.
'Sverre Olsen was sitting on the bed when Waaler came in,' Harry said. According to Waaler, he was standing by the door and he asked Olsen about the night Ellen was killed. Olsen pretended he couldn't remember the date, so Waaler asked a few more questions and gradually it became obvious that Olsen did not have an alibi. According to Waaler, he asked Olsen to go to the station with him and give a statement, and that was when Olsen suddenly grabbed the revolver that he must have kept hidden under the pillow. He fired and the bullet passed above his shoulder and through the door-here's the hole-and through the ceiling in the hall. According to Waaler, he pulled out his service revolver and got Olsen before he could fire off any more shots.'
'Quick reactions. Good shot, too, I heard.'
'Smack in the forehead,' Harry said.
'Not so strange perhaps. Waaler got top results in the shooting test last autumn.'
'You're forgetting my results,' Harry said drily.
'How's it going, Ronald?' Moller shouted, turning to the inspector dressed in white.
'Plain sailing, I reckon.' The inspector stood up and straightened his back with a groan. 'We found the bullet that killed Olsen behind the Eternit panel here. The one that went through the door continued on up through the ceiling. We'll have to see if we can find that one as well so that the ballistics boys have something to play with tomorrow. The angles fit anyway.'
'Hm. Thanks.'
'Don't mention it. How's your wife by the way?'
Moller told him how his wife was, omitted to ask how the inspector's was, but for all Harry knew, he didn't have one. Last year four of the boys in Forensics had separated from their wives in the same month. They had joked in the canteen that it must have been the smell of corpses.
They saw Weber outside the house. He was standing on his own with a cup of coffee in his hand, watching the man on the ladder. 'Was it alright, Weber?' Moller asked.
Weber squinted at them as if he first had to check whether he could be bothered to answer them.
'She won't be a problem,' he said, peering up at the ladder man again. 'Of course she said she couldn't understand it because her son hated the sight of blood and so on, but we won't have any problems as far as the factual things that happened here are concerned.'
'Hm.' Moller placed a hand behind Harry's elbow. 'Let's take a little walk.'
They strolled down the road. It was an area with small houses, small gardens and blocks of flats at the end. Some children, their faces red with effort, pedalled past them on their way up to the police cars with the sweeping
