‘It’s urgent,’ Harry said.
‘Why’s that?’
She had him there. Harry made an airy gesture with his hand, the kind that is supposed to say everything, but says nothing.
‘I’ll make a decision straight after lunch…’ She pointedly peered down at the form. ‘… Hole. I’ll put the blue chit in your pigeon hole, if it gets clearance.’
Harry clenched his teeth to make sure he didn’t say anything hasty. Because he knew she was behaving in a proper manner. Naturally, she was overcompensating for the fact that she was young, inexperienced and a woman in a male-dominated world. But she showed a determination to be respected; from the outset she demonstrated that the steamroller technique would not work on her. Well done. He felt like grabbing her glasses and smashing them.
‘Could you ring my internal number when you’ve made up your mind?’ he said. ‘For the moment my office is quite a distance from the pigeon holes.’
‘Fine,’ she said graciously.
Harry was in the culvert, about fifty metres from the office, when he heard the door open. A figure came out, hastily locked up after himself, turned and began to hurry towards Harry. And stiffened when he caught sight of him.
‘Did I startle you, Bjorn?’ Harry asked gently.
The distance between them was still over twenty metres, but the walls cast the sound towards Bjorn Holm.
‘Bit,’ said the man from Toten, straightening the multicoloured Rasta hat covering his red hair. ‘You creep up on folk.’
‘Mm. And you?’
‘What about me?’
‘What are you doing here? I thought you had enough to do in Kripos. You’ve been given a wonderful new job, I hear.’ Harry stopped two metres from Holm, who was obviously taken aback.
‘Not sure about wonderful,’ Holm said. ‘I’m not allowed to work on what I like best.’
‘Which is?’
‘Forensics. You know me.’
‘Do I?’
‘Eh?’ Holm frowned. ‘Coordination of forensics and strategic planning, what’s that s’posed to be when it’s at home? Passing on messages, calling meetings, sending out reports.’
‘It’s a promotion,’ Harry said. ‘The start of something good, don’t you think?’
Holm snorted. ‘Know what I think? I think Bellman’s put me there to keep me out of the loop, to make sure I don’t get any first-hand info. Because he suspects that if I do, he’s not sure he’ll get it before you.’
‘But he’s mistaken there,’ Harry said, standing face to face with the forensics officer.
Bjorn Holm blinked twice. ‘What the fuck is this, Harry?’
‘Yes, what the fuck is it?’ Harry heard the anger making his voice tight, metallic. ‘What the fuck were you doing in the office, Bjorn? All your crap has gone now.’
‘Doing?’ Bjorn said. ‘Fetching this, wasn’t I.’ He held up his right hand. It was clutching a book. ‘You said you’d leave it in reception, remember?’
Hank Williams: The Biography.
Harry felt the shame flood into his cheeks.
‘Mm.’
‘Mm,’ Bjorn mimicked.
‘I had it with me when we moved out,’ Harry said. ‘But we did a Uturn halfway down the culvert and came back. Then I forgot all about it.’
‘OK. Can I go now?’
Harry stepped aside, and listened to Bjorn stomping down the culvert between curses.
He unlocked the office.
Flopped into the chair.
Looked around.
The notebook. He flicked through. He hadn’t taken any notes from the conversation, nothing that would pinpoint Tony Leike as a suspect. Harry opened the drawers in the desk to see if there were any signs of someone having rifled them. It all looked untouched. Could Harry have been wrong after all? Could he hope that Holm was not leaking information to Mikael Bellman?
Harry glanced at his watch. Praying the new police solicitor ate quickly. He struck an arbitrary key on the computer and the screen came to life. It was still showing the page with his last Google search. In the search box the name shone out at him: Tony Leike.
41
The Blue Chit
‘So,’said Aslak Krongli, twirling his coffee cup. Kaja thought it looked like an egg cup in his large hand. She had taken a seat opposite him at the table closest to the window. The police canteen was situated on the top floor and was of standard Norwegian design, that is, light and clean, but not so cosy that people would be tempted to sit for longer than necessary. The great advantage of the room was its view of the town, but that didn’t seem to interest Krongli much.
‘I checked the guest books at the other self-service cabins in the area,’ he went on. ‘The only people who had written in the book that they were planning to spend the next night at Havass cabin were Charlotte Lolles and Iska Peller, who were in Tunvegg the night before.’
‘And we already know about them,’ Kaja said.
‘Yes. So in fact I have only two things that might be of interest to you.’
‘And they are?’
‘I was speaking on the phone to an elderly couple who were at the Tunvegg cabin the same night as Lolles and Peller. They said that a man had turned up in the evening, had a bite to eat, changed his shirt, then went on his way heading south-west. Even though it was dark. And the only cabin in that direction is Havass.’
‘And this person…’
‘They barely saw him. Seemed as if he didn’t want to be seen, either; he didn’t take off his balaclava or his old-fashioned slalom goggles, not even when changing his shirt. The wife said she thought he might have had a serious injury at one time.’
‘Why was that?’
‘She could only remember thinking this, couldn’t say why. Nevertheless, he might have changed direction when he was out of sight, and skied to another cabin.’
‘Suppose so,’ Kaja said, checking her watch.
‘Anyone come forward in response to your crime alert, by the way?’
‘No,’ Kaja said.
‘You look as though you mean yes.’
Kaja’s eyes shot up at Aslak Krongli, who reacted by holding up his palms. ‘Country clod in town! Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that.’
‘Alright,’ Kaja said.
They both inspected their coffee cups.
‘You said there were two things I might be interested in,’ Kaja said. ‘What’s the second?’
‘I know I’m going to regret saying this,’ Krongli said. The quiet laughter was back in his eyes.
Kaja guessed immediately which direction the conversation was going to take and knew he was right: he would regret it.
