'Tell me what you can see.'
'I can see my neighbour with a kicksled. I can see a man coming out of the backroom at the locksmith's as I'm leaving. And I can see the waiter in M. And that TV celeb, Per Stеle Lшnning.'
She laughed. 'Did you know that the retina reverses everything so your brain receives a mirror image first? If you want to see things as they really are, you have to see them in a mirror. Then you would have seen some quite different people in the pictures.' Her eyes were radiant and Harry couldn't bring himself to object that the retina didn't reverse images, it turned them upside down. 'This will be my final masterpiece, Harry. This is what I will be remembered for.'
'These portraits?'
'No, they're merely a part of the whole work of art. It's not finished yet. Just wait.'
'Mm, has it got a name?'
' 'Nemesis',' she said in a low voice.
He gazed enquiringly at her and their eyes locked.
'After the goddess, you know.'
The shadow fell over one side of her face. Harry looked away. He had seen enough. The curve of her back begging for a dancing partner, one foot in front of the other as if unsure whether to move forwards or backwards, her heaving bosom and the slim neck with the veins he imagined he could see throbbing. He felt hot and a tiny bit faint. What was it she said? 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go.' Had he been?
'Harry…'
'I have to go,' he said.
He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop's screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother's bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: 'Mine for ever?'
'Not bloody likely,' he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him.
'Mine for ever?'
'Yes,' he groaned and came.
When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.
'After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,' she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.
The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS Elenora. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother's first lover-though not her first ever-in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.
Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn't matter.
That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna's grandmother's bed.
Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer on the white sheets of her grandmother's bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt clichй: 'You deserve someone better than me.'
At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.
That was seven years ago, and the relationship had only lasted six weeks. After that he had only met her twice. Once in a bar when she had gone over to him with tears in her eyes and asked him to go somewhere else, which he had done. And once at an exhibition where Harry had taken his younger sister. He had promised to call her, but he never did.
Harry rolled over to look at the clock again. 3.22. He had kissed her. At the end of the evening. Once he was safely outside the door of her flat with the wavy glass, he had leaned over to give her a goodnight hug and it had become a kiss. Easy and great. Easy, at any rate. 3.33. Christ, when had he become so sensitive that he felt pangs of guilt for giving an old flame a goodnight kiss? Harry tried to take deep, regular breaths to concentrate his mind on possible escape routes from Bogstadveien via Industrigata. In. Out. In again. He could still smell her fragrance. Feel the sweet pressure of her body. The rough insistence of her tongue.
6
Chilli
The day's first rays had just risen over the edge of Ekeberg Ridge, peeped under the half-drawn blind in the Crime Squad conference room and wedged themselves between the folds of skin around Harry's pinched eyes. Rune Ivarsson stood at the end of the long table, legs apart, rocking up and down on the soles of his feet, his hands behind his back. A flip chart with WELCOME in big red letters at his rear. Harry presumed this was something Ivarsson had picked up at a seminar on presentations and made a half-hearted attempt to stifle a yawn as the Head of the Robberies Unit began to speak.
'Good morning, everyone. The eight of us sitting around the table constitute the team assembled to investigate the bank robbery committed in Bogstadveien on Friday.'
'Murder,' Harry mumbled.
'I beg your pardon?'
Harry straightened up in his chair. The damned sun was blinding him whichever way he turned. 'I suppose it would be correct to base the investigation on the fact that it was a murder.'
Ivarsson gave a wry smile. Not to Harry, but to the others sitting around the table whom he took in with one fleeting glance. 'I thought I should start by introducing you to each other, but our friend from Crime Squad has already made a start. Inspector Harry Hole has been kindly loaned by his superior, Bjarne Mшller, as his speciality is murder.'
'Serious Crime,' Harry said.
'Serious Crime. On the left of Hole, we have Torleif Weber from Forensics who led the inquiry at the crime scene. As many of you know, Weber is our most experienced forensic investigator. Famous for his analytical powers and unerring intuition. The Chief Superintendent once said that he would have liked to have Weber with him as a tracker dog in his hunting parties.'
Laughter around the table. Harry didn't need to look at Weber to know that he wasn't smiling. Weber almost never smiled, at least not for people he didn't like, and he liked almost no one. Especially among the younger stratum of bosses which, in Weber's opinion, was comprised exclusively of incompetent careerists with no feeling for the profession or the force, but who had stronger instincts for the administrative power and influence which could be attained through brief appearances at Police HQ.
Ivarsson smiled and swayed up and down like the skipper of a sea-going vessel as he waited for the laughter to die down.
