could prioritise his job. But the three most important reasons sat around the table arguing about who should have the plastic figure in the cornflakes box and who should sit in front today when she drove them to school. Two girls, one boy. Three perfect reasons to appreciate the woman and her genes’ compatibility with his.
‘Will you be late again tonight?’ she asked, furtively stroking his hair. He knew she loved his hair.
‘It might be a long session,’ he said. ‘We’re starting with the suspect today.’ He knew that over the course of the day the papers would publish what they already knew: that the arrestee was Tony Leike. But he had made it a principle never to reveal confidentialities even at home. That also enabled him to explain overtime regularly with ‘I can’t talk about that, darling’.
‘Why didn’t you question him yesterday?’ she asked while buttering the children’s bread for their packed lunches.
‘We had to gather more facts. And finish searching his house.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Afraid I can’t be that specific, darling,’ he said and gave her the regretful confidentiality look so as not to reveal the fact that she had actually put her finger on a sensitive point. Bjorn Holm and the crime scene officers hadn’t found anything during the search that could have linked Leike to any of the murders. Fortunately, for the moment, however, that was of minor importance.
‘Softening him up in a cell overnight won’t hurt,’ Bellman said. ‘It’ll just make him more receptive when we start. And the first part of the questioning is always the crunch.’
‘Is it?’ she asked, and he could tell she was trying to sound interested.
‘I have to be off.’ He got up and kissed her on the cheek. Yes, he certainly did appreciate her. The thought of forgoing her and the children, the framework and infrastructure that had enabled him to rise through the ranks, through the classes, was of course absurd. To follow the impulses of his heart, to throw up everything for love or whatever it was, was utopian, a dream he could think and talk about, with Kaja as a listener. But if you were going to dream, Mikael Bellman preferred dreams that were grander than that.
He inspected his front teeth in the hall mirror and checked his silk tie was straight. The press were bound to be out in force.
How long would he be able to keep Kaja? He thought he had detected some doubts in her last night. And a lack of enthusiasm in their lovemaking. But he also knew that as long as he was heading for the top, as he had been doing so far, he would be able to control her. It wasn’t that Kaja was a gold-digger with clear objectives of what he, as overall boss, could do for her own career. It wasn’t about intellect; it was pure biology. Women could be as modern as they liked, but when it came to submitting to the alpha male they were still at primate level. However, if she was beginning to entertain doubts because she thought that he would never renounce his wife for her sake, perhaps it was time to give her some encouragement. After all, he needed her to feed him with inside info about Crime Squad for a while yet, until all the loose ends were tied, until this battle was over. And the war won.
He went over to the window while buttoning up his coat. The house they had taken over from his parents was in Manglerud, not the best area of town, if you asked the West Enders. But those who had grown up here had a tendency to stay; it was a quarter with soul. And it was his quarter. With a view over the rest of Oslo. Which would also soon be his.
‘They’re coming now,’ the uniformed officer said. He stood in the doorway of one of the new interview rooms at Kripos.
‘OK,’ Mikael Bellman said.
Some interrogators liked to have the interviewee led to the room first, to keep him or her waiting, to make it clear who was in charge. So that they could enjoy the great entrance and go in hard straight away while they had them at their most defensive and vulnerable. Bellman preferred to be seated and ready when the suspect was ushered in. To mark his territory, to announce who owned the room. He was still able to keep the suspect waiting while he skimmed through his papers, able to feel the nervousness mounting in the room and then – when the time was ripe – raise his eyes and shoot. But these were the fine details of interview techniques. Which, naturally, he was happy to discuss with other competent chief interrogators. Again, he checked that the red recording light was switched on. Fiddling with technical equipment after the suspect had arrived could spoil the preliminary establishing of status.
Through the window he saw Beavis and Kolkka enter the adjacent office. Between them walked Tony Leike, whom they had brought from the custody block at Police HQ.
Bellman took a deep breath. Yes, his pulse was a bit higher now. A mixture of aggression and nerves. Tony Leike had declined the opportunity to have a solicitor present. In essence, of course, that was an advantage for Kripos, it gave them greater latitude. But at the same time it was a signal that Leike considered he had little to fear. Poor sucker. He can’t have known that Bellman had proof that Leike had rung Elias Skog immediately before he was murdered. Someone whose name Leike had claimed he didn’t even know.
Bellman looked down at the papers and heard Leike entering the room. Beavis closed the door behind him as he had been instructed.
‘Take a seat,’ Bellman said without looking up.
He heard Leike do what he was told.
Bellman stopped at an arbitrary piece of paper and stroked his lower lip with a forefinger while slowly counting to himself, from one upwards. The silence quivered in the small enclosed room. One, two, three. He and his colleagues had been sent on a course in the new interrogation methods they were being instructed to use – so- called investigative viewing – the point of which, according to these ungrounded academic types, was openness, dialogue and trust. Four, five, six. Bellman had listened quietly – after all, the model had been chosen at the highest level – but what sort of characters did these people actually think Kripos interviewed? Sensitive but obliging souls who tell you everything you want to know in exchange for a shoulder to cry on? They insisted the methods the police had used hitherto, the traditional nine-step American FBI model, was inhuman, manipulative, and it made innocent people confess to crimes they hadn’t committed and was therefore counterproductive. Seven, eight, nine. OK, so say it put the odd suggestible chicken in the coop, but what was that compared with the grinning scum who strolled away, killing themselves with laughter at ‘openness, dialogue and trust’?
Ten.
Bellman pressed his fingertips together and raised his eyes.
‘We know you rang Elias Skog from Oslo, and that two days later you were in Stavanger. And that you killed him. These are the facts we have, but what I am wondering is why. Or didn’t you have a motive, Leike?’
That was step one of the nine-step model drawn up by the FBI agents Inbau, Reid and Buckley: the confrontation, the attempt to use the shock effect to land a knockout punch straight away, the declaration that they knew everything already, there was no point denying guilt. This had one sole aim: confession. Here Bellman combined step one with another interviewing technique: linking one fact with one or several non-facts. In this case he linked the incontestable date of the phone call with the contention that Leike had been to Stavanger and he was a killer. Hearing the proof for the first claim, Leike would automatically conclude that they also had concrete proof for the others. And that these facts were so simple and irrefutable that they could jump straight to the only thing left to answer: why?
Bellman saw Leike swallow, saw him bare his white milestone-sized teeth in an attempted smile, saw the confusion in his eyes and knew that they had already won.
‘I didn’t ring any Elias Skog,’ Leike said.
Bellman sighed. ‘Do you want me to show you the listed calls from Telenor?’
Leike shrugged. ‘I didn’t ring. I lost a mobile phone a while back. Maybe someone rang him using that?’
‘Don’t try to be smart, Leike. We’re talking about your landline.’
‘I didn’t ring him, I’m telling you.’
‘I heard. According to official records, you live alone.’
‘Yes, I do. That is-’
‘Your fiancee sleeps over now and then. And sometimes you get up earlier than her and go to work while she’s still in your apartment?’
‘That happens. But I’m at hers more often than not.’
‘Well, now. Has Galtung’s heiress daughter got a more luxurious pad than you, Leike?’
‘Maybe. Cosier, at any rate.’
Bellman crossed his arms and smiled. ‘Nonetheless, if you didn’t call Skog from your house, she must have
