comical sight, a long sausage of a seam that vanished into a thin loose thread over the knees and then recommenced higher up. The trousers must have dated back to the seventies; that was the last time she’d seen a sewn-in crease.
The shirt was what at school she would have called spotty, light blue with polka dots, and the tie, also light blue, was evidently chosen to complement it. On top of all this magnificence he was wearing a black-and-white check suit jacket, missing a button-which didn’t matter, since it was much too tight to fasten anyway. His hair reminded her of a hedgehog.
“Can I help you, can I help you?” he asked in a loud and affable voice, looking with some misgiving at the figure with the earring. Hanne’s presence must have allayed his qualms, because his face lit up as he turned to her and repeated his greeting.
“Yes, we’d like to look at some secondhand cars,” Hanne said, rather hesitantly, glancing over the little man’s shoulder through a door with a glass panel that hadn’t been cleaned for at least a couple of years. She guessed it probably led to a showroom.
“Secondhand cars, well, you’ve certainly come to the right place,” the man said with a smile, even more amicable now, as if he’d thought at first that all they wanted was a spark plug and now saw the chance of a more significant sale.
“Follow me, madam, sir! Just follow me!”
He led them out through the filthy door, and Billy T. noticed a similar door adjacent to it, opening into some kind of office.
The smell of oil was refreshing after all the Christmas trees; the proper smell of real cars. It was obviously a business with no aspiration to be a specialised dealership: there were Ladas, Peugeots, Opels, and several four- or five-year-old Mercedes in apparently good condition.
“Look around and take your pick! May I ask what sort of price you had in mind?”
He smiled hopefully and glanced towards the nearest Mercedes.
“Three or four thousand kroner,” Billy T. muttered, and the man puckered his wet lips uncertainly.
“He’s joking,” Hanne reassured him. “We’ve got about seventy thousand. But we don’t have a fixed limit.
“My parents might chip in too,” she whispered confidentially into his ear.
The car salesman’s face brightened and he took her by the arm.
“Then you ought to cast your eyes over this Opel Kadett,” he said.
It looked in pretty good condition.
“Nineteen eighty-seven, only forty thousand kilometres on the clock,
“Lovely car.” Hanne nodded, giving her putative husband a meaningful glance. He took the hint and asked the chequered man if he could use the toilet.
“Just through there, just through there,” he replied in a benevolent tone, and Hanne began to wonder whether he had some kind of speech defect that made him repeat everything. A sort of sophisticated stammer, perhaps. Billy T. went off.
“Nervous stomach,” she explained. “He’s got an interview for a new job later this afternoon. This is the fourth time, poor man.”
The salesman expressed his sympathy, and persuaded her to sit inside the car. It certainly was a nice model.
“I’m not familiar with this make,” she said. “Would you mind sitting in it with me and going over the controls?”
“No trouble at all. No trouble at all.” He turned on the ignition and demonstrated all the finer points.
“Beautiful motor,” he said emphatically. “Well maintained. Between you and me, the previous owner was a bit of a skinflint, but that means he looked after it all right.”
He stroked the newly polished dashboard, flashed the lights, adjusted the seat-back, switched on the radio, put in a cassette of Rod Stewart, and spent an inordinately long time fastening the seat belt round Hanne.
She turned towards him. “And the price?”
None of the cars had price labels on, which she found peculiar.
“The price… Yes, the price…”
He smacked his lips and sucked the air in through his teeth for a moment before giving her a smile she presumed was meant to seem friendly and confidence-inspiring.
“You’ve got seventy thousand and nice parents. For you I could say seventy-five. That includes the radio and new winter tyres.”
They’d been sitting there for more than five minutes now, and she was beginning to wish Billy T. would return. There was a limit to how long she could haggle over a car without suddenly finding that she’d bought it. Another three minutes passed before he tapped on the window.
“We’d better go. We’ve got to fetch the kids,” he said.
“No, I’ll fetch them, you’ve got your interview,” she corrected him.
“I’ll ring you about this car,” she promised the man in Terylene, who could barely conceal his disappointment at losing what he’d thought was going to be an easy sale. He recovered himself and gave her his card. It was as tasteless as its owner, dark blue artificial silk with his name on in gold, “Roger Stromsjord, Man. Dir.” Pretentious title.
“I own the place,” he explained with a modest shrug of his shoulders. “Don’t take too long making up your mind! I have a fast turnover with cars like these. Very popular. Very popular, I have to say.”
Rounding the corner, this time with the wind behind them, they returned to their own car and collapsed in shrieks of laughter.
When Hanne had dried her tears, she asked, “Did you find anything?”
He leant forward at an angle to fish out a notebook from his back pocket, and slapped it into her palm.
“The only thing there of any interest at all. It was in his windcheater pocket.”
Hanne was no longer laughing.
“You idiot, Billy! That’s not what we learnt at police college. And it’s bloody stupid if it does have something important in it and we can’t use it in evidence. Unlawful seizure! How will you explain that?”
“Oh, leave off. This little book isn’t going to put anyone behind bars. But it might help you along the way. Perhaps. I don’t know what’s in it, I only had a brief glance. Phone numbers. Be a bit grateful, please.”
Curiosity had dispelled her anger. She began looking through it. Naturally enough it smelt of Magic Tree. And it did indeed contain masses of telephone numbers, the majority entered after a name, in alphabetical order for the first five or six pages and then absolutely random. The ones at the end had no names, a few had initials, most of them just small incomprehensible signs.
Hanne was taken aback. Some of the numbers started with figures that didn’t exist as first digits in Oslo, and there were no area codes given. Turning the pages, she came to a halt at four initials.
“H. v. d. K.,” she exclaimed. “Han van der Kerch! But I don’t recognise the number…”
“Check in the phone book,” said Billy T., but snatched it from the parcel shelf before Hanne could get to it. “What’s Van der Kerch under, Van or Kerch?”
“No idea, try both.”
He found it under Kerch. It was quite different from the one in the notebook. Hanne was disappointed, but thought there was something about the two numbers that she couldn’t quite perceive. Some relationship, almost, even though they were completely different. It took her thirty seconds to work it out.
“Got it! The phone book number is the notebook number minus the next number in sequence, including negative numbers but ignoring the minus!”
Billy T. didn’t get it.
“What the hell are you on about?”
“Haven’t you ever played those party games with numerals? You’re given a sequence of numbers, and you have to work out the pattern and supply the last one. A kind of IQ test, some would call it, but I think it’s more of a party trick myself. Look: the number in the notebook is 93 24 35. So 9 minus 3 equals 6; 3 minus 2 is 1; 2 minus 4 is minus 2, but forget about the minus; 4 minus 3 is 1; and 3 minus 5 is minus 2. From 5 take away the first figure, 9, and that makes minus 4. The number in the phone book must be 61 21 24.”
“That’s right!”
