Suddenly she sprang to her feet and turned up the volume control on the radio. It must be working loose, she thought, judging from the crackling noise as she turned the knob.
Lavik in custody! God, what a triumph for Hakon. Another fifty-two-year-old man had been released, but both rulings were being challenged. That must be Roger. Why had they released one and held the other? She had been so certain that they would either both be put inside or both be freed.
There was little further information given.
Only gradually did her conscience begin to prick. She had promised Hakon that before going away anywhere she would phone him. She hadn’t. Couldn’t face it. Maybe she would phone him this evening. Maybe.
The meal was eaten, and the dog given a couple more scraps. She would wash the dishes before walking the kilometre or so to the shop for the newspapers. She wanted to keep up with what was going on.
“Where the bloody hell
He threw the receiver down on the desk. It cracked.
“Oh, damn,” he said, staring at it foolishly and a little apprehensively. He put it to his ear to test it: yes, he could still hear the dialling tone. A rubber band would have to do as a temporary repair.
“I don’t get it,” he said, calming down. “At the office they say she won’t be available for a while. At home there’s no reply.”
And I’m definitely not ringing Nils, he thought to himself. Where could Karen be?
“We have to find her,” declared Hanne rather unnecessarily. “We need a new statement urgently. It would have been best to get it done today. If we’re lucky, the result of the appeal won’t be announced till tomorrow, and we could let them have a new statement then, couldn’t we?”
“I suppose so,” Hakon muttered.
He didn’t know what to think. Karen had promised to let him know when she was going to her cottage. With commendable self-restraint he had kept to his side of the bargain. Not phoned, not called on her. It was unusual for her not to reciprocate. If she really had gone away, that is. There were numerous possibilities. For all he knew, she might be having a discreet meeting with a client. Nothing to worry about. However, he’d had an uneasy gnawing suspicion since Sunday. The comforting feeling of at least being in the same city as Karen had vanished completely.
“She’s got a mobile with an ex-directory number. Use all the police pressure you can bring to bear and get hold of it. Telecom, her office, anywhere. Just get me the number. It shouldn’t be all that difficult.”
“And I’ll continue the search for the bootless man, however hopeless it seems,” said Hanne, and went back to her own office.
The silver-haired man was afraid. Fear was an unfamiliar enemy for him, and he resisted it stubbornly. Even though he had scoured all the newspapers, it was impossible to get any real idea of what the police actually knew. The article in the
Yet his consuming fear was not so easily assuaged; its bloodied talons had a tight grip around his heart, and the pain was intense. His breathing was reduced momentarily to a series of short gasps, and he struggled to regain control. Groping feverishly for the bottle of pills in his inside pocket, he fumbled with the cap and shook out the contents to put one under his tongue. The relief was immediate. His breathing became more regular again, and he managed to suppress his panic.
“Good Lord, whatever’s the matter?”
His neatly attired secretary stood horrified in the doorway before rushing over to him.
“Are you all right? You look ghastly.”
Her concern seemed genuine, which it was. She idolised her boss, and she also had an innate horror of grey, clammy skin ever since her husband had died in bed beside her five years ago.
“I’m better now,” he assured her, brushing her hand away from his brow. “Truly. Much better.”
She bustled out for a glass of water, and by the time she came back some of the natural colour had returned to his face. He drank it eagerly and with a tremulous smile asked for more. She rushed off to refill the glass, which he downed with equal alacrity.
After further affirmation that all was now well, his secretary withdrew to her adjoining room. Obviously reluctant, and with a worried frown, she left the door ajar, as if assuming he would at least make some kind of noise before expiring. He stood up with difficulty and closed it behind her.
He had to pull himself together. Perhaps he should ask for a couple of days off. But the vital thing was to maintain a completely detached attitude to events. They couldn’t arrest him. It was essential not to allow his mask to slip. For as long as was humanly possible. He must, he really
“How much money is there actually in drugs?”
The question was surprising coming as it did from an investigator who had been working on a drugs case for weeks. But Hanne Wilhelmsen had never been shy of asking obvious questions, and just recently she’d begun to wonder. When eminently respectable men with what she regarded as generous incomes were willing to risk everything for the sake of some extra dough, the sums involved had to be pretty substantial.
Billy T. wasn’t in the least taken aback. Drugs were a vague and imprecise concept for most people, even within the police force. For him, though, it was straightforward enough: money, misery, and death.
“This autumn the various drugs squads in the Scandinavian countries have seized eleven kilos of heroin in the course of six weeks,” he replied. “We arrested thirty couriers in Scandinavia. All the result of Norwegian narcotics intelligence.”
He sounded proud, and had good reason to be.
“One gram provides at least thirty-five individual fixes. One fix costs two hundred and fifty kroner on the street. So you can calculate what sort of money we’re talking about.”
She scribbled the figures down on a napkin, tearing it in the process.
“About eight thousand seven hundred kroner a gram! That’s…”
With her eyes closed and her lips in silent motion she gave up on the napkin and worked it out in her head.
“Eight point seven million kroner a kilo,” she said, opening her eyes. “Nearly a hundred million for eleven kilos. Eleven kilos! That’s not much more than a washing machine load! But can there be a market for such vast quantities?”
“If there wasn’t a market for it, it wouldn’t have been brought in,” said Billy T. dryly. “And it’s so damned easy to smuggle it in. Our borders are so vulnerable, with any number of approaches by sea, so many flights, not to speak of the amount of road traffic thundering through the frontier posts. It’s virtually impossible to keep up any effective control procedures. But fortunately it’s the distribution that’s more problematical for them. They have to operate in an environment that’s rotten to the core-which is what plays into our hands. In drugs investigations we’re heavily dependent on informers. And thank God there’s plenty of them.”
“But where does it all come from?”
“Heroin? Mainly from Asia. Pakistan, for instance. Sixty, maybe seventy percent, of Norwegian heroin emanates from there. As a rule it’ll have been on a tour of Africa before it finally reaches Europe.”
“Africa? That’s a roundabout route!”
“Well, geographically, perhaps, but there are plenty of willing runners. Pure exploitation of poverty-stricken Africans who have nothing to lose. In The Gambia they even teach them how to do it! ‘Gambian Swallow School.’ Those boys can swallow huge quantities of the stuff. First they make little balls of about ten grams each, wrap
