‘There must be,’ Harry said, illuminating the wall above several blue stains, before the cone of light found a sheet pinned to the right of the pictures. A tiny alarm bell had begun to go off in his brain. The sheet was torn at the side and covered in hand-drawn lines and columns. But there were different handwriting styles.
‘Here it is,’ the officer said.
For some reason, Harry suddenly thought about the work lamp. And the blue ceiling. And the smell of ammonia. And realised at that instant that the alarm in his head had nothing to do with the paper.
‘Don’t…’ Harry started.
But too late.
The explosion was not technically an explosion but – as it would appear in the report the fire chief would sign the following day – an explosion-like fire triggered by an electric spark from cables connected to a canister of ammonia gas that in its turn ignited the PSG painted over the whole ceiling and splattered on the walls.
Harry gasped as the oxygen in the room was drawn into the flames and he felt an immense heat bear down on his head. He automatically fell to his knees and ran his hands through his hair to see if it was alight. When he looked up again, flames were coming off the walls. He wanted to breathe in, but managed to stop the reflex. Got to his feet. The door was only two metres away, but he had to have… he stretched for the sheet of paper. For the missing page from the Havass guest book.
‘Move away!’ The officer appeared in the doorway with the fire extinguisher under his arm and the hose in his hand. As though in slow motion, Harry saw it squirt out. Saw the golden-brown jet released from the hose splash against the wall. Brown that should have been white; liquid that should have been powder. And already, before he looked into the jaws of the flames that rose on two legs and roared at him from where the liquid landed, before he smelt the sweet sting of petrol in his nostrils, before he saw the flames follow the jet of petrol towards the officer standing in the doorway, with the handle still depressed, in shock, Harry knew why the extinguisher had been hanging from the middle of the lunch-room wall, on display, impossible to miss, red and new, screaming out to be used.
Harry’s shoulder hit the policeman at waist height, folding him over the rampaging inspector and knocking him backwards into the room with Harry on top.
They sent a couple of chairs flying as they skidded under the table. The officer, gasping for air, gesticulated and pointed while opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Harry turned. Wrapped in flames, the red extinguisher rumbled and rolled towards them. The hose was spitting melted rubber. Harry shot up, dragging the officer after him, pulled him to the door as a stopwatch ticked timelessly in his head. He shoved the swaying officer out of the room, onto the gallery, thrust him down to the floor alongside him as it came, what the fire chief in his report would describe as an explosion, and which blew out all the windows and set fire to the entire lunch room.
The cutting room is burning. It’s on the news. You have to serve and protect, Harry Hole, not demolish and destroy. You will have to pay compensation. If not, I will take something from you that you hold dear. In a matter of seconds. You have no idea how easy it will be.
66
After the Fire
The evening darkness had descended over Nydalen. Harry stood with a blanket over his shoulders and a large paper cup in his hand as he and Bjorn Holm watched the smoke divers running in and out with the last PSG buckets that would ever leave the Kadok factory.
‘So he’d pinned up the pictures of the murder victims, had he?’ Bjorn Holm said.
‘Yep,’ Harry said. ‘Except for the prostitute in Leipzig, Juliana Verni.’
‘What about the page? Are you sure it was from the Havass guest book?’
‘Yes. I saw the guest book when I was in the cabin and the pages were identical.’
‘And so you were standing half a metre from the name of the eighth guest, but you didn’t see it?’
Harry shrugged. ‘Perhaps I need reading glasses. Things happened bloody quickly in there, Bjorn. And my interest in the page waned rather when the officer started spraying petrol.’
‘Course, I didn’t mean-’
‘There were some letters on the wall. From what I could see they were blackmail letters. Maybe someone had already rumbled him.’
A fireman came towards them. His clothes creaked and groaned as he walked.
‘Kripos, aren’t you?’ The man’s voice resonated in a way that matched the helmet and boots. And he had body language that said boss.
Harry hesitated, but confirmed with a nod; no reason to complicate matters.
‘What actually happened in there?’
‘That’s what I’m hoping you boys will eventually be able to tell us,’ Harry said. ‘But in general terms I think we can say that whoever found himself a rent-free office in there had a clear plan for dealing with uninvited guests.’
‘Oh?’
‘I should have known as soon as I saw the neon tubes on the ceiling. If they’d been working, the tenant wouldn’t have needed a desk lamp. The switch was connected to something else, some kind of ignition device.’
‘You think so, do you? Well, right, we’ll get some experts in tomorrow morning.’
‘What does it look like inside?’ Holm asked. ‘The room where it started.’
The fireman scrutinised Holm. ‘PSG on the walls and ceiling, son. What do you think it looks like?’
Harry was tired. Tired of being on the receiving end, tired of being afraid, tired of always being too late. But right now most tired of grown men who never tire of playing cock of the walk. Harry spoke in a low voice, so low that the fireman had to lean in to hear.
‘Unless you’re seriously interested in what my forensics officer thinks about the room you’ve just sent umpteen smoke divers into, I suggest you spit out what you know in concise but exhaustive terms. You know there was a guy sitting there planning six or seven murders. Which he carried out. And we’re very interested to know if we can expect to find clues which might help us to stop this very, very bad man. Can you be concise like that?’
The fireman straightened. Coughed. ‘PSG is extremely-’
‘Listen. We’re asking you for the consequences, not the cause.’
The fireman’s face had gone a colour that was not solely due to the heat from the burning PSG. ‘Burned out. Totally burned out. Papers, furniture, computer, the lot.’
‘Thank you, boss,’ Harry said.
The two policemen watched the fireman’s back as he left.
‘My forensics officer?’ Holm repeated, pulling a face as if he had swallowed something nasty.
‘Had to sound like a bit of a boss, too.’
‘Good to outsmart someone when you’ve just been outsmarted yourself, isn’t it?’
Harry nodded and pulled the blanket around him more tightly. ‘He said burned out, didn’t he?’
‘Burned out. How does that feel?’
Harry stared miserably at the smoke still seeping out of the factory windows into the fire service’s searchlights.
‘Like being knobbed in Nydalen,’ he answered, draining the rest of the cold coffee.
Harry drove away from Nydalen, but got no further than the red lights in Uelandsgate before Bjorn Holm rang again.
‘Forensics have done tests on the semen on Adele’s ski pants, and we’ve got a DNA profile.’
‘Already?’ Harry exclaimed.
‘Partial profile. But enough for them to state with 93 per cent certainty that we have a match.’
Harry sat up straight in the seat.
Match. What a wonderful word. Perhaps the day wasn’t a waste after all.
‘Out with it then!’ Harry said.
