Norwegian by Night

‘Catch the bad guy, Sigrid.’

‘Yes, chief.’

Eventually — and Sigrid can’t say for sure when, because she’s lost track of time — the conversation ends.

Rubbing her eyes, Sigrid emerges from her office into the main room. This is not the morning she had in mind. She went to bed late last night, ate poorly, woke to find only decaffeinated instant coffee left in the cabinet above the refrigerator, and simply didn’t have the spiritual gumption to walk three blocks to stand in line for ten minutes at United Bakeries for a twenty-seven kroner cup of coffee that has been carefully engineered, in the last few years, to be served lukewarm because — according to the turtleneck-wearing elite barista — ‘it makes the coffee taste better’.

Try letting your customers tell you what tastes better.

Perhaps, though, it is the morning she deserves. Despite it being obvious to everyone connected to this case that the woman was killed by this Kosovar, there is no direct evidence at the moment, which is irritating. They have a shoe print on the front door, but no fingerprints. The woman was strangled with a cord, so there are no prints even to take off her body. The murder weapon is missing, and no one saw anything. Unless someone was in the closet, and saw something.

Sigrid takes a few steps further into the room, where she is generally ignored by her colleagues, who all seem remarkably busy and professional at the moment.

This is comforting, because she feels neither.

The hunt is on for the killer, of course, but Sigrid’s real concern is for the boy, and perhaps also for the old man. If the boy was in the closet, and the killer was his own father, he must be terrified beyond words. Ideally, she’d like to have him in custody and turned over to social services, but there is a niggling — though very unlikely — loophole at the moment. If there really is nothing connecting the boy’s father to the murder, what’s to stop him from walking in and demanding the boy?

There must be grounds for preventing it. It’s the morning, and there is insufficient caffeine in her veins, which is why she can’t think of the plug for the loophole. It still amazes her that her own father used to wake in the morning and take a shot of akevitt before going out to the barn to get on with the milking and other duties. He was never a heavy drinker, but times have changed. The Oslo intellectual types don’t go in for that sort of manly approach to facing the cold and dark of a northern morning. And surely they’re right. It’s unhealthy and old fashioned; we all need to take better care of ourselves now.

Or maybe we’ve become a nation of pussies.

‘You,’ she says to a young cop she’s never seen before.

‘Mats,’ he says, surprised she is speaking to him.

‘Go get me a cup of coffee.’

Admit it, though. Wouldn’t a shot of akevitt be better?

‘And everyone else, I need your attention. Gather round. Pull up a chair.’

It takes a minute for the room to wind down and for the office chairs to roll into position. When the circle has formed, Sigrid — sitting now, and still decaffeinated — addresses the troops.

‘Thank you all for working so hard. I know it was a long night. I see that we still don’t have any direct leads on the boy, the old man, or the suspect. So, to summarise, we have no CCTV footage of anything useful, no reports from other police stations or patrols, no leads from the flat itself that could point us in a direction, and no active theories about how everyone is slipping through our iron grip.’

They’re all now staring at their own shoes, which Sigrid reads to mean that her summary is accurate. There are seven of them. Seven droopy dwarfs. And she is Snow White, awake from her long sleep. And not a cup of coffee to be found. Just a room full of hairy midgets.

‘OK. So let’s think beyond our case. What has happened recently in Oslo that, by some creative act of imagination, we may be able to connect to the current problem?’

A woman in her twenties with blonde hair raises her hand.

‘You don’t actually need to raise your hand. We can just talk.’

‘Ah. A couple was arrested for swimming naked in the fountain in Frogner Park.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No, just the two of them,’ the young officer added.

‘That’s not what I meant.’

Flipping through his notes, another cop raises his hand. Sigrid points to him.

‘A man stole a shopping cart from a Kiwi supermarket. His friend pushed him down Ullevalsveien. He was going forty kilometres an hour. The officer said he was issued with a speeding ticket.’

Sigrid does not look pleased.

‘Serious things happen in this city.’

‘Not yesterday,’ the officer adds, immediately wishing he hadn’t.

‘OK. I want anything else unusual brought to my attention. Anything at all. The way Petter does. Understood?’

They are quiet, and Sigrid nods.

A man in his forties speaks up. ‘It would have been easy for the suspect to leave in a friend’s car. We can’t track that.’

‘No,’ says Sigrid. ‘I’ve been thinking that, too. Does anyone know whether this Enver has a car registered in his own name?’

‘He doesn’t,’ says the same cop.

Petter speaks up. ‘A boat was stolen from the pier by Akershusstranda.’

‘What kind of boat?’

‘A little boat.’

‘Do you see a connection?’

‘Well, I’ve been thinking about the line from Mr Horowitz’s note about ‘River Rats’, but he’s an old, frail man. How’s he going to steal a boat with a little boy?’

Sigrid nods. The connection and the rejection of it both make sense. But her father’s voice speaks to her and offers another view. She listens to this, and shares it with the others.

‘Another way to see it is that a former US Marine who fought in Korea sees himself on a last mission to protect a small boy who reminds him of his dead son. And this Marine, in a foreign environment, has successfully evaded every trap we have set for him in over thirty-six hours, and no one — including his immediate family — has any idea where he is. So let’s change our frame on this. What if we’re not tracking down a senile old man, but instead we’re up against a wily old fox with a noble cause? And what if we’re not simply inept — though we are — but in fact we’re competing, and he’s winning?’

They are quiet as they think about this. Then Petter says, ‘Why doesn’t he turn the boy into the police? He’d be safe with us.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t think so. Maybe he doesn’t trust us. Maybe he saw something that made him think otherwise. I can’t say. All I can hope is that if he’s able to evade us, he can also evade the suspect and his associates. Because I have a feeling that the father wants the son back.

‘Go find that boat,’ instructs Sigrid. ‘It can’t have gone far.’

At the Apent Bakeri, across from the Oslo Literature House, Kadri talks with his mouth full of frosted cinnamon bun as a former KLA colleague and a young recruit strain to understand what he might be saying.

One lights a cigarette and squints his eyes so he can hear better.

Kadri swallows and says, ‘Are these delicious, or what?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ says the one with the cigarette.

Kadri takes another bite and says in Albanian, ‘Hungry has nothing to do with it.’

The second one says, ‘Kadri, what are we doing here?’

Kadri — though Enver has begged him not to — wears gold chains around his neck over a black shirt that looks as though it was found in a 1970s disco memorabilia shop. Kadri’s mobile phone is on the table next to the Marlboros, and he sips from a big bowl of cafe latte.