horrible smell. The receptionist had his hands full moving guests around as they came back from their allocated rooms and announced that they were uninhabitable. The strange thing was that it wasn’t just one particular area of the hotel. On the contrary, the complaints were coming from one room here, another there, and in the end he had run out of patience. Given the number of rooms that could no longer be used, the hotel was seriously overbooked.
The Hotel Continental in Oslo was a proud establishment that most definitely did not tolerate an unpleasant smell in its rooms.
Fritiof Hansen, the operations manager, had been trying to track down the problem for more than fifty minutes. He had begun with the first room that had been rejected by an irate Frenchman threatening to move to the Grand. A disgusting, sweetish smell assailed his nostrils as he opened the door. There was nothing to explain the stench as far as Fritiof Hansen could see. The bathroom was freshly cleaned. All the drawers were empty, apart from the obligatory copy of the New Testament and brochures about Oslo’s nightlife and the entertainment available. He did find a dirty cotton-wool ball under the bed, and, rather embarrassingly, a used condom behind one of the legs. But nothing that smelled. Nor were there any places in the room where the smell was stronger, as far as he could tell. And as soon as he stepped into the corridor, he was surrounded once more by the scent of luxury and carpet cleaner. In the room next door, all was as it should be. When he opened a door further along the corridor, the stench was there again.
It just didn’t make any sense.
He was now standing down in the foyer, legs apart and hands behind his back as he stuck his nose in the air and sniffed. Admittedly, Fritiof Hansen was a man of sixty-three with a reduced sense of smell after smoking twenty cigarettes a day for forty years. But he had stopped smoking three years ago, and his senses of taste and smell had both improved.
‘Edvard,’ he said, holding out his hand to a bellboy who was staggering past with a bag under his arm and a suitcase in each hand. ‘Is there a funny smell just here?’
‘No,’ gasped Edvard without stopping. ‘But it stinks down in the cellar!’
‘Right…’
Fritiof Hansen clicked his heels like a soldier before brushing an imaginary speck of dust from his uniform. It was green, freshly ironed and with razor-sharp creases. His black shoes had been polished until they shone. His identity card with its magnetic strip dangled from an extendable cord clipped to his belt; combined with the carefully chosen code 1111, it gave him access to every room in the building. When he set off, his bearing was erect and military.
The cellar of the Continental was a confusing labyrinth, but not to Fritiof Hansen. For more than sixteen years he had taken care of small details and major issues at the hotel. When he was given the title of operations manager the previous year, he realized it was just a way of recognizing his loyalty. He wasn’t really the manager of anything. Before he got the job at the Continental, he had packed paper clips in a protected workshop in Groruddalen. He proved himself to be unusually handy, and became a kind of informal caretaker there, until his boss had recommended him for a job at the Continental. Fritiof Hansen had turned up for the interview freshly shaven, wearing neat overalls and carrying his toolbox. He got the job, and since then he hadn’t missed a single day’s work.
He didn’t like the cellar.
The complex machinery down here was maintained by a team of specialists. Fritiof Hansen might occasionally change a light bulb or fix a door that had got stuck, but the hotel used external companies for renovations and maintenance. And for the air-conditioning system. The module that collected fresh air from outside was located on the roof and in its own area on the top floor. The plant itself was in the cellar. Over the years it had been augmented in a way that made it into two independent appliances. During the latest phase of modernization it had been recommended that the whole thing be renewed, but this proved too expensive, so a compromise was reached between the hotel and the suppliers: a new, smaller plant was installed to ease the load on the old one. Fritiof Hansen could hear the low, monotone hum before he reached the inner corridor where the locked doors to the machine room were located.
As he walked down the stairs, he wrinkled his nose. It didn’t smell quite the same as the polluted rooms, but here, too, a strange, sweetish smell found its way into his nostrils, combined with damp and dust and the distinctive mustiness of old buildings.
Fritiof Hansen didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in his brother and in Arbeiderpartiet and the hotel management, who had promised him a job here for as long as he could stand on his own two legs. Over the years he had also begun to believe in himself. Ghosts were invisible. Anything you couldn’t see didn’t exist. And yet he always felt that strange sense of unease as he set off down the long, dark corridors lined with doors leading to rooms which concealed things he recognized, but often didn’t understand.
At the point where the corridor bore to the left, the smell grew stronger. He was getting close to the air- conditioning plants which were in two rooms next door to each other. With each step he took, the unpleasant feeling grew. Perhaps he should go and fetch someone. Edvard was a good lad who was always ready to stop for a chat when he had time.
But Edvard was just a bellboy. Fritiof Hansen was operations manager, with a badge on his chest and the code for every room in the entire building. This was his job, and the receptionist had told him he had an hour to sort out what was going on before the management called in professional help.
As if he wasn’t a professional.
Despite the fact that most things in the cellar were old, the door was locked with a modern card reader. He swiped his card and keyed in the code as steadily as he could.
He opened the door.
The stench hit him with such force that he took a couple of steps backwards. He cupped his hands over his nose before hesitantly moving forward.
He stopped in the doorway of the dark room. His free hand groped for the light switch. When he found it he was almost dazzled by the fluorescent tube which suddenly drenched the room in an unpleasant blue light.
Four metres away, half-hidden behind some kind of machinery that could have been for just about anything, he could see a pair of legs from the knees down. It was difficult to tell whether they belonged to a woman or a man.
Fritiof Hansen had a set evening ritual. Every weekday at 9.35 p.m. he watched
Grissom was the best.
Gil Grissom wouldn’t like it if an operations manager at a respectable hotel walked into a crime scene, destroying a whole lot of microscopic evidence that might be there. Fritiof Hansen was quite convinced this was a crime scene. At any rate, the person over by the wall was definitely dead. He remembered an episode where Grissom had established the time of death by studying the development of fly larvae on a pig’s carcass. It had been bad enough on television.
‘Dead as a doornail,’ he muttered, mainly to convince himself. ‘It stinks of death in here.’
Slowly he moved back and closed the door. He checked the lock had clicked into place and set off towards the stairs. Before he got around the corner where the corridor led off at an angle of ninety degrees, he had broken into a run.
‘I was actually thinking about letting him go. But then we found the hash. I needed to interview him properly, and then it struck me that…’
DC Knut Bork handed over a report to Silje Sorensen as they walked across the blue zone in the police station. She stopped as she glanced through the document.
On closer investigation, Martin Setre had turned out to be fifteen years and eleven months old. He had spent the first part of his life with his biological parents. He was already perceived as an unlucky child during his time at
